Science Says: Sleep Less, Dance More

W​​hat if feeling great requires something unexpected? Here are three counterintuitive things that can genuinely transform how you feel.

Get Less Sleep

If you spend a lot of time in bed awake with an active mind, you aren’t alone. Many high achievers spend a good portion of the night ruminating on the problems they need to solve the following day, or feeling anxious about the fact that they aren’t sleeping, i.e., suffering from insomnia.

If this sounds like you, try compressing your sleep schedule. “The more time you spend in bed not sleeping,” writes clinical psychologist and sleep coach Nick Wignall, “the more likely your brain is to associate your bed with worry, anxiety and frustration, all of which produce more arousal and make sleep less likely.”

The solution is to intentionally spend less time in bed. This “increases your body’s natural and powerful drive to sleep,” explains Wignall, making you sleepier when you get into bed and therefore more likely to fall asleep and stay asleep. This retrains your brain to associate your bed with sleep rather than an active mind.

Wignall recommends going to bed later and waking up earlier, so you are in bed for no more than 6 hours. This will make you more tired than usual in the short term. After a week or two of this, your sleep quality will dramatically improve. Once you consistently sleep for 6 hours, increase your time in bed by 30 minutes every week or two until you no longer feel sleep-deprived during the day.

The goal, of course, is to improve your sleep quality in the long run, as extensive research demonstrates this is essential to our health and happiness.

Sacrifice Pleasure for Purpose

Having and nurturing a strong sense of purpose is critical for our flourishing, but sometimes we unintentionally block purpose when we pursue pleasure.

Purpose and happiness typically overlap: Only a tiny percentage of people experience one without the other. But it’s fascinating when researchers peer into the lives of unhappy people who have meaning and happy people who lack purpose.

Psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues famously showed that when people’s lives are filled with happiness, but are low in purpose and meaning, they are often shallow, self-absorbed, and selfish—and their happiness tends to be fleeting.

By contrast, when researchers look at unhappy people leading meaningful lives, they observe that often difficult things have happened to them. Unhappy but fulfilled people tend to do a lot of deep thinking. They spend time reflecting on their challenges, and that reflection generates rich rewards: Unhappiness doesn’t usually last in the presence of meaning.

Purpose can be unpleasant. It can require making hard choices, having difficult conversations, and putting others before ourselves. Being unwilling to endure this difficulty or discomfort in the short term can keep us from finding purpose in the long run.

Fortunately, happiness tends to follow purpose. Purposeful activities generate positive emotions and deepen social connections, both of which increase our well-being.

Just Dance

Stunning research—a large meta-analysis of 218 studies with 14,170 participants—shows that dancing is the most effective way to reduce depressive symptoms and improve our happiness, followed by walking or jogging, cognitive-behavioral therapy, and yoga. All of these activities are more effective than SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors), the most common prescription antidepressant medications.

Disrupted sleep, quiet wondering about what comes next — these aren’t signs that something is wrong with you. They’re invitations to sleep smarter, live with more purpose, and yes, to just dance.