Leaders and sleep: when the nights are too short for good decisions

“I sleep five hours. I’m used to it.”

People in senior roles say this almost proudly. As if it were part of the job description: early meetings, late calls with other time zones, email at eleven at night because that is finally when it is quiet. And then there is the part nobody mentions out loud — eyes open at three in the morning, mind already at tomorrow’s board meeting, at the figures that don’t add up, at the conversation that has to happen with someone who will not take it well.

When someone tells me “I’m used to it”, I believe that this is how it feels to them. But that is exactly the trap. Lack of sleep is one of the few states in which you feel you have adapted while the measurements say something else. And because decisions at the top spill over onto a great many people, a leader’s sleep is less of a private matter than it seems.

A debt you don’t notice

One of the most cited studies on chronic sleep restriction came out of David Dinges’s laboratory in Philadelphia. In 2003 Hans Van Dongen and colleagues limited healthy adults to six hours of sleep a night for two weeks. After fourteen days, their scores on tests of attention and working memory were roughly as poor as those of people who had stayed awake for a whole night or two. But that was not the most important finding. The participants rated themselves as only slightly sleepy — and that rating stopped getting worse after the first few days, even though their performance kept declining.

This means that the feeling of “I’m fine” is not a reliable gauge. After a few short nights, sleepiness levels off while performance keeps sliding. We have no built-in warning light that tells us we are thinking more slowly today than we were a month ago. That is why it feels as though we have got used to it.

The Australian researchers Ann Williamson and Anne-Marie Feyer compared wakefulness with alcohol in 2000. After seventeen to nineteen hours awake, performance on some tasks was similar to that at a blood alcohol concentration of around 0.05 per cent. No one would chair a board meeting after three glasses of wine. Yet after a day that began at six in the morning and ends with a video call at ten at night, we do it without a second thought.

Why this matters especially at the top

The organisational psychologist Christopher Barnes has spent more than a decade asking what sleep means for work. His central idea is simple: sleep is not just rest for the body but fuel for self-regulation — the capacity to hold back your first reaction, think twice and choose how you will say something. On an assembly line, self-regulation is useful. In leadership, it is nearly everything.

A leader spends the whole day doing exactly this: listening to people who bring bad news without becoming defensive. Choosing between two poor options. Keeping irritation hidden from the team, knowing they will read it as a signal. When self-regulation runs out, it does not show up as a dramatic breakdown but as small shifts — a slightly sharper email, a slightly quicker decision, a little less curiosity about what the other person really meant.

I have written more about what happens to decision-making when the stakes are high in Decision-making under pressure. Here it is enough to say that decision fatigue and sleep loss are a bad pair: both draw on the same resource, just from two sides.

A sleep-deprived leader is not only their own problem

In one of his studies, Barnes and his colleagues followed leaders and their teams over a number of consecutive days. When leaders had slept worse, their staff were more likely the next day to describe them as rude, sarcastic or belittling. And on those days, the team’s engagement was lower too. The effect was daily rather than lasting — which is both bad and good news. Bad, because one poor night is enough. Good, because one good night is also enough for the atmosphere to recover.

I value this finding because it moves the conversation away from personal endurance. Many senior people think of their sleep as a private sacrifice: “If I’m tired, that’s my business.” It isn’t, entirely. A team reads its leader all the time. People spend hours interpreting the tone in which they said “come and see me”. When a leader is short of sleep, their tiredness seeps into the emotional climate of the whole group — and the group cannot excuse it on the grounds that the night was short, because they don’t know.

Emotions without a brake

In 2007, Seung-Schik Yoo, Matthew Walker and colleagues showed something many people know from experience. After a night without sleep, the amygdala — the part of the brain that quickly detects threat — reacted noticeably more strongly to unpleasant images than in rested people. At the same time, the connection between the amygdala and the part of the prefrontal cortex that usually calms that reaction and puts it in context was weaker.

In other words: after a short night the alarm is louder and the hand that silences it is weaker. That is why, after a bad night, a remark from the finance director sounds like a personal attack, a poor quarterly figure like proof that everything is going wrong, and silence in the room like disagreement. If you want to know how this plays out in everyday life, I have written about it in more detail in Sleep and emotion: why everything hurts more after a bad night.

For senior people there is another layer. At the top there are few people who will tell you: “You were sharp today — are you all right?” It is more likely that people pull back, stop bringing bad news and start choosing their words carefully. The leader does not notice this. They only notice that it is getting quieter around them.

When you have time to sleep but can’t

So far I have written as if this were about quantity — too few hours because work swallowed them. But for many leaders the problem is not that they don’t go to bed. They do, and they don’t fall asleep. Or they fall asleep and wake at three with their heart already racing.

This is not a lack of discipline. A body that has been on standby all day cannot simply switch over. The hormone cortisol has its own natural rhythm — it rises in the morning and falls in the evening — but under prolonged pressure that rhythm can shift. Add a screen in bed, a late coffee, travel across time zones that disrupts your circadian rhythm, and “just one more look” at your inbox that opens a fresh worry.

In the field we call this state hyperarousal — an over-activated nervous system. It is explained well in Hyperarousal: why chronic insomnia is not a sleep problem but an arousal problem, and I have written about early waking in Waking at three. For leaders, the key point is that an hour in bed is not the same as sleep. If your mind stays in the meeting, your body stays in the office.

A culture that rewards sleeplessness

In many places there is an unwritten rule that a real leader is the first in and the last out, answers email at midnight and wakes up fresh at the airport. Tiredness becomes proof of commitment. Anyone who says they go to bed at ten risks seeming less serious.

In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we are interested in where such an inner command comes from. Often it is not just part of business culture. Someone who grew up with a parent who worked to exhaustion and regarded rest with suspicion often carries the same rule into adulthood, only now they call it “high standards”. If you recognise yourself here, you may find it helpful to read that rest is a skill, not a reward for work done.

This culture has another consequence: a leader who sleeps badly tells no one. Not their partner, because they don’t want to worry them. Not colleagues, because it would look like weakness. Not their doctor, because “it isn’t an illness”. So they are left alone with their insomnia, which is perhaps the worst possible combination for sleep.

How it sounds in conversation

The conversation below is a composite, not a real person. But it is very similar to conversations that often happen in stories like these.

“I don’t wake up at night because I’m worried. I just wake up.”
“And when you wake up — where is your mind?”
“At the eight o’clock meeting. At what I’m going to say.”
“When do you talk to anyone about what’s ahead of you during the day?”
“There’s no time during the day. During the day I just do it.”
“Then perhaps you have that conversation at three in the morning. With yourself.”

For many people in senior positions, the night is the only time when no one needs anything from them. That is when everything put off during the day takes its turn. That is why, with leaders’ insomnia, a better routine alone often isn’t enough — what also helps is a space during the day where thoughts can be spoken before they arrive at night.

Exercise: closing the day

The exercise takes fifteen minutes and you can do it tonight. You don’t need an app, just a sheet of paper. Do it at least an hour before bed, and not in bed.

1. Write down the open loops. List everything left unfinished: decisions, emails, conversations. No sorting, just in any order. The aim is not to solve them but to move them out of your head and onto paper.
2. Add the next step to each. Not the solution — only the first concrete step and when you will take it (“tomorrow at nine I’ll call M.”). The brain lets go more easily of something that has a next step and a time.
3. Mark what isn’t yours. For each item, ask: is this really my burden, or did I take it on because no one else would? Circle whatever isn’t yours — tomorrow you will talk to someone else about it.
4. Close the device. Put your phone and laptop in another room, or at least out of reach of the bed. If something comes to mind in the night, write it on a sheet beside the bed, not in your phone.
5. Make a transition. Ten minutes of something with no goal: a short walk, a shower, a conversation that isn’t about work. The body needs a signal that the working day is over — until it gets one, it stays on standby.

If you want to track your sleep more systematically, the sleep diary can help. Two weeks of notes often tell you more than a year of guessing.

Where this story doesn’t hold

It wouldn’t be fair to end with the idea that all sleep problems come from culture and stress. A few limits need to be said out loud.

Some people really do need less sleep. There are rare genetic variants that allow people to sleep less without harm. But they are very rare — far rarer than the number of people who believe they are among them. If you need an alarm clock, coffee to come to life in the morning and the weekend to “catch up”, you are probably not one of them.

Poor sleep can be a sign of a physical problem. Loud snoring and pauses in breathing noticed by a partner, morning headaches and daytime sleepiness despite enough hours can be signs of obstructive sleep apnoea. Depression, thyroid problems, chronic pain, hormonal changes and some medications also alter sleep. So: if you have been sleeping badly for more than a few weeks, see your GP. No exercise with a sheet of paper will solve that.

Sleep must not become another KPI. Researchers have described a phenomenon they named orthosomnia: people who track their sleep with a smartwatch or ring become so anxious about the numbers that they sleep worse. Leaders are especially prone to this, because they are used to measuring and improving everything. Sleep cannot be forced — you can only make room for it. If worrying about sleep has become part of the problem, the post on fear of insomnia will help.

For chronic insomnia, there are proven methods. According to the guidelines of medical associations, cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia is the first choice, ahead of sleeping pills. You can read more in Cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-I). Psychotherapy of the kind I practise is not a substitute for it — but it can help with what lies beneath the insomnia: the burden you carry alone, inner commands, and relationships in which there is no room for tiredness.

Sleep as a question of relationships

Finally, I come back to what interests me most about leaders’ sleep as a marriage and family therapist in training. Sleep doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens in a bed you may share with a partner who is also awake while you type at two in the morning. In a family where the children know that their father or mother is home, but not really. In a team that is used to getting an answer even at midnight — and so sends its questions at midnight.

When a leader starts to sleep better, it is often not only their day that changes. What the people around them expect, and what they dare to say, changes too. If you feel you are already close to the edge, read When a leader burns out as well. Sleep loss is often the first sign, and the easiest to overlook.

What to remember

• After a few weeks of short nights, the feeling of sleepiness levels off while performance keeps falling. “I’m used to it” is not a reliable measurement.
• Sleep is fuel for self-regulation — for holding back your first reaction. In leadership, that is nearly everything.
• A team feels its leader’s sleep loss the very next day, in tone and atmosphere.
• Often the problem isn’t time in bed but a nervous system that won’t switch over. Closing the day helps — and so does someone to talk to during the day.
• If you have been sleeping badly for weeks, snore, or are sleepy during the day despite enough hours, see a doctor.