Freud observed, somewhere in the vast archive of his thinking, that the person who is hungry likes to talk about food, the person with no money likes to talk about money, and our oligarchs and politicians like to talk about morality. The principle being that we lecture most forcefully about the things we most struggle to practice.
I thought about that observation when I agreed to write this piece, because the honest version of it has to begin with an admission: I am not great at sleep. Not consistently, not in all seasons, not in the way I would prescribe if someone asked me how to do it properly. I know what it requires. I know what it costs when I don’t protect it. And I still let my evening run long more often than I should, still check the thing that probably didn’t need checking before I put the phone down, still negotiate with myself about bedtime in ways I would never negotiate about a training session.
So take what follows as someone speaking from conviction rather than from mastery. The two are not the same, and pretending otherwise would undermine the only point worth making.
The night before races or big events, I don’t sleep.
One Night Doesn’t Decide the Outcome
This is not an exaggeration for effect. I lie in the hotel bed with the alarm set earlier than I would like, in a room that smells like somewhere else, listening to my own heartbeat do things it doesn’t do on ordinary nights, running through transitions and nutrition plans and weather forecasts I have already reviewed enough times to recite. The hours move slowly, with an almost deliberate cruelty. By the time the alarm sounds I have been technically horizontal for six or seven hours and actually rested for perhaps two of them, and I get up anyway, pull on my gear or my suit, and go race.
And here is what I have learned from doing this more than once: it doesn’t matter nearly as much as I thought it would. Not because sleep doesn’t matter – sleep matters more than almost any other variable in health and performance – but because the night before the race is not where the race is won or lost in the category of sleep. That work was done in the months of consistent nights that preceded it. The cumulative foundation was already built. One bad night at the end of a long, well-rested training block is a surface inconvenience sitting on top of something solid. Remove the foundation, and no single good night before the event would save you.
This distinction matters. Sleep isn’t just about a single night. It’s a sustained, compounding practice – and one of the most underappreciated ideas in the wellness conversation. We tend to think about sleep the way we think about the weather: something that happens to us, variable and largely outside our control, worth attending to only when it’s dramatically bad. What it actually is, for anyone serious about performance, health, or functioning at a high level across a demanding life, is a practice – something built deliberately, protected consistently, and accumulated over time, the way fitness is. You don’t get fit from one great training session. You don’t get the benefits of sleep from one great night.
What Happens in Your Body While You Sleep
The biology is worth understanding briefly, because it clarifies what’s actually at stake. The adaptation your training is meant to produce – the muscle repair, the hormonal reset, the consolidation of movement patterns, the immune reinforcement that keeps you healthy enough to train again tomorrow – does not happen during the workout. It happens during sleep.
The miles you ran or workouts you undertook this week are instructions your body has been handed. Sleep is when your body reads them, processes them, and converts them into actual fitness. Interrupt that process consistently, and the training stimulus accumulates without producing the adaptation it was meant to produce. You are, in a real physical sense, working out for a diminished return.
The growth hormone piece is worth knowing specifically because it illustrates the precision of what sleep is doing. The largest daily pulse of human growth hormone – critical for muscle repair, fat metabolism, cellular regeneration – occurs during the first deep slow-wave sleep cycle of the night. For someone asleep by ten or eleven, that pulse fires in its full depth sometime between midnight and three in the morning. Delay sleep significantly, and the conditions for that pulse degrade; the body can partially compensate by shifting the timing, but the depth of early-night slow-wave sleep is difficult to replicate later. Consistent, reasonably early bedtimes are not a grandmotherly suggestion. They are a performance variable with a specific mechanism behind them.
The case extends well beyond athletics, which is where it becomes genuinely important for anyone navigating a demanding work life.
The Hidden Cost of Sleep Deprivation on Decision-Making
Sleep-deprived judgment is degraded in ways the sleep-deprived person is specifically poorly positioned to detect. This is one of the cruelest features of the condition: the confidence that you are functioning normally persists well past the point where functioning is actually normal. The research is unambiguous on this – reaction time, emotional regulation, creative problem-solving, the capacity to weigh competing considerations patiently – all of these degrade under consistent sleep pressure, and they degrade quietly, in ways that only become visible in retrospect if at all.
The executive who compresses sleep to fit in another hour of work is not simply tired. They are making the next day’s decisions with a subtly compromised instrument, and the one after that, and the degradation compounds in the same direction that good sleep compounds in the opposite one.
The immune system belongs in this conversation too, though it tends to get less attention in performance-focused circles. Sleep is when the immune system does its most significant work. It’s when cytokines (immune signaling molecules) are produced, when inflammatory responses are regulated, when the body’s defenses are maintained and replenished. The athlete who chronically undervalues sleep is not just risking poor race performance. They are systematically undermining the immune function that keeps them healthy enough to train in the first place. There is a particular irony in sacrificing sleep for training when the training depends on sleep to produce anything.
And the emotional dimension is real, though it is the hardest to quantify. The version of me operating on sustained good sleep is measurably more patient, more generous in interpretation, more capable of the kind of presence that good leadership and good relationships require. That is not a soft observation. Mood, tolerance, the capacity for genuine attention to another person – these are performance variables with consequences in every domain of life, and they degrade with sleep just as reliably as aerobic capacity degrades without training.
Why Sleep Is the Foundation of Health and Performance
Sleep, in other words, is not one component of a healthy life sitting alongside the others – the exercise, the nutrition, the stress management – as peers. It is the foundation on which all of them operate. The body that hasn’t slept cannot adapt well to training, cannot metabolize nutrients optimally, and cannot regulate the hormonal systems that govern energy, mood, and recovery. You can eat perfectly and train intelligently and still be systematically undermining both if the sleep foundation is compromised. It is the ground floor, not the roof. Everything else sits on top of it.
I am still working on this. But I know what the data feels like in my own body – the difference between a week of protected sleep and a week of compressed nights is not subtle, and it shows up everywhere: in the training, in the work, in the quality of attention I bring to the people around me. The knowing matters even when the execution is imperfect, because it changes what I reach for when I have the choice.
Challenge for the Month
Three practical things worth trying, none of them requiring perfection. First, pick a target bedtime and protect it at least five nights out of seven – ideally before eleven, earlier if your schedule allows. Second, put the phone down thirty minutes before that time, not because the screen light argument is necessarily decisive, but because the habit of winding down deliberately is itself valuable. Third, notice – genuinely notice – what the days feel like after different kinds of nights. Not with a tracker, not with scores, just with honest attention.
Your own data, accumulated over a few weeks, will tell you more than any study. Sleep is where the work gets done. The challenge is simply to let it.
