Your Nighttime Self Is Drunk

<p>This episode looks at what came up at a daughter&#39;s parent-teacher meeting — specifically, the part about sleep that ended up feeling more personal than parental.</p><p><br></p><p>The detail that lands hardest: by midnight, after waking at seven, cognitive function has dropped to the equivalent of a 0.1 percent blood alcohol level. Legally drunk. And it doesn&#39;t even require an all-nighter — six hours a night for eight days gets you there just the same.</p><p><br></p><p>There&#39;s a small but significant shift described here: the move from &quot;I should probably sleep more&quot; to &quot;if I don&#39;t, I am losing performance.&quot; Not guilt, not resolve — just clarity. The foggy feeling that gets written off as a bad day may be something more like a chronically impaired brain.</p><p><br></p><p>It also touches on weekend sleep catch-up and why that tends to backfire, borrowing a phrase — &quot;social jet lag&quot; — that compares irregular sleep schedules to flying overseas and back every single weekend.</p><p><br></p><p>A quiet reckoning with something long half-known: that what shapes a day — at the shop, with family, on a project — might have less to do with willpower or effort than with what happened the night before.</p>