Sleep is a 24-hour problem

I used to be a vampire.

For most of my teens and twenties, I treated sleep like an afterthought. In college, I was essentially nocturnal. I ate late-night meals, stayed on AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) all night, drank a lot, and basically ignored my circadian rhythm (because I didn't even know what that was).

Even after college when I started my 9-5, I made the classic "social jet lag" mistake: I'd stay up several hours later on weekends and sleep in to "catch up," then try to snap back into an early work schedule Monday. At the time, I mostly got away with it. I'd fall asleep and wake up eight hours later.

That changed in my late thirties after having a kid. I still fell asleep fine, but staying asleep became the problem. I'd wake up in the night (often to pee), and then my mind would race. Two hours of lying there awake became normal. The next day, I felt like I got hit by a bus.

And I started noticing a bigger truth: sleep is the lever that makes everything else easier or harder. When sleep is good, training feels better, dieting is easier, mood is steadier, and energy is higher. When sleep is bad, everything is uphill. The downstream effects of poor sleep go beyond day-to-day and impact long-term chronic disease risk.

There's scientific backing for this. Adults generally need 7–9 hours of sleep (CDC/AASM guidelines), and short sleep is associated with higher risk of weight gain, cardiometabolic disease, and mood issues. Even one night of partial sleep loss can impair attention and reaction time.

As a new parent (and someone who had just lost a dad to early onset heart disease), I became obsessed with holistic health and longevity and quickly learned sleep was a core pillar. I came across Zaid K. Dahhaj, a soccer player turned circadian biology expert, on Twitter. He taught me that sleep isn't just about what you do at bedtime. It's a 24-hour problem that requires an all-day solution. And light is at the center of it all.

Early morning sunlight helps anchor the body's internal clock (the suprachiasmatic nucleus), while bright light after dark can suppress melatonin and delay sleep onset. In other words, you can't fully "hack" sleep at 9 PM if you spent the whole day undermining your circadian signals, which is exactly what I was doing.

I hate feeling like crap, especially when it's preventable, and certainly did not like the idea of digging myself an early grave. So my goal became simple: stack small, repeatable habits throughout the day that make deeper and more consistent sleep a natural byproduct of my routine.

Over this series, I'll walk through exactly what I do—from morning sunlight to caffeine control, meal timing, evening light management, wind-down tools, and what I do at 2 AM when my brain wants to start a meeting.

It's still a work in progress. But I've come a long way since I started on this journey and the difference between now and my nocturnal college days is night and day (pun intended).

If I learned how to fix my sleep, so can you. At the end of the day, it's not about perfection. It's about building an environment and routine that makes good sleep the default.