Sleep Is a Superpower

Why I was picking fights about dinner at 6 PM

I’d just finished up my work day around 6pm and was having a normal conversation with my wife about planning dinner and the next day. The kind of conversation we have every evening. And I was just not having it. Short-tempered, reactive, not engaging in any productive way. She wasn’t doing anything wrong. I just couldn’t show up as myself.

That week, I’d been dragging at work too. Low energy, no motivation, not fully present in meetings. My kids would ask me to play and I’d say “in a minute” and then not follow through. I blamed work, blamed stress, kept pushing through my workouts thinking discipline would fix whatever was off. It didn’t. I was adding stress to a body that was already running on empty. This went on for about a week.

Then one night I took a sleep aid and slept through the night. Maybe seven hours. The next morning, everything shifted. My patience, my mood, my desire to show up and engage. The experience of the day was way better. I played with my kids after work without having to force it. Same life, completely different person living it.

For most of my life, I treated sleep as the thing I could cut. “I’ll sleep when I die.” Productivity meant squeezing more hours from the day. Staying up late felt like ambition. Powering through on five hours felt like discipline. I wore it like a badge, the way a lot of people do. Sleep was what you sacrificed to get more done, and I never once thought of it as the thing that made everything else work.

I’ve been running this pattern for over twenty years. In my twenties, I stayed up late because I thought more hours meant more output. In my thirties, I pushed through because that’s what driven people do. Each time, the cost wasn’t dramatic. A week here and there where I was a worse version of myself: a worse husband, a less present father, a little less effective at work. And I never connected it to sleep because I was looking everywhere else for the explanation. The thing about being under-slept is that the part of your brain that would notice the problem is the part that’s impaired. You can’t think clearly enough to realize you’re not thinking clearly.

Someone once shared a framework with me called HALT: don’t make important decisions when you’re Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired. Sleep is the T in that list, but it deserves its own conversation because unlike hunger or anger, you often can’t tell it’s the one running the show.

One good night of sleep made me see the whole week differently. I wasn’t just catching up on rest. I was restoring my ability to think, to be patient, to care about the things I actually care about and engage in life. Here’s what I wish I’d understood twenty years ago: cutting sleep for ambition is a bad trade. It just doesn’t work that way.

I still have stretches where sleep doesn’t come easily. The difference now is that I’ve learned to read the signals. When I’m reaching for a third coffee by noon, when I’m craving sugary, high-carb food I know I don’t want, when I can see myself making a choice I know isn’t good for me and I can’t stop myself. These are usually a sign that my body is under-resourced and I haven’t slept enough. And when a simple question about dinner starts to feel like a confrontation, I check sleep first.

Sleep is the difference between the father who says “in a minute” and the one who gets on the floor and plays. I know which one I want to be.