Mental Health Awareness Month – Entry #4

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IMPORTANT NOTE: I am NOT a mental health professional. I’m just a person who loves you and has been through some things myself. If you need professional help, please start here.

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I used to wear my sleep deprivation like a badge of honor.

Four hours a night? Five if I was lucky? That meant I was working harder than everyone else. It meant I was serious. Committed. Grinding while other people were coasting. The hustle culture gospel told me that sleep was for people who didn’t want it bad enough — and for a long time, I believed it.

That was one of the dumbest things I ever believed. And I’ve believed some pretty dumb things.

The Lie We Were Sold

Somewhere along the way, we decided that exhaustion was a personality trait.

You hear it all the time. “I only need five hours.” Said with pride. Said like it’s a superpower. Said by people who are running on fumes and calling it fuel.

The tech world is especially bad for this. The startup culture, the “always on” mentality, the glorification of the founder who sleeps under his desk. We built an entire mythology around the idea that rest is laziness in disguise, that the people who sleep eight hours are the ones who aren’t hungry enough.

Here’s what nobody tells you: the people preaching that gospel are usually running from something. The busyness, the grind, the relentless forward motion — sometimes it’s ambition, sure. But sometimes it’s just a really effective way to never have to sit alone with your thoughts.

And when your mental health is already fragile, that distinction matters enormously.

What Sleep Deprivation Actually Does to Your Brain

I’m not going to throw a bunch of studies at you. You can Google that. What I’m going to tell you is what it actually felt like from the inside.

When I was consistently not sleeping — and there were long stretches of this, especially during the hardest years — my brain stopped working the way it was supposed to. Not in a dramatic, obvious way. In a slow, creeping way that I kept explaining away with other things.

The anxiety got worse. That low-level hum of worry that I could usually manage would turn into something louder and harder to reason with. Things that were a four on the stress scale started feeling like an eight. My ability to put problems in perspective — something I’m normally decent at — just… wasn’t there.

The ADHD got dramatically worse. Focus was gone. The hyperfocus that I can usually harness? Nowhere. Instead I had a brain that jumped from thing to thing and couldn’t finish a single one of them. Then I’d get frustrated with myself for not finishing things, which fed the anxiety, which made the sleep worse, which made the ADHD worse. Round and round.

The emotional regulation disappeared. I’d have a short fuse I couldn’t explain. I’d snap at people I loved for things that didn’t deserve a reaction. And then I’d feel terrible about it, which kept me up at night, which — you see where this goes.

Here’s the thing nobody talks about: sleep deprivation doesn’t just make you tired. It makes your mental health problems bigger. Whatever you’re already dealing with — anxiety, depression, ADHD, mood swings, emotional volatility — sleep deprivation turns the volume all the way up. It’s not a separate issue. It’s a multiplier on every issue you already have.

The 2am Brain Is Not Your Friend

If you’ve ever had anxiety or depression, you know about the 2am brain.

The 2am brain is not the same brain you have at 2pm. It doesn’t have access to perspective. It doesn’t do nuance. It takes whatever is already worrying you and inflates it to catastrophic proportions. The thing that was a manageable problem at noon becomes an unfixable disaster at 2am. The mistake you made at work becomes evidence that your entire career is built on sand. The argument you had with someone you love becomes proof that you’re fundamentally hard to love.

None of that is real. But it feels completely real. And when you’re already not sleeping, and the 2am brain kicks in, getting back to sleep becomes almost impossible — which means you’re going to face tomorrow’s actual problems on even less rest than yesterday.

I spent years in that cycle. And I kept treating it like a sleep problem when it was actually a mental health problem wearing a sleep problem’s clothes.

What It Took for Me to Take This Seriously

I’ll be honest — I didn’t prioritize sleep until I was forced to. Until the consequences of not sleeping became impossible to ignore or explain away. Until a doctor told me flat out that everything else I was trying to fix — the mood, the focus, the anxiety — was never going to get better as long as I was running on empty.

That landed hard. Because I’d been throwing effort at all the other things without addressing the foundation. It’s like trying to paint a house that’s structurally compromised. You can put a beautiful coat of paint on it, but if the foundation is crumbling, none of it matters.

Sleep is the foundation.

Not the only thing — let’s be clear. I’m not going to tell you that eight hours solves everything. It doesn’t. But I can tell you from personal experience that almost everything else is harder, less effective, and more painful without it. Therapy is harder. Medication works less well. Exercise doesn’t recover you the way it should. The coping skills you’ve worked to build are less accessible when your brain is running on a deficit.

And the mental health struggles you’re already managing? They get louder and meaner and harder to deal with.

It’s Not Just Hours. It’s What You’re Running From.

Here’s the part I want to sit on for a second, because I think it’s the most important thing in this post.

For a lot of people — and this was true for me — not sleeping isn’t just negligence. It’s avoidance.

When you stop moving, when the distractions go quiet, when it’s just you in the dark with your own thoughts — that’s when the stuff you’ve been outrunning all day catches up to you. The anxiety that the busyness kept at bay. The grief you haven’t processed. The relationship that’s not right. The thing you said you’d deal with “when you have time” that you’ve been making sure you never have time for.

For me, staying up late was sometimes unconsciously safer than going to sleep and having to be alone with my brain. The TV, the phone, the scrolling, the one more thing on the to-do list — all of it was noise. And noise, when your mental health is struggling, can feel like relief.

It isn’t. It’s just postponement with extra steps.

The stuff waiting for you in the dark doesn’t go away because you stayed up until 1am. It just waits. And it’s less patient the next night.

What I Actually Do Now

I’m not going to hand you a sleep hygiene checklist. You’ve seen those. You know what they say. What I’ll tell you is the mindset shift that mattered more than any routine:

I stopped treating sleep as the thing I do after I’ve finished everything else. Because here’s the truth — you never finish everything else. There is always one more email, one more task, one more thing you could do. If sleep is what’s left over after productivity, you will always be last in line.

Sleep has to be a decision. A non-negotiable. Not a reward for getting everything done but a commitment to the person who has to show up tomorrow and do hard things.

When I started treating sleep like it mattered — like it was actually part of my mental health maintenance and not an interruption to my real work — things shifted. Not immediately. Not perfectly. But meaningfully.

The anxiety quieted a little. The ADHD was more manageable. The emotional volatility leveled out. I had more access to the parts of myself I actually liked — the patience, the perspective, the ability to think clearly under pressure.

None of those things came from a supplement or an app or a productivity framework. They came from sleep. The free thing. The obvious thing. The thing I’d been treating like an afterthought for years.

Before I Go

If you’re running on empty right now — and a lot of you are, I know it — I want you to ask yourself honestly:

Is the busyness keeping you going, or is it keeping you from something?

Because sometimes the grind isn’t ambition. Sometimes it’s armor. And sometimes the most courageous thing you can do for your mental health isn’t a breakthrough conversation or a new coping strategy.

Sometimes it’s just going to bed.

Give your brain the chance to recover. It’s working harder than you know.

–Evan