"sleepy_mk" by beccafrog is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
Confessions of a former sleep skeptic
Oh man, I'm completely screwed.
Those were my thoughts after reading the fantastic book Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, PhD.
Until very recently, I've had a fairly aggressive morning routine [1] which sees me up and out of bed by 4:15am during the weekdays. Like many people in the modern world, I wake up with an alarm clock each morning and force myself up and into the daily grind because I see no other practical alternative to accomplish all I want to.
Cutting sleep short is clearly not fun. I did it as a concession to the various demands on my life: challenging job, being a part of the lives of my wife and four active children, many hobbies, and volunteering commitments.
The only way I found to manage the myriad demands placed on my waking hours ... was to manufacture more waking hours each day, and thus, trading in several hours of sleep each night in return.
Optimizing Fatigue
After much experimentation over the years I found that heading to bed around 10:00pm and waking up at 4:15am was the optimal trade-off between productivity and constant tiredness.
Mondays were typically much easier because I was able to "rebound" on the weekends by sleeping between 7 and 8 hours each night. However, dragging myself out of bed on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday mornings became a real test of willpower. I tended to wear down quickly throughout the course of the week and my willpower suffered daily.
As mentioned, Saturday and Sunday were more like recovery days where I would greedily attempt to get closer to 8 hours per night of sleep, although unfortunately, I would often fail to do that if we had social engagements or nights out.
Fitbit app sleep record of a typical non-travel week. The red and green boxes were added by me to highlight the difference between Sunday - Thursday nights (red) and Friday and Saturday night (green). In this example, I also had a long nap on Sunday afternoon.
I am a sleep tracking devotee. I love to see my nightly sleep quality and to track trends over time. I've been able to amass nearly 8 years of mostly complete sleep data.
Over the years, these sleep data have taught me:
- I cannot have coffee after 4:00pm if I want to sleep well that night. Drinking coffee before 4:00pm poses no noticeable impact on my sleep.
- Drinking alcohol in the evening massively disrupts my sleep starting with restlessness around 12:30am that night. One drink with dinner has little effect but more than that has a large negative impact.
- During the week (Sunday night through Thursday night) I typically slept (slumber, not time in bed) between 4 hours and 50 minutes - 5 hours and 30 minutes each night.
- I typically fall asleep within 1 minute of laying down.
Waking up obscenely early game me something I craved: uninterrupted time. I loved the fact that rising early gave me more awake time to devote to things I consider important. And I'm not going to lie, sleeping less than many people made me feel hardcore, dedicated and tough. Perhaps I bought into the old belief “I’ll sleep when I’m dead“ and the famous saying from Arnold Schwarzenegger “Sleep Faster“.
Denying yourself sleep became cool
Sleep machismo in corporate culture is very real, and I was definitely affected by it. Seeing colleagues denying sleep and still performing at high levels creates an allure of the superhuman executive myth. These executives exist in my company, and likely your company as well. High ranking politicians often exhibit the same sleep denying message to the public. [2]
I'd like to say that I pushed back when I saw my employees jeopardizing their health by working late into the night or early morning hours, but I didn't. To me, that is an embarrasing personal leadership failure.
It's nice to see that discussions around the importance of sleep and the dangers of not sleeping enough are trending in modern productivity circles. But as an average person, many of the anecdotes in the media are impossible to relate to; many of the people who say they sleep 8.5 hours a night and wake daily without an alarm are typically already successful, independently wealthy and have eschewed a 9-to-5 job long ago.
Sleep is necessary for life
Disclaimer: I'm not a doctor. All I can do is repeat what the current mountain of scientific evidence suggests a lack of sleep is doing to our bodies, our lives, and our society. And it's not pretty.
I can attest to the very real short-term problems that modern, everyday sleep deprivation creates:
- Continuously tired. Feeling like you can you fall asleep anytime, anywhere if you would just let yourself.
- Lack of energy, especially in the afternoon and evening
- Reduced ability to focus and an increased susceptibility to time wasting distractions (such as "checking" mail, social media, etc.)
- Lack of mental acuity (i.e. feeling slower and dumber than you should be)
I naively thought these issues were short-term tradeoffs in service of achieving my longer-term goals.
I was terribly wrong.
By depriving myself of much needed sleep, I didn't realize I was literally killing myself long-term. The chronic effects of not giving yourself enough sleep are:
- higher rates of mortality overall
- increased risk of cancer
- increased risk of coronary heart disease
- weight gain, overeating and insulin resistance
- increased rates of infection and inflammation
- increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia
- impacted rational decision making, worse memory forming and recall, and reduced emotional restraint
When you look at the huge negative impact lack of sleep has on the human body, the fact that so many of us do it and celebrate it blows my mind. To me, it's analagous to the high rates of smoking in the U.S. through the 1980s even though the link to lung cancer was shown in the 1950s. [3]
Please, just sleep
I urge you to read Why We Sleep and to carefully scrutinize your relationship with sleep and your daily sleep habits. If money or time is stopping you from reading a physical book, then at least download and listen to these three episodes with Matthew Walker and Dr. Peter Attia:
- Episode 1 Part I of III: Dangers of poor sleep, Alzheimer’s risk, mental health, memory consolidation, and more
- Episode 2 Part II of III: Heart disease, cancer, sexual function, and the causes of sleep disruption (and tips to correct it)
- Episode 3 Part III of III: The penetrating effects of poor sleep from metabolism to performance to genetics, and the impact of caffeine, alcohol, THC, and CBD on sleep
I'm now a reformed sleep skeptic. In fact, I'll talk to nearly anybody about the importance of sleeping enough each night. As you can imagine, I'm a big hit at cocktail parties...
I still don't get the recommended hours of sleep (especially when travelling), but I do the very best I can. I prioritize my daily sleep like a religious zealot and try to get 8 full hours in bed each day (resulting in approximately 7 hours of slumber per night).
Sleep data from a typical non-travel week now that I’m prioritizing my sleep. It’s still not perfect, but you can see more 7 hour days than previously.
So now that I'm sleeping more, is my life perfect? Nope, not even close. I do feel better (MUCH better), my mood is more even and my patience with the craziness of life is greater. However, I still struggle to prioritize all the things that I took care of easily in my morning routine.
From a professional perspective, I'm not working as much as before and this means some balls are dropping and even more email goes unread and unanswered.
Ultimately, being a human being and a professional leader is all about making choices, reaping the rewards, and suffering the consequences.
And for now at least, I choose to sleep. And I hope you do too.
Take care, and I'll talk to you next time.
Footnotes:
[note 1]: My morning routine post was written in 2015. It was very similar to what I did (until recently) in 2019, except I added in time for a workout. For the past few years I’ve been waking up at 4:15am each morning.
[note 2]: Both Ronald Reagan (former U.S. president) and Margaret Thatcher (former U.K. Prime Minister) were vocal about their low number of nightly sleep hours and both suffered from dementia late in life. Reagan had full-blown Alzheimer’s disease. This isn't conclusive, but it's a scary reminder that our mental abilities are more fragile than we think and can disappear from us. Sleep plays a large restorative role in brain health.
[note 3]: The history of smoking is fascinating to me. Its long history involves socio-economic dynamics, economics, cartels, propaganda and media, medical establishment controls and studies, and education. For a condensed version of how medical research finally helped reduce the smoking (and death) rates, see this article.