We celebrate presence, precision, and high performance in leadership. But we ignore the very foundation that powers all three: sleep. Why do we still treat sleep and leadership as separate conversations when it may be our greatest advantage? I didn’t fully understand that until one of the busiest seasons of my career left me foggy, depleted, and quietly unraveling.
We were rolling out a job leveling system and new applicant tracking system, restructuring a global division, and shifting to hybrid work, all during a pandemic. My sleep was fractured, my health declined, my decisions dulled, and my confidence wavered.
Then one weekend, I crashed — hard. I slept 11 hours straight.
When I woke up, I didn’t just feel rested; I felt clear, strategic, and human again. A colleague later told me, “You’re on fire.” And she was right. But what lit that fire wasn’t hustle; it was rest. If we want stronger performance and more resilient teams, it’s time to treat sleep and leadership as inseparable.
Sleep Productivity Myths
Missing a week of good sleep is like showing up to work slightly drunk every day and expecting brilliance. We treat sleep like an obstacle to productivity and leadership, as if clarity, presence, and sharp decision-making are forged in caffeine and chaos.
A former senior leader once said to me, “Sleep is for the weak.” I nodded politely while quietly sitting in the shame of the full seven hours I’d had the night before. We’ve all heard it before from high-profile CEOs and founders bragging about surviving on four hours a night. Boardrooms have celebrated that mindset for years. And in the quiet moments between meetings, many of us have unraveled, just wishing for one more hour of sleep.
When I interviewed sleep and productivity expert Lyndsay Scola, whose clients include senior political and corporate leaders, she told me: “You wouldn’t say, ‘I’ve got a big project coming up, so for the next two weeks I’m not going to breathe.’ You might feel like you can catch your breath at the end, but I promise — oxygen was still getting into your lungs the whole time. Sleep works the same way.”
For years, Lyndsay was working at the highest levels supporting presidential teams, media execs, and power players while quietly managing undiagnosed narcolepsy and ADHD. “We’ve been conditioned to believe burnout is the cost of ambition,” she told me. “And exhaustion means we’re ‘doing it right.’ But no one is meant to be productive every second of the day—and we actually get more done, with less burnout, when we learn our natural rhythms and give ourselves real downtime.”
Her story mirrored what I see in far too many high-performing leaders: a dangerous confusion between overfunctioning and effectiveness. This confusion led to my own burnout and ultimately inspired me to write Burnt Out to Lit Up: How to Reignite the Joy of Leading People.
That pressure is real and persistent. For women and people of color, the expectation to work twice as hard to earn half the recognition isn’t a distant childhood lesson; it’s a daily reality. Systemic and cultural biases continue to reward over-delivery while punishing pause, making rest feel like a risk rather than a right. Over time, that pressure teaches us to override our bodies, our needs, and even our clarity.
But performance science says otherwise: Rest isn’t what you get after you prove your worth. It’s how you sustain it.
The Science Of Sleep And Leadership Performance
You wouldn’t skip oxygen before a big meeting. So why skip sleep?
We may think skipping sleep buys us time, but here’s what we’re actually trading away:
- Accuracy: Developers who missed sleep wrote 50% less functional code and introduced twice as many bugs.
- Cognitive performance: Losing just one hour of sleep each night for a week leads to a 9% drop in overall performance.
- Emotional regulation: One night of poor sleep makes the amygdala 60% more reactive, impairing your ability to make sound, calm decisions.
- Workplace confidence: Poor sleep lowers occupational self-efficacy, meaning even high performers can start doubting their abilities.
So how do we go from knowing sleep matters to making it a standard for how we lead?
High Performance Sleep And Leadership
“This isn’t about nap pods,” says Lyndsay Scola, who recently launched Sleep is the Power Move, a science-backed roadmap to better sleep. “It’s about the norms we set and the messages we send.”
Redesigning leadership to make space for rest is about culture. Like any leadership skill, it starts with what we model, reward, and repeat.
Here’s what that looks like in action:
1. Model Rest Through Sleep Out Loud
Say it plainly: “I’m logging off to recharge with a nap.” Ask in check-ins: “How rested have you felt this week, 1–5?” Be curious, not judgmental. Celebrate the great decisions that follow real recovery.
2. Interrupt The Always-On Loop
“One of the first workplace norms I’d challenge is the idea that stepping away from your desk — let alone closing your eyes — signals laziness.” Scola encourages what she calls performance recovery time — 10 to 20 minutes of deliberate pause — to reset your mind. And research backs her up: NASA found a 26-minute nap improved performance by 34% and alertness by 54%.
3. Align Work Schedules With Biology, Not Bravado
Scola helped one executive team shift a daily meeting from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m, a time when all chronotypes — the individual biological schedules when we naturally wake up, feel most productive, and wind down. The result? “Fewer glazed-over faces, more engaged discussions, and noticeably faster decision-making.”
Normalizing sleep as fuel, and making it part of performance conversations, is a business strategy.
Leadership Means Learning To Sleep Smarter
In most leadership circles, sleep still isn’t treated as the infrastructure that makes great work possible. It’s treated like a perk or a pause, not a performance advantage.
Too often, rest is framed as a reward—something you get after the work is done, not part of doing great work. Research shows that rest is a leadership essential. Well-rested leaders think faster, decide better, and burn out slower than their exhausted peers.
As Lyndsay Scola puts it: “Sleep is not a reward for finishing the work — it’s the fuel that makes exceptional work possible. Leaders who prioritize their rest aren’t stepping back from their careers; they’re stepping into them with more clarity, better judgment, and a longer runway for success.”
If sleep is the fuel for leadership, what happens to organizations when only the privileged are allowed to rest?
Sleep Deprivation Is A Leadership Equity Issue
There’s more at stake than performance alone. When we glorify constant output and ignore the realities of rest, we can reinforce inequities for low-wage workers, caregivers, people with limited leave, especially for those managing chronic health issues, caregiving responsibilities, or simply different energy patterns. Burnout culture doesn’t just drain individuals; it sidelines the very people and perspectives we need most.
Sleep Like A Leader
We deserve careers we don’t need to recover from. So do our teams.
We spend billions on leadership development but ignore the zero-cost reset that powers it all: sleep. The best leaders I know don’t brag about burnout. They protect energy. They move with clarity, lead with steadiness, and yes, they sleep.
Because sleep isn’t time lost; it’s capacity gained. It’s the fuel for sharper decisions, smarter moves, and cultures where people and business thrive.
If we want stronger teams and saner leaders, we have to stop treating rest like a perk and start treating sleep like infrastructure. Sleep and leadership aren’t separate conversations. Sleep is strategy. It starts with you.