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Welcome back to the Built for Pressure podcast. This framework has been coming up constantly in my recent executive workshop, so I'm bringing this tactical brief out of the vault.
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I recently reviewed the performance logs of a professional basketball player who came to me complaining of chronic cognitive fatigue, despite hitting a textbook nine hours of sleep every single night.
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So when we looked closer at his autonomic state, we found his deep non-run sleep was non-existent because his nervous system was completely cooked by late night screen time and unmanaged cortisol loops.
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When he was sleeping, like he was sleeping, but he wasn't recovering.
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Millions of executives are living in this exact gray zone.
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They think sleep is passive, but true high performance requires it to be an active strategic protocol.
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This episode completely reframes the recovery into an elite tactical metric.
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Let's head into the vault.
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Sleep is not a passive recovery. It's an act of performance prep.
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It supports memory, emotional regulation, immunity, and energy.
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Matt Walker says that sleep is your superpower, right? Chronic deprivation shortens lifespan, increases disease risk, and impairs decision-making.
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There's this eight-hour myth that Jen Gunter talks about in her TED Talk.
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And so she says that eight hours isn't a biological standard, but it's an industrial era slogan.
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The normal range for sleep is six to nine hours. And the key indicator is you wake up feeling reasonably refreshed.
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And if the answer is yes, you're likely getting enough.
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Obsessing over this magic number creates stress and harms sleep quality.
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Now, natural sleep cycles are going to fluctuate. And Jesse Gamble talks about this pre-industrial societies that often had segmented sleep or biphasic sleep, two shorter periods, not one block.
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Now, the modern monophasic sleep is shaped by industrial schedules and not by biology.
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Again, the takeaway here is that there isn't one perfect way to sleep.
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So experiment with what fits with you and your body and your performance needs.
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James Lionheart talks about sleep quality versus sleep quantity, right? So focusing only on hours fuels anxiety, right? It's better to address sleep quality.
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So stress management throughout the day, relationship with work and other devices before bed, and then the recovery environment itself and having it be really, really solid, almost like a cave, dark, what is it?
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Dark, cool, and quiet.
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There's a lot of positive contributors to sleep that Peter Tierney talks about.
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And so some of these positive contributors are consistent bed and wake-up times.
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So this really anchors a circadian rhythm. The bedroom environment, cool, dark, and quiet, like I talked about.
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Morning light exposure, which resets the body clock.
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Physical activity during the day, but avoiding intense sessions too close to bedtime.
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Relaxation journals, right? Relaxation rituals, or journaling, late reading or mindfulness or breath work before bed instead of being on the phone.
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And finally, a nutritional support, tart cherry, magnesium, thionine, glycine, but only as compliments, not as crutches. These are supplements, not supplements.
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Not not not crutches to poor dieting. Some negative contributors to sleep are stress and anxiety.
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These are the biggest enemies of sleep quality, late caffeine, alcohol or heavy meals, travel and time zones, like jet lag disrupts, really disrupts the circadian rhythm. And there's apps to help you with that as well.
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Pain, illness and noise or poor sleep gear, you know, a mattress or pillow that doesn't work for you.
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Overthinking or tracking obsessions. So this can really create performance anxiety around sleep, which is really interesting, I think.
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Exercise and sleep are linked. They're vigorous exercise improves sleep quality and daytime alertness.
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And people who move regularly report better sleep, even if the total hours are the same as sedentary peers, which I think is super interesting.
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So that means their sleep quality goes up.
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So if you move well, you will sleep well.
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Big picture, sleep isn't one more thing to stress over. So treat it like training, experiment, notice patterns and adjust routines.
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The goal is to wake up ready to engage at a high level, not just eight hours of sleep.
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And if you're looking for a good sleep log, I'm trying to remember where this one was, it was the national, so let me look it up for you here.
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So the sleep diary, the sleep diary was.
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National Health Institute, Yes. So Sleep Diary by NHLBI. So it's the National Institutes of Health.
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And it's really good. I've used this with a lot of clients and I've used it myself.
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And I just think it's super solid for tracking your sleep and figuring out what's actually happening with it.
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So if you're looking to actually, and it's got a lot of really good, a lot of the behaviors that I've talked about, it gets you to reflect on them.
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So you're going to find it really interesting and yeah, that's all I wanted to share today. So today's invitation, besides checking out that sleep diary, is, what's one change you can make this week to improve the quality of your sleep environment?
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And how can you experiment with your sleep routines without obsessing over the perfect number?
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Again, these questions are great. I would start with the diary, collect some data for a week and like print it out, put it by your bed or do it on the phone or whatever.
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And then start to answer the questions because the questions are gonna, you're gonna have more objective data from the diary.
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If this framework moved the needle for you today, be a force multiplier.
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Share this episode with one leader in your network who is currently under fire.
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I'm Zoran Stojkovic and I'll see you next time.