From Burnout To Balance: Why Sleep Beats Hustle

What if the grind that built your career is quietly breaking your health? 

We share a candid story of chasing productivity through 70–80 hour weeks, new fatherhood, on-call nights, and late teaching prep that spiraled into stress, palpitations, and creeping burnout, then the pivot that turned sleep into a non-negotiable performance tool.

Together we unpack why sleep is an active biological process, not downtime. You’ll hear how deep sleep drives tissue repair and metabolic recovery, how REM consolidates memory and stabilizes mood, and why the brain’s glymphatic system clears waste most effectively at night. 

We connect the dots between short or fragmented sleep and higher risks of hypertension, insulin resistance, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and all-cause mortality, and we talk frankly about circadian rhythm disruption and why shift work raises disease risk across populations.

We also get practical. Learn how consistent bed and wake times strengthen your internal clock, how dimming lights and reducing blue light support melatonin, and how to build a wind-down routine that conditions your brain to switch states on cue. 

We share simple cues, light stretching, a brief breath practice, a sleep mask, less evening caffeine and alcohol, that protect sleep architecture and translate into clearer focus, steadier mood, and better choices the next day. The takeaway is simple and powerful: productivity without recovery is a dead end; prioritize sleep and the other lifestyle pillars naturally align.

If this resonates, follow the show, share it with a friend who’s burning the candle at both ends, and leave a quick review to help others find these tools. Your eight hours might be the most effective upgrade you make this year.

Go check out my website for tons of free resources on how to transition towards a healthier diet and lifestyle.

You can download my free plant-based recipes eBook and a ton of other free resources by visiting  the Digital Downloads tab of my website at https://www.plantbaseddrjules.com/shop

Don't forget to check out my blog at https://www.plantbaseddrjules.com/blog 

You can also watch my educational videos on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMpkQRXb7G-StAotV0dmahQ

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Thanks so much!

Peace, love, plants!
Dr. Jules 

Transcript

Section A

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Yo Plappies buddies, welcome back to season three of the podcast. This year's gonna be amazing. We'll be talking about all of the different pillars of lifestyle medicine, from nutrition to exercise to stress to sleep and everything in between. Yo, Plappies buddies, welcome back to another episode. Today I want to talk about a subject that probably defined the last few decades of my life, probably defined my whole decade studying and studying medicine, definitely describes the first 10 years of me working. So I always held that belief that hustle culture was toughing it out, and I'll I'll sleep when I'm dead and I'll be as productive as I can while I can. But in 2014, I started to see the downsides of hustle culture. In 2014, I had my second child. Cassie was born, Zara was two years old. I was probably working 70 to 80 hour weeks, working from eight to six on most nights, and working anywhere from two to three nights per week. And I was on call during the weekends, probably one weekend out of every three. So, and every six weeks was my turn to have a 24-7 on-call stint at the hospital while working during the day. I mean, I was getting calls at night. Life was crazy. What makes it even crazier is back then I was teaching a ton of hours at our local medical school. And the worst part is not the teaching, the worst part is the preparation. So typical day would look like me leaving for work at 7.15, working non-stop, sometimes without most days without eating during lunch. Work from 8 to 5:30, then drove from 5.30 to 6 to another clinic where I worked again from like 6 to 8:30 to 9. I got home at like 9.30 p.m. Some days I tried to fit in a quick hit workout, a 30-minute intense workout. And then from 10 to 12, I was prepping courses, and I did that for years, almost almost a full decade. Then I got my first child and life hit me in the face. And I recognized that I probably needed to slow down, but I never did. I vented to my friends, I vented to my wife. Where it really got difficult was where I was on call. So I was on call at the hospital, you do your rounds, and then you have your pager or your phone that beeps at any time of the night whenever patients don't go well. Now, while I was on call, I was typically still working at the office and prepping courses, and now my Zara was born, and she was sick with allergies and eczema and asthma and milk protein allergies and had blood in her stools when she was born. It was just a crazy period in my life, but you know what? I could tough it out. I could, I mean, hustle culture was who I was at the time, and I would probably brag that time that I was doing all this work. Well, then Cassie was born, and that second child, when Melissa was busy with Cassie and I needed to pitch in more for Zara, that's when I really realized that I was my mental health was nosediving. It was a hard time for me, and it took a lot, it took a lot of time for me to actually admit how down in the dumbs my mental health was. I wasn't sleeping well. I remember getting heart palpitations at night when I was trying to sleep. I just felt the stress pouring out of my body. And that stress is not just in your head, right? It's actual a biochemical mechanism that we can easily explain. And that we learned in first-year medical school. 2014, I had a heart-to-heart conversation with one of my friends over lunch. He told me, Jules, you need to clean your life up. Work isn't everything great. I am a workaholic by nature, if you haven't guessed already. But I was at the point where it was starting to harm my family life, my own mental health life. And that's when all of my medications, my medical conditions, really started to get worse. I was on a ton of medication, health was not going great. I was already thinking about changing my lifestyle when Zara was born, but it's Cassie that really consolidated everything. And in no time, I was prioritizing my health, my food, my nutrition, monitoring my sleep, making sure to manage my stress. I started dabbling in meditation. That's where everything just kind of really lined up for me. So I want to talk about it because that hustle culture, which I so promoted, was actually harming my own health. Now, the idea that sleep is optional, or worse, that sleep is a weakness, that's somehow been normalized. And phrases like, I'll sleep when I'm dead, they get repeated proudly, and people are really happy to say that they can function on five-hour sleep nights. Now, it's almost like chronic exhaustion was a badge of honor. But the science tells us the opposite story. Chronic sleep disruption and long-term sleep deprivation, they're strongly linked to a higher risk of earlier death. Now, like not just being fatigued or not just burnout, real measurable increases in disease risk, in the risk of almost all chronic diseases, from hypertension to cardiovascular risk to cancer to diabetes and insulin resistance, and to all-cause mortality. And what makes it even worse is how often I say, I've always I've always slept five or six hours and I feel fine. Now, feeling fine is not the same thing as being fine, and it's not the same thing as being protected against the risk of chronic diseases later on. Now, in the short term, your body will adapt very well. It'll compensate, it'll mask symptoms, your hormones will change, your adrenaline will get higher, but those adaptations don't erase the long-term metabolic consequences of having insufficient sleep. And one of the biggest misunderstandings about sleep is the idea that it's a passive state. It's you simply nod and fall into sleep, and then time passes and nothing else happens. Now, sleep is actually one of the most biologically active states that we enter into each day. When we sleep, our the body repairs metabolic damage, repairs oxidative stress, hormonal systems recalibrate, and immune signaling readjusts. And the brain, in particular, does something very remarkable during sleep. It actually activates a specialized waste clearance system that's called the gymphatic system. So this system becomes very active during deep sleep and it actually clears and cleans metabolic byproducts that built up during the day. That includes like neurotoxic proteins that are linked to neurodegenerative disease. Now, sleep is not just resting from biology, it's actual, it's an active state of maintenance, of cleanup, of repair. And when we look at the actual sleep architecture, it becomes very clear why total sleep time and quality matter so much. About a quarter of the night is actually spent in deep, sloway sleep. That's often called stage N3. Now, this stage is the stage that supports physical recovery, tissue repair, metabolic recovery. And roughly 25% of your night also occurs in REM sleep. So REM sleep plays a critical role in processing emotions and learning and consolidating memories, and it's also deeply connected to mental health and mood regulations. And about half of the night is spent in stage two sleep or N2. Now, this stage kind of supports nervous system regulation and it helps integrate memory and learning. Now, all of the stages matter, none are optional or better than the other. You need stage two to progress to stage three, and then you need stage three to progress to stage REM. And N1 or stage one, where you're just kind of dozing off, you spend just a few percentage points of your night at that stage. So it's it's important, but it's more a segue into stages N2, N3, and REM. What's important is not just the amount of sleep or the quantity of sleep you get, but also the quality of your sleep. So when your sleep is either shorter or fragmented or poor in quality, meaning that you don't necessarily progress in the right order or sequence from one stage to the other, or you don't necessarily make it to stage N3 because you have sleep apnea or restless leg syndrome. The stages as a whole, they all get disrupted. And over time, that disruption will carry consequences. Now, people who consistently sleep too little, they face a significant higher risk of type 2 diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, obesity, your risk of cancer rises, your risk of Alzheimer's increases, and the evidence that links insufficient sleep to chronic disease is not subtle. It's very consistent across populations and across study designs. Now, most adults require somewhere between seven and nine hours of sleep per night. And most people probably function best when they're closer to eight or eight and a half hours. Now, genetics do play a role in the amount of sleep you ultimately need, but the margin for chronic sleep deprivation is much smaller than people think. And despite this, nearly a third of adults regularly sleep fewer than six hours per night. And that matters because sleep deprivation is so biologically disruptive that the World Health Organization has actually classified night shift work as carcinogenic. And this classification will reflect increased cancer rates even seen in shift workers, driven largely by chronic circadian rhythm disruption. Now, that means that our nurses and doctors that are working night shifts and getting chronically disrupted sleep have increased risk of cancer. Now that should make us pause. Yet when life gets busy and work demands increase, when expectations rise or deadlines happen, sleep is often the first thing that we sacrifice. But we tell ourselves that it's temporary and we'll catch up later or catch up on the weekend. I've told myself for years that productivity comes first. But unfortunately, the cost it accumulates quietly in the background. Now I'm 44, I personally prioritize sleep as if my life depends on it. Because in many ways it does. And I don't just feel better, I function better. I mean, I really attribute my increase in productivity to the fact that I sleep more and I sleep better and I have a spedtime routine before going to bed and I wear a sleep mask and I monitor my sleep hours and sleep sleep quality and quantity with my woo-ban. Now, for me, I get more productive when I sleep best. And so sleep is kind of one of that non-negotiable lifestyle changes that I'm not willing to skip. A hustle culture, it may reward output in the short term, but over the long term, it basically undermines the very help that we need to sustain that output, right? Productivity without recovery is not sustainable over time. Right on. Well, as you already know, hustle culture normalizes being chronically sleep deprived, but the science shows that this comes at a real serious cost. And sleep is an active biological process. It's essential for metabolic repair and clearing brain waste or and regulating emotions. And reducing the risk of chronic disease in the long term. If your sleep is chronically short or fragmented, it increases the risk of a ton of diseases. It's really needs to be part of your health strategy. So my practical tip that you may be able to apply in your life is just try to be consistent. And for me, being consistent means trying to go to bed and to wake up at similar times on most days. Just I I know people just kind of sleep in during the weekend and try to pay off that sleep debt that they acquired or accumulated during the week, but having similar bed and wake times, it helps support circadian rhythms. And your your suprachiasmatic nucleus, which is a part of your brain that kind of we refer to it as your internal biological clock, it determines how all other cells in your body behave and how your hormones fluctuate and how your hormones they impact every single biochemical process in your body, from the way you metabolize glucose or produce insulin. You have to protect your circadian rhythm. It's a way to help prime your body in producing melatonin at the right time to induce sleep and to shut off cortisol at a right time so you can go to sleep or deal with the stressors when you wake up. Consistency is very important, but also the quantity of your sleep. So you want to make sure that you just get enough sleep. Seven to nine hours is typical, probably best if you are closer to eight. One of the things that I do every single night is I create this kind of wind-down period before going to bed. I chuckle while saying this because I harass my wife every night to turn off the lights. Because blue light is the main suppressor of melatonin production. So by dimming lights before going to bed, as you're part of your bedtime routine, you help melatonin secretion increase. And this helps your body prime itself for bed. Now, unfortunately, blue lights also are in your phones, in your screens, and on your TV. So consider putting these away if you can, or at least making the light dimmer. Now, having that routine before bed is a little bit like how Pavlov's dog started salivating. If you know this story, it's pretty simple. Pavlov rang a bell, then fed his dog, and over time the dog got conditioned to when he heard the bell, knew that food was coming. And so when Pavlov took away the food and just started ringing the bell, the dog would still salivate. That's classic conditioning, an experiment made famous by Pavlov. And that's the same thing that happens to our brain before going to sleep. So that's why some people on vacation or out of their bed, out of their environment, they have trouble sleeping. So there's a wind-down routine that you can also do while you're on vacation. That wind-down routine can be making sure you have the same toothbrush or the same music you listen to or the same pajama or having the same pillow, wearing the same sleep mask. The goal is to have as many cues as possible, as many bells as possible by referring to Pavlov'd dog. When I go to bed and I sit down in my bed and I pluff my pillow and I start stretching, I do 30 seconds of meditation, I put on my sleep mask. My brain knows what's coming and primes itself for sleep. Now, your sleep routine can look a lot different than mine, and that's perfectly fine. But the the goal is to surround yourself with as many of Pavlov's bells as you can so your body naturally falls into sleep. So talked about a sleep mask, talked about lights, talked about dimming and limiting screens to support natural melatonin release. You have to reframe sleep as recovery and not as a weakness. Be cautious of late-day caffeine or alcohol, both will disrupt sleep architecture, even if they make you fall asleep easily. For alcohol, for example. You need to treat sleep like your medication and your nutrition and your exercise need to line up. Also keep in mind that all lifestyle pillars are interrelated. So when you sleep better, you feel better, you are more likely to work out or to eat healthier. If your sleep is disrupted, that typically means that the next day you're gonna be more irritable, you're gonna make poorer health food choices, you're probably gonna be less likely to exercise. And studies have shown that people who have disruptive sleep tend to eat upwards of 300 or more excess calories the next day. Specifically from processed carb rich foods. So that's pretty much easy proof that all of these lifestyle pillars are related. So hustle culture has grown into this toxic way of living your life where short-term productivity is at the expense of long-term life expectancy. Right on. I hope this makes sense. I mean, I know that a lot of people are probably living in hustle culture right now. And uh, if it wasn't for hustle culture, I probably wouldn't have accomplished everything that I have. But it's to trying to find that balance, right? I just want people to not fall into the trap that I fell into 2014. Probably in retrospect, I was going through a burnout. We can call it a burn-in because I never took time off work, but my mental health was shot, and probably everything suffered. And most importantly, my relationships probably suffered. So listen to the guy who speaks from his mistakes, prioritize recovery, prioritize health, prioritize breathing exercises, prioritize sleep, meditation, whatever makes you feel better and that is healthy. Prioritize your nutrition and all of the other lifestyle pillars. Cool. Right on. Thanks so much for listening. You have an awesome day.com to find free downloadable resources. And remember that you can find me on Facebook and Instagram at Dr.JulesCormier, and on YouTube at Plantbased Dr.Jules.