The Sleep Number That Changes Everything
Most leaders have never checked.
Seven years ago I bought a Fitbit.
I bought it during pregnancy to track my steps and stay accountable with my fitness. I wanted to be a “fit pregnant lady”. That was the whole plan.
What I didn’t know? That it tracked my sleep too.
The first morning I looked at the sleep data, I was genuinely shocked.
You see, I had always told myself I was a good sleeper. I went to bed around 10:30pm and woke up around 6:30 in the morning.
Eight hours. Done.
I never questioned it because I closed my eyes and opened them again eight hours later and nothing felt wrong.
What the data showed me was that I wasn’t actually sleeping for eight hours.
I was sleeping for only six hours and forty-five minutes (!?) and the rest of the time I was awake. Tossing. Turning. Brief wake-ups I had no memory of.
Little red spikes all over the graph that I couldn’t argue with.
And here’s the part that really got me: I wasn’t overly tired.
I wasn’t dragging through my days, obviously struggling. I thought I felt normal.
That was the problem.
Six hours and forty-five minutes of broken sleep had become my baseline. That was just how a work day felt. What thinking felt like. What energy felt like.
I didn’t even realize that I was shorting myself hours of quality sleep each night and it was slowly eroding my performance during the day.
The Thing I Didn’t Know I Didn’t Know
What that Fitbit data taught me is something most people never think about. There is a difference between your sleep opportunity and your actual sleep time.
Sleep opportunity is how long you give yourself to sleep. If you go to bed at 11 and wake up at 7, that’s an eight-hour sleep opportunity.
Sleep time is how much of that time you’re actually asleep.
The percent of time you actually spend asleep while you’re laying in bed is called your sleep efficiency and for most people, that gap is larger than they think.
How to calculate your sleep efficiency:
Take the number of hours you actually slept and divide it by the number of hours you spent in bed. Multiply by 100 to get a percentage.
So if you were in bed for 8 hours but only slept for 6 hours and 45 minutes, your sleep efficiency is 84% (6:45hrs/8hrs).
Oura, a wearable performance tracker company, considers 85% sleep efficiency the minimum benchmark for a good night. I personally aim for 90% and above, and I notice the difference when I fall below it.
In an eight-hour window, 90% efficiency means spending no more than about 45 minutes awake across the entire night. Most of the leaders I work with are awake closer to 60 to 90 minutes each night without realizing it, simply because most of those wake-ups go completely unnoticed.
Why It Doesn’t Feel Like a Problem
This is the part that stays with me most.
Your body adapts. Your depleted baseline starts to feel like your normal.
You stop questioning whether you could feel significantly better because you genuinely can’t remember what significantly better feels like.
I wasn’t struggling on the outside. I was functioning. Running my business, seeing clients, showing up. But I was doing all of it on six hours and forty-five minutes of broken sleep and calling it fine.
It wasn’t until I fixed my sleep months later that I understood what I had been missing. My thinking got sharper. My mornings got easier. Ideas came faster. And I realized I hadn’t been functioning at my normal.
I had been functioning at someone else’s floor.
I use an Oura Ring now to track my sleep, rest and recovery and the data is even more detailed, but the Fitbit was the thing that first made me stop assuming and start actually looking.
The Question Worth Sitting With This Week
If you tracked your sleep tonight, what do you think you’d actually find?
Not what you assume. Not what you tell yourself. What the data would actually show.
Most people are surprised. I was. And that surprise was the beginning of everything that changed.
Next issue, I’ll share exactly what I did about it, including the three-week protocol that taught my body to wake up without an alarm clock, fully rested, at the same time every day.
Tanessa
Tanessa Shears is a Sleep and Performance Specialist who works with Canadian leadership teams. Her corporate workshops translate the biology of sustained high performance into practical protocols leaders can use the next day. Learn more: tanessashears.com'
Have you ever actually tracked your sleep? I'd love to know what you found or what you think you'd find if you did.