Your Nighttime Self Is Drunk

This episode looks at what came up at a daughter's parent-teacher meeting — specifically, the part about sleep that ended up feeling more personal than parental.

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't even require an all-nighter — six hours a night for eight days gets you there just the same.

There's a small but significant shift described here: the move from "I should probably sleep more" to "if I don't, I am losing performance." 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.

It also touches on weekend sleep catch-up and why that tends to backfire, borrowing a phrase — "social jet lag" — that compares irregular sleep schedules to flying overseas and back every single weekend.

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.