It’s 4pm on a Wednesday, three days into a big week. The paragraph on the screen hasn’t changed. You’ve read it twice. The words are there. But the meaning and context is suddenly lost. The brain is feeling foggy, dusty, and you know sleep deprivation is starting to kick in.
For most of the leaders I work with, that’s not an unusual Wednesday. That’s every Wednesday.
Dr Jemma King is a sleep and stress researcher who has spent over a decade inside elite performance environments: Special Operations Command, Olympic programs, executive teams. When we sat down to talk about her book Sleep First, Jemma handed me the cleanest diagnosis I’ve heard of why high performers consistently underinvest in sleep. “You’re probably sleeping just well enough to keep going,” she said. “And that is the problem.”
The Grey Zone Nobody Talks About
Just well enough is not a performance state. It’s a performance trap.
It masquerades as resilience. You got through the week. Deals have been closed. You and your team survived another quarter. But there is a version of you that makes better decisions under pressure, stays calm when the room erupts, and recovers faster between the long and challenging days. Most of us have been on the wrong side of that gap for so long we’ve forgotten the reference point.
The danger isn’t running on empty. Everyone knows what that feels like. The danger is the grey zone: sleeping enough that you don’t feel impaired, but not enough to operate at your full capacity. You can sustain it for months, sometimes years (over time running on empty becomes a habit), and because you’re ‘functional’, work keeps getting done. Until something breaks, and you suddenly realise the deficit has been quietly compounding for a long time.
Meet Your Midnight Librarian
Your brain doesn’t stop when you close your eyes. In the early hours you cycle through deep slow-wave sleep, the physical restoration work. From around 2am, as the architecture shifts, something more complex begins called REM sleep, where your brain processes the emotional and cognitive load of the day.
Jemma describes it as the midnight librarian, and I think it’s the most useful analogy I’ve come across for explaining what actually happens at 3am. Picture a librarian at a bench with a stack of folders, each one holding the memories, decisions, conversations, and unresolved tensions from your day. Most folders are easy: file this, archive that, discard the rest. But occasionally something lands on the desk that’s too emotionally complex to sort without guidance. The librarian can’t file it alone so they do the only thing available: wake up the boss.
That’s why so many leaders wake at 3am with a head full of noise. It isn’t anxiety. It isn’t a weak mind. It’s a filing system trying to do its job without the resources it needs.
Give your midnight librarian a brief before you sleep. Write down the open loops: decisions pending, conversations incomplete, things weighing on you. Assigning each task tells your brain the executive will attend to it at a later (more appropriate) time. Resources are properly reallocated. And Jemma’s clients who do this consistently report shorter 3am wake-ups and are fresher the following day.
What the Evidence Shows
Here’s where the conversation gets uncomfortable.
When Jemma looks at the highest performers across her research: executives with sustained careers and operators running high-stakes environments without burning out, two patterns emerge. One is genetic. A rare gene variant called DEC2 allows certain individuals to function on four to five hours of sleep with minimal performance decrement.1 These people exist. In Jemma’s clinical experience across elite military, sport, and corporate environments, they appear more frequently than chance would predict, which is a significant reason the cultural narrative glorifies short sleep. Some of the most visible high performers genuinely don’t need much. But they are rare.
The second pattern is discipline. Deliberate, non-negotiable prioritisation of sleep as a performance input. The leaders Jemma studied who’ve had sustainable careers without major burnout are, in her words, “utterly selfish” about sleep. They leave early. They protect the night before a big day. They’ve seen what operating in the grey zone costs them personally, and they refuse to do it.
The third pattern is data. The leaders who’ve gone the distance use performance metrics as feedback loops, not as sources of anxiety. They know their baselines. They can see when accumulated load is affecting recovery before performance visibly suffers.
Why This Is a Leadership Problem, not a Wellness One
Sleep deprivation doesn’t just make you tired. It changes how you read people.
Research on sleep-deprived individuals shows they’re significantly less accurate at reading facial expressions, missing both threat cues and positive signals in the room.2 The person across the table who is simply thinking is perceived as hostile or resistant. Cortisol elevates earlier in the day. Trust responses dull. Decision quality degrades in exactly the situations that require it most: the high-stakes meeting, the difficult conversation, the call under pressure.
This is a leadership capacity issue. The executives who’ve had long careers without major derailment events aren’t exceptional in every dimension. In many cases, the single most consistent differentiator is that they protected their sleep before they needed to.
5 Ways to Close the Sleep Gap
- Anchor your wake time. Whatever happened the night before, keep the same wake time. This regulates your sleep pressure: the biological pull toward sleep that builds around 16 hours after waking. Consistency here has a compounding effect that no other single adjustment can match.
- Brief your midnight librarian before bed. Five minutes. Write down the open loops, categorise the concerns, assign each a time for tomorrow. You’re telling your brain the filing can wait. It works.
- Know your sleep bus. Your body signals sleep readiness at a predictable window each night. Miss it and the next bus is slower, less efficient, and takes longer to get you into deep sleep. Learn your window and protect it most nights of the week.
- Track the right things. If you use a wearable, stop fixating on hours alone. Watch your heart rate variability (HRV) trend against your own baseline (HRV measures the variation in time between consecutive heartbeats and reflects how well your nervous system has recovered; significant drops are a reliable early warning of accumulated load and illness risk), and notice the ratio of REM to slow-wave sleep. If the data is making you more anxious rather than less, put the wearable away. Introspective awareness of how you actually feel is a legitimate alternative that too many leaders have been trained out of using.
- Do the cost-benefit. Look at what’s keeping you from sleep and weigh its value against your performance, your relationships, and your longevity. The answer rarely justifies the trade. But you have to be honest enough to run the calculation.
The Question Worth Sitting With
Sleep isn’t the finish line. It’s the foundation. The most dangerous state isn’t running on empty; everyone eventually hits that wall and adjusts. The most dangerous state is the grey zone: just well enough to keep going, not well enough to perform at your ceiling.
If you’re reading this on a Wednesday afternoon, slightly foggy, making it through but not quite at your best. You already know which side of that line you’re on.
The question is how long you’re prepared to stay there.
If this is landing, particularly if you lead a team or organisation where this performance gap is visible, Performance Intelligence works with leadership teams to build the habits and systems that make high performance sustainable.
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About Andrew May
Andrew May is a high performance expert, keynote speaker, and founder of Performance Intelligence. Over two decades he has worked with senior leaders, executive teams, and elite athletes across Australia and internationally to build the habits, systems, and mental skills that sustain high performance over time. Andrew is the host of the Performance Intelligence Podcast.
References
[1] He, Y., Jones, C.R., Fujiki, N., Xu, Y., Guo, B., Holder, J.L., Rossner, M.J., Nishino, S., & Fu, Y.H. (2009). The transcriptional repressor DEC2 regulates sleep length in mammals. Science, 325(5942), 866–870. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1174443
[2] van der Helm, E., Gujar, N., & Walker, M.P. (2010). Sleep deprivation impairs the accurate recognition of human emotions. Sleep, 33(3), 335–342. https://doi.org/10.1093/sleep/33.3.335
