Chapter 10
Sleepless Nights and the Walking Dead
People ask me if I sleep well at night with all of the competition. I tell them I sleep like a baby—I wake up every two hours and cry.
—Roberto C. Goizueta
Zombies are slowly killing your company culture. Are you one of them? According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), one‐third of us suffer from insomnia.1 A growing body of work indicates that poor sleep is a killer. In fact, if you took the CDC map of U.S. sleep issues and overlaid it with their maps for heart disease and poor mental health, you'd find nearly perfect correlations across states.2–4 People suffering from insomnia are 10 times more likely to suffer from depression, at 60% greater risk for obesity, and miss 11 more days of work annually because of absenteeism and presenteeism.5
Beyond taking years off of people's lives, insomnia also takes a toll on culture. Remember our definition of culture—consistent, observable patterns of behavior. If one‐third of your workforce (leaders included) have sleep issues, they also struggle with focusing, productivity, and generally being nice to co‐workers. Insomnia turns us into zombies looking to kill fun and rip the flesh from the joy around us. When you don't sleep, you may as well wear a T‐shirt that says, “Leave me alone. I'm a jerk today.” You don't have to imagine one‐third of your company experiencing this. It's already happening. #TheWalkingDead
Worse, for workers in jobs like construction, manufacturing, utilities, or oil and gas, the lack of sleep is the equivalent of being hung over. Even one bad night can reduce your motor reflexes significantly.6 Now, imagine you're behind the wheel of a tractor trailer or forklift, or operating in dangerous conditions. It's like going to work drunk—skip 20 to 25 hours of snooze time and you'd be well over the U.S. legal driving limit at 0.1%.7 In these cases, the lack of sleep can also place bystanders in harm's way. In 2014, a Walmart truck slammed into comedian Tracy Morgan's limo, killing a passenger. The driver fell asleep at the wheel in the middle of a 14‐hour shift, having been awake for 28 hours.8 While the $10 million dollar settlement grabbed headlines, similar issues happen every day in business and go unnoticed. In fact, AAA estimates that sleepy drivers account for 328,000 accidents every year in the United States.9
Why Am I So Damn Good at Insomnia?
We're training our brains all the time. We get better at the things we do most. Think about your sleep patterns. What do you practice constantly? Are you training good sleep habits? Or are you like one‐third of Americans who train themselves to be zombies, great at insomnia?
As leaders, we have to protect our own sleep to ensure we're at our best. Most of us don't. That led the Whil team to create a four‐week digital sleep training program with FusionHealth and Dr. Jeffrey Durmer called “Synchronize Your Mind and Body for Better Sleep.” I'm borrowing from Dr. Durmer's work here with his permission. Jeff is a systems neuroscientist, neurologist, and sleep medicine physician. He's also one of the coolest peeps I know. On top of ridiculous credentials, including working with the Fortune 500, the Atlanta Falcons, and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), he's also annoyingly good looking. Our team calls him, “super hot sleep Doc.” They call me Joe.
Dr. Durmer has worked with thousands of professionals to address the impact of sleep on their physical, mental, and emotional health, their performance, and their overall quality of life. In his work with everyone ranging from truck drivers to CEOs, Jeff tells me, “I've found that people who ‘suffer from their sleep, rather than savor it' don't really know why. That results in years of misperception, sloppy sleep behaviors, or easily treatable sleep disorders.”
Dr. Durmer uses the science of sleep and circadian neurobiology to improve the quality of life for professionals suffering from sleep issues. He trains strong leaders to be “strong sleepers.” This is important. Too many of us actually train to be terrible sleepers. By the time we lie down at night, our daytime activities have already set the stage for an awful night's sleep. Then we feed the insomnia beast. We start with a hint of strong worrying, add a big dose of regret, sprinkled with anxiety and a splash of grief, longing, and maybe a few conspiracy theories for dessert. We cycle through our to‐do lists for the next day. Or next week. Or next year. The more we do this, the better the brain gets at revisiting these thoughts. It becomes a routine. A habit. We become increasingly efficient at driving ourselves nuts. The more we train ourselves to be experts at insomnia, the more it limits our ability to be effective leaders.
REM And Non‐REM Sleep Both Matter
Sleep is so natural that it works like hunger and thirst. Your brain builds up a “hunger” for sleep (like a zombie wants brains) when it's awake for too long. When you expend enough energy, you experience sleepiness. This trigger starts your mind and body on a well‐choreographed “change of state” from being awake into being asleep. This “sleep dance” includes two distinct types: rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and non‐REM sleep.
For most, our sleep switches between REM and non‐REM every 90 to 120 minutes throughout the night. The first half is dominated by non‐REM sleep, providing your body and brain with essentials to restore function, fight disease, and inflammation. It is also why you feel rested even if you've slept only a few hours. Basically, your brain clears out what you don't need at night, giving you that “refreshed” feeling when you wake. Dr. Durmer calls it, “Taking out the trash.”
This is also the time your body heals itself by lowering blood pressure, heart rate, body temperature, blood glucose, and insulin levels. Without non‐REM sleep, your brain and body would be unprepared for life.
REM sleep is distinct from non‐REM sleep because it comes and goes. REM sleep is associated with dreaming, memory, and emotion. If non‐REM is housekeeping for the brain, REM sleep is housekeeping for the mind.
When you feel the stress of the day in your mind or through body tension, it pulls you out of the natural process of programmed sleep. Because of that, being a bad sleeper often correlates to being a less effective leader. Jeff points out, “The rate of sleep disorders is very high. And most go untreated because individuals don't know what to look for. But there is good news. Just as you can learn to control your emotions with mindfulness, you can also learn to control the mind‐body synergy that leads to sleep.”
Turn Off the “Wake”
It's important to know how the brain produces wakefulness so that you can learn to turn it off when it's time for bed. We build up a “sleep hunger” throughout the day as we burn energy. This is satisfied (reversed) by sleep. There is also a system in your brain that creates wakefulness, and it's unique because it also responds to light.
The wake system functions a bit differently from sleep, in that there is no “hunger” that accumulates. Instead, wakefulness happens because we have a cellular switch deep in a part of the brain called the hypothalamus. It's like a 24‐hour pacemaker for wakefulness. This neural pacemaker, known as the Suprachiasmatic Nucleus (let's just call it the SCN) synchronizes wake‐promoting hormones, neurochemicals, and shuts down sleep “hunger” when you wake up.
Because it is directly linked to light detection in your eyes, it becomes active when you see light. This is why getting light exposure in the morning and throughout your day is very effective for staying awake. It helps shut down sleepiness—much more effectively than caffeine, and it doesn't hang around in your brain for six to eight hours, either.
Mindfulness can also help when you're sleep deprived. One study found meditators who sleep less actually had less of a decline in cognitive function than nonmeditators who don't sleep well.10 Other studies have shown that mindfulness results in what scientists call the “relaxation response”—a physiological state of deep rest induced by practices like meditation and yoga. So even if you're not getting enough sleep, meditation helps you experience the deep rest your body needs for processes like energy metabolism and immunity.
Understand Your Sleep Environment
As your knowledge about sleep increases, you'll be able to look around your bedroom and identify problems like light. Light is the most important element to control when you're trying to synchronize your mind and body for sleep.
How Much Sleep Have You Lost? Let's pressure‐test how you're building up your insomnia expertise. Over the past five years, how much sleep have you lost due to anxiety? There are 365 days in the year. On average, a person takes 10 to 20 minutes to fall asleep.12 An insomniac can take one to two hours to get there. If that's you, in the past you may have “practiced” staying awake for hundreds of hours. In five years, that's approaching 3,500 hours. Most insomniacs suffer for years. It's not hard to see how easily we put in those 10,000 hours from Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers to become top‐notch experts at insomnia.
Having spent 30 years as a corporate road warrior, I learned the hard way. Prolonged insomnia reached the point of affecting my mood, my focus, and my judgment. As we age, sleep becomes increasingly more important for both our physical wellness and our mental wellbeing. For leaders, good sleep also has the intense side effects of decreasing grumpiness, snarkiness, and just being a jerk. In patients with insomnia, mindfulness training improved both the quality and duration of their sleep.13
Treat sleep the way kids treat Pokémon cards: young kids quickly develop an expertise and understanding of the value of the individual cards. Early on, they may get tricked into trading a valuable one for a “chump” card. They quickly learn better. What if we all treated sleep as a precious object not to be traded away for another glass of wine, cup of coffee, or piece of cake? We'd train ourselves in new ways to protect what we value most. As I get older, sleep has moved way up on that list.
Don't wait to learn this later in life. Start treating sleep like your life depends on it. Because it does.
A Word of Caution. If your sleep is not improving, or if you're concerned about specific sleep symptoms such as snoring, restlessness, or nightmares, please see a specialist for an evaluation. Dr. Durmer says that nearly 80% of adults with sleep disorders suffer in silence not knowing they have a medical condition that needs attention. Don't be that person.