Sleep: Strategies to build better sleep habits for leaders

Almost every living being with a brain sleeps. Humans. Animals. Even insects. And by the end of your life, you’ll have spent nearly a third of it unconscious. Though it may be better to think about it as you having spent two-thirds of your life conscious because of sleep. Sleep is deeply valuable. It’s a critical recovery period for your brain, key to its health, and necessary to ready yourself for high-performance waking hours. You may hear the mantra “you can sleep when you're dead,” and you should chuckle when you hear it. It’s best followed by, “if you don’t plan to use your head.” At Bessemer Venture Partners, we know from long years of working with some of the most iconic founders and executives that people who build world-changing businesses all eventually learn how dangerous it can be to undersleep.

But how dangerous? And how precisely does it work? Over the past 30 years, sleep scientists have begun to unravel the intricate connection between sleep, hormonal health, and cognitive function.

Here is what we know: When we don’t sleep, we lose our motor control, ability to reason and self-regulate emotions, form memories, and more. Yet because we lose our reason, our sleep-deprived selves also tend to believe they’re alert and competent when they’re basically intoxicated. Sleeplessness caused or contributed to some of the greatest disasters in modern history, including the nuclear meltdowns at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, the Challenger Space Shuttle crash, and the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

If sleepiness can cause someone to crash a ship or melt a reactor, consider the decisions you’re making at the head of the company — impaired and unaware. That’s the short-term danger: You can’t trust your own brain. You’re sleep-walking, as it were, through critical decisions.

And that’s not even getting into the long-term effects. Habitual undersleeping is linked to memory diseases like Alzheimer's.

In this chapter, we’ll explore the science of sleep — how it firms up our grip on reality, helps us process memories, regulates our emotions, helps us act rationally, and much else.

TLDR on sleep 

When founders don’t sleep, they operate impaired but unaware. Sleeping less than six hours for one week causes you to function the same as someone who’s legally drunk. You’ll struggle to form memories and regulate your emotions. Chronic undersleeping is linked to Alzheimer’s. To sleep better, create a routine, avoid screens before bed, wind down, and stave off caffeine after 2 p.m.

Sleep science

• 6% more car accidents - Current Biology
• 5% more heart attacks - MDPI
• 8% more strokes - ScienceDirect

Modern sleep scientists equate the effects of undersleeping to those of drinking alcohol. In studies, people who sleep less than six hours for four nights in a row are as cognitively impaired as someone who can be arrested for drunk driving. (Keep in mind that it’s illegal for someone over 21 to drive if they have a BAC of 0.08% or higher.)

• Being awake for 17 hours is similar to having a blood alcohol content of 0.05%.
• Being awake for 24 hours is similar to having a blood alcohol content of 0.10%.

Consider your role as a leader in this context. Your entire organization relies on you for your keen leadership and if you’re spending entire days or weeks operating as if legally drunk with slowed reaction times, impaired motor control, altered consciousness, and mood swings, what effects might that have?

And that’s just the beginning. To understand how sleep deprivation impacts our ability to encode memories, regulate our emotions, and clear our brains of toxins, let’s discuss more of the science.

Sleep occurs in phases — five to six cycles per night. Each phase is made up of two stages, which we can measure by the patterns of electrical signals in the brain, and by the fact that in some phases, people’s eyes rapidly move — hence the name of the two major alternating phases: rapid eye movement (REM) and non-rapid eye movement (NREM).

Here’s what the sleep cycles look like — 

Earlier in the night, your need for Deep Sleep is higher, so you spend more time in Stage 3 sleep with less time in REM (Stage 4). As the night progresses, especially towards the early morning, the pattern shifts: your body demands more REM sleep and less Deep Sleep. In the final sleep cycles just before waking, you might not experience any Deep Sleep at all, but you will have more REM sleep.

Of the many benefits found with sleep, it is noteworthy that during Deep Sleep, your body flushes toxins (metabolites) from your brain, and during REM sleep, you encode memories and learn. Both are vital. Interrupt either and you lose those benefits and memories.

Some studies show that if you disrupt someone during their REM phases, but not their Deep Sleep phases, it disrupts their ability to process their emotions. It also disrupts their ability to form memories — people can’t recall things they learned the prior day.

Disrupt someone during their Deep Sleep and you disrupt the glymphatic system that flushes toxins from your brain and spinal fluid. Not getting enough of this sleep is linked to disorders like hypertension, obesity, and type 2 diabetes.

Here is what your body and brain get during different phases of sleep:

Impact of Deep Sleep

• Releases growth hormone
• The brain consolidates rote and motor learning
• The body releases cerebrospinal fluid to flush the brain which removes metabolites and waste products from the day

Impact of REM sleep

• The brain organizes conceptual learning
• The brain enhances your problem-solving ability
• The nervous system aids in emotional regulation

We can’t talk about sleep without mentioning coffee and caffeine, the world’s most pervasive and beloved legal, addictive stimulant. Caffeine makes us feel less tired because it limits our sensitivity to adenosine, which is the chemical marker needed for sleep. We are by no means promoting an agenda of abstinence, but rather one of mindfulness. After all, an estimated 90% of the world drinks caffeine each day, and it is chemically addictive. Abandon it and you suffer withdrawals.

“There’s no coincidence that coffee and [non-ceremonial] tea arose at the same time as the industrial revolution,” writes Michael Pollan in This Is Your Mind on Plants. “Coffee improves performance on a range of cognitive measures — of memory, focus, alertness, vigilance, attention, and learning.” The cost is that caffeine, the active compound found in coffee and tea, has a half-life of eight hours, meaning that eight hours after you consume it, only half has left your system. So someone who drinks a cup of coffee at 5pm is still wired by bedtime. And while it won't necessarily keep you awake (you are not alone in being able to doze off after an espresso), it makes it difficult to get into REM sleep. You might sleep a full night, but you’ll be proportionally deprived of sleep’s benefits.

Sleep quality is as important as sleep quantity.

This is just a friendly reminder that to “generate” sleep, as sleep scientists put it, you need a few things. (1) You need that caffeine out of your system, (2) to be deprived of light for the time leading up to bed, and (3) to cool down. (During sleep, your core temperature drops.) And to stay asleep, you need quiet, to be free of aches and pains, and to not have so much water in your system that you have to get up to go to the bathroom.

The takeaway on caffeine consumption is simple — it’s about timing and moderation. Exos experts also state the key is to not drink caffeine past 2 p.m. so your body has enough time to process it from your system before a typical bedtime.

Wisdom and suggested interventions for good sleep 

Fifty-five percent of executives in our survey know they are not getting good sleep.

• 38% are running on 5-6 hours
• 41% are running on 6-7 hours
• 25% go to bed after midnight

If you’re reading this and nodding your head literally because you slept less than the recommended seven to eight hours last night, you are not alone.

So what can you do? Start with a test — for two weeks, incorporate several of the sleep practices below to help yourself to get a full eight hours, and journal about the effects. (Leave a half an hour before bed to wind down, or what’s known as “sleep opportunity” time.)

Consider the impact this has on folks in a profession like medicine. While doctors famously function on little sleep, forcing them to sleep reduces serious medical errors by two-thirds. You may experience something similar.

“Just last week I was speaking with a senior executive who finally prioritized his sleep on the advice of his private longevity doctor. He told me, ‘I’m paying him a lot of money so I figured I should at least try.’ In only two weeks, he described the results as life-changing,” says Stefan Underwood, CSCS, SVP of Methodology at Exos. “Physically, emotionally, and cognitively he felt better than he could have imagined. But the point is this: He didn’t think it was that bad before the change. The ‘ah-ha’ comes once they feel it.”

We recognize that sleeping more on a CEO’s schedule probably isn’t easy. But perhaps that two-week test will convince you that those extra hours you spend working each night aren’t all that productive, and only deprive you and your company of your best decisions the next day.

“The most common excuses I hear are ‘I operate just fine on short sleep,’ ‘There’s time to sleep when I’m dead,’ and ‘I don’t have a choice and it is what it is,’” says Exos’ expert in sleep science. “I get it. There are only 24 hours in a day,” continues Stefan. “When in conflict, CEOs steal time from their sleep. It comes from being achievement-driven and in service of others. But you really only have one option: Ask whether those priorities are really bigger priorities than your baseline cognitive function.”

STRIVE for better sleep with these three strategies

Achieving restful sleep can be simplified into three key approaches: optimizing your biology, enhancing your sleep environment, and minimizing disruptions. We provide various tactics under each strategy that you can incorporate into your routine to suit your needs.

1. Get your biology on board

• Sunlight exposure: Get 10-20 minutes of direct sunlight shortly after waking up, ideally in the morning. This helps regulate your circadian rhythm by optimizing cortisol levels and setting the stage for melatonin production at night.
• Consistent sleep and wake times: Aim to go to bed and wake up at the same time (roughly within 30 minutes) every day, including weekends. This consistency helps train your internal clock.
• Daily exercise: Engage in regular physical activity to support circadian entrainment and make it easier to fall asleep at night.
• Breathing and relaxation: Incorporate breathing exercises or relaxation techniques to reduce stress before bed.
• Delay caffeine intake: Wait 60-90 minutes after waking before consuming caffeine to avoid afternoon crashes and support natural cortisol rhythms. Depending on timing, caffeine can be a sleep disrupter and should be avoided after 2 p.m.

2. Optimize your sleep environment

• Create a dark room: Use blackout curtains to eliminate light, which can disrupt sleep. An eye mask can also help if blackout conditions are not possible.
• Maintain a cool temperature: Keep your room slightly cooler than normal (approximately 68F/20C.). Adjust with blankets as needed to find your ideal sleeping temperature.
• Consistent noise or quiet: Use white noise machines or earplugs if needed to block out disruptive sounds.
• Quality bedding: Invest in a good quality pillow, mattress, and consider using a weighted blanket or cooling mattress to enhance comfort.
• Bring familiar items when traveling: Use your home pillow or other familiar sleep items when traveling to maintain sleep consistency.

3. Minimize sleep disruptors

• Manage light exposure: Avoid blue light from screens at least an hour before bedtime to prevent disruption of melatonin production.
• Monitor caffeine and alcohol: Be mindful of caffeine and alcohol intake, especially in the hours leading up to bedtime, as they can interfere with sleep quality.
• Avoid late night eating or exercise: Limit food intake and vigorous exercise close to bedtime to prevent disrupting your sleep cycle.
• Allow for Do-Not-Disturb Mode: Allow yourself at least 30 minutes of wind-down time before bed to relax and transition into sleep mode.

Prioritizing better sleep all comes down to what it means to you personally. Choose your “why” that’s motivating your better sleep habits. Which are you most worried about? Sleep can help with all of the following. Pick one, run the test, and report back.

• Leadership ability and emotional intelligence
• Longevity/cognitive decline
• Anabolic and workout recovery
• Mental health and resilience