Sleep deprivation is NOT a badge of honor

Sometimes we get the idea into our heads that sleep deprivation is a sign of how hard of a worker you are. We imagine a scenario that goes something like this:

Person A - "I didn't sleep very much last night, I was up finishing up ." Person B (thinking) - "Wow what a hard worker! He needs a raise."

Now in reality this never happens. In fact according to this article on Signal vs. Noise you are more likely to loose productivity, creativity and controll of your temper when suffering from sleep deprivation. From the article:

Forgoing sleep is like borrowing from a loan shark. Sure you get that extra hours right now to cover for your overly-optimistic estimation, but at what price? The shark will be back and if you can’t pay, he’ll break your creativity, morale, and good-mannered nature as virtue twigs.

...to think you can do with 6 hours or less is probably an illusion. Worse, it’s an illusion you’ll have a hard time bursting. Sleep-deprived people often vastly underestimate the impact on their abilities, studies have shown.

This lesson is to myself as much as anyone else. The 6 hour sleep cycle is all to familiar to me. And just like the article said I keep rationalizing and imagining to myself that I'm actually fine after 6 hours of sleep. So time to get to it and start getting to bed before 23:00.