Back in 2018, I wrote a short post called “Do This One Thing When Exhausted.” My advice was simple: dial it back. Rest. Walk. Drop the intense workouts until your wits come back.
I still stand by the core of it. Exercise is a stressor. Stack too many stressors, and even one that’s usually medicine will start acting against you. That’s true.
But it’s not the whole truth. Eight years and a whole lot more lived experience later, I’d say it differently now.
What '2018 me' had right
That “near-heap on the ground” feeling isn’t a mystery. It’s the body telling you it’s running out of room. Racing heart on the stairs. Brain fog by 3 p.m. Irritable at nothing. The scratchy throat you can’t quite catch a break from. If you push into a real workout in that state, you can absolutely tip into full illness.
For years before becoming an entrepreneur, I chased two things at the same time: competing as an amateur athlete and working like an executive who never clocks out. Here’s what that taught me, the hard way, more than once. If I was training hard, I couldn’t also work 70-hour weeks. If I was working 70-hour weeks, I couldn’t also train hard.
Go hard and fast in one lane. Fine. Go hard and fast in every lane at once, indefinitely, and your body sends the bill.
“Dial it back” isn’t just about skipping a workout when you’re tired. It’s about looking honestly at everywhere you’re pushing (work, training, family, travel) and admitting you can’t max out on all of it simultaneously without getting sick. Something’s gotta give. You can’t go hard everywhere at once.
And never mind the cornerstones of health. I consider these to be 1) food and nutrition, 2) sleep and stress resilience, and 3) movement and exercise. Three cornerstones. If two are wobbly, the third can’t carry the load, no matter how “clean” you eat.
But sometimes you don't get the choice
Sometimes the alarm goes off, and the tracker shows four hours. A sick kid, a deadline, a red-eye, a night your brain just wouldn’t quiet down. The day doesn’t wait, and you’ve got a full one ahead.
And what your body needs in that moment turns out to be a little counterintuitive.
Two things surprised me most.
First: one bad night is metabolically louder than you’d think.
In one careful study, healthy adults who slept just 4 hours for a single night woke up with insulin resistance across multiple pathways the next day. Hepatic insulin resistance went up. Their glucose disposal dropped about 25%1 Their blood work briefly looked like something you’d expect to see in someone with metabolic disease. In healthy people. From one short night.
Add cortisol to the picture. Even partial sleep loss elevates plasma cortisol the following evening by 37% to 45%2. That’s exactly why you can still feel wired at 9 p.m. (or 3 a.m.) after a bad night. The cycle persists.
And the increased hunger you might feel after a bad night’s sleep isn’t in your head either. After one night of sleep loss, ghrelin (the hunger hormone) rises and leptin (the fullness hormone) drops3,4 That “why am I feeling ravenous today?” moment isn’t weakness. It’s endocrinology.
Second: the answer isn’t only rest. This is where I want to update myself.
In 2018 I said, “walk gently.” Turns out, gentle walking is lovely for many things, but it doesn’t rescue the glucose story after a sleepless night. When researchers had healthy young men do 30 minutes of moderate walking the morning after one bad night, the elevated post-meal glucose did not budge5.
What does help? Short, vigorous bursts.
The exercise snack
“Exercise snacks” (or, more formally, “vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity”, VILPA) are exactly what they sound like. Bursts of hard-ish movement, usually under a minute or two, tucked into the day.
A brisk stair climb. A minute of jumping jacks. A hard, fast walk up a hill or the stairs on the way back from lunch.
In a study of non-exercising adults wearing accelerometers, just 4 to 5 minutes a day of these tiny vigorous bursts was linked to a 26% to 40% lower risk of all-cause mortality and roughly a 48% lower risk of cardiovascular death6,7.
Not four minutes of continued running. Four minutes total across the day, in aggregate, of small, honest bursts.
And when researchers looked specifically at sleep loss, three sessions of high-intensity interval exercise across a week of restricted sleep protected the glucose tolerance and mitochondrial function that sleep loss would otherwise have degraded8.
Here’s the honest nuance, though: exercise protects your metabolism amid sleep loss, but it doesn’t rescue your mood or alertness9. Only sleep does that.
While bursts are a smart bridge for a bad day, they’re not a substitute for the sleep you owe your body.
Get outside. Your body needs to know it's daytime.
One more thing I do now that 2018 me didn’t. As much as I can – and especially on a bad-night morning, I get outside as soon as I can. A quick stretch on the porch or walk around the block. Just being under the actual sky.
I’m not talking about the “stare into the sun” thing you see on the internet. Please don’t do that. (My ophthalmologist corrected me after I had some issues with that one!) Simply get outside, in the ambient early light, and let your body register that it’s daytime and you’re upright and awake.
The research on this is straightforward. Every 30 minutes of morning sunlight (before 10 a.m.) is associated with meaningfully better sleep quality that night and a healthier-aligned circadian rhythm10. It’s the cleanest tool we’ve got for telling a sleep-deprived body that today is day and tonight will be night.
What to actually do tomorrow if you slept four hours
– Hydrate first. Water before coffee or food. It’s best to wait for these and let your body wake up naturally.
– Get outside for 5 to 15 minutes early. Fresh air, indirect light. No staring at the sun.
– Eat protein-forward. Skip the sugar spike. Your insulin is already working overtime.
– Get 3 to 5 short vigorous bursts across the day. Lap the stairs. A minute of jumping jacks. A brisk hill walk. Get breathless briefly, on purpose.
– Skip the hero workout. Save that for a rested day.
– Protect tonight’s sleep like it’s your job. Because for today, it is.
– Be kind to yourself. No shame, no blame. Just the next good decision.
Protect the asset
If there’s one line I’d want you to leave with, it’s this: protect the asset. (IE, YOU!)
Keep moving, even in small doses. And be kind to yourself while you do it. There’s no shame in a hard week catching up with you, and no blame in needing a minute to recover. Life’s too short for either.
High performers don’t get a pass on being human. If anything, you need these tools more, because you’re the one most likely to try to push straight through it all.
Next time a bad night catches you off guard, you’ll know: a few short bursts of movement, some real daylight, and a genuinely good meal will do more for you than powering through on caffeine and willpower ever will.
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References / Sources
1. Donga E, et al. A single night of partial sleep deprivation induces insulin resistance in multiple metabolic pathways in healthy subjects. J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2010;95(6):2963–2968 (https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article-abstract/95/6/2963/2598810)
2. Leproult R, Copinschi G, Buxton O, Van Cauter E. Sleep loss results in an elevation of cortisol levels the next evening. Sleep. 1997;20(10):865–870. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9415946/
3. van Egmond LT, et al. Effects of acute sleep loss on leptin, ghrelin, and adiponectin in adults with healthy weight and obesity. Obesity. 2022. (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/oby.23616)
4. Schmid SM, et al. A single night of sleep deprivation increases ghrelin levels and feelings of hunger in normal-weight healthy men. J Sleep Res. 2008. (https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2869.2008.00662.x)
5. Slater T, et al. Acute impairments in glucose tolerance following one night of partial sleep restriction are not rescued by moderate-intensity walking in young men. 2023. (https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa69903/Download/69903__34992__a563497a82b9468ca0b30d328424f14f.pdf)
6. Stamatakis E, et al. Association of wearable device-measured vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity with mortality. Nature Medicine. 2022;28:2521–2529. (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36482104/)
7. Stamatakis E, et al. Vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity and cancer incidence among non-exercising adults. JAMA Oncology. 2023;9(9):1255–1259. (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaoncology/fullarticle/2807734)
8. Saner NJ, et al. Exercise mitigates sleep-loss-induced changes in glucose tolerance, mitochondrial function, sarcoplasmic protein synthesis, and diurnal rhythms. J Physiol. 2020. (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7704425/)
9. Saner NJ, et al. The effect of sleep restriction, with or without HIIT, on behavioural alertness and mood state in young healthy males. J Sleep Res. 2023. (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jsr.13987)
10. Aoki H, et al. The role of sunlight in sleep regulation: analysis of morning, afternoon, and full-day exposure. 2025. (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12502225/)
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