Boosting Overall Productivity with Better Sleep Management with Dr. Els van der Helm

Ashish Kothari: Hi, my dear friend. It is so lovely to have you on our podcast. And I'm so looking forward to this really important conversation on sleep.

Dr. Els van der Helm: Me too. Thank you for having me.

Ashish Kothari: First thing in the morning. I can tell you, I slept eight hours. My Valtteri meter is telling me I'm 95 percent on all levels. I've slept really well. It was high quality sleep. So I'm really excited. This is early morning for me, that I get the chance to talk with you.

So listen, Els, share with me a little bit around your journey. You're one of the leading world's neuroscientists who focuses on sleep. Tell me a little bit about your journey into how you fell into this field and what really inspires you now to do most of your work around this topic.

Dr. Els van der Helm: Yeah, well, it all started way back when I was just 16 years old. I read a book by Stanford professor Bill DeMent. The Dutch version was called Healthy Sleeping. The American title, if anyone wants to dig it up, is called The Promise of Sleep. It's still actually a good book, although some things are slightly out of date now.

In the book, Professor DeMent really describes how much suffering there is in the world because people don't value it enough or struggle to get good sleep. He describes everything that happens while we are asleep and how magical it is.

And that just really drew me, this idea that so many people see this as a waste of time. Yet there's so much value there if everybody would be aware and actually act on that knowledge. So there's no university study of sleep.

I ended up choosing psychology, neuropsychology, and also neuroscience and started to do sleep research in the Netherlands, then at Harvard, and then did my PhD at UC Berkeley. All focused on sleep and how sleep basically allows us to improve our cognitive function, but also our emotional functioning.

Towards the end of my PhD, I was a little disillusioned, honestly, with academia. I felt like I didn't have much impact, that I was working really hard and producing these papers and didn't feel like it really changed anything in the world.

So I had no idea what else to do with my PhD and then joined McKinsey as a consultant. Thought I would never do anything with all of that sleep knowledge ever again. I always thought it'll be funny someday I'll tell my kids that, back in the day, I did this PhD on sleep.

But then when I joined the firm, it was very different from academia. One of the things I noticed was how much employees received in terms of training and support. I got stress management training, time management training, leadership training. And in none of those training sessions did the word sleep ever come up, and that made no sense to me.

At the same time, I also experienced that everybody was working really long days, sacrificing their sleep. And I knew that that was the stupidest thing to do if you want to do good work. So I started to give workshops internally and for clients on the importance of sleep and giving them sleep tips.

That was where I saw, “wait, I can bring these worlds together, my academic career and the business world.” The great thing about doing those sessions is that you can immediately see these light bulbs go on.

And then of course, these are my colleagues. So I would see them months and years later and they would tell me, "Else, because of you, I stopped snoozing and I'm so happy." So it became clear to me that that was really my calling and my way to make a difference and help people.

After a couple of years, I left the firm, which is now more than eight years ago, and since then I've been working mostly with larger organizations and leaders on this topic of sleep and everything that comes with it, like stress management, exercise, nutrition, your light exposure, et cetera.

Ashish Kothari: You know, it's so interesting. I love that. What I love about what you just shared is how often this happens.

We start to define ourselves based on the degree we have, and then a career. And you consciously said, "Hey, the university career is not serving me anymore because I want to research, but I really want to have an impact." So, I'm going to leave.

I know so many people who are at universities that are unhappy, but they still keep going because they've put all this time into it. You can think about this in every profession.

I spent all this time learning IT. I've grown up, I had spent 12 years at McKinsey, six years as a partner. I completely changed my practice areas, even though I was incredibly productive, because it wasn't fueling my soul. That was not what I was born to do.

Dr. Els van der Helm: One fallacy that I definitely fell into is that I always continued until I felt like I was really good at the job before deciding whether it was something for me. In the first couple of months, I absolutely struggled and would have been very happy to walk away immediately.

But I felt like I needed to learn how to do this, and then I waited until I was good at it to say, "You know what, I still don't like it." In hindsight, maybe I could have made those decisions even faster.

Ashish Kothari: Kudos to you for doing that. The second important thing you mentioned is that we don't actually talk about sleep, we don't train people on sleep, not just the quality but the quantity too. This reflection I had the same.

I changed how many of our teams showed up at clients because imagine this: we would never get into a plane if we knew that the pilot only slept for 6 hours the night before. They're not actually allowed to get in the plane.

Here we are paying all this money for consultants who get up at 4 or 5 a.m., get on a flight, caffeine-fueled, and show up at the client. What we are paying for is cognitive performance, and people are showing up drowsy after all these late nights, not even at their best.

So this notion of how we don't prioritize, I would rather have someone show up at the client actually awake and at their best.

That’s where I want to go. Talk to us a bit, Els, about why sleep is so important, not just for our health, but more importantly, in this world where most of our work is cognitive. What's the price we are paying as individuals and as organizations for a sleep-deprived workforce?

Dr. Els van der Helm: Yeah, it's a great question because it's kind of surprising that this thing we do every night, and most people, even in business jobs, still do it every night. So why does it matter so much if we just shave off a couple of hours of this thing that we already do all the time anyway? It's been a long mystery for a long time.

In the last decades, we've peeled away a bit more about what makes sleep so fundamental. There isn't just one reason why we sleep. All organisms on earth sleep, and there are probably all these different functions that piggybacked on top of it.

What makes sleep so foundational is that it really impacts every cell of our body. There's almost no function that you can measure that doesn't see a negative impact from sleep loss. Starting with knowledge workers, we really see that people knock off a bunch of IQ points. By that, I mean cognitive performance.

So your ability to not just stay alert and awake but actually to problem solve, to have new insights, to come up with creative solutions—all of that suffers when we don't get good sleep.

I always remember my time at the firm. It's like, "Okay, let's all go problem-solving," but let's also think about what preceded this problem-solving session and how much sleep we've had the last couple of nights and how consistent that sleep has been and how high the quality has been.

And by the way, the big danger here is that people get hired for their IQ, and then we knock off many of these IQ points, but we often don't notice our own performance slipping. There have been so many studies where you can see people's performance decrease day after day of just losing two hours a night.

And then after two weeks, you ask them, "How are you doing?" Objectively, they perform horribly, but they don't know this. They're blind to their own performance. They might say, "I'm fine. I don't feel that sleepy."

So we often think that our subjective levels of sleepiness are a good indication of how we're doing, but in reality, that's not a good indication at all. We think we do fine and we think we come up with pretty good solutions, but in reality, they could have been 20 or 40 percent better.

Ashish Kothari: In fact, it's interesting. It's so true on the cognitive side. I remember the study by Matthew Walker, which basically showed 10 days of six hours or less of sleep. By the end of those 10 days, your level of cognitive performance is at the same level as if you went a whole 24 hours without sleeping.

If you really want to experience it, dear friends, go 24 hours without sleeping, see how clearly you're seeing. And just connect with that and notice the next time you actually go for a long period with six hours, what's happening?

We see it all the time with my teams. Every day, people get a little slower, it takes them a little longer, and the thinking is not as creative by the end of the day. So that's cognitive. Talk to us a little bit about the other aspects, like the emotional and physical damages that we are actually incurring on our bodies.

Dr. Els van der Helm: To add to your experiment, I have a more fun way to experiment this. You could also just have three and a half glasses of wine instead of staying up for 24 hours. That's the level of impairment you will get to. That's 0.08 in blood alcohol level, if anyone really wants to try this, which really goes back to the show, like you would never show up drunk like that at work. In fact, you'd be fired.

Yet still very often we see people who work very long days and send emails at crazy times as ambitious and dedicated instead of stupid and almost drunk in terms of their performance.

Okay, but let's move on indeed. So it's IQ, but then we have EQ. So our ability to stay emotionally stable.

So this happens both after 24 hours of complete sleep deprivation. But my own study found that this is already slowly happening across a normal day of wakefulness, where we can see that people become much more emotionally reactive when they see negative stimuli.

And so we get a much more intense response. And if you look at the brain, we see that particularly the prefrontal cortex, the part that makes us smarter than most other animals or maybe all other animals, allows us for planning organization, but also inhibition.

So what we see is that the prefrontal cortex inhibits our emotional center. The center that makes us want to fight, flight, or freeze. So when you get that nasty email, you kind of want to respond and type a really curt response back and then normally it's your prefrontal cortex that says, "Hey, calm down. Let's read this, calm down, let's count to 10. Is it really that bad?"

So really appraise what's happening and think of it in a different way. But that only happens when we're well rested, and the best part of the day for that is in the morning. And then we basically see that it degrades a bit as the day progresses.

Particularly, with sleep loss, we are worse at managing our own emotions, but on top of that, we're also worse at interpreting people around us and their emotions, what emotions they're experiencings and how intense their emotions are.

So there’s IQ, EQ, and then the final part is what I call SQ, or what's been called social intelligence. What we really see there is that it doesn't just impact you as an individual, but when you have been tired and you show up at work in this exhausted state, we see that it impacts how you interact with others, but even how others view you without even interacting with you.

So when you show up tired, you often feel more lonely. You will keep people at a distance, but people who look at you also think you look more lonely and they don't really want to cooperate with you because they also start to feel more lonely themselves and they want to avoid you.

So when we show up tired at work, there's no "fake it until you make it." We can't fake it. We show in many different ways that we are tired and that there's something evolutionary in us that makes us want to avoid other people who are tired, probably for good reason, because they're more likely to get sick.

They're more likely to lash out at us, to not have their emotions under control. So it has a really big impact on our relationships. And we see that couples who've had a bad night of sleep get into conflicts more easily and are less likely to solve the conflict.

Ashish Kothari: And of course, all the physical costs we end up paying, high levels of dementia risk, Alzheimer's risk. Sleep is when our brain is getting rid of all the toxic chemicals that are a byproduct of our natural process in our brain. And if we don't get enough, they don't leave. Over time they build up, which is kind of what drives it.

But there is something that you just triggered for me right now, which is really interesting. I haven't come across a study that actually correlates and shows how much of the rise of incivility in the workplace is actually because of people sleeping less and less. And my gut is telling me that we will see organizations with high sleep debt also have a high civility debt. I'm curious if you have seen any study like that.

Dr. Els van der Helm: Yeah, there's some excellent research in this space. They all kind of use different terms for these behaviors, but to give you some examples, I really like the work by Professor Christopher Barnes from the Foster School of Business. He looks at all the different ways that sleep is impacting the workplace, and specifically, looks at leadership.

What you see there is that when leaders have a bad night of sleep, they show up the next day and are immediately rated as more abusive in their leadership style by the people below them. And what we also see is that the engagement among those team members immediately declines.

We often think of leaders as either good or bad, abusive or not, but his study really showed it actually fluctuates and is highly correlated with the quality of sleep that leaders have. And we see the same thing for individuals, not necessarily leaders, but anyone at work who doesn't have good sleep is starting to behave less ethically. This is partially because they sometimes lack moral awareness, so they don't quite see that the choices they're making could have moral implications.

In general, if your IQ is going down, your EQ is going down, your SQ is going down, you're becoming a less great person to work with, probably because you're just functioning at such a lower capacity that it is harder to see the bigger picture, to notice those little red flags that maybe something is off here, to show empathy to the people you're working with, and at the end of the day to really do the right thing.

So he did another study where they looked at something like a corporate citizen, doing the right thing for the organization, for the greater good. Well, they also found that when people didn't have good sleep, they were less likely to do that.

Other studies have also found that we're less altruistic when we've had poor sleep. We're actually less likely to donate money to charity, for instance, when we're tired. You really see this across the board. It's no surprise that if people start to get worse sleep, they experience more stress. This is a really negative cycle.

You can start with either more stress and then getting poor sleep, but it can also start with poor sleep, which then makes us more vulnerable to stress. We can easily get into this negative spiral where we also show up at work more cranky, more irritable, and less likely thinking about the greater good of everybody around us, as if we just want to get through the day and go home.

Ashish Kothari: What it brings up for me is this question that I'm sitting with and I was going to ask you about more research findings, but I'm going to ask you a different question. You've done eight years of work implementing this work with companies, and there's tons of stories you were sharing.

What I get curious about is the reason people say, "I know I should sleep more, but I don't sleep more because I have so much work to do. I have so much work pressure. And I don't know how to sleep more."

In today's world with global teams, I was actually just with somebody yesterday with a large global multinational. They said, "My first meeting starts at 6 AM because I have a European team, and my last meeting might be, if you're working with Asia, it might be 9 PM or 10 PM."

So there are structural issues that so many individuals report and then organizational leaders often will say, "I want people to sleep more, but they're not," because of the work, the targets, everything else.

What I'm really interested in is, in this work where you've made tremendous impact, have you helped people address those structural factors, those big things at the job and the organizational levels that are fundamentally resulting in people making poor choices?

Dr. Els van der Helm: Yes, some of those structural changes have been made, but that really only happens when the most senior leaders are on board with this. The example that you just gave, like a leader says, "Everybody should get really good sleep. And I'm very supportive of this," is because you yourself have noticed what happens when you don't get good sleep.

You've improved your sleep and now think, "Wow, it's like I've got this superpower and I want everyone else to have this superpower because I now know if everyone else doesn't get that, I'm going to be paying the price."

You really need to start seeing this not just as, "We could maybe have a little bit of upside, but the business is more important." No, you should really see the other side too, that the business is hurting as long as sleep isn't improved.

The examples you gave are very common. These calls at all hours of the day, without any regard to people's personal rhythm. What we do with our clients is that we help them determine if they're a morning or an evening type or kind of middle of the road.

Then we help them determine what hours of the day are best for what sort of tasks, and that really differs from person to person, what their optimal hours are. Sure, you could do a call at 6 AM or 9 PM, but you're going to be paying a price for that, depending on how bad it is in your personal rhythm.

It's not to say that everybody is suddenly now allowed to put blockers across their calendars for all their preferred hours, but it's about being aware. This is how these conversations start.

Then it becomes about, "Are there some calls where maybe I'm not necessary, or I'm not necessary every single week on that call, or I'm going to listen to the recording later on, or I will dial in, but I'm going to have my camera off because I'm already in my pajamas at that time, and I don't want to look at my screen. I will just listen in."

It's really about starting this dialogue of when the best times are, and if the trade-off is worth it. If we all know that Nancy is a morning type and now we're asking her to dial in at 8 PM into a call that really is going to hurt her ability to wind down in the evening and get good quality sleep and be more productive the next day, then we're really going to have to think, "Is it so critical that Nancy is there? Can she not chime in offline and watch this later?"

Sometimes you'll still have to say, "No, this is really critical, and we need her and there's no other time in the day." But what we see in reality is that a lot of these things are flexible, if need be. We just need to be aware of the cost before we're willing to make these trade-offs.

Ashish Kothari: And I like that. It also makes me wonder, given we know the research behind sleep and how important it is and the high cost we pay, if more teams and more organizations actually pulsed people on how many hours people are sleeping and use that as some kind of a sleep indicator to really be aware.

Unless you measure something and unless you focus on it, you don't improve it because you tell yourself the story that people are okay. If we normalize a different behavior and not really recognize the cost that we're paying for it, I wonder what the impact of that would be if every team, whether explicitly or implicitly checked in at least once a week, once a month, once a quarter on, "Hey, what's the quality of sleep that we're getting and the quantity and how do we keep improving that?"

Dr. Els van der Helm: Yeah, so this is exactly what we did at one of the top consulting firms where we wouldn't just have the inspirational talk at the beginning, but we would say, now all these teams are going to have to start making a commitment around what is going to be the norm for them going on.

And everybody, every individual would pick their own norm, but then across eight weeks, we had all of these teams track their sleep debt, the difference between how much sleep you need and how much sleep you're actually getting. We would really focus on the work week to basically look at their Friday sleep debt.

Then we had teams track this every single week. We would also have them track their own subjective performance. I already told you, people generally are not great at estimating their own performance, but it was hard to get a better objective measurement. We also looked at stress levels.

And of course, I'm not necessarily advocating for doing this in any type of organizations, all these teams wanted to participate in this particular experiment. What we did is every week we would publish the teams and their average sleep debt.

Then at the end, we could also see that there was this direct correlation between their sleep debt and how productive they were, and what it also directly correlated with was whether or not the leadership was supportive of people getting good sleep.

What leaders do really gets magnified, what they do themselves, how they talk about sleep, how they value sleep, and how they directly support the people below them towards getting better sleep. What you track and what you measure does tend to change just for the sake of measuring. And we definitely saw that.

I'm not saying this can be done in any organization because we've also seen organizations where people were like, "I don't want to report my sleep data, I don't want to share that with the people above me." I totally get that and I also respect it.

So I don't think that's always necessary. It doesn't work in every organization, but in this particular organization, we saw that it really gave great results in people really being focused as a team to say, "How are we going to get our average down? What do you need this week?"

One team, for instance, you probably remember this from your own consulting days, you go out for dinner as a team or with a client and these dinners are always so long and it takes a long time and then you still have things to do.

So what they did is they agreed, when we go out for dinner jointly, it's great, we can all socialize, but we're going to do it for max one hour. We're going to call ahead to the restaurant and say, "Can you serve these three courses in one hour from 6 to 7 PM or 7 to 8 PM? Then we'll be there. Otherwise, we'll go somewhere else."

So that was one thing other teams would say, "We're going to quit team dinners because we don't like them at all, we're going to have team breakfast or a team lunch." So every team came up with something else.

And I think that goes back to what you were just saying. Like everybody, every team usually knows what will serve them best. There's no one-size-fits-all, but it starts with creating this awareness and creating the discussion.

Ashish Kothari: And you know what I love about that, Els, is often in this whole space around flourishing and wellbeing and nutrition and sleep, sometimes we're looking for permission from somebody out there. And my invitation to our listeners is: You don't need permission.

If you're a team leader who's listening to this and says, "I knew this," take this as an additional inspiration to say, Go create forums, go create a little survey that you with your team does every week, consistently measure those three things that Els is talking about:

the amount of sleep that you're getting

the level of stress that you experience

your ability to manage sleep

your self-reported productivity

Measure it and have a conversation around what can we do? Look, there's a lot that you don't control, but there is a lot that we all control. And if we even just start working on the controllables, you'll actually start to make a dent in this for you. And hopefully, that starts to inspire other people.

I'm a huge believer and advocate for personal autonomy and agency because I don't think we can wait amongst all of the bureaucracies and the legalities of doing something like this and oh my God, we're going to get sued. Forget that. Just start with your team. Let's make it human because in the end, this is what it's about.

Dr. Els van der Helm: To kind of jump off of that, I'm working on a book that really focuses on sleep leadership. On one hand, it's about what a leader can really do in this space.

But on the other hand, it's for anybody who says, "I want to become a sleep leader. I want to be more proactive about managing my own sleep instead of letting the day happen and then seeing how many hours are left for me to get good sleep."

Even the lowest person in the organization can be a role model for others in how they deal with sleep. You can share what works for you, what you stick to, what you’ve learned about sleep, and problem-solve with people around you how you might be able to help them.

You don't need to be a sleep expert or a leader to do this. Anybody can take the lead and inspire other people around them.

Ashish Kothari: I love that. So on that topic of personal agency, I would love to next go, Els, on this question. A lot of times people don't do the right things because they have these stories, these myths that we hold.

One that was very common in the consulting world is, "I'm going to focus and do all this, and it's fine if I'm not sleeping enough, but I'm just going to sleep all weekend and I'm going to be okay." And you and I both know it's the biggest fallacy, but what are some of the most common myths that you run into? Maybe cover three or four of those.

Dr. Els van der Helm: Well, let's start with the one that you just gave, because I think this one is very common. "Let me get my work done during the week and then I will just catch up on the weekend."

How these become myths is that there's a tiny bit of truth to it in that some people think, "Oh, if I rack up a sleep debt, I can't recover. I can't catch up on sleep anyways. So there's no point in trying." That's not true. You should try to catch up on sleep. So preferably as soon as possible.

So if you've had a bad night Tuesday night, then see if you can catch up Wednesday night or Thursday night instead of waiting until the weekend. But if the only option is for you to wait until the weekend, then please get more sleep on the weekend. But what most people do is sleep in in the morning.

Instead, what's more preferable is to go to bed a bit earlier or take a nap during the day, if neither of those are an option, then go for option three, which is sleeping in in the morning. And why that one is least preferable is that most of your deep sleep is in the first half of the night.

So you're very unlikely to get more deep sleep by sleeping in in the morning. And the other reason is that when you sleep in in the morning, you're shifting your rhythm. You're shifting your circadian rhythm. And then you can give yourself social jet lag on the weekend, which is what a lot of people do.

So you go to bed later on the weekend than you do during the week, you sleep in, and then, I'm sure listeners will recognize this, Sunday night comes, you go to bed at your normal time and you're wide awake and you can't fall asleep. And very often that then coincides with anxiety because you can't fall asleep.

And then people think it's anxiety about their job, but it's actually that their body clock has shifted across the weekend and they're just not tired yet. So that's one slight danger of sleeping in in the morning. And hence, I'd rather have you go to bed earlier or take a nap, but definitely try to catch up on sleep.

The reason being is that we really build up sleep debt and our brain keeps track of the last two weeks of sleep debt. What we see is that chronic sleep deprivation, so not getting good sleep during the week, is much harder to recover from than acute sleep deprivation, like skipping an entire night or having one bad night.

As soon as it becomes chronic, our brain starts to adjust and it makes it much harder to properly catch up and really get back to baseline in terms of our performance, our mood, but also, for instance, our metabolic health.

We see that our insulin sensitivity, for example, goes down when we haven't had good sleep, and two nights of unlimited sleep after five shorter nights is not enough to get us back to baseline.

We see this in many different measurements, whether we look at immune system functioning or attention levels or other cognitive performance. So the big myth there is that you can fully catch up with these two nights on the weekend, where in reality, people go about it in a suboptimal way, and they are not back at baseline.

Ashish Kothari: I love that. I lived into that fallacy for a long time. Not anymore. But then, they do the second thing, which is also a myth that you talk about. So then I can't fall asleep. What do I do? I need to go to sleep.

So either I'm going to take a sleeping pill or I'm going to have alcohol. Because that's going to put me to sleep and then I'm sleeping really well. But talk to us a little bit about the alcohol myth.

Dr. Els van der Helm: Actually, both sleep medication and alcohol often help people fall asleep faster. That's also how sleep medication gets judged by how fast you fall asleep. Does it make you fall asleep faster than placebo?

So we see that medication does that, alcohol does that. But then comes the issue, which is the rest of the night. With alcohol, we see that people fall asleep faster, but then get worse sleep quality, particularly in the second half of the night.

Of course, it depends a bit on how much alcohol you've had, because the more alcohol, the more sedated you are. And that means that you're knocked out. If we look at your sleep, it looks like you've got a lot of deep sleep, but this is sedated deep sleep, not the natural deep sleep.

Then we see that you go into withdrawal the second half of the night, and that's when we really get very restless. We see more awakenings. In the first half of the night, your dream sleep gets suppressed, but then you get a REM rebound the second half of the night, so people can get really intense dreams and wake up actually quite more exhausted than otherwise.

So yes, it makes you sleepy, it helps you fall asleep faster. But what you then get is nothing like the good stuff of good sleep. And we see something very similar with sleep medication in that there is no sleep medication on the market that really mimics sleep, that can really give us all the benefits of sleep.

So we can be unconscious, but being unconscious is very different from all the processes that happen during natural sleep.

And I really want to stress here that if you have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep during the night that the best therapy is called cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, so CBT-I, and I really urge you to either find a therapist trained in CBT-I, there are also some digital apps out there.

One of them is Sleepio, which has been approved by the FDA to kind of help you step by step. And what we see with people who get CBT-I instead of sleep medication is that they improve their sleep, but this is really long term benefits, really beyond the first couple of weeks.

Ashish Kothari: I love that. What might be a third myth that you want to talk about?

Dr. Els van der Helm: That's a good question. One myth that I so often hear about that I always need to correct people on is that they think that leaders don't get much sleep, that in order to reach the top, you have to be able to get by on five or six hours of sleep. There's been an excellent study by the founder of the Potential Project, Rasmus Holgaard.

Dr. Els van der Helm: I love Rasmus. They did this excellent study where they looked at a really big database of people across organizations and across levels and looked at how much sleep they were getting, and they found that the leaders were actually sleeping more than everybody else. Also often seen in my own research work with clients.

Secondly, they interviewed a lot of those leaders to figure out, are they now sleeping more now that they are at the top and can outsource everything? Or if they look back, have they always prioritized? They found in these interviews that it was the latter, that people really had always prioritized their sleep.

You can literally sleep your way to the top, basically, and it also makes a lot of sense because you're not going to last throughout a career by always being sleep deprived and always running behind everything else. Instead of really being able to get to this peak performance that is needed to get promotion after promotion.

Ashish Kothari: Yeah. It's another version of the classic, if-then-else game. That's the story people fall into. You know, I'm right now just at an entry level. And if I need to go all in and when I make manager, then I'll sleep more, and then become a manager. I want to become a director and then I'll sleep more.

And then it's a VP and then it's an SVP. And now I'm a CEO. But I'm a CEO of a hundred million company, aiming to see a billion-dollar company. And it just never ends. So either we make a choice, just like with happiness and flourishing, you can make a choice here and now to say, this is what I'm going to do.

You can look at the research, just like we look at research for everything else. You will never take a medicine unless it is researched that it works. You will also not take a medicine that is proven that it has ill effects.

So many of us today are choosing to take a medicine, because it's a choice. Think about choice as a medicine. You are choosing to ingest something in you that is creating all these long-term effects on health, but short-term effects.

I mean, we are sabotaging ourselves in terms of what we need to deliver, how we relate with others, our level of creativity, like all of those four, the IQ, the SQ, the EQ, why would you want to do that? You don't do it in any other aspect of your life. Why do we want to do that? Because we somehow feel that this is a luxury, not a necessity.

Dr. Els van der Helm: Oh, totally. And I often hear this from people that, "I just don't have the time." It sounds stupid, but it goes back to your real priorities. Very often people think, "I need to do all these other things in my life to do really well at work, and then have all these other things in order to be happy, to someday get the life that I need and that I deserve."

But in that process, they're totally shortcutting themselves on immediate happiness. And I think that just really irks me because I just think you could immediately have such a big bump in how happy you are, how many positive emotions you're feeling versus how many negative emotions you're feeling.

Wouldn't you want that immediately? Have better relationships, have more patience with the people around you. Usually people don't get motivated by, "Oh, you're going to increase your risk of cancer or cardiovascular disease or type two diabetes or dementia decades from now."

But really think about it right now, better if you get good sleep. So for me often, what I will do when I've had poor sleep is that I really clear my schedule and I make time for a nap in the afternoon.

And it's really hard because I have to take something off of my to-do list and I'm just going to do nothing. I'm just going to go to bed. Even for me, it's still like a thing to do that, to say, "No, this is going to be the best thing."

And to me, it feels like I take this magical medicine because I just know, "Okay, this is an investment." And afterwards, maybe not immediately after the nap, but later in the day, I feel like, "Yes, that was the right decision." And particularly the next morning I feel okay, "I'm back on track. I can do everything."

Ashish Kothari: I love that. Think about it, many people every morning wake up and take multivitamins, right? This is my multivitamin. So physically I'm working and all of that stuff. Think about going to bed and sleeping. This is the medicine that I'm taking. That is going to keep working and it's free.

You don't need a prescription for it. You don't need a doctor. You don't need anybody. It's free. But it has side effects. The side effects are you're going to wake up fresh and you're going to be kinder and you're going to be able to collaborate more and you're going to have more access to creativity.

You're going to live longer. I mean, the best multivitamin you can take is to sleep eight hours or more.

Dr. Els van der Helm: I want to stress that this isn't always about making really big changes. Think about some small changes that you can make, whether it's starting to become just a bit more consistent in your rhythm.

Just saying, "Let's try five out of the seven nights during the week that I want to be in bed by a certain time, whatever time is best for you," or you say, "I just can't do this during the week. Well, I'm going to take a Saturday afternoon recovery nap. I'm just going to clear that in my schedule."

That's my time to recharge, particularly for people with young kids. That can be a really good one. So it can be really small things that help you to improve your sleep. And then you'll slowly start noticing the impact.

Ashish Kothari: I love it. I'll add one and then we wrap up. I'd love to have you back, Els, at another point, because there's so much we can talk more about this topic. Yes. And this is a very simple one. This is about doing something less.

So, stop drinking caffeine after two. Don't drink caffeine after two. Caffeine has a six-hour half-life. For some, it might be four, for some, it might be eight, but literally think about it if you can't sleep. Here's what you're doing.

If you have caffeine at 4, and I spent 20 years having my Starbucks run at 4 o'clock, if you drink coffee at 3 or 4 because your energy is sinking and you're tired, just know that at 10 o'clock, half of that is still in your body and it's fundamentally counteracting your ability to sleep.

So just literally, this is about doing something less. Take that out and instead, if you're feeling tired, go out in nature, move your arms, do some jumping jacks, call somebody. There are other ways in which you can get that energy boost back rather than the standard afternoon coffee.

Dr. Els van der Helm: Yes. And what I personally do is I love decaf and it's like a placebo to my brain. I drink the decaf and it smells like coffee and there's really good decaf these days. So if it's really about the craving and taste for you, then go for decaf.

Ashish Kothari: I loved it. Els, thank you for joining us. Thank you for this beautiful conversation, which is also very real. I love the realism in our conversation because these are things that people can go do right now and it doesn't ignore the broader shifts that need to happen and the support people need.

So thank you. I so love this and we'd love to have you back at some point and we can go deeper into some of the corporate programs and for leaders to really think about integrating this into their journeys.

Dr. Els van der Helm: Thank you so much for having me. It's been great to bounce back and forth with you. And I really hope that this will inspire some people listening to make a change either at work or in their personal life.

Maybe just tell someone else around them to listen to the podcast and adopt some of these changes. I often see that people know very well who around them could use some help.

Ashish Kothari: Absolutely. Thank you, my friend. Have a wonderful rest of your day.

Dr. Els van der Helm: Thank you for having me. And by the way, if anyone wants to learn more, I have a monthly newsletter. It's very easy to find if you look me up online or on LinkedIn, where I also often post, so that people can really get these tips on a regular basis.

Ashish Kothari: We will add those to our notes, to our podcast notes as well as when we release the podcast, it'll be there. So we'll help people find you, Els. And I know for all the work I'm doing with clients, you will definitely be one that I want to bring in on just such an important topic.

Dr. Els van der Helm: I'd love to. All the best with your work and everybody listening, with getting over the hurdle of starting with that one change. Thanks.