The Sleep Researcher’s Paradox: When Knowing Isn’t Enough

I am an insomniac. As I write this, I am sitting in the sleep lab, fulfilling my duties as a research assistant during an overnight recording. I am monitoring someone else’s sleep architecture in real time - staging transitions, targeting slow oscillations - while acutely aware of my own fragmented nights. To be honest with you, there is something humbling about watching sleep unfold on a computer screen while you are missing out on it yourself.

You might expect that people who dedicate their careers to studying sleep would sleep incredibly well. And why wouldn’t you? We spend our days collecting EEG data and talking about rhythm, stability, and recovery. But knowing how sleep works does not automatically make you good at protecting it. Some nights I close my laptop and then open it again twenty minutes later. Some nights I lie in bed replaying conversations or planning the next day. Other nights, I am tired and wired at the same time. It’s not dramatic. It’s just… familiar.

And I am not the only one. Across our team, the pattern is recognizable. We care deeply about sleep. We understand how it restores the brain. And yet, when deadlines and tasks pile up, sleep is often the first thing that gets shortened. Not because we doubt its importance. Not because we dismiss the science. But because in the moment, everything else feels more pressing.

Productivi-Tease: When Sleep Loss Steals the Work That Matters

Sleep deprivation rarely removes the ability to work. You can still show up, respond quickly, and meet deadlines. What changes is harder to detect. The depth of your thinking begins to thin out. Around the lab, we sometimes jokingly refer to this as “Productivi-Tease”: that feeling of still being productive even as the capacities that make work meaningful begin to narrow.

Creative thinking is often one of the first areas affected. Experimental research shows that sleep deprivation can impair divergent thinking, the ability to generate original ideas and flexibly connect distant concepts [1]. Ideas may still come, but they tend to feel more predictable. The mental leap that once felt effortless becomes smaller. Associations tighten.

A similar pattern appears in cognitive flexibility. Sleep deprivation is associated with reduced task-switching accuracy and greater difficulty adapting when rules or demands change [2]. Reaction speed can remain relatively intact, which makes the decline easy to overlook. You respond quickly and remain active, but precision softens and subtle errors begin to creep in.

Because speed survives, it is easy to assume nothing fundamental has changed. The work continues. But the cognitive range within which you operate quietly narrows. And when that space compresses, the depth and impact of the work often compress with it.

‍The Knowledge-Action Gap: Where experts struggle too

Knowing what is good for you does not always mean you do it. You can understand the importance of sleep and still stay up to finish one more task. You can advise others to protect their recovery hours and still push your own bedtime back by an hour. The choice rarely feels reckless. Most of the time, it feels justified.

The same pattern shows up even in professions built around health. Physicians spend their careers advising patients to take care of their well-being, yet many struggle to do the same for themselves. High workload and emotional strain are linked to poorer physician well-being, and overwork can become normalized within medical culture [3]. Many doctors report working while ill or delaying care because time pressure and professional expectations make stepping back difficult [4].

And the truth is, those tensions reach us too. Working in sleep science does not remove the pressures that shape how people live and work. We study recovery, rhythm, and brain restoration for a living, but we still live inside the same schedules, expectations, and long days as everyone else.

If you spend enough time around sleep researchers, you quickly realise that many of us arrived in this field because of our own complicated relationship with sleep.

Our Lead Tech, Stefan Jongejan, lives with atypical sleep and rarely feels restored, no matter how long he spends in bed. “I wake up as exhausted as when I went to sleep,” he says. That experience is not separate from his work. “What interests me is developing solutions that are non-invasive, durable, and fundamentally different from what is currently available.”

Sleep struggles can also look very different from person to person. During stressful periods, our Founder and CSO, Lucia Talamini, finds herself awake longer than she intended. “When life gets stressful, my mind doesn’t switch off,” she says. She describes a situation many people recognise: “Sometimes your mind is tired, but your body isn’t.”

Taken together, these experiences illustrate the same paradox. We study sleep because we understand what it protects. And yet we struggle with it too.

In many ways, that is exactly why the work matters to us. The problems we are trying to solve are not abstract. They are the same ones we run into ourselves. Which means that when we work on better ways to stabilize sleep, restore rhythm, and protect cognitive recovery, we are not only working toward solutions for others. We are also working toward something we need in our own lives.

And that changes the perspective. The sleep researcher’s paradox is not hypocrisy. It is recognition. We know how it feels.

Turning the Paradox Into a Solution

This week marks Sleep Awareness Week, a moment that reminds people how important sleep is. But knowing that sleep matters and actually protecting it are not the same thing. For those of us working at Deep Sleep Technologies, that tension is impossible to ignore. We see every day how strongly cognitive performance depends on recovery, and how quickly creativity, reasoning, and adaptability begin to narrow when sleep is disrupted.

That is precisely why our work focuses on the brain’s deepest sleep rhythms. At DST, we commercialise technology designed to enhance and stabilise slow oscillations during deep sleep using a closed-loop acoustic stimulation (CLAS) algorithm.

In many ways, my colleagues and I, whom you met in this story, are also the first consumers of the technology we are building at Deep Sleep Technologies. We experience the problem, we study its biology, and we work every day on technologies designed to improve it.

If meaningful work depends on a rested brain, restoring deep sleep is not a luxury. It is exactly why we do the work we do.

‍References

[1] Lim, A. R., Williams, B. J., & Bullock, B. (2024). The effect of sleep deprivation on creative cognition: A systematic review of experiment-based research. Creativity Research Journal, 37(4), 712–722. https://doi.org/10.1080/10400419.2024.2343508

[2] Sun, X., Qu, Z., Zhang, X., Zhang, Y., Zhang, X., Zhao, H., & Zhang, H. (2025). The effects of sleep deprivation on cognitive flexibility: A scoping review of outcomes and Biological Mechanisms. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 19. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2025.1626309

[3] Wallace, J. E., & Lemaire, J. (2007). On physician well being—you’ll get by with a little help from your friends. Social Science & Medicine, 64(12), 2565–2577. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2007.03.016

[4] Feeney, S., O’Brien, K., O’Keeffe, N., Iomaire, A. N., Kelly, M. E., McCormack, J., McGuire, G., & Evans, D. S. (2016). Practise what you preach: Health behaviours and stress among non-consultant hospital doctors. Clinical Medicine, 16(1), 12–18. https://doi.org/10.7861/clinmedicine.16-1-12