Stopping the culture of short sleep

Why are we still viewing short sleep as a personal achievement?
An executive who has flown across three time zones and still turns up for an early presentation in the office is praised for being committed. A CEO who claims to run on five hours of sleep, does Hyrox training every night of the week, takes morning ice baths, answers emails before sunrise, and also attends all of his children’s school events is seen as disciplined, impressive, resilient.

There is a problem with this way of thinking. Having shorter sleep isn’t a productivity strategy long-term. In many cases, it’s a sign that the body is coping with a level of strain it was never designed to tolerate over long time.

When sleep deprivation has been going on for months and years, many people get so used to this suboptimal level of physiological and psychological wellbeing, they are often convinced that short sleep is what their body needs, that it’s enough for them personally. They manage high workloads, commit to all family events, have a rigorous exercise regime, socialise and travel. From the outside, everything looks functional. Yet underneath, lack of sleep can slowly erode their health, affecting the functioning of every system in the body - impacting on energy, immune function, cognitive health, resilience and mood regulation. Poor energy management, slower thinking, decision fatigue, lapses in concentration and brain fog, reduced motivation, and reliance on caffeine and energy drinks can become their new norm. What's more, research shows that chronically sleep deprived people are not aware how sleep deprived they are.

Poor quality and quantity sleep can become both a personal health risk issue and a workplace productivity and performance hindrance. Functioning on suboptimal levels of energy and cognitive reserve may stop them seeking help trying to resolve the issue, especially if the culture around them is still celebrating shorter sleep as a personal achievement.

There’s a significant difference between getting through the day and functioning optimally. Someone with poor quality sleep might carry out all of their daily tasks, work to deadlines, attend meetings, and keep up with family responsibilities, but the effects on long-term physical and mental resilience will be seen and felt over the years to come.

Over 60% of people in the UK report issues like trouble falling asleep, staying asleep and waking up tired.
Research on sleep health in the past 15-20 years has shown that limiting sleep to five or six hours per night over consecutive days leads to cumulative declines in cognitive performance. One study found that people restricted to six hours of sleep per night over fourteen days developed significant performance impairments. Importantly, they often underestimated how impaired they had become, meaning their subjective sense of “I’m fine” didn’t match their actual performance.

Several landmark studies by David Dinges - the Director of the Division of Sleep and Chronobiology at Pennsylvania University - show that long-term sleep deprivation severely damages vital cognitive processes, such as concentration and attention. His research demonstrates that the brain cannot adapt to only getting 4 or 6 hours of sleep a night. Using a Psychomotor Vigilance Test as a performance measure, his studies show that those people who had a full 8 hours of sleep hardly had any attention lapses and little or no cognitive declines over a 14-day study. However, participants who slept for only 4 or 6 hours had results that showed steady declined performance, with almost each passing day.

This is one of the most important points to understand about human sleep. It can affect concentration, reaction time, alertness and decision-making long before someone realises they have a cognitive ‘slow-down’. People might take longer to complete mundane tasks, need more time to become active and alert in the morning, have little motivation to exercise, or rely more on caffeine and sugary snacks, while still believing they are functioning normally.

Sleep loss doesn’t always feel dramatic. After one or two poor nights, you might feel irritable, unmotivated or desperate for caffeine. But when the same pattern continues for weeks, months, or years, the body adjusts to a lower level of functioning. This low-level exhaustion can become an accepted baseline, and people can start measuring every other sleep pattern against that tired version of themselves.

Sleep is a biological process that supports metabolic health, immune function, hormone regulation, recovery, emotional stability, mood regulation and brain repair processes. When sleep is shortened or disrupted, many systems are affected at once.

Poor sleep can interfere with how the body regulates blood sugar and insulin. This is one reason people often feel hungrier, crave sugary foods, rely more on quick energy or struggle with weight when they’re not sleeping efficiently. Sleep restriction has been linked with insulin resistance, which is a key factor in prediabetes, high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes. Reviews on sleep disruption and metabolic health also link poor sleep to appetite regulation, obesity risk, and changes in glucose metabolism.

For many people, this becomes a cycle. They sleep poorly, feel tired, crave high-energy snacks or sweets, experience energy crashes, feel more stressed, and then sleep poorly again. The issue is rarely about willpower; it’s often a vicious cycle which is hard to break.

Sleep and mental health have a two-way relationship. Poor sleep can increase emotional reactivity, anxiety, low mood and irritability. At the same time, stress, anxiety, depression and chronic pain can make it harder to sleep.

This is why someone might feel tired but wired at bedtime. The body is exhausted, but the nervous system is still alert. Elevated cortisol levels keep the body in an inflammatory state, which inhibits recovery. Over time, this can affect day-to-day life. The person may develop low-level anxiety, low mood or anhedonia - a characteristic of depression. A person might need longer to complete simple and familiar tasks, take longer to work on a deadline, and even make more technical mistakes because they constantly feel drained of resources, and concentration is hard to master.

Sleep also plays an important role in immune health. During sleep, the body lowers inflammation and supports immune processes that protect against infection and illness. Research has shown that even partial sleep deprivation can reduce natural killer cell activity, an important part of immune surveillance. In one study, sleep deprivation between 3 am and 7 am reduced natural killer cell activity in most participants, with average activity falling significantly before returning to baseline after resumed sleep.

This doesn’t mean one bad night will ruin someone’s health. But it does mean that repeated short sleep can place extra pressure on immune function. People might notice they pick up colds, viruses, or infections more often, take longer to recover, or feel generally more run-down.

Every workout is a controlled form of physical stress. The benefit isn’t only the training session itself, but the repair that happens afterwards. Sleep supports tissue repair, muscle recovery, hormone regulation and inflammation control.

When sleep is shortened, the body might not recover as effectively, and inflammation remains high. This can leave people feeling sore for longer, more prone to injuries, chronic muscle or joints aches, more frequent musculoskeletal issues, or less motivated to exercise over the long run. For high-performing professionals who tend to also train hard, this is especially important. A demanding work schedule combined with intense exercise and poor sleep can be a recipe for under-recovery.

The brain also uses sleep for detoxification and repair processes. The glymphatic system, similar to the lymphatic system, helps remove toxins and by-products that accumulate during the day. Poor or shortened sleep has been associated with changes in amyloid-beta and tau, two proteins linked with Alzheimer’s disease. Sleep plays an important role in clearing these from the brain, while sleep deprivation may contribute to their build-up over time.

In simple terms, sleep isn't just rest, it is a most crucial aspect of the brain repair mechanism, protecting cognitive functioning in ageing. When sleep is repeatedly shortened, memory, concentration, processing speed and mental clarity can all be negatively affected.

This is where sleep becomes a sustainable performance issue in teams. Sleep deprivation isn’t obvious. Employees can still arrive on time, attend meetings, answer emails and complete their work, but the quality, speed and accuracy may be reduced. This suboptimal state of physiological and psychological functioning doesn’t let people maximise the potential of their mind or body due to persistently poor quality sleep.

After one or two nights of poor sleep, the effects are usually easier to recognise. Energy drops, reaction times slow, motivation decreases, and it can take longer to feel alert in the morning. People often rely more on caffeine, struggle to focus or find that routine tasks require more effort than usual. The bigger problem is that, over time, this can start to feel normal. An employee might not notice that the same report now takes longer to complete, that they are carrying work into the evening, or that they are skipping exercise because their energy has dropped. Persistent under-sleeping can reset what “normal” feels like.

For businesses, this can show up as slower decision-making, more mistakes, reduced creativity, poor communication, lower motivation, lower engagement and poor resilience. In addition, there is a greater risk of errors in the roles that involve using machinery, precision technology, clinical judgement, engineering, financial sectors. It can also affect workplace culture. When short sleep is praised as a sign of commitment, employees feel pressure to ignore tiredness rather than address it.

A tired workforce often still looks busy, committed and productive. But this isn’t the same as high sustainable performance. Education in sleep health should become part of a wider wellbeing resilience strategy, because people's ability to perform to high standards, adapt to continuous change and increase productivity are only viable when they learn how to manage their energy effectively, prevent cognitive fatigue and retain optimal mental capacity.

Sleep problems do not always mean lying awake all night. They can include:

Insufficient sleep or bad quality sleep are rooted in lifestyle, where a lot of factors play their role, these are: sedentary lifestyle or low physical activity levels, poor diet choices, lack of bedtime routine, poor sleep hygiene, high stress levels, evening screen use, regular alcohol intake, high anxiety levels and several more.

Getting enough sleep isn’t a luxury or a weakness. It’s one of the body’s most important foundations for health. Without enough good-quality sleep, other areas begin to suffer: metabolism, mood, immunity, recovery, cognition and performance.

At Boost My Energy, I help people look beyond the idea that tiredness is just part of life. If you’re not getting enough sleep, waking feeling exhausted, struggling with energy during the day or feeling your cognitive agility and capacity are lowered,, it might be time to understand what is causing the problem.

Sleep is when the body repairs itself, the brain resets to optimal functioning, and energy is rebuilt for sustainability. If your sleep no longer feels restorative, changing your habits by working with a sleep health professional is important to sustain your performance and preserve mental resilience.

Stay healthy, be joyful!

Love, Katya