M.M #4: Sleep As The Foundation For A Good Life

Plus 14-day access to a sleep course by world-leading performance coach Andy Galpin.

Welcome back to Meta Mystic Mondays!

Today’s newsletter is focused on sleep.

As always, I’m going to begin with personal, lived experience — the foundation of this newsletter — rather than jumping straight into studies, abstract analysis, or interpretations of other people’s experiences. Then I’ll get into some neuroscience, and end with an actionable initiative you can take to start improving your sleep, guided by a world-leading sleep expert.

What’s motivating me to write a whole newsletter on sleep is the painfully slow realization that poor sleep is one of the two or three major factors hampering my growth and flourishing in life. In other words, I feel as though insufficient sleep quality and quantity is one of the biggest causes of the frustrating gap between my current life and the life I dream of living.

There’s a long, complicated backstory behind how my sleep got so terrible, but in essence: in early 2022, I started suffering from debilitating anxiety and various psychosomatic issues that resulted in the worst sleep of my life. Around mid-2023, using pain-reprocessing therapy — mostly self-administered through “somatic tracking” meditations — I was able to resolve most of the acute psychosomatic and anxiety-related issues.

My sleep improved somewhat as a result of better nervous system regulation, but it was still suboptimal and has basically stagnated since. It was almost like I had accepted that poor sleep was just a part of life.

In my case, by poor sleep I mean unrestful sleep, low heart rate variability — usually in the early 30s — and around 75–80% sleep efficiency according to my fitness tracker. In practical terms, this means I only feel well-rested if I’m in bed for 10–12 hours. But because my sleep efficiency is so low, those 10–12 hours are really more like 8–9.5 hours of actual sleep. So both my subjective experience and the objective metrics seem to align: my sleep quality is in pretty terrible shape.

Based on everything I’ve read and experienced, the two biggest levers for me are going to be sleeping on time — ideally around 10–10:30 p.m. — and doing more meditative practices during waking life to regulate my nervous system. The hope is that if my nervous system is more regulated during the day, it can slide into a parasympathetic state more easily at night.

I’m working on both of these things through almost religious weekly self-monitoring and “successive approximation” — gradually lowering my bedtime by about 15 minutes each week. I’ve found it literally impossible, despite all my willpower, to “just go to bed at 10” when I’ve typically been sleeping somewhere between midnight and 1:30 a.m. for years.

So far, I’ve managed to move my average bedtime down to around 11:45 p.m.

This week, I’m aiming for 11.

Exhaustion Is The Enemy Of Creativity

Now, onto the ramifications of feeling perpetually exhausted and drained.

My productivity and creativity have taken a big hit. And unfortunately — though also fortunately in other respects — I don’t have a boss or manager keeping me accountable to a certain number of work hours every week. Other than my readers, of course, but you only see the output, not the input. So I don’t have nearly as much external accountability as the average person.

Over the past four years, I’ve been living under the draining burden of constant tiredness and exhaustion. This has drastically shortened the window of time in which I can actually focus and dial in on important projects.

When you’re exhausted, it’s very difficult to have long, effortful writing sessions. The generative, creative state at the heart of my work has been far too elusive in my life for far too long. The big, transcendent creative ideas seem to come far less in exhausted states than well-rested ones.

In order to create high-level, boundary-pushing content, I need to be able to access that state for longer periods of time. Recent financial struggles have also kicked this insight into full gear. Sleep is critical for focus, creativity, productivity — and all of that feeds directly into the financial growth of the podcast and this newsletter.

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One important angle on this, which really hits hard for me, is that failing to sleep well — and therefore failing to be as creatively prolific as I could be — feels like an insult to my own potential as a creator, writer, podcaster, social being, and overall person.

I know I have strong talents. And I feel like I’ve been criminally wasting some of them because of this unresolved sleep issue.

But this goes beyond work and productivity. It cuts right into the themes this newsletter is most interested in: self-development, agency, nervous system regulation, and inner growth.

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Sleep deprivation seems to biologically tilt me toward what I’d call my lower self: the more reactive, insecure, impulsive, validation-seeking version of me. When I’m poorly rested, my prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain involved in self-control, decision-making, planning, and emotional regulation — is simply not operating at full capacity. The more primitive, threat-sensitive parts of the brain have more room to run the show.

This matters enormously for social life, dating, relationships, confidence, and self-expression. A well-rested brain has more access to patience, perspective, humour, restraint, and grounded self-assurance. A sleep-deprived brain is more likely to interpret ambiguity as rejection, overthink signals, chase short-term comfort, and collapse into old patterns of insecurity.

In other words, poor sleep makes it harder to live from my higher self: the part of me that is calm, confident, agentic, creative, emotionally regulated, and rooted in a basic sense of “I’m okay.” It makes me more likely to live from the old self: anxious, scarce, self-doubting, approval-hungry, and less capable of choosing the behaviour that would actually move my life forward.

This is one of the cruelest parts of chronic poor sleep: it doesn’t just reduce performance; it subtly changes the felt sense of being you. The world feels more threatening. Social opportunities feel heavier. Rejection feels more catastrophic. Discipline feels less accessible. Even basic self-trust becomes harder to summon.

So my emerging realization is that improving sleep is not just a health optimization project. It is an identity project. It is a spiritual project. It is a nervous-system project. It is one of the most direct ways I can make my higher self more available on a daily basis.

Otherwise, all the things I strive for take a massive hit:

Agency, mindfulness, creativity, autonomy, responsibility.

In other words, I don’t live like the “meta mystic” that I aim for when I’m not well-rested.

Facts About Sleep & Mental Health:

• Emotional control gets weaker. In sleep-deprived adults, studies have found increased amygdala reactivity along with reduced medial prefrontal cortex activity, which matters because the prefrontal cortex helps regulate emotional responses and make decisions in accordance with one’s hierarchy of goals. [pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih]

• Stress systems can stay overactivated. Mechanistic reviews describe sleep loss as dysregulating the HPA axis and sympathetic nervous system, which can keep the body in a more stressed, hyperaroused state and make it harder to settle mentally. [icr-heart]

• Circadian disruption may worsen symptoms. Sleep and circadian rhythms are tightly linked to mental health, and disruption in the quality, continuity, or timing of sleep can precipitate or worsen psychiatric symptoms in vulnerable adults. [phc.ox.ac]

• REM and slow-wave sleep appear important for mood processing. Experimental and review literature suggests REM sleep helps process emotional experiences, while slow-wave sleep is tied to positive affect; disrupting either can leave adults more emotionally reactive and less resilient the next day. [pubmed]

Reflection Prompts

1. What is the quality and quantity of your sleep right now?

Take a few minutes to honestly assess your current sleep.

Are you getting enough hours? Are you waking up rested? Do you feel like your sleep is truly sufficient — or are you quietly running on fumes and treating exhaustion as normal?

2. If your sleep is insufficient, contemplate what might change if you were truly well-rested.

Take two or three minutes to actually visualize this.

How much better might your life become if your nervous system was more restored each day? Would you make better decisions? Would you feel more aware, mindful, and emotionally regulated? Would you be more patient, creative, disciplined, confident, or socially open? Would you connect with others more easily?

Imagine the version of you who is not constantly fighting fatigue. What becomes more possible for that person?

3. Start improving your bedtime through simple tracking.

Here are some quick instructions on how to start improving your bedtime, if that is a struggle for you, as it has been for me.

Starting tomorrow, track your bedtime every night for one week. You can do this in a journal, the Notes app on your phone, a spreadsheet, or with any AI tool of your choice.

At the end of the week, calculate your average bedtime.

Then, starting the following week, try to lower your average bedtime by 15 minutes. Keep doing this week by week until you reach your desired bedtime.

Don’t try to overhaul your life overnight. Just track, average, adjust, and repeat.

Sleep Challenge: Sign Up Now

I also want to recommend a 14-day sleep program I’ve just started by sleep performance coach Andy Galpin, who has a PhD in human bioenergetics, works with elite athletes, hosts a podcast on Andrew Huberman’s network, and has also been a guest on The Illusion of Consensus. He’s partnered with Waking Up — my favourite meditation app — to offer a 14-day sleep improvement course, and even though I’m only a couple days in, I’m already learning tools and habits I somehow hadn’t come across despite doing a lot of research on sleep.

You can get started by signing up for a 14-day free trial of Waking Up using my affiliate link below (you’ll only be charged after 14 days if you choose to keep using the app):

Then, once you’re registered, you can sign up for the sleep course at this hub using your Waking Up credentials:

https://www.wakingup.com/deeprestreset

(Note: this challenge technically started June 8th but you can begin whenever and it is available to everyone till August)

I hope this piece helps you realize that sleep is not some secondary health habit — it is foundational to living a good life. The Meta Mystic life, and the Meta Mystic potential this newsletter is striving toward, cannot be fully actualized without proper sleep. So I hope you take something from my experience, the neuroscience, the journal prompts, and the actionable steps above — and start making sleep a real priority in your own life.

Alright, it’s 11pm now! I’m going to bed.