Andrew Colsky on Sleep as the Secret Pillar of Performance

In a world that celebrates productivity and constant motion, sleep is often treated as a luxury rather than the foundation of high performance. Yet science tells a different story. In the third feature of our four part series, Andrew Colsky examines why rest is the overlooked engine behind success, creativity and resilience.

Drawing from both personal experience and professional insight, Colsky explains how deep sleep secures long term memory, sharpens focus and restores the body for physical performance. He challenges the guilt that parents and professionals often feel about prioritising rest, and shows how ignoring sleep not only reduces output but also strains relationships and health.

For Colsky, performance is not about squeezing more hours out of the day. It is about using the night wisely so that the day ahead is sharper, stronger and more sustainable.

How do you convince high achievers that sleep is not a luxury but an essential tool for success? 

Well, this goes back to how do you convince anyone of anything you have to understand what their concerns are How they process information and what's important to them? Because people are going to focus on what is important to them and they're not going to focus on what's important to you unless that's the thing that's important to them. So you have to understand how to communicate with this person in the first place about anything. Typically, a high achiever is going to be, I think of like lawyers, for example, and probably because I am a lawyer. But high achiever lawyers operate by fact and analysis. 

So if I was working with a client who was a high achieving lawyer, and find this the same with ⁓ CEOs and executives, I'm going to present them with the science. I'm going to show them what happens related to whatever their specific sleep disorder may be. And I'm going to help them understand that by trying to stay awake and focus on something versus getting some sleep, you're actually getting a negative return on your investment. 

I learned this important lesson in law school where In law school, you get one final exam at the end of the year in each class. There's no quizzes, there's no tests, there's nothing. You have no grade until the last day of class and then you got to put everything on paper that one time. So you can imagine the stress preparing for law school final exams. Well, I as a young law student decided I needed to stay up and really cram hard because there's so much information you don't want to miss anything when you're going in for your exam. And I forced myself to stay up trying to memorize more and more and more and more. 

And what I learned later when I got into the sleep profession is had I gone to sleep when I got into deep sleep, that's when my body and my mind process the information that I was taking in. And it puts it into long-term memory and it makes it meaningful in my system. So by forcing myself to stay up and try and cram information, I didn't give myself the ability to get into deep sleep, so I didn't have the ability to process all the information and put it into my long-term memory, thus hurting my abilities on my exams. So I would get into information like that to help them understand what's going on, and ultimately they're the ones that are going to have to decide whether they want to do or what they want to do to try and improve their sleep. I can provide them with science and facts and information and suggestions, but I'm not going to make them improve their sleep. They have to decide what they want to achieve.

Can you share an example where improved sleep dramatically changed someone's productivity or creativity? 

Well, I think just because it's right on top of my mind, ⁓ the example that I just gave you about myself in law school. ⁓ When I learned that I need to get into deep sleep in order to process complex information and topics, then I started to give myself the ability to do just that. And when I put the books down and I put the information down and I valued sleep over cramming, my mind was able to digest the information, process the information. 

And I'm sure we all experienced this the next day when you wake up, you're kind of more clear-minded and level headed and you see the information in a fresh light and things that you just didn't understand last night, all of a sudden you start to understand them and they make sense to you and you sort of have those epiphany type of moments. So I think a lot of people can relate to that, that they struggle with something at night, they're having a hard time with it, especially students who are studying something or having a hard time grasping a concept.

They finally go to bed and when they wake up the next morning, suddenly it's all clear. Well, that's because everything processed at night when they finally got into their stage three deep sleep.

Parents and professionals often feel torn between responsibilities and rest. What advice do you give to those who feel guilty about prioritizing sleep? 

Well, now you get into personal choices. I think that in general, when people are properly educated about sleep, that they can make the proper decisions for themselves.  Obviously if they're new parents, well their priority is the health of their new child and they're going to be waking up even though they don't want to because of feeding, because of changing the baby and all the things that go along with being new parents. Professionals, they often have these high stress environments where they're competing to get more billable hours in than someone else and I have a lot of clients in my practice that are newer lawyers in these high-pressure firms and a lot of them decide that they didn't sign up for this, they didn't sign up to give away their mental health and their physical health for money and they decide that this is not a healthy environment for them or their body tells them that it's not healthy, meaning that their mental health suffers and they need to find ways to address it. 

Other people thrive in environments like that and that's perfectly fine. If it's the right environment for them, then keep going. That's great. So ⁓ if you feel guilty about prioritizing sleep, then you have to ask, what are my core values? Am I acting in line with my core values? Because ultimately, my mental health and my physical health are going to align with my core values even if I'm trying to fool myself to doing something different. So at the end of the day, if I prioritize sleep but my body needs sleep, my mental health and my physical health are going to suffer to the point that I need to make a change and then I will have no choice but to prioritize sleep. So in the end, your body's going to win. But if you want to struggle with it in between, that's a personal choice.

What does the science say about the connection between quality sleep and physical performance? 

Well, I think I've already answered this a couple of times, but let's take the example where you look at professional athletes. Because these are people who have ⁓ the need for high quality physical performance. And the good news is that many ⁓ coaches or teams or people working in the industry of professional athletes recognize the value of sleep. And so they hire sleep coaches and they develop sleep programs and they prioritize their sleep as part of their training program because they realize that if they don't sleep and they don't give their body the chance to rest and repair that their performance is ultimately going to be diminished as opposed to improved. 

So, you know, I've done several radio shows with people who are professional ⁓ sleep practitioners who work with high performing athletes and they talk about what they do and what's necessary.

The average guy on the street or an Olympic athlete, you both are human beings with body systems that function the same way. And sleep is just important for each one of you. And so there's no difference ⁓ if you are a high physical performer from the standpoint that we all need sleep because our bodies need the benefits of sleep in order to be able to function at our best.

Do you believe that relationship suffer when sleep is ignored? 

Well, if you've got someone who is sleep deprived and cranky and irritable and things like that, they're probably going to respond to their partner with that crankiness and irritability and it's going to have a negative impact on their sleep. You know, we hear people talk about this, this phrase “sleep divorce,” which personally, I don't like that term at all. 

I call it an individual sleeping plan, meaning that we sort of expect that a couple is going to sleep together in the same bed because those are just sort of social norms. But in reality, sometimes you have someone who is a heavy snorter or someone who has very different body temperature needs at night. One sleeps too hot, one sleeps too cold. Maybe someone ⁓ moves around a lot at night and disturbs the other.

I've had clients who just cannot sleep with someone else in the bed, regardless of the situation. Their body just doesn't allow them to sleep when that's the case. So there's so many different reasons why people might want to sleep in different beds, plenty of reasons why they might want to stay in the same bed. But if something is going on and it's negatively impacting your relationship and it relates to sleep, then obviously addressing the sleep issue isn't important.

So I have no problem with people developing individualized sleeping plans, sleeping in separate rooms maybe. ⁓ Doesn't mean they can't get together in the same bed for ⁓ intimacy and cuddle time and other things, but for actual sleep time, their physical and mental health may be improved by sleeping in a different location. So ⁓ the relationship suffer when sleep is ignored? Yeah, but it can be addressed.

In your opinion, why do find it easier to value diet and exercise over rest, even though sleep may be just as powerful? 

Well, my opinion on this one is take a look at the internet and take a look at media that's available to us. You're going to find a lot of information about diet. You're going to find a lot of information about exercise. You're going to find probably very little information about sleep. So we value the things that are on our mind. And diet and exercise are important for sure, but they're not any more or less important than sleep.

Sleep has been left out of the conversation primarily because the scientific community didn't see sleep as an issue. They saw it as a side effect of living as opposed to something that was important in and of itself. And it wasn't until the late 60s, early 70s that the concept of sleep science began to emerge and evolve where scientists started to actually study sleep and realized how much importance we were missing and how much sleep contributes to our entire system. 

So sleep science is still relatively new compared to other things that we have studied related to the body. Interviews like this and shows like my Sleep Science Today radio show or my YouTube channel. There's plenty of other podcasts out there and sleep professionals with YouTube channels and other social media channels. Now the word is starting to get out. I was doing some research just the other day in 2025 is sort of the year of sleep tourism and sleep in general. They're exploding in terms of the level of interest related to sleep.

Think about it, hotel chains, high-end spas, other places developing programs specifically designed for you to come to help you sleep better or improve your sleep or give you a restful vacation. That was never something on the radar before. Nobody would have been asking for it. Now it's a high priority item and a lot of people are looking for it.

What is one change a reader could make tonight to perform better tomorrow? 

Well, again, I believe our body is a system and we really have to treat our system ⁓ holistically. So one quick tip is not going to improve a person's sleep. But if I had to pick one thing above all else, I would say if you are laying in bed and you are having trouble sleeping, get out of bed and only return to bed when you are so tired that you know that you're going to fall asleep. That means no scrolling on the internet, laying in bed, no laying in bed, worrying about things and ruminating about things. If you are not asleep, then you should not be in your bed. That one rule alone will probably have the biggest impact, but you really need to address sleep as a holistic system.

This conversation with Andrew Colsky makes clear that sleep is not a trade off against productivity but the very resource that sustains it. From athletes who depend on recovery to professionals whose decisions carry weight, the science of rest reveals that the body and mind cannot perform at their peak without consistent and restorative sleep.

Colsky reminds us that while diet and exercise dominate cultural conversations about health, it is sleep that quietly underpins both. As this series approaches its conclusion, the focus turns toward what it means to make rest a priority in a culture that so often undervalues it.