Sleep: The Most Underrated Tool in Your Pursuit of Excellence
Everybody wants to train harder, grind longer, and push further. But hereâs the truth â if you are not sleeping well, youâre leaving progress on the table. Youâre doing the work, but youâre not saving the game. During sleep â especially deep sleep and REM â your brain literally downloads the information from your hippocampus (short-term memory) and stores it into your cortex (long-term storage). The skills you trained, the lessons you learned, the combinations you drilled â they only fully become a part of you when your brain files them away during sleep. So if you put in hours at the gym⊠study technique⊠read books⊠train your mind⊠and then barely sleep â itâs like turning off the video game without hitting save. You wake up the next day with only half of what you earned. But sleep doesnât just save yesterday â it prepares you for tomorrow. One night of good sleep impacts two days: - It locks in the work from the day you just lived. - It prepares your mind, body, and hormones to attack the day ahead. Why Sleep Matters for Performance 1. Physical Recovery - Muscle repair, tissue growth, and release of growth hormone all spike during deep sleep. - Poor sleep = higher inflammation, slower recovery, worse reaction time, more injuries. 2. Mental Performance & Skill Retention - REM sleep is where your brain organizes and âsavesâ skills, movement patterns, strategies. - No REM = sloppy technique, poor decision-making, slower learning. - This is literally the difference between training and actually improving. 3. Hormones & Endocrine Health - Testosterone, growth hormone, thyroid hormones â all regulated while you sleep. - Chronic poor sleep = lower testosterone, higher cortisol, insulin resistance, weight gain. - People are jumping to TRT and blaming hormones⊠but many are just chronically under-slept. You Canât Out-Train Bad Sleep You can eat perfect. You can train perfectly. You can be mentally tough.But if you disrespect sleep â your body will eventually force you to pay that debt.