In our fast paced culture, there’s a healthy pressure to do more with less. It makes sense at times when there is limited time and resources. But it’s a productivity killer when it comes to sleep.  Experts say we need about eight hours a night. But the national average is about 6.8. During times of high operational tempo, the real average is even lower.

It’s easy to think that one hour of lost sleep is equal to one hour of bonus productivity. I’m afraid to report that studies show it doesn’t work that way.  I would be disingenuous to suggest that we won’t face emergencies every now an then and need to give up sleep. But our lack of sleep isn’t usually about emergencies. We act like sleep is a luxury or an indulgence; as a result, sacrificing sleep in the name of productivity has become routine.

Cheating our sleep is like maxing out our credit cards. There’s a benefit now-at least, it feels like it-but the bill always comes due in the form of decreased health and mental ability. No one would choose to be sick and stupid, but depriving our bodies of sleep is the same thing. Robbing our sleep is robbing our productivity.

Four Crucial Ways Sleep Helps Us Achieve More

There are several ways sleeping more at night can help us accomplish more during the day:

1. Sleep keeps us sharp. How many times have you gone blank in a briefing, nodded at your desk, or forgot where you were going? It’s happened to me more than I’d like to admit. Skimping on sleep-even a little-can dramatically impair our mental performance, creating fatigue, inability to focus, slow reaction times, and more.

Did you know that in one study test subjects going on six hours of sleep a night for two weeks functioned at the same level of impairment as someone legally drunk? But those who got eight hours demonstrated no impairment at all.

2. Sleep improves our ability to remember, learn, and grow. I’m sure brain teasers are fine, but adequate sleep is the best learning tool there is.  Our minds are particularly active when we sleep, integrating new information learned during the day, processing memories, and sorting the significant from all the meaningless stuff we pick up. Even dreaming is critical to this process. If our work depends on our creativity and insight-and whose doesn’t?-then sleep is essential.

3. Sleep refreshes our emotional state.  I have spoken with several military families who during very busy time in their lives, gave up sleep to get more done. But as a result, they also struggled with discouragement, anxiety and being irritable. I suggested to them that weariness was most likely the real culprit.

Nothing can make us feel depressed, moody, and irritable like missing sleep. Here’s the good news: Getting enough sleep is like hitting the reset button.

In his book “Eat Move Sleep,” Tom Rath explains that sleep reduces stress chemicals in the brain and dials back the part of the brain that processes emotions. The result is that we can start fresh if we invest in our sleep.

4. Sleep revitalizes our bodies. We all have a body clock. When we ignore its signals to play longer or work more, we create unnecessary stress, and that stress contributes to depression, fatigue, weight gain, high blood pressure, and a lot worse.

But sleep lowers the stress chemicals in our bodies, boosts our immune system, and improves our bodies’ metabolism. Instead of waking unrested after putting in extra hours on a project, why not wake approach it recharged the next day? You’ll do better work and feel better about it.

Bottom line: Instead of thinking of sleep as self-indulgence, we need to think of it as self-improvement.

There’s nothing wrong with doing more with less, but if we’re not smart about it, we can really hurt our productivity and even our health. It hardly matters what the short term gains are if we try making that our norm. If we want to achieve more, we need to go to bed.