Quick truth from a neurosurgeon who spent years trying to out-hustle biology: sleep isn’t a luxury. It’s a necessity. And that’s not an exaggeration. Sleep is your body’s built-in maintenance system. It resets hormones, clears toxins from the brain, restores metabolism, and steadies emotion and focus.
Sleep is actually very risky from an evolutionary standpoint. You’re unconscious and vulnerable… Yet, every species still does it! Dolphins rest one side of their brain at a time to surface for air. Birds sleep mid-flight with one eye open. Evolution kept sleep because nothing can replace what it does.
I learned that lesson the hard way. During neurosurgical training, I worked a hundred hours a week and mistook endurance for excellence. When the adrenaline finally stopped, my thyroid, testosterone, and energy collapsed. There wasn’t a disease to diagnose, just years of debt from lost sleep. I learned that you can’t defy basic biology without paying a steep price. Sleep is the body’s greatest optimizer when it’s right, and its most destructive force when it’s wrong.
So how do you start fixing sleep? The first lever you can pull is light.
Your brain’s internal clock takes its cues from light; both its presence and absence. Getting bright outdoor light into your eyes within an hour of waking tells your system the day has begun. Avoiding bright overhead lights and screens at night tells it that night has arrived. Those two cues alone reset your rhythm faster than any supplement.
Once I understood that, I convinced my wife to run a small family experiment. At the time we had four young children, and bedtime was a nightly battle. No one wanted to sleep. So I suggested that after sunset, we turn off the overheads and screens and light the house only with candles. My wife tolerated it with good humor, and the result was undeniable! Everyone fell asleep faster and slept deeper. We didn’t keep the candles forever, but we kept the principle: bright light in the morning, low light at night.
Temperature, timing, and mental load matter too. Keep your room cool, around sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. Go to bed and wake up at consistent times. Give your mind a quiet landing instead of diving into bed straight from a glowing screen or a heated conversation. These are all signals to your nervous system that it’s safe to power down.
If you need gentle support, magnesium in the evening and glycine before bed can help. They relax the body and support deeper sleep. And melatonin isn’t for everyone. It’s best reserved for jet lag, shift work, or irregular schedules.
The truth is simple: sleep isn’t the enemy of productivity. It’s the fuel. When sleep works, focus sharpens, metabolism steadies, and emotional balance returns. It’s the most reversible risk factor for all disease in modern medicine.
If this message resonates, I did a fantastic podcast episode on sleep that unpacks the science, from sleep architecture to circadian rhythms. I lay out a step-by-step plan for better sleep that you can use tonight!
Share this with a friend who swears they’ll “sleep when they’re dead.” They might rethink that deadline.