Restlessly Wrestling with Sleep
It can take work to sleep well. It can take sleep to work well.
Image generated with DALL-E.
The Early Bird
My Phillips Wake-Up Plus warmed the room with a soft yellow glow, simulating the sun. My eye cracked open to read the digital orange display with a blinking colon.
5:15 AM.
It’s not Tim Cook early, but it’s early enough to own the day and “Eat the Frog” as they say. That’s essential for a CEO, right?
It’s early 2012 and I’m not yet addicted to coffee, but I am hooked on a certain kind of drip. On Facebook or Twitter I regularly see the kinds of articles (and “listicles”) that reinforce a way of thinking. We’ve got to hustle to succeed.
I’m far from Silicon Valley but living in “the city that never sleeps” my foray into entrepreneurship didn’t feel out of place. I knew hustle well, as a native (“upstate”) New Yorker, and now 5-year NYC resident.
On top of that, I was a veteran of teaching in New York City. I could do anything.
I just needed those extra, early morning hours to get things done...
The Night Owl
But to embrace the early morning I was contending with a long-time tendency: I love staying up late.
Some of this might be hardwired. But it was also nurtured, as my Dad, a cellist, played at the Met Opera many nights each week, returning home after midnight.
Creatives know the night well. The clock is less oppressive after dinner if you don’t adhere to a rigid bedtime. You can follow the flow of a conversation or virtual world or piece of music to new places.
A drink or a smoke can alter the mind-state.
Or just venture outside and you can absorb the vastness of the cosmos. There, everything operates on a different timescale.
What better way to expand your thinking?
Whenever I’ve needed to generate something original, the night has been my friend.
I remember discovering that I wasn’t alone as a creative in business when one night I found myself messaging with C-Suite leaders, a few months after joining Box.
It was the only time they were freed of the back-to-back schedule of the core work day. Finally, they could really focus and think creatively.
As a leader you want to break new ground. Like the construction crews on critical infrastructure, sometimes you’ve got to mount a headlamp and brave the darkness.
Hacking Sleep?
To be a lark and an owl, something’s got to give. But how little sleep is too little?
Most of the research suggests adults need between 7-9 hours a night.
I like 7.5, but I’ve often pushed it on six. Early on, I tried out operating on <5.
My first attempts to cut sleep from both ends happened as a Teach for America teacher. I felt the high demands of closing the achievement gap personally. I interpreted the call to action as a demand for grueling hours.
Every day.
Pushing myself to the brink first had noticeable affects on my mood and decision-making. A series of nights with 3-4 hours of sleep left me foggy-brained and irritable. I struggled to maintain consistent and clear communication. I cancelled work-outs and skipped social plans.
One day, when trying to get my student’s attention, I struck a Tibetan meditation bowl. This was my preferred technique over yelling or clapping. It was calm! But this time, they didn’t respond. Angry and impatient, I hit it again. Harder. Harder!
Then the bowl, my symbol of control and serenity, cracked. Looking with surprise at the dull metal, I saw myself reflected back – worn and on the verge of breaking.
I was breaking. Literally. First, at just twenty-two, I developed a case of shingles. Then the flu knocked me out for several days. Finally, one early morning while driving to work I hit a patch of water. The car hydroplaned into the barrier.
I walked away intact, but the car did not.
I don’t know if sleep slowed my reaction time that day. But the crash ended my reckless disregard for sleep. I started paying closer attention to how sleep impacted my performance, and made adjustments to not only avoid accidents, but to steer myself towards excellence.
I brought these insights on sleep boundaries and requirements into entrepreneurship.
Could I make my sleep habits a foundation for effective leadership?
By 2011, the era of the "quantified self" had dawned. Inspired by Tim Ferriss’s '4 Hour Body', I experimented with wearables and special appliances, seeking efficiency in my resting hours. I also experimented with polyphasic sleep and lucid dreaming to see if I could reach new frontiers, but these efforts ultimately reinforced a vital lesson I had learned from teaching: sustainable performance requires sustained periods of rest.
When Real Sleep Training Begins
Teaching and business gave me an early glimpse of the sleep challenges that face parents. During the summer of 2018, there were many nights while watching the monitor and hoping for my daughter to learn some self-soothing that I’d read Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child by Dr. Marc Weissbluth.
I found the research studies on how children sleep fascinating and illuminating.
When we do a good job with teaching sleep to children, they feel better and learn more effectively; long-term, their are numerous direct and indirect benefits to good foundational sleep in childhood.
As an adult and parent, the irony is that raising children - including sleep training - sabotages your own sleep. It can start as early as pregnancy, and what I now know almost six years later, is that sleep disruption almost never ends.
A National Nightmare
Summer of 2020. I simply could not turn off my brain when the lights went out. All around us, things were literally and figuratively on fire.
If I did fall asleep, I would inevitably wake up to a nightmare.
Once awake, thoughts of the world around me would swirl in my mind.
For the first time, I had a full-on battle with insomnia.
Overcoming Fear and Fatigue
I gradually overcame my insomnia, thanks to a multi-pronged approach. With doctor-supervised micro-dosing of doxylamine succinate, avoiding alcohol and caffeine, and coaching and therapy, I solved the internal challenges. I also benefited by managing prioritization of my work and civic activities to reassert control.
But these responses aren’t available to everyone who faces a threat to their sleep.
People in war zones and high poverty, climate-stressed environments face not only the acute risks to bodily safety, but also a chronic assault on basic needs like sleep. These deprivations create cascades of stress that produce further social and emotional calamity.
And even here in America, a significant proportion of adults struggle to maintain the sleep habits that enable essential rest.
From the National Sleep Foundation’s 2023 Survey Report, p. 9
According to the Sleep Research Society, “In the United States alone, working days lost due to insufficient sleep and sleep disorders account for $411 billion in economic losses and represent 2.28 percent of our country’s GDP annually.”
We need more leaders to acknowledge this crisis and unmet opportunity.
Leading with and for Sleep
So what can we do?
First, there’s taking care of your own sleep.
If you are not a care-giver or guardian, and as long as you have a safe home that you can modify as you please, you can probably optimize sleep as a competitive advantage. Sleep provides rest and repair for the body and mind, and an opportunity to start each day with energy, dexterity, and gratitude. You’ll show up in service better as a result.
Second, there are those you care for.
Culture and health start at home. Both for your own habits and in your priorities for others, focus on sleep. Model good habits, and explicitly teach and enable your loved ones to set up their environment, care for their mind and body during the day and night, and prioritize rest.
Third, there are those you influence outside your home.
We can start by talking about sleep, so that we can identify where sleep challenges are acting as a silent drag on major initiatives. Then, critical policies at work, in schools, and beyond, as well as cultural norms, need reform.
Can you do anything to build better policies or norms for rest?
In closing…
It takes work to get good sleep.
It takes sleep to get good work.
If we figure this out, maybe one day, our dreams will come true.
What’s your sleep story? Leave a comment.
Recommendations
If you want to go “deeper” on sleep and its powers for leadership, I recommend you start with your own sleep and then work out from there. Try to pick one concrete action from below to prioritize this week, and put it on your to-do list before you move on for the day!
Sleep awareness. There are books and products to help you learn about sleep in general, and your sleep specifically. Two things to consider to start would be:
Sleep journaling - each day for a week or more, journal at the start and end of each day, and give a special emphasis on what happened during the night. Can you identify patterns or lessons for what good sleep looks like for you, and how to get it?
Sleep measurement - I’m not up to speed on the latest wearables, but using one of the many products that fit on a wrist that measure motion and heart rate, you can often pick up some nuggets of wisdom by diving into the data these tools serve up.
Sleep facilitation. Generally your decisions around physical environment (bed and bedding, room temperature), lightning, and sound can have a big impact on how restful your night is. In addition, your habits (especially diet and exercise, but also your morning and evening routines) can greatly affect how your sleep. Two of my favorite, low-level investments I’ve relied on now for years to facilitate sleep include:
White-noise sound machine. For a long time we used Dohm noise machine because the mechanical sound has a lower frequency than a small speaker can match - however, I’ve found that overtime it’s too loud and I’m worried about long-term impact on my hearing. Especially if you’re in a small room and/or can’t use ear plugs, I think a small travel device like this on a low frequency, low volume setting is est.
Black out curtains. Obviously you need to shop to fit your windows and room. However, I will share that this travel black out shade is a great thing to be able to travel with especially if you need to darken the room for little ones who can’t wear eye shades.
Toughen up. It’s not all about comfort. Sometimes sleeping in uncomfortable places helps build resilience and low sensitivity. Change it up, go camping, and see how your core routine improves!
Sleep advocacy. You can make an effort to advocate for better sleep culture in your workplace or community on your own, but if you want to connect with resources or organizations and multiple effects, check these out:
The National Sleep Foundation: “is an independent nonprofit, dedicated to improving overall health and well-being by advancing sleep health.” This is a great place to start for reading up on the research and finding easy to share content.
Sleep Research Society: is focused on research and is geared to scientists, but there are some free resources and tools for advocacy you can find on the website.
Project Sleep: is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization raising awareness about sleep health and sleep conditions. It’s a little bit focused on sleep disorders, but is not narrowly focused on them.