Sleep, Energy, and the Daily Rhythm

Every other chapter in this book is a way of using the cognitive resources you woke up with this morning. This chapter is about how many of those resources you actually have.

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A trader I'll call Elena is, on paper, doing everything right. She has read the body chapters from this book, three times. She runs a clean pre-market routine: 90-second body audit, three minutes of box breathing, light therapy lamp on her desk during the first half hour of the session. Her workspace is tuned. Her chair is the right height. Her monitors are at eye level. Her temperature is 70°F. She runs the quiet-eye protocol on every entry. By every visible measure, Elena is the model student of Chapters 11 and 12.

Elena is also, quietly, falling apart.

Her trading is mediocre. Not catastrophic. Not blown up. Just consistently, frustratingly, mediocre. She has flat months. She has small drawdowns followed by small recoveries. She has, for the last nine months, been hovering around break-even on a $200,000 account, after running modestly profitable for the previous two years. She cannot find the strategy reason because there is no strategy reason. She cannot find the psychology reason because she has done the psychology work.

When I asked her, finally, about her sleep, the picture appeared very quickly.

She has two children, ages 4 and 7. She wakes at 5:45 AM to start her pre-market work. She gets to bed, on a typical night, at 11:30 PM (after the kids' bedtime, the dishes, the lunches packed for the next day, and "thirty minutes of finally being a person"). That is six hours and fifteen minutes in bed, which means, given normal sleep latency and middle-of-the-night wakings, she is getting roughly five and a half hours of actual sleep.