Oct 20 • Sleep Accountability
Sleep: The Most Underrated Tool in Your Pursuit of Excellence
Everybody wants to train harder, grind longer, and push further. But here’s the truth — if you are not sleeping well, you’re leaving progress on the table. You’re doing the work, but you’re not saving the game.
During sleep — especially deep sleep and REM — 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 — 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 — it’s like turning off the video game without hitting save. You wake up the next day with only half of what you earned.
But sleep doesn’t just save yesterday — 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 “saves” 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 — 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 Can’t Out-Train Bad Sleep
You can eat perfect. You can train perfectly. You can be mentally tough.But if you disrespect sleep — your body will eventually force you to pay that debt.
Ideal Sleep Conditions (Simple, but powerful)
✔ Pitch-black room – even tiny lights disrupt melatonin.
✔ Cool temperature (60–68°F / 15–19°C) – your core temp needs to drop to fall asleep.
✔ Consistent noise or stillness – a fan, white noise, or quiet (not chaos).
✔ Consistent sleep and wake time – your body needs rhythm, not randomness.
Things Destroying Your Sleep (That You Don’t Notice)
❌ Caffeine after 2 p.m. – Coffee, energy drinks, pre-workout, soda, teas.Caffeine has a half-life of ~6 hours. You might fall asleep, but you won’t reach deep sleep.
❌ Bright screens before bed – Phone light hits your eyes and tells your brain “It’s daytime.” Melatonin drops. Your circadian rhythm shifts later.
❌ No morning sunlight – Viewing sunlight within the first 30 minutes of waking helps set your internal clock, boost cortisol when it’s supposed to rise (morning), and helps melatonin rise when it’s supposed to (night).
Start tracking your sleep. You don’t need an expensive ring or watch — though they help (I personally use a Garmin watch). Just start paying attention and being intentional:
- What time did you get in bed?
- How long did it take to fall asleep?
- What time did you wake up?
- How did you feel when you woke up?
- Did you want to attack the day — or hide under the covers?
Excellence isn’t just built in the gym. It’s built in every area of our lives. especially in the little things — in the dark, when no one is watching.
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Sleep: The Most Underrated Tool in Your Pursuit of Excellence
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