running on empty

I've been burning the candle at both ends this month, to say the least. So when I showed up bright and early to grand rounds last week—required attendance, no getting out of it—I found myself sitting in a dark auditorium at an hour so early that it can only be described as "still yesterday” for most sane people. The lecture started before the sun came up…and finished before the sun came up. The topic? A humbling review of the literature on how critical sleep is to performance and wellbeing.

You can't make this stuff up. There's something almost cosmically funny about a room full of exhausted residents being lectured in the dark about the dangers of sleep deprivation. But man, the coffee was good.

Ninety-five percent of the people around me were actively experiencing the very phenomenon of destructive sleep debt being discussed on the slides. But the research was compelling enough that I actually woke up. The kind of studies that make you realize you've been operating under a fundamental misunderstanding about how your own brain works.

The lecturer started by telling us about a simple experiment. Researchers took a group of people and had them sleep only six hours a night for two weeks. Not extreme—plenty of us do this regularly, telling ourselves we're just busy, just pushing through a deadline. They measured cognitive performance throughout: reaction time, attention, problem-solving.

By the end of those two weeks, these people were performing at the same level as someone who'd been awake for 48 hours straight. Basically functioning like they'd pulled two consecutive all-nighters.

But the kicker: when asked to rate their own sleepiness and performance, they reported feeling only mildly tired. A little off, maybe. Nothing serious. Meanwhile their actual test scores had fallen off a cliff.

This is the trick exhaustion plays on us. We think we can compensate with willpower, with focus, with just trying harder. But you can't think your way out of being tired any more than you can reason your way out of being drunk.

The very thing you're using to solve the problem—your brain—is itself compromised.

The lecturer showed us another study that made half the room laugh nervously. Researchers analyzed over a decade of federal court sentencing data, looking specifically at what happened after daylight saving time in spring. You know, when we all lose that single hour.

Judges—whose job is literally to be impartial—gave sentences that were five percent longer on the Monday after the time change. Five percent. From one hour of lost sleep. The researchers themselves noted they were surprised the effect showed up so clearly, even after accounting for every other variable they could think of.

One hour, and someone's getting months added to their sentence.

Then there was the study on false confessions. Researchers kept one group up all night, let another sleep normally.

The next morning, they asked everyone to sign a statement falsely admitting they'd pressed a computer key they'd been warned not to touch—supposedly causing data loss. Just one request. No pressure, no interrogation tactics.

The sleep-deprived people were 4.5 times more likely to sign it.

Your exhausted brain is making decisions you wouldn't make. Seeing problems that aren't there, missing solutions that are. And the whole time, it's quietly insisting everything's fine.

We all do this. We convince ourselves we're the exception. Sure, that person shouldn't be driving after being up for 20 hours. But me? I've got coffee. I've got work to do. I'm managing.

Except you're not. Sleep deprivation impairs you about as much as being drunk—it's responsible for roughly 100,000 car crashes a year in the US. But unlike drunk driving, we don't have a cultural taboo against exhausted driving. In my job, we brag about our all-nighters. We wear our sleepless nights like badges of honor.

The lecturer explained what's happening in your brain during sleep deprivation: microsleeps. Brief episodes—half a second to fifteen seconds—where parts of your brain just shut off. You're not aware of them happening. You think you're awake and alert. But your consciousness is flickering on and off like a faulty lightbulb. After one night of restricted sleep, people experience more than double the number of these episodes.

Your brain is essentially buffering, and you don't even notice the pauses.

What really struck me was learning that chronic sleep deprivation gets better at hiding itself over time. Someone who's been up for 24 hours knows they're wrecked—they feel terrible. But people who've been running on six hours for a week? They actually start feeling better. Their self-reported sleepiness goes down. They think they've adapted.

They haven't. Their performance is still terrible. They've just lost the ability to judge how terrible it is. The instrument you'd use to evaluate the problem—your brain—is itself broken.

It's like asking a drunk person if they're too drunk to drive. The answer is always "I'm fine."

I thought about all those nights I'd stayed up late, convinced I was being productive. Convinced that sleep would be giving up. That rest was for people who didn't care as much.

But that's exhaustion talking. That's the impaired brain insisting it's not impaired.

The wisdom here isn't complicated. It's not a productivity hack or a way to optimize your sleep schedule. It's simpler and more humbling than that: sometimes the smartest thing you can do is admit you can't do anything at all right now.

Your brain needs maintenance. Not because you're weak, but because you're human. That problem you're wrestling with at midnight, the one that feels urgent and impossible? It will look different in the morning. Not because the problem changed—but because you did.

You can't think your way out of being tired.

Which, coming from someone who's spent this month trying to do exactly that, is advice I'm probably going to need to hear a few hundred more times before it sticks.

John

Thanks for reading The Mayfly Letter.

Your support allows me to continue doing something I truly love.

John Conrad