Sleep expert and behavioural scientist Dr Jemma King says small business owners who sacrifice shut-eye in pursuit of success may be robbing themselves of a free high-performance asset.
While pursuing their dreams, many small business owners, ironically, sacrifice sleep. The entrepreneur who needs more hours in their day often manufactures time by burning the candle at both ends. But instead of unlocking gains, slogging away at work during sleep time may be counterproductive.
Behavioural scientist and sleep researcher Dr Jemma King says businesspeople are one of the highest-risk groups in the community for poor sleep, as they endure the relentless demands of leadership alongside unprecedented opportunities for stimulation. “We are up against a huge, very intelligent, science-driven engine that’s grabbing us and making it very hard for us to go to sleep,” she says.
In her book Sleep First, she outlines how a relatively simple and free reframe can help business owners redefine their relationship with sleep and turn time in bed into an asset. “If you understand the science of sleep, you can hack into it,” she argues. “It is the greatest performance-enhancing legal protocol that you can implement in your life.”
Biology Hasn’t Kept Pace With The Changing World Of Work
Studies estimate around two-thirds of Western adults get inadequate sleep each night, sleeping one to two hours less each night than they did 50 to 100 years ago. But while rest patterns have changed, biology has not.
Human sleep continues to be governed by the circadian rhythm, a light-dark cycle that has existed for hundreds of thousands of years. King says modern environments now work against it on almost every front, from later meal times to a phone that never stops buzzing with distractions and disruptive brightness. Her warning comes with an acronym: “I call it Alan. Don’t sleep with Alan: Artificial Light At Night.”
King treats business leaders as a distinct clinical cohort. “There’s an over-representation of people with insomnia who are small business owners,” she notes, pointing to the compounding stress load of finances, employees, customers and market pressure on one set of shoulders.
Sustained stress has physiological consequences. “The stress hormone cortisol is kryptonite to sleep,” King explains. “It’s designed to motor, move you, help give you the resources to fight or flee, which is the antithesis of what you are doing when you need to go to sleep.”
It’s not only stress giving founders what King calls “dinner plate eyes” at 3AM. Stimulants like coffee or energy drinks are commonly used to provide a second wind once the kids are in bed. “That’s when they have to do their thinking or their paperwork, and you see people use caffeine to push through,” she observes. “Also, small business owners often haven’t had time to have proper meals throughout the day and they’ll snack at night, which is also really bad for sleep, so there’s a constellation of factors that come into play.”
Once they’ve called it a day, King has a name for the late-night scroll many founders rely on to decompress. “I call it revenge bedtime procrastination,” she says of this attempt to carve out me-time. But if they miss the natural sleep-pressure window, she says, it triggers a fresh burst of cortisol and adrenaline that puts deep, restorative sleep much further out of reach. “When people get that second wind, they’ve kind of missed the express bus to deep sleep, and it takes them a much longer time,” she explains.
While she acknowledges the need to tune out, she says this is not the right kind of downtime to seek pre-bedtime. “What you’re doing is you are stealing from tomorrow to pay for today, and Mother Nature always comes to get their debts. Mother Nature’s like the mafia – you cannot get away with it!” she jokes. “You can’t buck physics.”
Leaders Cannot Hide Sleep Deprivation From Teams
Sleep debt does more than make a business owner feel tired – it hits the mental faculties their business runs on. King rattles off a list: judgement, emotional regulation, reliable decision making. “Losing a few hours a night produces impairment, which is kind of similar to being drunk. And not good drunk – grumpy drunk,” she clarifies.
It becomes more difficult to rationalise and control reactions. “The fear part of your brain – the amygdala – you lose ability to regulate that, so you get 60 per cent more activation in your fear centres, your anger centres,” she explains, “so, you’ve got a lot of things going against you if you’re sleep-deprived and you’ve got a stressful job.”
The impact ripples beyond the leader. In a research project alongside Harvard professor Amy Edmondson, King found that sleep-deprived leaders undermine the psychological safety of their teams through what scientists call chemo signalling, a subconscious transmission picked up by people in close proximity. “Leaders think sleep deprivation is a hidden thing – it doesn’t matter, no one will notice – but that’s not true,” she says. “Those bosses who are sleep-deprived, their teams do not trust them as much the next day.” Employees are less willing to speak up or flag mistakes, while customers and stakeholders interpret a rested founder as being more in control.
Reset The Alarm To Avoid The Pumpkin Effect
Many owners assume that insufficient sleep is inevitable if they’re to grow their business. “People think it’s a zero-sum proposition, like you either are successful or you look after yourself and sleep well,” King states. But she uses science to argue against this framing.
She highlights a late-night productivity trap she calls the pumpkin effect, based on what economists know as the law of marginal returns. “You’re 30 to 40 per cent less efficient the closer you get to midnight,” she says. The first two hours of sleep before midnight are when the brain wants to clear waste, file away memories and recalibrate energy, so denying it this opportunity has consequences. “Your ability to detect errors, your ability to be efficient, your ability to not make mistakes slowly gets worse the closer you get to midnight, as does thinking, deciding and high-attention-to-detail work,” she explains. “If you’re doing the books, that becomes suboptimal.”
Instead, for business owners who have no choice but to work longer hours, she proposes a hack that requires a lifestyle adjustment but is biologically more suitable. “If you can, shift your whole sleep cycle back, so you’re going to bed at 9.30PM and getting up at 3.30AM or 4AM,” she advises. “What you’ve given yourself is that window of very deep replenishing sleep, so the 3AM or 4AM you is 30 to 40 per cent more efficient than the midnight-1AM version of you.”
Consistency Is Key To Good Sleep Hygiene
King’s first recommendation for business owners wanting to improve their sleep is not a gadget or a supplement. It is consistency. She offers a workplace analogy.
“Imagine if you as a small business owner said to your staff, ‘We’re going to be open on Tuesday,’ and they say, ‘Okay, what time should we come in?’ And you say, ‘I don’t know. When I open the doors.’ You can’t do that to your staff, right? They need to know.” Bodies require the same certainty. “Inside every cell of your body, there’s a tiny clock that needs to know, do I ramp up or do I ramp down? If you’re not giving your cells consistency, they get very stressed. They produce stress hormones, and they don’t function as adequately as before. The best thing you can do is give yourselves some kind of consistency, so just start with that.”
Next, tweaks to routines can make it easier to fall and stay asleep: confine caffeine to earlier in the day, avoid heavy meals close to bedtime, keep the bedroom dark and cool, and keep the phone out of the bedroom. If scrolling is non-negotiable, King suggests making time in the morning rather than during the two hours before sleep.
If insomnia persists – or, conversely, if people find themselves regularly sleeping more than nine hours – a GP may wish to explore underlying metabolic or mental health issues.
Just as owners look to AI to supercharge their small businesses, King suggests they see sleep as a high-leverage tool to optimise themselves – adding, it costs nothing. “If I said to someone, ‘I’ve got a pill for you, it’s going to make you live longer, it’s going to make you beautiful, smart, fast, have great skin, be intelligent’ – how much would you pay for that pill? People would pay thousands for it,” King says. “But you can actually do it every night by yourself for free. You don’t need anything, just a pillow and some dark curtains.”
And if motivation is required beyond sharper business acumen, King reminds business owners that sleeping for fewer than seven hours a night can shorten lifespans.
“Sleep like your life depends on it,” King says, “because it does.”
