My Brain Needs Sleep Training

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For a lot of my working life, I treated sleep as optional, and stress as normal.

A father of four and CEO of two bike companies, time was always at a premium. I convinced myself that six hours was plenty. Stress kept me sharp. It helped me stay calm under pressure, push through uncertainty, and remain productive. Or so I thought.

What I didn’t grasp was how stress and a lack of sleep was eroding my brain.

One afternoon, I was running job interviews for a new Quality Control Manager. HR had lined up four candidates, and I was halfway through the third when things started to blur.

Sitting across from me, the candidate was walking me through his QC experience in aluminum production. I was staring down at his resume on the boardroom table and my mind started to wander away to the welding department’s delivery issues.

Suddenly I realized it had become quiet.

I jerked my head up and looked around. There was no one in the boardroom but me!

I stumbled to the reception desk and asked, “Where did he go…I was just interviewing someone?”

The receptionist looked at me a bit puzzled, “Oh, he left about five minutes ago. Is there something wrong?”

That’s when it hit me: I had fallen asleep in the middle of an interview. “No, it’s all fine.”

Embarrassed, I brushed it off with a chuckle; “If he’s that boring, I won’t hire him.”

I'm a bit wiser now, realizing that sleep isn’t a wasted part of the day. It’s when my brain repairs, and rewires me. Neurologists use great metaphors for what’s happening at night in my head:

• Sleep is my brain's rinse cycle for clearing out junk that clogs its function.
• Sleep is the equivalent of plugging my phone in.
• Lack of sleep degrades my performance in ways that affect my leadership – I start to appear critical or short-tempered.

I’ve done stupid things in the early days of business.

My lawyer wanted me to prove to him what the risks were of someone tampering with the front wheel. While being filmed one day in front of my house, I loosened the quick release on the axle of the front wheel. I started riding slowly downhill on our sidewalk. After 100 feet, the front wheel dipped into a small divot, and I was ungracefully launched over the handlebars.

I wish it was that easy to topple into sleep!

I’m also guilty of not prioritizing sleep. So I’m starting on three pre-sleep ideas, I hope will become routines:

1. I’m trying to keep my late evenings more calm, even boring, to get my brain to rest. No major decisions, no heavy thinking, no arguments.
2. About once a week I fail at this one: No caffeine, no sweets in the late afternoon or evening.
3. This one’s also tough: Stop screens 30 minutes prior to bedtime, so that blue light that keeps my brain to stay alert is gone.

What happens when I sleep well? Thinking and creativity is sharper. My emotional resilience is robust. My aging brain thanks me.

Leading a company, I believed sleep was one thing I could trim back to gain more benefit from 24 hours. But the science is clear, and my own experience confirms it: sleep isn’t wasted time. It’s possibly the ultimate productivity hack.

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I would love to connect with you on LinkedIn or Facebook

See you next week,

Grayson

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