Get Some Sleep

When I say I take sleep seriously, I don't just mean white noise machines and eye masks. I mean last month I overnighted a mattress (identical to the one I have at home) to my parents' house in Massachusetts ahead of my visit.

I didn't bother explaining. They've met the version of me that shows up without sleep.

He's ornery. He's easily overwhelmed, quick to misread tone, reactive in ways that make small things feel sharp and personal.

He's a worse driver. He's short with waiters. He gets fixated on problems that aren't actually problems, and he ignores the ones that are.

He can still sound articulate, still perform, but everything about him is tight and brittle.

I hate being him.

Poor sleep doesn't feel like an impairment while it's happening. That's what makes it dangerous.

A few years into building SparkPlug, I was sleeping maybe 6 hours a night. Sometimes 4. It felt like a superpower! With a little bit of help from caffeine and Adderall, I thought I was outworking everyone. I was focused and "on."

Looking back, I wasn't falling apart, but I was becoming a person I didn't recognize.

Not irrational, just off. Less precise. More reactive.

I'd get snippy with my co-founder over things that didn't matter. I'd misread Slack messages and assume bad intent. I'd stare at emails and data and feel nothing. No pattern recognition, no insight. Just static.

At the time, I chalked this up to "burnout." It felt like a tough week. A foggy morning. A normal dip in energy. The more I ignored it, the more normal it started to feel.

Years later, after reading Why We Sleep and learning to listen to my body, I can see it clearly: I was stumbling through a fog. Blunt when I should've been nuanced. Apathetic when I should've been curious.

None of it felt like a red flag at the time.

Why We Sleep revealed the brutal truth: healthy adults restricted to six hours of sleep per night for two weeks performed cognitively as if they'd been awake for 48 hours straight.

The worst part is, they didn't feel impaired. In fact, they reported feeling basically normal.

Sleep deprivation doesn't broadcast itself. It mimics baseline while slowly dulling every edge. You don't realize your cognition is corrupted, because the part of you that would catch it is already fried.

Researchers discovered something even more unsettling about what sleep loss does to your decision-making. After one night without rest, the brain's amygdala becomes 60% more reactive to negative stimuli. At the same time, the prefrontal cortex goes offline.

In practice: we become more reactive, less empathetic, and significantly worse at reading social situations. We start interpreting neutral expressions as hostile. We lose the emotional fine-tuning that keeps relationships intact.

I've been that person.

The version of me that emerged after consecutive nights of poor sleep was a real jerk. My team would walk on eggshells around me. I'd become unpredictably reactive and managing my mood became part of their job.

Sleep debt puts rose-colored glasses on your risk assessment. The Journal of Neuroscience studies show that tired brains become hypersensitive to potential rewards while going blind to potential losses. fMRI scans light up when sleep-deprived subjects see possible gains but barely register when shown risks.

I’ve never pulled the nuclear lever at 2 AM, but I’ve definitely stared at a pitch deck or roadmap and thought, “This is genius,” only to re-read it in the morning and wonder what the hell I was thinking.

Bummer news: you can't just catch up on poor sleep with one good night.

Studies show that after a week of sleep restriction, even a full 10-hour recovery sleep fails to restore cognitive performance to baseline. Some deficits persist for days.

This is why "I'll catch up on weekends" doesn't work. You're operating with chronically impaired judgment that doesn't reset with one lazy Saturday morning.

I track this in my own performance. When I've accumulated sleep debt, it takes three to four nights of good sleep before I trust myself to make important decisions. My risk assessment stays skewed and emotional regulation remains brittle.

Most people I know have never experienced their cognitive baseline. They've been operating with some level of sleep debt for so long that impaired judgment feels normal.

Everyone claims they know someone who only needs five hours of sleep. Some even aspire to be that person.

We've mythologized the short sleeper: Edison, who called sleep "a criminal waste of time"; Thatcher, who ran the UK on four hours a night; CEOs and founders today who brag about 3am wakeups like badges of honor.

In reality, true short sleepers carry a rare genetic mutation that allows them to function normally on less than six hours. They make up 1% to 3% of the population.

Unless you've won that genetic lottery, you're not thriving on four hours. You're adapted to dysfunction. And the myth persists because believing you're built different protects your ego from acknowledging that your judgment, reaction time, and emotional regulation are degrading.

After nearly destroying relationships and even my business through chronic sleep deprivation, I built what some might call an "unreasonable" sleep system.

Blackout curtains and eye masks that block every photon. White noise. Temperature-controlled rooms at 64 degrees. No alarm clock and first-thing early morning light.

The mattress I shipped home was just the expression of a deeper realization: I don't trust any version of myself that emerges after poor sleep.

Sure, my protocol system has costs. I've broken A/C units trying to hit arctic temperatures, missed plenty of morning meetings, and paid obscene amounts for later flights to get an extra few hours.

I've been called neurotic. But I've also made better decisions, treated people with more patience, and maintained the emotional stability required to navigate chaos.

When my parents told me I used to be "miserable to be around" during visits home from college, I initially took it as criticism. Now I see it as data. I was arriving home after benders with no cognitive buffer for family dynamics. I was mean because I was operating with an impaired nervous system.

Today, I can spot the sleep-deprived version of others from across a room. They talk faster. Interrupt more. Make grand pronouncements while missing obvious social cues. They're convinced they're operating at peak performance while everyone around them manages the fallout.

Sleep debt is like financial debt: the people carrying the most are often the least aware of the interest they're paying.

The difference is that sleep debt compounds in ways that affect everyone around you. Your team, your family, and everyone else who depends on your judgment.

The mattress arrived a few hours after I did and I slept nine hours in a bed that felt exactly like home. The next morning, I didn't have to work so hard to be the best version of myself.

Sometimes the most strategic thing you can do is give yourself the tools to think straight.

Most of us have never experienced our own cognitive baseline. We've been operating with accumulated sleep debt for so long that we've forgotten what clear thinking feels like.

The version of yourself that emerges after consistently good sleep is undeniably more patient, more emotionally stable, better at reading complex situations, and significantly less likely to make decisions you'll regret.

We obsess over supplements, track our macros, optimize morning routines, wear wrist-based diagnostics to bed, and still ignore the one variable that changes everything: sleep.

Sleep is the foundation. It decides which version of you walks into the meeting, the workout, the hard conversation, the launch.

And if you're going to trust someone with important decisions about your life, work, and relationships, it might as well be the version of yourself that's actually thinking clearly.

Up and to the right.