Short Sleep with Pre-Goof Alert

You need enough sleep to stay warm. Get a normal amount of sleep, nightly through the winter. If you’re shortchanging it, you can test your alertness before you get in trouble.

Cheating on sleep makes your body somewhat discoordinated. Besides clouding your judgment, being sleep-deprived limits how much physical heat you generate. Not always, but often enough.

When you wake up, you’re cooler. It seems to take my body about an hour to get to a normal level of heat production. That’s after normal all-night sleep. I don’t know if the skin’s temperature is lower, but the air feels colder right after waking up, regardless of what time it is. It’s colder compared to later in the day. And, if we haven’t slept enough, the effect of being colder persists longer.

Since shortchanging sleep can hobble your judgment, create an early warning system. Pick an important thing you have to do. Make up a little thing that hardly matters and always do it before the big thing. If you do the little thing that hardly matters and you do it wrong, that’s your early warning. If you do it wrong twice in a day, take a nap or get someone to watch your judgment.

If a warning won’t save you, better go sleep normally before the sky starts falling.