Whether you have fitness goals or financial goals and whether you seek to improve your self-esteem or your weight, the foundation of any self-improvement is motivation. No matter what else you do, you need to sleep better to improve your motivation. While so many people seek miracle solutions to the problems in their life, sometimes a free, simple and powerful solution is waiting there in their bedrooms: sleep.

Extensive research now supports how sleep deprivation can lead to weight gain. While I am not interested in writing about weight gain or weight loss specifically, understanding how this somewhat counter-intuitive evidence exists can help you better appreciate why good sleep is vital to your success in any endeavor.

Why Better Sleep Is A Must

Lack of sleep, not surprisingly, makes people feel sluggish and lethargic. What people may not realize is that this sluggish, lethargic feeling not only impacts you physically, but it impacts your motivation, discipline and perseverance in ways you do not consciously realize.

Furthermore, lacking sleep over several days can have a sustained negative impact on your motivation and discipline. What this means is that if you did not get a good night of rest for two or three nights, then you got what seemed like plenty of sleep one night, you will still suffer from a lack of focus, determination and perseverance during your waking hours.

How Poor Sleeping Habits Affect You

While it is a little surprising how little we really understand about the phenomenon of sleep, plenty of research corroborates the hypothesis that not enough sleep is detrimental to our physical and mental health. Poor sleep leads to our body doing a poor job of regulating fundamental biological functions, like our metabolism and our appetite. With an imbalance in this area, you may find yourself slowly gaining weight even without overeating.

Then as you carry more and more weight, you become even more sluggish and fatigued by your lack of sleep, which in turn leads you to experience even poorer sleeping habits. It becomes a terrible cycle which feeds upon itself, slowly degrading your quality of life.

Try not to focus on only the literal weight gain aspect of this phenomenon. Rather, the weight gain can be a metaphor for our motivation and discipline being weighed down.

Sleep Better to Reverse the Cycle and Find a Fountain of Motivation

The good news is that just by putting a more serious and deliberate focus on your amount and quality of sleep, you can radically reverse this cycle and find a flourishing fountain of health and motivation through sleeping better.

The key is to prioritize bedtime and healthy pre-sleep habits. For just four to six weeks, put everything else at least one notch below your goal of getting to bed earlier and entering sleep in a more relaxed and healthful state. This does not mean you need to sacrifice your other priorities. Rather, you will soon find you are much better equipped to address and fulfill all the many responsibilities of your life after you put your first priority on good sleep.

You will soon see the cycle reverse itself: you will sleep better because you are getting more done and you will get more done because you are sleeping better. The irony of this is that it leads to greater fitness and weight loss as well. So now you better understand those confused workaholics who are gaining weight even though they feel like they are so active they are too busy to sleep.

Poor sleep leads to poor motivation, so you must learn how to curb one of the worst culprits of sleep disruption: Night Sweats. Find out why sweating at night occurs and what you can do to stop it: Sweating While Sleeping http://www.helpfornightsweats.com/sweating-while-sleeping/.