On sleeping well
Good sleep isn’t the goal—it’s the outcome.
Sleep Is the Signal
Lately, I’ve been seeing a flood of ads and clips on how to train yourself to sleep better—techniques, routines, apps promising deeper REM cycles, all emphasizing the importance of a good night’s rest while offering quasi-magical solutions.
Meanwhile, in my industry, it’s practically a badge of honor to brag about how little you sleep. Scroll through LinkedIn or Twitter and you’ll find plenty of executives boasting about sleepless nights, as if sleep deprivation were some rite of passage for success. Elon Musk comes to mind—famous for pulling all-nighters. Startup founders often romanticize “the grind.”
I’ve always leaned toward the first camp—acknowledging the importance sleep deserves and trying to “optimize” it in some way. I truly believe productivity starts with rest. If you’re not sleeping, you’re not thinking clearly. Sleep is essential—physically for recovery, mentally for clarity. Better sleep leads to better decisions, healthier relationships, and sharper problem-solving. You simply can’t sustain productivity without rest.
For years, I treated sleep as a means to an end—the necessary downtime to power a high-functioning day. I even trained myself—through meditation and other techniques—to fall asleep faster, improve sleep quality, and get back to sleep if I woke up in the middle of the night. And these strategies do help, to a point.
But lately, I’ve started to view sleep differently. Not as a performance tool to be hacked, but as a reflection—a thermometer for my overall well-being.
If my sleep is off, something deeper usually is too.
If I’m tossing, turning, or waking up at 3 a.m., it’s often a signal:
Maybe I’m anxious because my actions that day didn’t align with my values.
Maybe my body is flagging something—an overlooked health issue.
Maybe I’m stressed about goals I’m not acting on.
Or maybe I’m just caught in a spiral over things I can’t control.
So I’ve reframed how I think about sleep.
I think about it the same way I came to think about grades in college: they weren’t the goal—just a reflection of how much I truly learned.
Likewise, good sleep isn’t the goal—it’s the outcome.
Sleep, in this new light, isn’t just a resource to manage.
It’s a signal. A mirror. A quiet but persistent measure of whether I’m conducting my life in alignment with the standards I’ve set for myself.
P.S. There’s always an exception to every mental model. In this case, one word—babies.