You'd make more money and do your job better if you followed a hallowed piece of advice from mom's everywhere: get a good night's sleep.

Get seven to eight hours of sleep. That's what mom's, doctors and sleep specialists keep telling us. Now, more research confirms that you can sleep you way to success.

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Doctors have always told us getting the right amount of sleep allows the brain to perform vital maintenance and restoration tasks that prepare it for the next day's challenges. Brains that get too little sleep won't perform as well as those that are rested.

"Missing a night's sleep degrades our neurobehavioral performance by the equivalent to being legally drunk," said Dr. Charles Czeisler, a sleep specialist at Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston. Neurobehavioral performance is another term for alertness or mental acuity.

And a good night's sleep is also good for your wallet.

A recent study by the economics department of the University of California, San Diego concluded that for persons who sleep too little, "a one-hour increase in long-run average sleep increases wages by 16%, equivalent to more than a year of schooling."

To reach this conclusion, researchers compared wage data with sleep times recorded in the U.S. Census Bureau's American Time Use Survey.

These findings repudiate what seems to be conventional wisdom among many American companies that high performers are those that hardly get any sleep. Doctors and scientists, however, have long trumpeted the message that sleep loss impairs higher-level brain skills.

They point out that when we're tired, we find it much harder to think innovatively and to be more creative. We also find it more difficult to adapt our thinking to new information or to learn new lessons.

More ominously, we struggle to make good judgments in very ambiguous situations.

Unfortunately, we get a lot less sleep than our grandparents. Blame this unhealthy lifestyle on smartphones, alarm clocks and the Internet.

Dr. Czeisler pointed out that 20 percent to 30 percent of workers sleep less than six hours a night during the week. Fifty years ago, he says, the number was only two to three percent.

"If you need an alarm clock to wake you up, by definition, you're not getting enough sleep," warns Dr. Czeisler.