Why Most CEOs and Entrepreneurs Get Sleep Wrong And Pay the Price
For many CEOs and entrepreneurs, sleep is the first thing sacrificed when the calendar gets crowded. There’s always another meeting, another flight, another deal that feels more urgent than getting to bed on time. On the surface, it appears to be a minor compromise. After all, you can catch up later, right?
But here’s the truth: consistently undervaluing sleep is one of the most costly mistakes a leader can make. It doesn’t just lead to grogginess—it quietly erodes the very capabilities your position demands most: clarity, emotional control, creativity, and resilience under pressure.
And unlike a missed workout or a skipped meal, the impact of poor sleep compounds. The longer you treat it as negotiable, the more it shows up in missed opportunities, frayed relationships, and decisions you wish you could take back.
This article breaks down the number one mistake executives make with sleep, why it’s so damaging, and what to do differently. The goal isn’t to make you a sleep perfectionist, it’s to help you see sleep for what it truly is: the operating system that makes every other part of your leadership and life function at its best.
The Hidden Mistake: Treating Sleep Like a Flexible Line Item
Most leaders view sleep as adjustable, something to cut when time gets tight. But your brain and body don’t work like a spreadsheet. Sleep is not a buffer; it’s infrastructure. Cut it too often, and you’re running your business on unstable ground.
Three Ways Executives Get Sleep Wrong
Ignoring circadian rhythm: Pushing late nights and irregular schedules leaves your body in a state of constant jet lag.
Prioritizing quantity over quality: Six or seven broken hours don’t deliver the same cognitive return as six solid, well-timed hours.
Using sleep as a buffer zone: When schedules overflow, sleep is often the first thing executives sacrifice—creating an energy debt that no amount of coffee or weekend catch-up can fix.
Why This Matters for Leaders
Sleep is not a personal wellness issue—it’s a performance multiplier. Protecting it means protecting your ability to negotiate, to inspire, and to make billion-dollar decisions without second-guessing. Neglecting it, on the other hand, is like leaking fuel before every major race.
At Executive Health, we see sleep as one of the most overlooked strategic levers available to CEOs and entrepreneurs. The leaders who win long term are those who stop treating it as optional and start treating it as the foundation of sustained performance. By aligning your sleep with your natural rhythm, prioritizing quality, and refusing to use it as a buffer, you gain an edge that compounds year after year.
If this resonates, watch the video below for the full breakdown. And when you’re ready to treat your health like the billion-dollar asset it is, explore how Executive Health can help you turn sleep—and every other pillar of performance—into a strategic advantage.
Transcript (May Not Be Exact)
Julian Hayes II
(0:00)
What's the number one mistake that most executives make with their sleep?
(0:07)
Here's a clue.
(0:09)
It's not that they don't sleep enough.
(0:11)
It's something less tangible, and it's actually more of a principle.
(0:16)
The answer lies in that they treat their sleep like a negotiable expense, something to come back on when work ramps up, travel gets busy, or life throws them a curveball.
(0:34)
Welcome, I'm Julian Hayes II, founder of Executive Health, where the mission is we help CEOs, entrepreneurs, and other A-level leaders optimize their billion-dollar asset so they can thrive in business, lead in their communities, and be more present with their families.
(0:49)
And here is the reality.
(0:51)
Poor sleep isn't just about feeling tired.
(0:55)
It is much more than just that thing.
(1:00)
For top-level leaders, whether you are a CEO, whether you are a founder,
(1:05)
or just any other type of leader with significant responsibility,
(1:10)
poor sleep directly erodes and weakens the very fabric and things that your career depends on,
(1:17)
whether that's decision-making, your emotional control and intelligence,
(1:23)
your memory, your charisma, your creativity, your ability to manage and work with people
(1:28)
is all directly affected by poor sleep.
(1:32)
Now, chronic sleep mismanagement is not just costing you a productive morning.
(1:38)
This thing is actually compounding into poor strategic choices, shorter tempers with your team, and we can probably throw family in there as well.
(1:48)
I often say that a lot of the relationship problems in the world could be filled if we had better quality sleep.
(1:57)
Now, throw in there also weaker executive presence and charisma, as I mentioned earlier, long-term health risks that can cut your career and your, unfortunately, life potential shorter.
(2:10)
So, if we think of it this way, you wouldn't cut your company's IT security budget because things were busy.
(2:20)
Sleep is that same type of infrastructure, except it's protecting your brain and your body instead of servers.
(2:32)
As I mentioned earlier, the biggest mistake when we think about sleep is treating it like a light switch that you can just turn off and then turn on at will.
(2:47)
And I like things in threes, so we're going to break this down into three parts.
(2:53)
And the first mistake, or the first principle, philosophy, whichever one you want to call it, is ignoring circadian rhythm.
(3:04)
Most leaders assume that they can push through late nights and simply make it up later.
(3:11)
But your body doesn't necessarily work like that.
(3:13)
Now, sure, a night or two, that's going to happen.
(3:18)
Newborns, that's going to happen.
(3:20)
But we're, in this example here, in this context, we're talking consistently over the long duration of time here, not just for a short time.
(3:30)
Because we all have seasons of life where our training's not as good, where our nutrition's not as good, where our sleep is not going to be as good.
(3:36)
That's fine.
(3:39)
But our circadian rhythm, it's hardwired through hormones, metabolism, brain chemistry.
(3:46)
They're all hardwired to sync with light in dark cycles.
(3:52)
So fighting that clock lowers your performance whether you realize it or not.
(3:58)
So when you ignore your circadian rhythms, and in a nutshell, try to override your in it biology that has been with us through millennia and multiple generations, our bodies are going to have to eventually pay the bill for doing something like this.
(4:16)
You can only defer that for so long before it catches up with you.
(4:21)
And much like anything, the further you put it off, the more you procrastinate it, the tougher, the more significant, the more painful it's going to be when you actually have to go and deal with it.
(4:35)
The second philosophy and principle here is prioritizing quantity over quality.
(4:41)
Many executives, leaders, entrepreneurs, and even just people in the day-to-day life that I talk to, well, they say, Julian, I get my six to seven hours, so I'm good.
(4:54)
But if those hours are fragmented and they're filled with blue light exposure beforehand, you have a drink or two each night to take some of the edge off of the day to relax a little bit.
(5:07)
It helps you sleep.
(5:08)
It helps me unwind.
(5:10)
Here are these types of things about that.
(5:15)
This is actually cutting short your deep and REM cycles.
(5:21)
And of course, you're running on half capacity, but your sleep quality, your sleep architecture is dramatically being affected with these types of decisions here.
(5:30)
And our sleep quality is important because this is also going to determine how well you're consolidating memories.
(5:40)
You're regulating your hormones, you're repairing tissues, your ability to lose body fat.
(5:48)
So six clean, uninterrupted hours that's aligned to your natural rhythms 10 out of 10 times are more powerful and better than eight broken ones that are fragmented.
(6:06)
So it's quantity, so it's quality just as much as it's quantity.
(6:11)
But for most people now, they need to focus on the quality part of it.
(6:17)
The third principle is using sleep as what I call a buffer zone.
(6:23)
This is a silent killer and our schedules overflow.
(6:29)
Oftentimes sleep, rest, recovery, rejuvenation, whichever words you want to use with it.
(6:36)
This is the first thing that many leaders sacrifice.
(6:40)
And sometimes it's unintentionally, it's just the way life is, it's just what happens.
(6:45)
So they treat it like a flexible buffer that can always be shaved off.
(6:50)
But over time, this becomes a pattern.
(6:53)
This becomes something that you're used to.
(6:56)
Your body gets used to it, which is kind of a tricky thing because you feel like you're doing fine on such short sleep, but there's a difference, a huge one between your existing and getting through the day and you're thriving and feeling optimal throughout the day.
(7:13)
So over time, this is becoming a pattern and this leads to an energy debt that coffee cannot help, supplements cannot help, a weekend catch-up cannot fix.
(7:33)
So instead of being the buffer, have sleep be your foundation that everything else is built on.
(7:40)
I'd rather leaders cut their exercising time, intensity, and whatnot short than them to sacrifice and cut short their recovery.
(7:52)
Because recovery is ultimately the driving force to enhancing everything else, to building everything else, to repairing everything else.
(8:04)
So I'm sure there's some pushback around this that, hey, Julien, this sounds great, but I run a global company.
(8:12)
I can't always get perfect sleep.
(8:14)
And you are absolutely right.
(8:16)
Life happens.
(8:17)
Markets don't wait and care for your REM cycles.
(8:20)
I totally get that.
(8:22)
But here's the truth.
(8:23)
Even a partial alignment pays off on this.
(8:26)
20 to 30 minutes of morning sunlight, setting a consistent cutoff for screens at night, leveraging blue blocking glasses like the ones I have on right now.
(8:37)
There's different colors for different times of the day.
(8:39)
That's a different topic for a different video.
(8:42)
Protecting a non-negotiable sleep window, even four or five nights a week of doing this.
(8:48)
Look at your batting average.
(8:50)
And over time, you're winning a lot more days compared to losing them.
(8:58)
All of this, when you do this and stack up more wins significantly compared to maybe days that are not as ideal, this is creating measurable improvements in your mental acuity, your resilience, your emotional control, and your physique and your health.
(9:14)
So think of this like compound interest.
(9:16)
You don't have to be perfect, but the small, the consistent deposits add up.
(9:22)
And the longer that you neglected, the more expensive the debt becomes.
(9:26)
So one costly mistake from fatigue, whether it's missing a market signal, it's botching a negotiation, it's losing your edge or you're bored, it's not having as much presence with your family, this can cost far more than protecting your sleep.
(9:44)
So the takeaway of this is the number one mistake that executives make with their sleep is treating it like a flexible line item, if we're speaking in corporate terms, instead of an operating system that it really is.
(9:57)
So if you're serious about leading at the highest level in your business, in your community, and most importantly in your family, protect your rhythms, guard your quality, and stop using sleep as your buffer zone.
(10:13)
And with that said, if you are a A-level leader, who knows, this may be an area that you've been struggling with, that you've been neglecting.
(10:25)
Perhaps it's time to take a closer look at your entire performance system.
(10:30)
And that's exactly what we do here, helping leaders turn their sleep and pretty much every other lever into a strategic advantage.
Julian Hayes II
(10:38)
If this sounds of interest to you, there's a link below to schedule a private executive health diagnostic call.
(10:45)
Think of this as a chemistry meeting where we're learning about each other, we're going to see if it makes sense.
Julian Hayes II
(10:54)
Regardless of what happens after that, you will have a game plan to turn your billion-dollar asset into the strategic tool that it is.
(11:03)
Until next time, until the next video, optimize today and lead tomorrow.
(11:07)
Peace.
