Sleep is a Performance Metric. Your body is your earliest alarm. Pay attention to it.
- Cécile Bastien Remy
- Sep 9, 2025
- 2 min read
One Insight
Exhaustion is not a badge of honor. It’s a breach of contract with your future work. When sleep disappears, judgment narrows, patience thins, messages get sharp where they should be strong. Great communicators manage energy first and message second, because delivery is a physiological event before it’s a rhetorical one.
Treat rest like runway. If you cut it short, you can still take off but every gust becomes a crisis. Put enough runway under you, and you can lift heavy ideas with grace.
One Story
Early in my career, insomnia became my manager. I wasn’t paid in money; I was paid in adrenaline. I kept saying yes to prove my value, and my body kept saying no. I finally listened. I didn’t need a meditation app. I needed a new relationship to limits. When I swapped martyrdom for maintenance, everything improved: clarity, pace, presence. My words sounded like me again.
One Tool: 90-Second Reset
You can’t nap before the board meets. You can reset.
1. Breath pattern: inhale for 4, hold for 4, exhale for 6. Six cycles. The longer exhale triggers your parasympathetic system, calm on demand.
2. Shake it up: thirty seconds of bouncing. Looks silly. Works reliably. It shakes out adrenaline that pools in your legs when you brace.
3. Shoulders down: raise them with an inhale, drop them with a sigh. Twice. Speak on the breath that follows. Your tone will lower; your authority will rise.
To make it stick, you can pair the reset with a cue such as touching the doorknob, closing your laptop,stepping into the room. Cues wire habits.
Your new boundary script to protect sleep:
“I want to do this well. To deliver by tomorrow morning, I’ll need either a narrower scope or a later deadline. Which serves the business best?”
You’re not asking for permission to rest. You’re allocating resources: time, attention, biology.
Make it stick
Model sane pacing. If you answer emails at midnight, your team will too no matter what your all-hands says.
Try it this week
Use the reset before your next high-stakes conversation. Notice how your first sentence lands. If it lands softer and stronger, you’ve just felt the compounding effect of small maintenance.
Et Voilà!
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