How to fix your sleep when you're stressed

Standard sleep advice (no screens before bed, magnesium, a consistent bedtime) doesn't solve the founder sleep problem. It treats the symptom rather than the cause.

The founder sleep problem has a specific mechanism. Until you address that mechanism, the tips won't stick.

The mechanism: cortisol at the wrong time

Sleep requires a hormonal handoff. In the late evening, as light fades, cortisol should be dropping while melatonin starts to rise. This shift is what produces the progressive drowsiness that leads into good sleep.

In a chronically stressed founder, cortisol stays elevated well into the evening. The mind is still running: reviewing what happened that day, planning what's happening tomorrow, processing the problems that are still unresolved. The body remains in a partial alert state. Melatonin can't rise properly. The transition into sleep is slow and incomplete.

Even when sleep does come, it tends to be lighter. Deep slow-wave sleep, the most restorative phase, when growth hormone is released and adenosine is cleared, requires low cortisol. Elevated night-time cortisol suppresses it. The founder wakes up having slept seven hours but feeling like they barely slept.

This is the pattern I see constantly: not sleep deprivation in the usual sense, but sleep that isn't doing the job it's supposed to do because the hormonal environment is wrong.

Why melatonin and magnesium alone don't fix it

Melatonin is a sleep timing signal, not a sedative. It tells your body it's time for sleep. If cortisol is elevated, the body is in conflict: one signal saying sleep, another signal saying stay alert. The melatonin rarely wins.

Magnesium glycinate is useful and I do recommend it. It genuinely helps relax muscles and calm the nervous system. It's a modest effect that can make sleep a bit better. It won't override the cortisol problem if that's the root cause.

The fix has to work upstream: reduce evening cortisol so the conditions for deep sleep are actually present.

The evening light problem

The most underestimated driver of elevated evening cortisol for founders is light. Specifically, bright overhead lighting and screen exposure after dark.

Light is one of the primary regulators of your cortisol rhythm. Bright light in the evening signals to your brain that it's still daytime, which keeps cortisol elevated and delays the shift to melatonin. Most founders are working in brightly lit offices or living rooms, staring at screens, right up until 11pm.

The work cutoff problem

The second driver is cognitive activation at the wrong time. Checking work email at 9pm, responding to Slack threads, reviewing numbers: these activate the same stress circuits that elevated cortisol in the first place. The content of the messages matters less than the act of engaging with work problems during the window when your brain should be winding down.

A hard work cutoff, an actual device boundary rather than just an intention, is not a nice-to-have. For founders with disrupted sleep, it's physiologically necessary. The cortisol system needs time to fully disengage before sleep can be restorative.

The minimum viable version: no work applications after 9pm. Email app closed. Slack notifications off. The 24-hour physiology doesn't care about your inbox. The work will still be there in the morning. The sleep debt compounds.

The morning anchor that protects evening sleep

Something counterintuitive: one of the most effective evening sleep interventions is a morning one.

Getting outside within 30 minutes of waking, in natural light, sets the cortisol awakening response correctly: a sharp morning peak that drives a well-timed decline across the day. When the morning cortisol peak is properly anchored, evening cortisol falls more reliably. The hormonal curve has a natural shape to it.

Founders who skip the morning light exposure, going from bed to phone to office without seeing outside, have a blunted, poorly timed cortisol rhythm all day. Evening cortisol is high because it never had a proper peak to decline from.

Ten minutes outside in the morning is one of the most effective sleep interventions I've seen in practice. It costs nothing and changes the entire hormonal curve for the day.

What the full picture looks like

Fixing sleep under chronic stress requires changes in both the morning and the evening, not just sleep hygiene tips at bedtime.

• Morning: outside within 30 minutes of waking, in natural light, before coffee.
• Daytime: a walk after lunch resets cortisol mid-day and reduces the afternoon spike that feeds into evening elevation.
• Evening: dim lighting from 8-9pm, work cutoff enforced by device boundaries, not just intention.
• Bedroom: cool, dark, and quiet. Blackout blinds if there's any street light. Phone on the other side of the room or out of the room entirely.
• Consistency: the single most important sleep variable is consistent sleep and wake times, including weekends. The circadian clock anchors to regularity. Sleeping in on weekends delays the clock and recreates Monday-morning jet lag.

Mark came to me sleeping 3/10 and on Amitriptyline prescribed for sleep. Within the first two weeks of the programme, before we'd even changed much about his nutrition, his sleep had moved to 6/10 just from the light and timing changes. By week eight it was 9/10. He came off the Amitriptyline with his GP's support.

Sleep doesn't need to be fixed with supplements or devices. It mostly needs the right conditions and a cortisol rhythm that works with it rather than against it.