SLEEP IS FOR SUCKERS
EVERY morning, after just two hours of rest, Rob Wiesenthal wakes up without an alarm clock at 3 a.m., ready to work.
Wiesenthal, the CEO of aviation company Blade, known as the Uber for helicopters, then works for two hours — making overseas calls and checking in on his company’s overnight flights. Afterward, he takes a two-hour nap, followed by business as usual.
After a total of just four hours of segmented sleep and a single oat-milk latte, “I’m ready to start my day,” says Wiesenthal, 52, whose idea of “sleeping in” on the weekends amounts to a mere five hours of shut-eye. “If you’re shut down or disengaged outside the hours of 9 to 5 . . . you’re just not going to be competitive.”
For ambitious captains of industry, if you snooze, you lose.
Despite a growing body of evidence linking poor sleep with an array of health problems, many CEOs say getting a full night’s rest is simply not an option when it comes to marketplace success. Earlier this month, Elon Musk, the divisive leader of Tesla, told the New York Times that he’s been logging sleepless, 120-hour work weeks in his company’s factory. His admission followed a confounding tweet about taking his company private — a statement he later walked back, but not before sparking a probe by US regulators. The troubling chain of events led one analyst to declare on Bloomberg.com that Musk’s exhaustion was the “most critical near-term concern” for Tesla.
Experts say erratic decisions such as Musk’s are some of the surest signs of sleep deprivation. In a study published last year in the Annals of Neurology, researchers found that people not only make bad decisions when they’re sleep-deprived — their judgment “gets worse and worse” in chronic cases, says Dr. Michael Grandner, director of the University of Arizona College of Medi- cine’s Sleep and Health Research program.
The “ability to focus, make good decisions and process complex information becomes impaired,” Grandner says. “What’s worse is that as time goes on, those people won’t realize their decisions are being affected.”
Plus, prioritizing work over slumber can actually make you somewhat of an unfavorable leader. Last week, researchers found that the sleep-deprived are
not only less inclined to engage with others — they were also viewed as “socially repulsive,” according to a study by UC Berkeley psychology and neuroscience professor Matthew Walker.
“Sleep is the single most effective thing you can do to reset the health of your brain and body — [it’s] life’s support system and a non-negotiable biological necessity,” says Walker, whose recent book, “Why We Sleep,” underlines the links between a lack of sleep and illnesses such as cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, stroke and obesity.
Musk’s humble brag didn’t just concern doctors. It sparked admonishment from Arianna Huffington, whose company Thrive Global aims to prevent workplace burnout. She cited research that found that after 17 hours without sleep, people begin to experience levels of cognitive impairment equivalent to being legally drunk. “There’s simply no way you can make good decisions and achieve your world-changing ambitions while running on empty,” she wrote in an open letter to Musk
But the embattled CEO and other restless execs scoffed at the unsolicited advice.
“I have the utmost respect for Arianna, but we may have to agree to disagree on this one,” says Wiesenthal. “Beyond the fact that we have ex- tremely competitive industries in New York City, I’m just not convinced a mandatory eight hours is for everyone.” (One to 3 percent of the population are thought to be “short sleepers” — those who function properly on fewer than six hours of sleep a night.)
Denise Lee, the founder of activewear brand Alala, says getting her collections into stores such as Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom and Bandier and into the hands of celebs including Khloé Kardashian, Ashley Graham and Reese Witherspoon usually means four to five hours of sleep a night, often less in the company’s early days in 2014. She frequently wakes up early to get work done before hitting the office, relying on holistic coffee concoctions to “turbo charge” her productivity.
“The reality of it is, there’s a lot to get done,” says the 36-year-old Chelsea resident, who admits she’d like to fit in more ZZZs. “I might have calls with China in the morning; my lawyer at 9 at night. There’s a mindset that people are accessible for longer hours, and especially here in [New York City], that culture of working long hours is very prevalent.”
And, “part of the problem is that now, people demand answers so quickly,” says John Barman, who says he gets an average of four hours of sleep a night running his luxury interior design firm for high-end clients such as George Stephanopoulos and the late Neil Simon. “At a time when business was slower, I was getting my sleep. But not as much now.”
Getting eight hours of sleep is now more necessary than ever for Neil Parikh — and for good reason: “I run a sleep company,” says the 29-yearold co-founder of sleep-product company Casper.
“It’s something I decided was important, as opposed to bragging about only getting four hours of sleep a night” like many business leaders often do, he says. Parikh’s beauty rest wasn’t always so on-brand, though. He, like a lot of startup founders, says he initially got four or five hours of sleep a night and was working about 100 hours a week. And the company’s culture hasn’t completely changed even now that it’s up and running: “Our engineering team is often up all night when we’re launching a new product,” he says.
Execs such as Lee and Parikh say they make better decisions, are more present for their employees and see a boost in productivity when they’re well-rested. Still, there’s a certain cachet to being the leader who never sleeps, says Erika London, president of FB Hospitality Group.
When she’s not guiding operations for half a dozen city restaurants open till all hours of the night, she’s up at the crack of dawn with her other job — “that’s 6 a.m., when my 1-year-old wakes up,” says the 32-year-old Hell’s Kitchen resident, who gets about four hours of sleep a night. “So I don’t really have a choice!”
Still, she can’t help but find the obsession with logging in long hours “a little ridiculous.” Flaunting it, she says, is “a way to be like, ‘I’m working harder. I’m working more.’ ”