I Was Not Sleeping Enough — And It Was Affecting Everything

This article shares personal experience and general information. For serious sleep issues, please consult a qualified doctor.

Working in IT, late nights are part of the culture. Deadlines, global team calls, the habit of checking work messages on your phone until you fall asleep — all of it adds up. For a period last year I was consistently getting five to six hours of sleep on weekdays and trying to compensate with longer weekend sleep. My work quality, my mood, and my ability to focus were all worse than they should have been, and I knew the sleep was the cause.

What Changed When I Fixed My Sleep Schedule

The most effective change I made was the most counterintuitive one — I stopped trying to sleep longer on weekends. Instead, I committed to waking up at the same time every single day regardless of what day it was or how tired I felt. This consistency, maintained for three to four weeks, produced a genuine improvement in how I felt on weekday mornings — even before I changed anything else about my sleep duration.

The reason this works is that your body's sleep-wake cycle is regulated by a consistent schedule. Inconsistent sleeping patterns — late nights and long lie-ins on weekends — disrupt this cycle in ways that persistent tiredness on weekday mornings reflects directly.

The Phone Problem

The most obvious change I needed to make was also the one I resisted longest — putting my phone away forty-five minutes before I intended to sleep. The blue light from screens genuinely suppresses melatonin production, making it harder to fall asleep and reducing sleep quality when you do. More than the light, the mental stimulation of checking messages, reading news, or scrolling social media keeps your brain in an alert state that takes time to wind down from.

Sleep is not the time you spend unconscious between productive activities. It is when your brain processes the day's learning, your immune system repairs itself, and your emotional regulation resets. Cutting it short consistently is not discipline — it is damage that accumulates slowly and shows up everywhere in your life.

What the IT Culture Gets Wrong

The culture in many IT environments implicitly — and sometimes explicitly — treats sleep as negotiable. Working late is associated with dedication. Sending messages at midnight signals commitment. This cultural attitude is directly harmful to the health and long-term productivity of the people inside it. You cannot consistently under-sleep and perform at the level that demanding technical work actually requires. The maths does not work.

Small Changes That Helped

Keeping my bedroom cooler than the rest of my flat. Not eating heavy food within two hours of sleeping. Putting work notifications on Do Not Disturb mode after a set evening time. These are not dramatic interventions — they are small environmental adjustments that cumulatively made real differences to how quickly I fell asleep and how rested I felt when I woke up.