My mother tells me that even as a baby, I barely slept. But I wasn’t crying. I was just lying there, wide awake, staring into space with what she described as wide-eyed curiosity. Several decades later, not much has changed. Insomnia is a reality I often have to deal with.

If you’re a leader who can’t seem to shut your mind off at night, this article is for you. Because here’s what that actually costs you at work.

Poor sleep doesn’t just make you tired. Research consistently shows it chips away at exactly the skills you rely on most as a leader. Decision-making becomes harder, takes longer, and in the end, you may not even make the best decision. Your ability to self-regulate your emotions is affected.  You find yourself being less patient than usual, it’s harder to think clearly, and your energy isn’t at its best. There are days where you feel like you’re going on fumes.

The irony is that the higher the stakes, the harder it is to sleep. And the worse you sleep, the higher the stakes feel.

Many of the leaders I work with are intelligent, driven, and yes, they have very active brains. They lie awake replaying conversations, solving tomorrow’s problems, or just… thinking. Chronic insomnia isn’t a character flaw for people like us. It’s the tax we pay for thinking and caring deeply.

A 2024 American Academy of Sleep Medicine survey found that 74% of Americans reported stress as a cause of disrupted sleep, followed by anxiety (68%) and depression (55%).

But the cost of paying that tax, night after night, is real. And it’s worth addressing.

The reason my coaching philosophy is built around leading better AND living better is because you can’t separate the two. When work consistently spills into the rest of your life, both suffer – including your health, well-being, and relationships. These in turn can affect your performance, and the Catch-22 continues..

I’ve tried a lot of apps over the years to help me sleep better. Soothing sounds, nature noise, guided meditations that told me to clear my mind. (Clear my mind. Yeah, right.) Some of them worked occasionally. Most of them left me more frustrated than when I started, still wide awake when the session ended.

Then I found WikiSleep. (Full disclosure: I have no financial connection to this company. I’m sharing this purely because it has been a genuine game changer for me.)

The whole concept is built on something called cognitive diversion. The idea is simple: give your brain something just interesting enough to latch onto, and it stops generating its own noise. Historical accounts, biographies, fascinating facts. The stories are engaging enough to hold your attention, but calm and quiet enough that your body can finally relax. Before you know it, you’re asleep.

It works for me because my brain doesn’t want to be told to do nothing. It wants something to do. WikiSleep gives my mind something to focus on. And then I’m out like a light.

This is exactly the kind of small shift I talk about with clients. You don’t always need a major overhaul to get meaningfully better results.

Dave Brailsford took over as performance director for British Cycling in 2003. At that point, British cyclists had never won the Tour de France. Not once in over a hundred years of the race’s history. Brailsford’s philosophy was simple: break everything down into its smallest components and improve each one by just one percent. The pillow riders slept on when travelling. The way they washed their hands. The seat ergonomics. Tiny things, compounded. In 2012, Bradley Wiggins became the first British cyclist ever to win the Tour de France.

Sleep is one of those improvements hiding in plain sight when it comes to your performance. More so than diet or exercise, sleep is the single most important factor in our health and performance. You can go without food for days, not so with sleep. And I don’t think I need to convince anyone reading this how differently you show up after a solid night’s rest versus a terrible one.

You don’t have to overhaul your whole life to lead better and live better. Sometimes it’s just about finding what actually works and tweaking it.

Not from the workload or pressure. She was tough and could handle anything thrown at her. She broke down because she missed her daughter’s recital. Again. She found it hard to come up with a good excuse as to her absence. All she knew was that her daughter was the only one on stage whose parents weren’t in the audience.

Laden with guilt, this executive knew that this was the price of wanting both a career and being a parent. Despite knowing this at a mental level, her heart felt heavy, and the weight was just as heavy on her shoulders than some of the most difficult projects she’s had to lead

Here’s the thing people don’t talk about leadership: it doesn’t stay at work.

While we often try to keep our personal life private at work, your brain can’t compartmentalize the two parts of your life easily.  Each side seeps into both worlds.

When you’re stressed at work, you snap at your kids over nothing. You’re impatient with your partner. Your mind is still replaying that difficult conversation at work while you’re supposedly watching a movie together on the weekend.

And when things are tense at home? You can’t focus in meetings. You avoid hard conversations because you’re already emotionally tapped out. You make reactive decisions you might regret later.

Most leadership advice treats work and life as separate problems. But your body doesn’t work that way.

You are like a two-sided coin: one side is work, the other side is home. And you take that coin wherever you go.  Which is why it’s hard to compartmentalize stress. It follows you everywhere.

So here’s something to think about. Where is stress from one side of your life showing up on the other side right now?

At times, the sources of our stress can feel complicated and overwhelming to address. So what is one small shift you could make this week that will make you a better leader, colleague, or partner?

An executive I work with told me she couldn’t remember the last time she woke up feeling rested. Not tired from a late night. Not exhausted from a tough week. Just perpetually running on empty, like her battery never fully charged.

Here’s what I told her: the problem isn’t the stress. It’s the kind of stress she’s having.

The Difference Between Stress That Helps and Stress That Hurts

We all know stress is bad for you. But let’s break that down.

There’s acute stress and there’s cumulative stress.

Acute stress is actually good for you. It’s what happens when you’re presenting to the board, handling a crisis call, or dealing with an unexpected problem. Your body kicks into gear, you handle it, and then you recover. That’s how we’re designed to work.

But cumulative stress? That’s different. That’s when stress doesn’t stop.

Think about it. You finish one difficult conversation and immediately jump into another. You close your laptop at 10pm still thinking about tomorrow’s problems. You wake up at 3 a.m. running through everything that could go wrong. Day after day. Week after week.

None of us are dealing with saber-tooth tigers in the office. But our bodies don’t know that.

What Actually Happens When Stress Piles Up

Here’s what I see with the leaders I coach:

A VP who used to be known for her calm judgment starts snapping at her team over minor issues. An executive who built his reputation on listening suddenly interrupts people mid-sentence. A founder who always saw the big picture gets stuck obsessing over details that don’t matter.

They all ask me the same thing: “Why am I like this? This isn’t who I am.”

It’s not who they are. It’s what happens when cumulative stress builds up over months and years with nowhere to go.

According to research by neuroscientist Richard Davidson, recovery speed is connected across your entire system. Your brain, your hormones, your nervous system, your physical body. When one part stays activated, everything stays activated.

So when you never truly recover from stress, it’s not just that you’re tired. Your judgment drops. Your empathy declines. Your ability to listen deteriorates. You overreact to things you’d normally handle without a second thought.

And from there, trust starts eroding quietly. Team performance drops. People start leaving.

Why Resilience Training Isn’t Enough

Most organizations try to solve this with a resilience webinar or a wellness initiative. Here’s the problem: you can’t resilience-train your way out of a systemic issue.

If your culture normalizes 60-hour weeks, if leaders are expected to be always available, if taking time off is seen as a weakness, no amount of meditation apps or lunch-and-learns will fix it.

Real resilience happens when recovery is built into how you work, not added on top of it. That means actual breaks between meetings. Real boundaries around after-hours communication. Time to think, not just react.

It means leadership modeling recovery, not just talking about it.

The Hidden Cost

The executive I mentioned at the start? Once we started tracking her actual recovery time, she realized she hadn’t had a single day in eight months where she wasn’t partially thinking about work. Not one.

She was running a marathon pace in a race that never ended.

That’s not a badge of honor. That’s a recipe for burnout. And worse, it was slowly eroding the very things that made her a great leader in the first place.

Here’s what I want you to think about: When was the last time you fully recovered from stress? Not just took a break, but actually felt the reset?

If you can’t remember, your body is keeping score. And eventually, it will present the bill.

What does real recovery look like for you?