Why Only The Rested Win
Or how to sleep your way into a better life. (No, not like that.)
“It was as though my body and my mind were unclenching, and then replenishing.” — Johann Hari in Stolen Focus, after getting his first good night of sleep in months
I smelled like gasoline in high school.
Not every day, but a high enough percentage of the time that it begins to make sense why I never had a serious girlfriend.
The smell came from working at the local gas station and man did I love that job. There was always something to do. Always a fire to put out (not literally, thankfully). Every day you’d meet at least one genuinely crazy person. Then, if there were any hot dogs left on the rollers — those wrinkly burnt sticks of meat were all yours!
But of all my memories working there, one of my favorite periods was the "Big Ben Saga."
Big Ben (not his real name) was a football player who was built like a damn fridge. Short, stocky, and solid as a rock. He also happened to be the nicest guy you could imagine.
The problem was his ability to stay awake…or lack thereof.
Big Ben liked to nap. In class. At lunch. Before and after practice. So, when he got a job working at the same gas station as me, I had an inkling it wasn’t going to last.
Sure enough, about a week into the job, Big Ben started disappearing for 20 minutes at a time. Just poof. Gone. All 220 lbs of the guy couldn’t be found anywhere. We’d check the bathrooms, the car wash, even the freezer — nothing.
Then, on her way out for a smoke break, one of my coworkers found him. Hidden in the back of the beer cave was a Budweiser hideaway.1 Big Ben had rearranged a few dozen cases to create a flat surface and a half wall to hide his body. Then, like a bear in hibernation, he’d crawl in to catch a few z’s before returning to work.
We all had a good laugh and promised to keep it a secret from the bossman. At least we tried...
A few days later, that bossman needed to solve an inventory discrepancy and, while combing through the beer cave, came upon a very large teenager snoozing away.
None of us could make out the words through his screaming, but we all knew what had happened. Big Ben was out of a bed and a job.
Sleeping is Believing
Sleep is weakness.
We might never come right out and say that, but a lot of us live our lives like it’s true.
We burn the candle at both ends—staying up late to check one more box and then waking up early to get a head start on the day. We grind because it's necessary—to stay ahead, to move forward, to avoid getting fired.
Sleeping in is a luxury once you’ve made it. But it’s a detriment before then. Only slackers hit snooze. Only party poopers climb in bed by 9.
But what if we’ve been misled?
What if instead of being a subtractor from your waking life, sleep was a multiplier?
At this point in your adult life, you probably know something about sleep. That it’s good for you and necessary for your body’s recovery. You might know that a good night’s rest helps you think better, even if you’re not clear on the specifics.
Today, I’m less concerned with what you know and am more interested in what you believe.
Knowing that sleep is good gets you a gold star on a test.
Believing that sleep is good gets your ass in bed on time.
But like any training program, you’re not going to hit your goal after one session. That’s why I like to start by setting expectations.
This week, and every week going forward while we’re in the Body Body Body series, the goal will be to plant a seed. A seed of belief about some physical lever you can pull to positively influence your brain. Over time, these seeds will take root and sprout habits that change your actions and, therefore, your life.
Our first lever is sleep.
The remainder of this post will focus on four visual analogies that explain how sleep (and the lack of it) impacts your brain. People who understood these facts gained an average of 42 minutes of sleep per night.2 I think, once you believe them, you’ll get even more than that.
4 Pictures Inside Your Head
Your brain does a lot while you sleep.
It’s like a little Amazon warehouse of activity — a mass of chaotic energy, all aimed at helping you wake up a better, stronger, more efficient version of yourself the next morning.
But 92% of it (I’m guesstimating) can be explained by the following four images:
A pendulum
A pair of glasses
A library
And an evidence board
In these four analogies lie (almost) everything you need to know about sleep and the brain, along with an understanding of why your life sucks when you don’t get enough of it.
The Pendulum
Who in your life gets especially cranky when tired?
I'm tempted to throw my wife under the bus on this one, but it's absolutely me. Honestly, we've been married 9 years now, and a not-insignificant reason for that longevity is due to her getting me to bed on time (thanks, babe 😅).
There are two things at play here: your amygdala, or what Dr. Matthew Walker, author of the book Why We Sleep, calls the "emotional gas pedal", and the prefrontal cortex, or the "brake pedal."3
When you get too little sleep (typically 6 hours or less), your "brain reverts to a primitive pattern of uncontrolled reactivity." You become all gas and no brake.
This is where our pendulum idea comes in.
The brain doesn't just become more negative when it's tired; it becomes more reactive to any emotion that's triggered. Your highs climb higher, and your lows fall lower. Either side extends by upwards of 60% of your "normal."
Sixty percent is just a number until you put it in a context we already know, like driving. If you’re on a highway where the speed limit is 50mph (which you follow cause you’re a good driver), a 60% fluctuation would be like you swinging between 20 and 80!
Sleep enables the brake. It quiets the crazy. It slows the pendulum, allowing you to respond — not just react.
A rested brain is in control.
The Glasses
In addition to narrowing the swings of our pendulum, sleep has a way of helping the brain see the world more clearly. And by that, I mean with less emotional interference.
An underslept brain sees the world "through frosted glass.”4 Our ability to interpret other people's emotions gets foggy, as does our ability to display our own. We misjudge situations, make inaccurate assumptions, and ultimately choose routes that take us further away from what we truly want.
In REM sleep, which happens primarily during hours 5-8 for most adults, our brains enter an “integration” phase where we “build an ever more accurate model of how the world works.”5 One of the reasons it’s so accurate is because it processes events, interactions, and learnings without emotions.
The chemicals responsible for anxiety and stress get switched off so that, for a few hours each night, we can become truly objective observers of our lives.6 Then, when we wake up, we "integrate" those insights into how we act and speak and move.
Getting enough sleep won’t give you rose-colored glasses, but it will prevent you from walking around with sludge-covered ones. Those last few hours wipe away the gunk. They offer us a clarity and accuracy that amplifies our effectiveness in the world.
A rested brain sees the truth.
The Library
When we talk about integration…what exactly are we integrating, and into where?
This is where we finally get to talk about memory, or as I like to think about it: our own personal, mobile library.
Now, I love libraries. Working in them is how I paid the bills in both undergrad and grad school. And the way books get added to a catalog is similar to how events become memories.
At the library, each new book would get entered into our software, tagged with info marking what it is and where it should go, and finally shelved in the correct location.
When you fall asleep, the first thing your brain does is decide what's worth keeping (i.e., gets added to the software) and what should get thrown out.7 Lots of things influence this process.
How strong are the emotions associated with event/interaction/information?
Does it tie into other subjects that already make up huge portions of your library?
Was there repetition present signaling that this thing should make the cut?
Then, just like a book, the good stuff gets tagged and carried off into the right place. You can imagine the nerdiest, most anal-retentive organizer living their best life, ensuring everything is exactly as it should be. This is what it looks like when you sleep.
When you undersleep or pull an all-nighter or take PDDs (performance dehancing drugs – like alcohol, caffeine, really spicy foods), the picture looks much different. The process becomes “leaky.”8
The new stuff coming in looks damaged, so most of it gets tossed out right away. Then the stuff that does make it through gets messy. That nerdy organizer becomes a disgruntled, distracted employee. They mislabel books, enter the information wrong, and shelve them all out of order.
Your ability to remember, and to use those memories to make decisions, gets cut by anywhere from 20% to 35% after missing one night of sleep.9 Stretch that over a period of weeks or months where you're not hitting the recommended 8 hours and the consequences intensify. Not only are you using less than ½ of your cognitive capacity to get through the day, you’re also learning 2x as slowly.
If life feels especially difficult, it might be because you have a shitty librarian. The good news is that sleep is smart. It knows how to fix its messes. You just have to show up (in bed) and let it work.
A rested brain holds the answer.
The Evidence Board
The last one is my favorite of the bunch.
If you’re a fan of detective shows, conspiracy forums, or It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, you’ve seen these before. They’re cork boards covered in pictures, documents, and newspaper clippings with strings of yarn crisscrossing atop in an effort to make connections.
This is exactly what your brain does, except that we call it creativity.
There’s two default ways your brain recalls and uses information (usually to solve a problem). When you’re awake, it’s logic. And by logic, we mean a clear, associative path from one thing to another. Think long division. It makes sense. It stays in one section of the library. There’s hierarchy.
This way is great for logical problems, but the really juicy stuff in life (relationships, business, art, etc.) aren’t solved this way.
That’s where the second way comes in: sleep. When you drift off to dreamland, your “logic guards” peace out. They don’t work the night shift. Which is why your dreams can get so weird. But it also enables your creativity to bloom.
In REM-sleep your brain “shortcuts the obvious links and favors very distantly related concepts.”10 Back in the library, this means your brain stops looking for the answer to a food question in the cooking section and starts jumping all over: history, technology, biography, gardening, yoga, maps!
There’s a reason evidence boards are also called crazy walls. The “information alchemy” your mind engages in seems random, unproductive.11 But that’s what needs to happen to make new possible.
Logic gets you from 1 to 2. Creativity gets you from 1 to 10.
An under-slept brain is like a board with no string. You lose the ability to make far-off connections and get stuck with short-sighted answers. Life feels smaller because it is. Creativity is the one superpower humans actually have access to. Don’t trade it for an extra hour of Netflix.
A rested brain solves the problem.
Sleep is All of It
What’s funny about the Big Ben story is that it all worked out in the end.
One of the wrestling coaches offered him a part-time conditioning job. Being in that environment got him interested in the sport, and two years later, he graduated with a wrestling scholarship to the local state university. Naps, in a roundabout way, paid for his college.
Now, while I can’t condone clandestine slumber parties (especially while on the clock), what I can tell you is that sleep is the foundation for how your waking life plays out in the real world. It is the mind’s fuel, it’s ammunition, tuning fork, doctor and coach.
Sleep will help you get to where you want to go. It will transform you into a clearer thinker, a bolder creative, and a gentler leader. It will show you the way forward. And when there isn't one, it'll teach you how to make one.
Sleep is where it all starts. Where mental fitness begins.
Sleep is how you win.
Beer Cave - a huge storage room where pallets of beer sat before getting moved into the fridge.
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, PhD, page 328. Going forward, I’ll abbreviate the book as WWS.
WWS page 146-147.
WWS page 215.
WWS page 52.
WWS page 208.
WWS page 109.
WWS page 311.
WWS page 125.
WWS page 225.
WWS page 219.
LOVED THIS!
1) It was worth the read just for this line: "I’m less concerned with what you know and am more interested in what you believe." The older I get, the more I resonate with this. Hence, the information myth from my book! Shameless plug!
2) This article gave me all the mental visualizations I needed to believe all the sleep benefits. You just gave me "Inside Out" for sleep. I didn't realize how much I needed this until you gave it to me.
3) Many of the breakthroughs in my life and my coaching clients' lives come from "letting go." And that "letting go" takes on a host of things. Past narratives, identities, ways of acting, control, etc. The connection I made while reading this article. Sleep is a daily invitation to "let go," to say I am not in control, to say many things are happening under the surface and beyond me that contribute to my success, to say it's not all on my shoulders. Choosing to get a good night's sleep is a daily opportunity to say YES to all those things.