I'm Maura Aronsmeli, and this is The Anxious Achiever.

We look at stories from business leaders who have dealt with anxiety, depression, or other mental health challenges, how they fell down, how they pick themselves up, and how they hope workplaces can change in the future.

While a lot of the focus of this show is around mental health and work, we also often spend time talking about the connection between physical and emotional health because they are so

intricately connected. And in the same way that it can be hard or impossible to go to work and do your

best when you're suffering from a physical ailment, a mental one can be even more debilitating.

And if you're a listener, you probably already know that. But we thought it was

time to dig a little deeper into the connection between body and mind through the lens of

something we do every day. Sleep. When my son Tom was a toddler, he would scream, I'm not tired, at the top of his lungs. And this was our cue that Tom was, in

fact, exhausted and about to have a massive tantrum if he didn't get put to bed stat. But he resisted

sleep as long as he possibly could.

Well, it turns out we grownups are not so different from toddlers when it comes to sleep deprivation.

Sleep makes you better at your job.

And as my guests today will tell you, we're more charismatic, more effective, more ethical,

and just plain nicer to be around when we get enough sleep.

So why don't we pay attention to this most fundamental need, instead glorifying sleeplessness?

Even with all the studies about how lack of sleep can make us less productive,

more likely to make a mistake, more irritable, in theory, a trifecta that

makes it hard to achieve at work, a huge number of industries still practice in a kind of

cult of sleep deprivation. To get to why this myth persists, what it means for work and how

anxiety and depression and lack of sleep contribute to each other and make people spiral.

We're joined today by sleep expert Christopher Barnes, Associate Professor at the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington.

It's interesting when I was thinking about what I wanted to ask you. I was thinking, you know, sleep is a topic that I feel like we all should know better, right?

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