Why Sleep Became Status

#183 - And Why Grind Culture Went Out of Fashion

Hello friends, I hope you had a great week!

A few weeks ago I was sitting at dinner with a few colleagues, and at some point one of them mentioned, without any irony, that his WHOOP score that morning had been in the red. He’d had a recovery rate of 34%. He said it the way someone might say they missed their flight. Something had gone wrong, something needed explaining.

Nobody laughed. Two other people at the table immediately started talking about their own HRV baselines.

I drove home thinking about this. Five years ago, that conversation would have been about the 6am flight someone had caught to make a meeting, or the 3am Slack message they’d sent that had actually moved a deal.

The badge of honor was suffering. The proof of commitment was visible sacrifice. And here we were, at dinner, treating an incomplete sleep cycle with the same gravitas.

One of my best friends used to be in super bad mood when we could not sleep (perhaps because of traveling or hard working), and I remember making fun of him… but as often happens with him he realized the important insight long before me!

Something has inverted. And I don’t think it’s just wellness culture doing what it always does, absorbing everything into a premium product and selling it back to you at $40 a month. There’s something structural happening underneath. Sleep became aspirational when the most effective people quietly stopped treating exhaustion as evidence of anything. The shift had less to do with getting softer and more to do with a recalibration of what “serious” looks like.

The Old Mythology Had Its Own Logic

It’s easy to mock hustle culture now. The Gary Vee 4am alarm. Elon sleeping on the factory floor. The “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” crowd on LinkedIn who seemed to believe that the number of hours you worked was itself a form of output.

But while I am old, I do remember this rethoric very well in my early professional life. We used to notice, and “brag” about hard work.

In knowledge work and entrepreneurship, effort is genuinely hard to observe. You can’t see someone thinking. You can’t audit a founder’s judgment. The quality of a decision often takes years to reveal itself. In that vacuum, visible sacrifice became a proxy signal. Working 80 hours told the room something: this person is committed, this person is serious, this person is not treating this like a hobby.

The problem with proxies is that they eventually decouple from the thing they’re supposed to measure. At some point, working 80 hours stopped meaning “highly committed” and started meaning “either inefficient or performing commitment for an audience.” The signal got gamed until it said nothing.

Somewhere in the late 2010s, a counter-signal emerged. Not leisure, exactly. Nobody was advocating for afternoon naps and three-hour lunches. Something more specific: recovery as a competitive input. The idea that if you wanted sustained, high-quality output over time, the bottleneck wasn’t hours worked. It was how well your brain and body showed up for those hours.

The Science Isn’t Gentle About This

Matthew Walker has spent a career making a case that is, honestly, hard to argue with once you sit with the data and he wrote a great book about it (that I am sure you have seen many people around you reading in the last years).

Sleep deprivation doesn’t just make you tired. It impairs prefrontal cortex function, the part of the brain responsible for judgment, impulse control, long-term planning, and the ability to distinguish a good idea from a bad one. The insidious part is that people who are chronically sleep-deprived are among the least capable of accurately assessing their own cognitive impairment. You become worse at everything, including measuring how much worse you’ve gotten.

Walker’s data on reaction time alone is striking. After 17-19 hours awake, performance on cognitive tasks drops to roughly the equivalent of a blood alcohol level of 0.05%. After 24 hours, it approaches legal intoxication. Most people doing “heroic” 18-hour work sessions are operating at a level of cognitive function they would never accept if it came from a bottle.

But the insight that landed differently for me came from sports science, not neuroscience. I heard it in a podcast about elite athletic preparation, and I’ve been thinking about it since.

You can bank sleep.

The benefits of sleep don’t reset to zero every night like a parking meter. Sleep debt is real, but so is sleep credit. Studies on athletes (swimmers, tennis players, basketball players) show that extending sleep in the days and weeks before a major competition produces measurable improvements in reaction time, sprint speed, accuracy, and mood, even when the athlete sleeps poorly the night before the event itself (which is classic as you’re nervous for what’s going to happen tomorrow).

An athlete who barely sleeps the night before a big match because of nerves isn’t necessarily at a disadvantage, provided they’ve been systematically protecting and accumulating sleep in the weeks prior. The bank was full. One bad night is a withdrawal, not a collapse.

LeBron James reportedly sleeps 12 hours a day. Roger Federer famously slept 10 hours during tournament preparation. They are, quite literally, performance investments, deposits that compound until the moment they’re needed. Sleep isn’t the absence of work. In the most rigorous sense, it’s when the biological work happens.

The $2 Million Dollar Night

No figure embeds this shift more strangely than Bryan Johnson.

Johnson is the founder of Braintree and OS Fund, now famous for spending approximately $2 million a year on what he calls the “Don’t Die” Blueprint, a full-stack biological optimization protocol that covers diet, light exposure, blood markers, supplements, and, above all else, sleep. He has said, without obvious exaggeration, that sleep is the single most important variable in his entire protocol. Everything else, the 111 pills he takes daily, the precise meal timing, the red light therapy, is downstream of sleep quality.

I find all of that easy enough to set aside, the clinical obsessiveness, the willingness to treat his own body as a software project, the aesthetic of a man who has optimized away any visible trace of spontaneity.

What interests me is that Johnson, who has more resources than nearly anyone alive, looked at the full menu of human performance interventions and concluded that the foundational one costs nothing except time and intention. His $2 million protocol is, at its core, an elaborate system for protecting and optimizing eight hours of darkness.

Who Actually Gets to Sleep

Here’s where the story gets uncomfortable.

The biohacker movement has correctly identified something real: sleep is leverage, recovery is a competitive advantage, and protecting your biology is a form of strategic discipline. But it has repackaged that insight into a premium consumer product. Whoop, Oura, Eight Sleep smart mattresses, magnesium glycinate, blackout curtains, blue-light-blocking glasses, sleep coaches. The market for sleep optimization is now worth tens of billions of dollars.

And yet, the most important variable in sleep quality isn’t any of those products. It’s autonomy.

The ability to go to bed at a consistent time, wake without an alarm, protect your sleep against disruption, and treat recovery as non-negotiable. That’s not a product. It’s a structural position. It requires control over your schedule, financial cushioning against the consequences of rest, and work arrangements that don’t penalize you for being unavailable.

I travel for work quite recently, and part of the cost of traveling is sleep disruption. In the past work travels meant eating at restaurants every night, perhaps a couple glasses of wine at dinner, later sleep due to time spent with colleagues… I have lately become very jealous of the routine, and started appreciating how maintaining routine and keeping a healthy sleeping schedule also when traveling ultimately allows me to be more energetic during the day and thus enjoy the following day much more.

A night-shift nurse, a parent of a newborn, someone working two jobs to cover rent: these people are constrained by something no sleep protocol can touch. No Oura ring addresses an autonomy deficit. The biohacker’s protocol assumes a level of control over your own time that most people simply don’t have.

This is the part of the “sleep as status symbol” conversation that usually gets skipped. What’s actually being signaled, when a senior executive mentions his recovery score or an elite athlete describes his sleep banking routine, is something closer to control. Over the calendar. Over the body. Over the conditions of existence. Sleep is just the most visible indicator of whether you have that control or not.

Sleep has probably always been a status symbol, in one form or another. The metric just flipped: where we once measured it by how little you could get away with, we now measure it by how much you can protect.

What Actually Goes Into a Good Night

If sleep is the output we’re all chasing, the honest question is what the inputs look like. Some of them we can’t defend against: a newborn, a 5am flight, a stretch of personal stress that pulls you out of bed at 3am and won’t let go. Those are withdrawals the bank account has to absorb. But the deposits, the part you can actually control, turn out to be less exotic than the $40-a-month supplement industry would like you to believe.

The first input, and the one that surprised me most, is resting heart rate. The lower it sits, the better you sleep, and the main lever for pushing it down is exercise. Not heroic training loads, just enough consistent movement that your cardiovascular system learns to idle quietly when you’re at rest. Walker touches on this, and every biohacker with a wearable eventually arrives at the same observation: the data doesn’t lie, people who move more sleep deeper.

The second input is the last thirty minutes before bed. No phone, no screen, something that engages your attention without demanding it. My mother, who has never read a Matthew Walker book and would politely decline if you offered her one, has said the same thing to me since I was a child: go to bed with a book in your hands. It turns out that one of the most valuable lines in the biohacker canon is something my Italian mom has been repeating for forty years, unaware she was ahead of the curve.

The third input is consistency. Same hour to bed, same hour to wake, including on weekends, including when you’d rather not. The body treats sleep less like a resource and more like a schedule, and it runs the schedule better when you stop renegotiating it every night. Bryan Johnson’s $2 million protocol is, underneath all the supplements and the light therapy, an elaborate monument to this one principle: pick a bedtime and defend it.

Everything else lives in the margins. A cold room helps. Full darkness helps. Not eating too close to bed helps. Not drinking alcohol helps (a lot more than we would all like to see!). The stuff that actually moves the needle is free, which is probably why it keeps getting crowded out by the stuff that isn’t.

What the Score Is Actually Measuring

The question I haven’t been able to shake since that dinner: what were we actually talking about when we talked about recovery rates and HRV baselines?

Not sleep. Not really. We were talking about the conditions under which sleep is possible. A good recovery score is evidence that you went to bed at a reasonable hour, that nothing pulled you back online at midnight, that the morning wasn’t aggressive enough to cut things short, that you had enough slack in your life to give your nervous system the space to do its work.

The score is a downstream indicator of upstream conditions. And the upstream conditions are the point.

The wellness economy has correctly diagnosed that rest is leverage. But it has largely responded by selling you better tools for recovering from a life that remains fundamentally hostile to recovery. Better mattresses for the same impossible schedule. Better supplements for the same structural overload. The root cause often stays untouched.

The question worth sitting with isn’t how to optimize your sleep. It’s what would have to change, in how work is structured, in what gets rewarded, in what we treat as evidence of contribution, for the sleep banking logic to be available to more people than the ones who can already afford to protect their nights. Because right now, the most important thing the biohackers got right is being sold as a consumer product to the people who least need it.

Have a fantastic weekend!
Giovanni