Director of strategy · Chronic insomnia
Eleven nights of unbroken sleep — a director of strategy who hadn't slept through since 2019
Director of strategy, late-30s — listed consumer-goods group (Northern Europe)
Five years of fragmented sleep, an immaculate bedroom, and a supplement stack that filled a drawer. Six weeks of coached upstream work — light ledger, glucose tail, autonomic discharge, CBT-I bedroom rule — produced his first eleven consecutive nights of unbroken sleep since 2019. He kept the magnesium and dropped almost everything else.
Context
Promoted to director in 2019. The 3am wake-up started the same quarter and never left. By the time he came to us he had a Chilipad, blackout blinds, an Oura ring, three sleep apps, and seven supplements stacked from 9pm to 10pm. His bedroom was, by any objective measure, optimised. He was averaging 4h 40m of fragmented sleep and snapping at his team in the corridor between board meetings.
The pattern
His insomnia was not a bedroom problem. It was a 3pm decision problem with a 9pm glucose tail and an undischarged sympathetic load that never got closed. Magnesium cannot resolve any of those. The bedroom was being asked to compensate, in 40 minutes of darkness, for sixteen hours of dysregulation. It could not. No bedroom can.
What we did
- •Audited 2pm–5pm window: third coffee dropped, deep-work block moved out of the late afternoon, walking 1:1s introduced for two slots a week
- •Light ledger rebuilt: 10 minutes of bright outdoor light within 30 minutes of waking, midday outdoor break, deliberate dimming protocol from sunset
- •Glucose tail flattened: dinner moved 90 minutes earlier, evening carbs lowered, 9pm protein/fat micro-snack added — the 3am wake-up resolved in week two
- •Autonomic discharge protocol between workday and evening: 7 minutes of brisk walk + cold rinse + long-exhale breathing, non-negotiable
- •CBT-I bedroom rule: out of bed within 20 minutes of any wake, dim chair, no phone, return only when sleepy — held for the three weeks it took to retrain the association
- •Supplement stack pruned from seven to two (magnesium glycinate + glycine), kept as polish on the corrected baseline
Outcomes
Avg sleep (continuous)
4h 40m → 7h 20m
First 11-night unbroken streak
Since 2019
3am wake-ups
5×/wk → 0–1×/wk
HRV (90-day avg)
26ms → 61ms
Sleep onset
42min → 8min
Supplement spend
−€180/month
"I had built a bedroom that could have hosted a sleep clinic. The work that finally let me sleep happened between 2pm and 5pm — and on a 7-minute walk before dinner. Nobody had ever told me my insomnia was a day problem. It was the most expensive thing nobody had said to me in five years."
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