For anyone in a demanding job, poor sleep quality can come with the package. But you can’t run on fumes for long.
Ever fallen asleep with your laptop on your chest? Or woken up at 3am to mentally reword an email you need to send first thing? As sleep expert, Sophie Bostock, shared in the ainslie + ainslie Perfromance People podcast, failing to see the signs of burnout, and – more importantly – change your behaviour in time, will catch up with you in the end.
Why we don’t see the signs
When sleep debt builds quietly and gradually, many of us don’t notice. But under the surface, our ability to focus, think creatively, make decisions and handle stress is declining.
As Bostock explains, “We have this disconnect between how you're actually performing and how you feel… we get used to whatever we're doing and we tell ourselves that that’s normal.”
This illusion of coping is dangerous because it allows chronic fatigue to accumulate until the effects are impossible to ignore.
“I’ll change next week”
Few people understand the slide into burnout better than Bostock herself.
“It’s pretty embarrassing, really,” she admits. “I had done a PhD all about work stress. I then went to work for a company that had a digital sleep improvement program – literally my job was going around telling other people how to sleep well.”
But passion and purpose can be double-edged swords. “It was a startup and it was mission-driven, and we were trying to change the world and improve mental health,” she recalls. “That was a very compelling mission… but I was working really long hours. I didn’t really sleep as much as I could have done.”
Like so many professionals, she convinced herself that rest could wait.
“I kept telling myself that I’ll change it next week — when we get this funding round, when I get through that deadline. But it never happened, because as soon as we got there, there was another hurdle.”
Eventually, the warning signs became impossible to ignore.
“I started to realise there’s a bit of you that doesn’t care — you’re still going through the motions, still working long hours, but there’s a sort of resentfulness that creeps in,” she says.
The wake up call
Bostock’s turning point came suddenly – and dramatically.
“I literally fell off a cliff,” she says. “I’d just flown in from overseas, only had a couple of hours’ sleep, but I’d promised friends I was going climbing. I made some really stupid mistakes that culminated in a pretty bad fall. I smashed up my ankle and had to be helicoptered off a cliff.”
The injury forced her to stop – for the first time in decades.
“It was the first time in probably twenty years I’d had to stop. And it had a profound effect on me… I had time to sleep. I started to feel more creative and energetic.”
That pause changed everything. It led her to reshape her work, launching her own business focused on helping others build healthier, more sustainable habits.
As Bostock’s experience shows, recovery isn’t optional, it’s fundamental.
Research confirms that most adults perform best with 7–9 hours of sleep, while so-called “short sleepers” are genetic rarities. And wearables now make the reality impossible to ignore.
Becoming your own sleep scientist
Bostock’s advice is practical, not perfectionist. The key, she says, is to experiment and measure.
“Let’s measure something,” she tells clients on the edge of burnout. “It could just be a pen-and-paper sleep diary. Then change one small thing — stop work an hour earlier, for example — and see what happens.”
Those small shifts often create momentum. “When people stop work a little earlier and give themselves that time to wind down, they sleep better, they feel more restored, and that energy helps them make other positive changes.”
As Bostock puts it: “You’re not going to change until you start to realise that you feel better as a result. You’ve got to experiment, give it time, and make it measurable.”
Success doesn’t depend on adding more hours, it depends on making those hours count. Especially when your health is on the line.
“Sleep is one of the most powerful performance tools we have,” she says, but only if we give it space to do its job.
Watch or listen to Sophie Bostock’s conversation in the Performance People podcast episode “Sleep Your Way to the Top,” which explores the science and habits behind sleep and leadership.
