The Body Is Your Boardroom: Here's One Metric You Can't Afford to Ignore

Co-written by Mike Pincus

Why do so many of us feel the pressure to brag about our worst performance metric? "I only slept four hours!" We may think we’re showing our commitment, but in actuality, we are giving ourselves the cognitive ability of someone legally drunk.

Recently Mike Pincus, a performance coach and former founder who has spent over 50,000 hours training high-performing leaders, and I sat down to discuss this paradox. What emerged was a frank look at why many founders sacrifice the one metric that determines everything else — and what to do about it.

Elite athletes protect sleep like it's classified information. Meanwhile, many founders and CEOs wear sleep deprivation like a badge of honor.

But here's what we've learned: sleep isn't optional. It's the physical version of your start up's funding. And if you’re skimping on sleep, you're running your body on empty reserves.

So let’s address the myth: sleep is for people who aren't hungry enough.

The Funding Round You Keep Rejecting

Think about the difference between four months of runway versus eight months of runway. Everyone understands that distinction. You wouldn't start hiring aggressively on four months of cash. You'd be strategic, cautious, and focused.

That's the difference between four hours of sleep and eight hours of sleep.

When we talk about the Super 7 Disciplines — sleep, stress management, nutrition, hydration, mobility, strength, and cardio — sleep is first for a reason: because everything else depends on it.

Sleep is your funding. While you're unconscious, your body is:

• Restoring energy and repairing tissue at the cellular level
• Consolidating memories and cementing what you learned
• Clearing metabolic waste from your brain
• Regulating your emotional responses and stress hormones

When your funding slows down — or worse, shuts down completely — you stop strategizing. You start reacting. Your risk management becomes crisis management. Every problem feels urgent. Every decision feels like a fire drill.

Sound familiar?

What We Missed Until It Was Too Late

Mike's story:

I lived this. Not as a cautionary tale I observed — I was the cautionary tale.

I went from getting proper sleep as a personal trainer (where I understood recovery because I saw the results in my clients) to barely sleeping while building a company. I told myself the same lie many founders tell themselves: "Once we get through this knothole, we'll be good."

The knot didn't loosen. It got tighter.

My sleep went from bad to worse. Quality and quantity both collapsed. And I watched the company start falling apart. What I couldn't see — what I was physiologically incapable of seeing because my brain wasn't functioning properly — was that I was falling apart.

I couldn't handle stress. Not because I wasn't capable, but because I literally wasn't sleeping. Every problem felt existential. Every decision felt life-or-death. I had no strategic thinking left — just survival mode, 16 hours a day.

The defining moment? Sitting on my couch, unable to get up. Staring at the ceiling, thinking, "How did I get here?"

And then the realization: I can't control the market. I can't control my investors. I can't control how fast we grow.

But I could control whether I slept.

The Warning Signs You're Ignoring Right Now

Here's the insidious part: sleep deprivation erodes your ability to recognize it's happening. You become the worst judge of your own performance.

But there are patterns. Watch for these:

Decision quality shifts. Your 10-year vision becomes "just get through this week." You stop thinking strategically and start thinking transactionally.

Risk assessment distorts. You're either making impulsive, reactive decisions without thinking through second-order consequences, or you're paralyzed, seeing danger everywhere and unable to move forward.

Cognitive fatigue compounds. Memory degrades. Focus narrows. Creativity — your ability to connect disparate ideas across domains — is one of the first casualties. A single night of poor sleep can tank your innovation capacity.

If you're reading this and thinking, "That's just what building a company feels like," we'd ask you this:

What would you tell your best friend who was living this same life? You know they can't hustle their way out of sleep deprivation. So why can you?

The Quality Question: Why Eight Hours Still Feels Like Four

One of the most common pushbacks we hear: "I got eight hours but still woke up anxious and exhausted."

Quality matters as much as quantity.

Your circadian rhythm, sleep environment, and pre-sleep routines all determine how restorative your sleep actually is. Eight hours in a bright room, scrolling your phone until midnight, waking up at different times every day? That's not the same as eight hours of deep, restorative sleep in a dark, cool room with a consistent schedule.

And here's the other truth nobody wants to hear: you can't just catch up on weekends.

Just as you can't out-exercise a bad diet, you also can't out-hustle bad sleep.

Every night of quality sleep is an investment in recovery. Chronic deprivation has compounding costs that take real time to repair. Five nights of four-hour sleep can't be undone with one 12-hour Saturday crash session. Your body doesn't work that way.

"But My Competitors Are Outworking Me"

Let's address the elephant in the room.

The 996 culture — 9am to 9pm, six days a week — is being glorified in tech circles. The narrative is seductive: if you're not willing to sacrifice everything, including sleep, you're not hungry enough. Your competitors are grinding while you're sleeping, and you'll lose.

Here's what that narrative gets wrong:

You're not competing on hours worked. You're competing on the quality of decisions made.

The founders who are still standing in 10 years aren't the ones who worked 996 in year one and burned out in year three. They're the ones who built sustainable systems that allowed them to operate at peak cognitive performance consistently.

996 isn't a productivity strategy. It's a burnout guarantee with extra steps.

And if you need proof, look at the research: cognitive performance declines sharply after about 50 hours of work per week. Beyond that, you're adding hours but subtracting output quality. You're working more and achieving less.

Are there times that 996 makes sense? Of course. Is it sustainable? No way.

The Protocol: How to Start

If you're ready to stop competing on exhaustion and start competing on clarity, here's where to begin:

1. Track your sleep for one week. Just observe. No judgment. Use your phone, a journal, whatever. Notice patterns: when you go to bed, when you wake up, how you feel.

2. Aim for 7-9 hours. This isn't negotiable. It's infrastructure. You wouldn't run a business on half the capital you need. Don't run your brain that way either.

3. Optimize your environment:

• Consistent wake time — even on weekends. Your circadian rhythm needs predictability.
• Dark, cool room — blackout curtains, 65-68°F if possible.
• Wind-down routine — reading (physical books), light stretching to relax, dim lights 30-60 minutes before bed.
• No electronics — your inbox will still be there in the morning. That email won't wire money by 11pm.

4. Train your nervous system. Sleep cues tell your body it's safe to let go of the day. The routine isn't about perfection — it's about consistency. Your brain learns: "When I do X, Y, and Z, it's time to shut down."

You'll notice measurable differences in decision-making, focus, and emotional regulation within days. Not weeks. Days.

What About the Chaos?

Travel. Product launches. Crises. We get it. Life isn't always controllable.

Here's the mindset shift: focus on what you can control.

When you're traveling across time zones or dealing with an unavoidable high-stress period, protect what you can:

• Keep consistent wake times even when sleep duration varies
• Maintain your sleep cues even in hotel rooms (bring your book, keep the room cool)
• Strategic naps if you're severely jet-lagged
• Guard your non-negotiables

Think of this like protecting your financial reserves during a market downturn. You can't control external conditions, but you can control how you manage what's critical.

The message isn't perfection. It's priorities.

The Reframe That Changes Everything

Sleep isn't self-care. It's not something you do when you have time left over after "real work."

Sleep is leadership leverage.

Without it, innovation falters, recovery stops, strategy disappears. Every other system — stress management, nutrition, movement, strength, endurance — depends on this foundation.

You'll handle life, business, and uncertainty a lot better when you're not operating with the brain function of someone legally drunk.

Once more for the folks in the back: elite athletes don't brag about skipping recovery days. Neither should we.

Your Next Steps

This week:

• Track your sleep for seven days. Keep a journal of how you felt.
• Set a consistent bedtime and wake time.
• Optimize one element of your environment (start with making your room darker or cooler).
• Notice what changes in your decision-making and focus. Look for patterns.

Before you optimize your supply chain (nutrition) or upgrade your operations (strength), you need your funding to flow properly.

Sleep first. Everything else follows.

Mavi Viljoen is Vice President of Administration at QED Investors and a Certified Executive Coach who works with founders, leaders, and rising executives on sustainable performance practices. Mike Pincus is a performance coach and former founder who has spent over 50,000 hours training high-performing leaders.

Next time: Stress as Risk Management — because once your funding is flowing, you need to learn how to read the warning signs before your systems crash.