Sleep Was the Last Thing I Took Seriously and It Changed Everything

I had operated on six hours of sleep for most of my working life in Helsinki with the quiet pride of someone who considered the ability to function on limited rest a form of mental toughness.

Finnish work culture in the sector I was in - technology, early-stage companies - was not as extreme as some cultures but it had a bias toward early starts, long days and a respect for the person who was always available that I had internalised without examining.

Six hours was not a choice I had made deliberately. It was what was left after a day that started early, ran long, and ended with the wind-down time I needed to transition from working to sleeping, which I had never shortened because it was the only part of the day that felt genuinely mine.

At 28, a period of sustained poor sleep triggered by a stressful project period produced a deterioration in my cognitive functioning that was pronounced enough to be visible to my colleagues before it was visible to me.

My manager mentioned it in a one-on-one with a diplomatic directness that I respected: she said my response time in meetings had slowed and that I seemed less able to hold complex ideas in working memory than she knew I was capable of.

I went to my GP, who asked about my sleep before anything else, and I answered honestly for the first time. She referred me to a sleep specialist who spent forty minutes with me and delivered a summary I found almost insultingly simple: I was chronically sleep-deprived and the cognitive effects I was experiencing were among the most well-documented consequences of that specific state.

The prescription was not a drug. It was eight hours, consistent timing, and a set of sleep hygiene adjustments that I implemented with the same systematic approach I would bring to any technical problem. The improvement was rapid and significant. Within three weeks my colleague told me, unprompted, that I seemed like myself again.

The productivity I had been protecting by staying up was recovered and then exceeded by the cognitive improvement of sleeping properly. The cruel irony of the previous years was this: I had been sacrificing sleep in the service of output that sleep deprivation was actively degrading.

I was making myself worse at the work in order to have more hours to do it badly.