In military operations, leaders meticulously track fuel, ammunition, and water. Yet, one of the most crucial components for mission success is often treated as a luxury or a personal choice: sleep.
About 70% of Service Members get fewer than six hours of sleep a night, compared to about 30% of the general population. The cost of inadequate sleep is absorbed by the human weapon system, resulting in reduced capacity for decision-making, impaired problem-solving, and increased vulnerability to stress, among other physical, cognitive, and psychological consequences. Just as it’s important to consider fuel and water supply, leaders can enhance mission success and safety by giving similar consideration to the supply of sleep for optimized troops.
This shift starts with “sleep leadership,” the quality of leaders who:
- Are aware of the effect of sleep on health, performance, and readiness
- Know what healthy sleep habits look like
- Practice good sleep habits
- Encourage their team members to practice those good habits
To maximize operational readiness and unit performance, leaders can benefit from reframing how they view and talk about sleep and recovery. Below, you’ll learn how to best model, influence, and make positive changes to the sleep culture in your command.
Model: Leaders are the Prototype
You have more power over your unit’s sleep readiness than you may think. As social beings, humans inherently prioritize “fitting in” and tend to unconsciously mirror the behaviors of the group. So Service Members mirror the behaviors they see in their chain of command. For example, a study of U.S. Air Force personnel found that trainees were more likely to smoke if their supervisor or instructor smoked. This was true regardless of whether they were non-smokers or had previously quit smoking.
This same dynamic dictates sleep norms. When a leader regularly operates while exhausted and over-caffeinated and sends non-urgent texts or emails at 0200, they are setting an example that Service Members may follow. Consider on the other hand, a leader demonstrating sleep leadership who is vocal about their own caffeine cutoff time and protective of their unit’s sleep hours. Both examples trickle down through the chain of command to affect sleep readiness.
TAKE ACTION: Reflect on your current sleep habits and how they have positively and negatively affected your morale, fitness, and relationships. Which of your sleep practices would you want members of your chain of command to mirror? Which habits would you caution them against?
Influence: Three Levels of Sleep Culture
Culture is the set of unspoken rules that underlie the collective behavior of your command. If a unit's culture suggests that "sleep is for the weak," its members will likely hide their fatigue to avoid being ostracized.
If change is needed, you can reflect on your unit’s sleep culture across three distinct levels:
Level 1: What We See: These are the behaviors and visible environmental conditions that anyone walking into your unit immediately observes.
- Pro-Sleep
- Leaders drink water instead of energy drinks or coffee in the afternoon.
- Blackout curtains are installed in barracks.
- Roommates are grouped by shift schedules so they don't interrupt each other's sleep.
- Noise, light, and temperature are actively controlled in sleeping quarters.
- Sleep-readiness education posters are displayed.
- Anti-Sleep
- Leaders consume caffeine late in the afternoon or evening.
- Superiors send command emails or texts with late-night or early-morning timestamps.
- Bright are lights left on in sleeping quarters 24/7.
Level 2: What We Say: This includes official messages, briefs, policies, mission statements, and interpersonal check-ins.
- Pro-Sleep
- A safety brief states, “We have a big training exercise coming up. I need everyone to get at least 8 hours of sleep on the nights leading up to it.”
- Leaders routinely ask Service Members about their sleep quality during check-ins.
- Superiors share personal stories about their own sleep roadblocks.
- Leaders enforce policies that restrict non-emergency communication after 1800.
- Teams are trained on fatigue management.
- Unit leaders treat sleep as “ammunition."
- Anti-Sleep
- A unit brief states, “We have a hard training exercise coming up. Get your head in the game and be ready to push through the fatigue.”
- Leaders use phrases like, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” or “Sleep on your own time.”
- The unit has policies (stated or implied) that treat rest as an optional suggestion rather than a mission requirement.
Level 3: What We Believe: These are the deep, unconscious beliefs treated as unwritten rules for success.
- Pro-Sleep Beliefs
- Performance depends on recovery.
- Communicating fatigue levels shows a commitment to safety.
- Napping is a tactical tool, rather than laziness.
- Addressing work-related stress optimizes readiness.
- Proper sleep planning and recovery is worthy of praise.
- Anti-Sleep Beliefs
- Rank equals endurance (“The higher my rank, the less sleep I should get”).
- Operating on little sleep is a badge of honor.
- Admitting fatigue makes you look weak or unreliable.
- Pushing through no sleep is worthy of praise.
TAKE ACTION: Review the pro- and anti-sleep examples. Which behaviors, phrases, or beliefs have you observed in your unit? What is one small change you can make this week to shift the culture?
Change: Organizational Transformation
Changing a deeply ingrained, anti-sleep culture is difficult. To successfully build pro-sleep culture, you can implement concrete actions that take your organization through a 3-stage “thermodynamic” model of change that likens culture to a block of ice:
Phase 1: Unfreeze (Break the Inertia): As a leader, you can begin to destabilize an anti-sleep status quo by proving that the current way of doing things hurts performance. Create a "burning platform" for the existing sleep culture using unit data:
- Connect fatigue to accident reports or injuries.
- Highlight degraded performance with hard numbers from the range, fitness tests, or AARs.
- Share data that emphasizes the importance of sleep for mental wellness, relationship health, and physical recovery.
Phase 2: Change (The Transition): Once the “cultural ice” has melted and team members are open to change, introduce specific interventions and schedule modifications.
Plan Around Sleep Needs:
- Delay PT until the afternoon on days before shift work and night operations so Service Members can get extra sleep in the mornings.
- Avoid sending non-emergency texts and emails during protected sleep hours.
- Schedule long-term shifts (2 or more weeks) that rotate forward rather than constant rotations to respect circadian rhythms: Day→Evening→Night.
- Allow time for your team to bank sleep hours before sustained operations and pay off sleep debt afterward (including a few days to reset after a night-shift block).
- Allot time for personal matters. Plan for at least 12 hours between the end of one shift and the beginning of the next to accommodate your unit’s need for nutrition, family time, PT, and personal hygiene.
Provide Education and Medical Support:
- Destigmatize sleep needs.
- Schedule an HPRC sleep training presentation for your unit.
- Consider the possibility of insomnia if a Service Member's sleep or fatigue doesn't improve with better habits, and encourage them to seek Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for insomnia (CBTi).
- Direct personnel who complain of extreme fatigue, loud snoring, or gasping for air to a healthcare provider to check for sleep apnea.
Phase 3: Refreeze (Stabilizing): If you do not refreeze the water into its new mold, it will turn into a messy puddle the moment the current command team leaves. You must lock in the new culture.
- Update Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) to reflect changes across all three levels of culture.
- Normalize sleep prioritization as a marker of professional excellence and readiness.
- Change unit policies.
- Permanently shift scheduling practices to ensure the pro-sleep culture survives indefinitely.
Conclusion
As a leader, you have the power to actively replace anti-sleep narratives with pro-sleep culture. This shift can enhance your unit’s physical and mental performance. Real change begins with a simple mindset shift: viewing operations with sleep-deprived personnel through the same risk management lens that you view operations with low fuel or limited ammunition.
Then, you can lead the charge by acting as a visible role model, shifting toward pro-sleep language, and implementing policy changes that treat sleep as a vital logistical resource.
