Do we need to sleep? The text came at 2:47 AM. Project… | By Moquet | October 2025
The text came at 2:47 AM. One venture capitalist I know, someone who prides himself on operating at what he calls “cognitive peaks,” sent me a photo of his wrist. Oura’s ring glowed faintly in the dark. “92 degrees sleep,” the message read. “Four hours. It feels incredible.”
I looked at the timestamp again. He had been awake for twenty-two hours straight, was about to board a plane to Singapore, and wanted me to know that his biometrics indicated that he had won.
This is where we are with sleep now. It has become a luxury good, something that can be perfected, hacked, compressed or transcended. The wearables industry has turned comfort into a competitive sport. Your sleep score is your report card. Eight hours for amateurs. We are told that the true elite can do for less.
I thought of my friend when a patient came in last month complaining of what she called “metabolic imbalance.” She was 38, ate clean, worked out six days a week, and couldn’t lose weight around her middle. Her web belt told her she was recovering appropriately. Her Apple Watch said heart rate variability looked good. But her fasting glucose was 118 and climbing.
“How much do you sleep?” I asked.
“Five, maybe six hours. I wake up at 4:30 to do CrossFit.”
“every day?”
“I feel good.”
Her cortisol levels suggested otherwise.
We have turned sleep into the thing that gets in the way of productivity, fitness and ambition. At the same time, biology screams the opposite. Every system we care about, metabolic health, cognitive function, immune resilience, is based on something that only happens when we are unconscious and still.
The American Academy of Sleep Medicine published a position statement in 2021 that sounds like a ransom note from your body. Sleep is not optional. It’s non-negotiable. Inadequate sleep and untreated sleep disorders are detrimental to health, well-being and overall safety. They used those words, “harmful,” which in the medical literature is the closest thing you can get to saying this is going to hurt you.
The American Thoracic Society went further. Sleep is essential for recovery, energy conservation, neurodevelopment, learning, memory, emotional regulation, cardiovascular and metabolic function, and cellular detoxification. This is not a partial list. That’s pretty much all that keeps a human functioning.
But we have wearables now. We have data. Surely this changes something.
My friend Oura-ring is not wrong that his device measures a real thing. Heart rate variability, resting heart rate, body temperature, movement patterns during sleep. These are actual physiological signals. The question is whether tracking them gives us permission to ignore them.
The wearables market has grown into a thirty billion dollar industry by selling us the promise of self-knowledge. Learn about your sleep stages. Improve your rapid eye movement. Understand your recovery. Most of this is really helpful. The problem is when we get measurement and mastery wrong, when we think that because we can measure sleep, we can negotiate it.
I have seen this pattern in the clinic over and over again. Someone showed me their sleep data, clear graphs showing they had ninety minutes of deep sleep, perfect sleep onset latency, and perfect temperature regulation. Then I look at their labs. Hemoglobin A1c creeps up. Increased markers of inflammation. Testosterone in the basement. The wearable says they’re fine. Their endocrine system tells them they are lying to themselves.
Sleep does things we still don’t fully understand. During non-REM sleep, the brain generates slow oscillations that somehow consolidate memory and prevent synaptic saturation. The glymphatic system, which was only discovered in 2012, removes metabolic waste from the central nervous system primarily during sleep. REM sleep recalibrates emotional processing in ways that no amount of meditation or therapy can replicate while awake.
These are not luxuries. They are maintenance functions of a biological system that has evolved over millions of years with non-negotiable requirements for downtime.
Animal studies make this starkly clear. Complete sleep deprivation in mammals leads to death. Not health problems after all. death. Mice die within two to three weeks of complete sleep deprivation, which is faster than from starvation. Flies that are bred to need less sleep through genetic manipulation still need some sleep. When researchers try to eliminate it completely, the organisms do not survive.
Humans are no different, we’re just better at lying to ourselves about it. Chronic sleep restriction does not eliminate the need for sleep. It creates what’s called sleep debt, and your body keeps a more accurate account than any wearable device. You can force yourself to wake up with caffeine, adrenaline, and sheer stubbornness. Cellular damage accumulates anyway.
This is where longevity medicine gets interesting and a bit silly at the same time. This field is obsessed with extending health, improving all vital signs, and preventing age-related decline. Billions are flocking to supplements, peptides and protocols designed to shave more functional years off a person’s lifespan. But then we treat sleep, one of the most powerful tools for cell repair and metabolic health, as if it were negotiable.
Some researchers have looked into whether we can engineer our way out of the need for sleep. Genetic studies on fruit flies and mice show that you can reduce the need for sleep through certain mutations. The problem is that these mutations come with trade-offs. Shorten lifespan. Poor learning. Low stress resistance. Evolution didn’t make sleep mandatory because it enjoys wasting a third of our lives. It is mandatory because nothing else does what sleep does.
There are no approved methods to completely eliminate sleep requirements in humans. This sentence comes from a comprehensive review of the neuroscience literature, and is as conclusive as the medical data. Pharmacological interventions can temporarily extend alertness. Modafinil, amphetamines, and caffeine in various forms can keep you conscious. They do not replace the restorative processes that occur during actual sleep.
The military has spent decades trying to solve this problem. If you can create soldiers who don’t need to sleep, you’ll have an overwhelming tactical advantage. They tested every steroid, every protocol, every technological intervention available. The conclusion is always the same. You can postpone sleep for a while. You can’t eliminate it. The longer it is postponed, the worse cognitive and physical functioning becomes, regardless of what the person believes about their waking life.
This creates a strange tension in modern medicine. We have more tools than ever before to measure physiological state. We can trace the structure of sleep right up to the moment. We can measure recovery with precision that our ancestors could not have imagined. But we mostly use these tools to convince ourselves that we can get away with less than the tools tell us we need more of.
I’m starting to think of this as the quantitative self-illusion. We love statements that confirm we are exceptional. A sleep score that says we’re fully recovered within five hours feels like permission to keep pushing. We ignore data that indicate limits. High fasting glucose, low testosterone, and constant fatigue we called “the grind.”
What’s actually revolutionary is not finding ways to need less sleep. It’s the building systems that help us protect the sleep we need while living our lives that actively work against it.
This is where you love the tools He will make fun They become relevant, not because they help you sleep less, but because they help you understand what sleep deprivation actually costs you. Most people do not associate their sleep patterns with their metabolic markers. They don’t see how five-hour nights for three straight months manifested as insulin resistance six months later. They don’t track how their heart rates dropped week after week as their sleep debt piled up, or how their training performance specifically stalled when their deep sleep fell below sixty minutes per night.
The platform pulls data from wearable devices, from labs, from training logs, and from calendar stress patterns, and shows you the actual biological consequences of your choices. Not in the abstract, but in your specific signs. Regulate your glucose. Your inflammatory condition. Your ability to recover. It’s one thing to tell yourself you feel good after five hours. It’s one thing to see your hemoglobin A1c rise and your heart rate fall while your wearable still gives you a passing grade.
This is important because sleep is difficult to prioritize in modern life. Unlike exercise or nutrition, where you can see immediate results from the effort, the benefits of sleep are often invisible until its absence causes problems. You can work sleep-deprived for years before the metabolic consequences show up in the form of illness. By then the damage is already done.
The promise of personalized medicine doesn’t help you improve your boundaries. It shows you where your actual limits are before you break yourself against them. Sleep is the most obvious example. Everyone thinks they are the exception, the person who can thrive with less. Almost no one actually does. But it takes longitudinal data on multiple systems to convincingly prove this argument.
My patient with a metabolic disorder began sleeping seven hours a night. Not because I convinced her of the arguments about sleep science. Because I showed her the relationship between her sleep data from Whoop and her quarterly metabolic labs over an eighteen-month period. Each period of sustained sleep restriction corresponds to a jump in her fasting glucose and a decrease in her insulin sensitivity. Every time she sleeps, her signs improve. The data proved that her willpower couldn’t do it.
Six months later, her fasting glucose reached 94. She is still training hard. She only does so on the basis of actual recovery rather than adrenaline and denial.
The venture capitalist behind the Oura gang called me last week from Singapore. The plane crashed three days into the flight, he couldn’t concentrate in meetings, and he felt sick for the first time in years. “My body finally gave up,” he said. I asked him how well he slept. “It’s gone down since my landing. Shows I need to recover.” He looked surprised, as if the machine had betrayed him by finally telling the truth.
The future of sleep is not about finding ways to need less of it. It’s the building systems that help us protect them in a world designed to steal them. Yes, tracking is better, but tracking is in the service of behavior change, not in the service of self-deception. Integrating sleep data with metabolic markers, training load, cognitive performance, and actual health outcomes measured over time. Not so we can improve our way to four hours a night, but so we can clearly see what seven or eight hours of good sleep actually does for every other metric we claim to care about.
Sleep is not the new luxury. It never ceased to be a biological necessity. We’ve gotten good at pretending otherwise. Wearables, trackers, data infrastructure, none of that changes basic biology. What can change is whether we pay attention to what that biology is telling us before we destroy ourselves trying to outrun it.
The platform He will make fun Construction takes this very seriously. Not sleep as a virtue signal or health trend, but sleep as a carrier pillar of metabolic health that either supports or undermines whatever you are trying to do. You can join their waitlist on moccet.ai and see what your actual data says about whether you’re sleeping enough, not what you’ve convinced yourself is true. Sometimes the most radical intervention is just measuring what matters and trusting what the measurements show you.
We’ve spent the past decade trying to engineer our way beyond human limitations. Better steroids, better tracking, better improvement protocols. Perhaps the real breakthrough is to accept that some limitations are not bugs to be fixed but features that keep the system running. Sleep is one of them. You can play with a lot of things in biology. You can’t play with this.
Post Comment