Sleep isn’t just rest — it’s the original compounding interest for your health and wealth. In this episode of Next Act Ninjas, Rachael Van Pelt, PhD, reveals why disrupted sleep accelerates aging, drains your finances, and robs you of independence. You’ll discover how sleep impacts metabolism, hormones, brain health, and decision-making — and why a simple “sleep reset” may be the highest-return investment you ever make for your healthspan and wealthspan.
Sleep isn’t just rest — it’s the original compounding interest for your health and wealth. In this episode of Next Act Ninjas, Rachael Van Pelt, PhD, reveals why disrupted sleep accelerates aging, drains your finances, and robs you of independence. You’ll discover how sleep impacts metabolism, hormones, brain health, and decision-making — and why a simple “sleep reset” may be the highest-return investment you ever make for your healthspan and wealthspan.
Chapters
00:00 The Importance of Sleep for Health and Wealth
00:54 Understanding Sleep Mechanisms and Circadian Rhythms
04:45 The Impact of Sleep on Brain Function and Decision Making
06:20 The Impact of Sleep Loss on Independence
07:26 Quality vs. Quantity: The Real Sleep Equation
08:49 A Good Night's Sleep Starts in the Morning
09:41 How Feeding and Fasting Signals Cellular Clocks
10:41 How to Reset Your Brain and Body for a Better Night's Sleep
13:49 Should You Take Naps?
14:42 How Does Exercise Impact Sleep?
15:50 Breaking the Cycle of Early Morning Waking
17:01 Battling the Mind Muck Around Sleep
17:35 Identifying Sleep Disorders and Their Solutions
18:24 Sleep Debt Will Drain Your Wealth
19:22 Investing in Sleep for Long-Term Benefits
Hey, hey, welcome back, Ninjas! Today we're talking about why one of the best investments you can make to improve health and wealth longevity is to just go to bed. Not because you're "weak", not because you "can't hack it", but because sleep is the original compounding interest. When you get sleep right, the benefits multiply. Your metabolism improves, your brain clears, your mood and motivation rebounds, you make smarter decisions. When you get sleep wrong, the debt compounds in the other direction, quietly, relentlessly, until the "interest payments" show up as medical bills, bad financial decisions, and a shorter, more expensive end of life. That's why sleep debt is a wealth drain. And many of us are paying that debt unconsciously.
But let's start by reframing what sleep even is. On the surface, it looks like you're powering down, doesn't it? But under the hood, your body is working extraordinarily hard. While your metabolic rate does ease off a bit to conserve energy, your cellular repair revs way up. Your immune system and hormones recalibrate and rebalance, kind of like a careful accountant reconciling the books at the end of the day.
What that means is cortisol settles, growth hormone pulses, the autonomic nervous system shifts from the sympathetic fight or flight mode to the parasympathetic rest and digest mode. And running beneath all of this is your circadian rhythm. That's the 24-hour program that synchronizes thousands of processes so that your physiologic systems aren't operating at cross purposes.
We used to think the brain alone kept time, but now we know that nearly every tissue in your body, your liver, your pancreas, your heart, even fat, expresses clock genes. And they anticipate every demand. When clocks are aligned, metabolism hums. When they're misaligned, biology gets chaotic and inefficient.
Aging complicates this even further. After we hit midlife, the master clock in our brain becomes less robust and our sleep architecture begins to change. Deep slow-wave sleep, the heavy restorative stuff, it begins to shrink. REM sleep gets patchier. So our sleep gets more fragmented and our chronotype shifts, which means that many "night owls" become "morning larks", whether they like it or not.
At the same time, the things that disturb sleep and cause insomnia become more common. That includes trouble falling asleep, trouble staying asleep, or waking too early and not being able to fall back to sleep. Disturbances also include disordered breathing like obstructive sleep apnea or movement disorders like restless leg syndrome. Add to that factors such as pain, night sweats, stress, medication side effects, and it's no surprise that many of us over 50 wake up feeling unrefreshed and of course just assume that that's how it's going to be from here on out.
But disrupted sleep is not a benign side effect of aging. Chronic sleep disruption accelerates aging across multiple physiologic domains. And it all starts with a few simple shifts in metabolism and hormones. Just one week of not getting enough sleep can make us metabolically unhealthy. Glucose tolerance and insulin sensitivity drops into the pre-diabetic range. The stress hormone cortisol drifts up and that triggers an increase in visceral fat accumulation. That's the unhealthy fat that we store in our muscle, liver, and gut. At the same time, the hunger and satiety hormones, ghrelin and leptin, become we crave easy calories. Altogether, these changes are the perfect recipe for accelerated fat storage and cardiometabolic disease risk.
Meanwhile, chronic low-grade inflammation simmers behind the scenes and we become more sensitive to pain. And unfortunately, sleep loss and pain create a negative feedback loop, each one worsening the other. And over time, that contributes to deterioration of our artery health, joint longevity, and our cancer fighting system. In short, sleep worsens healthspan. And none of that's fringe biomolecular aging, it's just basic physiology.
Now when we zoom into the brain, that's where sleep intersects most directly with wealthspan. When we get high quality sleep, the brain's glymphatic system does a good job of clearing out metabolic waste. Some of that waste includes the amyloid beta and tau proteins that contribute to Alzheimer's disease and other vascular dementias. Deep, slow-wave sleep improves the connections between our brain cells. While REM sleep is good for organizing our emotional memories. That's why a good night's sleep can "take the edge off" yesterday's stress. Conversely, when we don't get enough sleep or we sleep poorly, clearance of waste ticks up, and the brain has to do way more with far less. That doesn't just increase your risk of disease and dementia a few years from now, it affects the decisions you make this week.
Sleep-deprived brains chase more short-term rewards, and they discount long-term consequences. They mindlessly click suspicious links, miss fine print, and impulsively say yes to limited-time offers. If you're still in your power decade of peak earnings, that mind state can show up as financial missteps, stalled projects, or even lost opportunities. If you're managing assets, it shows up as over trading, chasing returns, or maybe even buying late night dopamine hits with your credit card. Tiny leaks like that, when you repeat them day after day, can shrink your portfolio fast, just like it'll shrink your health.
Sleep loss can also quickly shrink independence. While we're asleep, musculoskeletal strength and balance are under constant repair. And that's because during sleep, growth hormone and protein synthesis repairs and strengthens our muscle, bones, and joints. On the other hand, chronic poor sleep accelerates loss of muscle, bone, worsens balance and reaction time. And that combination increases your risk of falls and fractures. That's not just a medical problem, it's a lifestyle stopper because it usually leads to hospitalization, rehab, and at best, home modifications, at worst, premature entry into assisted living.
Anyone who has navigated that cascade of events knows just how quickly retirement math collapses under the weight of the expenses. But sleep is one of the cheapest insurance policies against that cascade. So it belongs right next to your asset allocation on the list of things that you can actively manage.
And here's something that I don't think is talked about nearly quality beats quantity. Six and a half hours of consolidated high quality sleep can outperform eight hours of fragmented tossing and turning. So the goal isn't just to get more time in bed, it's to make sure you're getting enough restorative sleep, enough Deep sleep and REM sleep.
Some people will swear that they sleep eight hours and they still feel wrecked. But that's because they're never sinking Deep into that slow brainwave sleep. Apnea is one major culprit. People think they're asleep, but the brain is still firefighting. Eight-clock hours in bed does little for you if you're having apnic oxygen dips that are yanking you out of slow-wave and REM sleep.
Restless legs, nighttime hot flashes, late night alcohol, all those can do similar things to your body. And yes, many sleep medications will knock you out, but they're going to also flatten the very sleep architecture you're trying to restore. Now there are cases where medication will help, and cases where CPAPs or dental appliances are life-changing, especially when disordered breathing is in play. But for the majority of people, the highest return on effort is going to come from rebuilding sleep quality at the behavioral and circadian rhythm level.
And that brings me to a subtle but crucial truth. A good night's sleep begins in the morning. Your brain's central clock is set primarily by daylight. Morning light, especially outdoor light within the first hour of waking, that's going to send a powerful daytime signal that will ripple throughout your endocrine system and determine when melatonin rises in the evening. If you miss that morning anchor, your bedtime is going to become mushy. But if you soak in a bit of morning light, falling asleep will be way easier without even trying. At the other end of the day, darkness also tells your central clock in the brain that it's time to start falling asleep. That's why dimming lights in the evening, getting off of your bright screens, that's an important piece of the puzzle.
Meanwhile, your peripheral clocks, those clock genes I just talked about, they're controlled by activity and feeding and fasting, not just light and dark cycles. When you push most of your calories late into the evening, especially sugar, alcohol, heavy fat loads, that makes those cellular clocks argue with your brain about what time it is. And the result is circadian drift. Your body starts to behave as if it's living in two different time zones. That drift shows up as late night cravings, bedtime heartburn, 3 a.m. waking, and morning brain and like you flew the red-eye.
If you align those clocks though, that drift settles. So if you want better sleep, you have to get on top of those signals to your central and peripheral clocks. You have to make sure that your brain and body are in the same time zone. You can do that by controlling your light and dark exposure, when you eat and when you don't eat, your bedtime and wake time, your activity versus sedentary time.
So just to give you an idea of how to put all those pieces together, let's talk about what you can do for a short focused reset. Something that you're not going to have to micromanage forever, but that's going to get your clocks realigned. I want you to start with a single non-negotiable, a fixed wake time, seven days a week. You don't have to white knuckle your bedtime, just nail the time that you wake up. Get out into real daylight within the first hour of the morning, even if it's cloudy, and even if it's just 10 minutes on the porch with your coffee.
Move your body enough to warm up your core and send some signals to your body that you're alive, you're awake. That could be light yoga, a few calisthenics, or just a short brisk walk. The first meal of the day when you break your fast, that should have some meaningful protein in it, 25 to 35 grams, that's going to help stabilize blood sugar, and that's also going to blunt late-day cravings that tend to sabotage your sleep.
And then you want to guard the back half of your day. Stop drinking caffeine by noon unless you're one of those rare, fast metabolizers. Watch the quiet saboteurs like pdeudophedrine-containing decongestants or PM pain relievers spiked with antihistamines. And you also probably want to forego that nightcap. All those things might help you nod off faster, but they will shred your sleep quality. Close your kitchen down two to three hours before bed. Let those peripheral clocks settle into the fasting mode that they were designed for overnight.
When evening comes, give yourself plenty of time to wind down. Get into your comfortable sleepwear, dim the lights, and no phones, TVs, computers in bed. Treat your bedroom as a sacred space for rest and relaxation. That's going to make a big difference. Trade the evening news or doom scrolling for anything that signals safety. For example, listening to relaxing music or gentle reading, journaling, prayer, stretches, maybe even a warm bath if you've had a hard day. People will roll their eyes at me when I talk about evening rituals until they notice just how reliably their nervous system responds to these kind of cues.
And look, if your sleep has been fragile for months or years, don't force it. The rewiring of your nervous system will take time, so you have to be patient. When you wake in the night and you find yourself spinning, simply enjoy being awake. You don't have to fix anything. Just welcome the bonus quiet time you get to meditate, pray, do breath work, practice gratitude. Maybe do a progressive relaxation exercise from the top of your head to the tips of your toes. If your monkey mind still won't stop chattering, pick a low-cognitive task that's going to occupy your attention without rousing you. Some of my favorites are counting backwards by seven, reciting the alphabet in reverse, or just gently repeating a prayer like a mantra. When drowsiness returns, just roll with it.
Many people will ask me about naps. I do think that it's a smart bridge to take a nap if you're trying to get yourself out of a deep sleep debt. But as soon as you're getting enough high quality sleep, you shouldn't need naps. At most aim for a short early afternoon power nap of only 15 to 20 minutes. You don't want that nap to become a second sleep episode, one that's going to cannibalize your sleep later. If you notice that naps are pushing your bedtime later and later and are stealing your slow-wave Deep sleep, trade them for a brief walk in daylight and a glass of water. That said, I do think a power nap beats mainlining caffeine and sugar to survive an afternoon when you're really tired. The goal isn't to outlaw naps, it's just to stop needing them most days of the week.
And I have to tackle exercise, not just because it's good for you, but because it's a time cue, one that impacts your sleep. Moderate-to-vigorous training, especially with some resistance training in the mix, is one of the most reliable ways to improve your sleep quality. It reduces anxiety and depressive symptoms. It raises and then lowers core temperature in a way that promotes sleepiness, and it helps re-synchronize your circadian rhythms if they've drifted.
People will also ask me whether it's better to exercise in the morning or the evening when it comes to improving sleep. And the short answer is just exercise whenever it works for you and you're most likely to stick with it. That said, the science suggests that doing strength or interval work late in the afternoon does prime Deep sleep better than morning exercise. So consider going to the gym instead of taking that afternoon nap. You're probably going to sleep better. Not only is exercise good for your body, it is good for those cellular clocks. And when you pair that with daytime light exposure and evening darkness, you're going to have a powerful trifecta of helping you sleep.
I want to also address the early morning waking problem because I think it's something that many people struggle with. This is that regular waking around two to four a.m. that's hard for many people to shake. Often it begins with a real it's a full bladder, night sweats, pain, but then it becomes a habit loop. After enough repetitions, those hormones that are on a 24-hour cycle, they adjust their peaks and troughs to your new wake time.
But fortunately, you can break the loop by nudging your schedule, just temporarily. All you have to do is go to bed 30 to 60 minutes later for a few nights while keeping the same fixed wake time every morning. If you do that, you're going to build enough sleep pressure to push through the "witching hour". Combine that with watching your fluid intake before bed, making your room a bit cooler, maybe some Tylenol for the pain, and that 3 a.m. wake-and-worry episode is going to dissolve within a week. If stress is the culprit, try keeping a tiny notebook by your bed where you can dump your worries right before you turn lights out. That way your brain doesn't feel obligated to process those worries all night.
And hey, I realize there's a lot of mind muck around sleep. If you're thinking, "I've always done fine on five hours", I think you should know that that's a subjective adaptation. It's not an objective one. The science shows that people who are restricted to fewer than six hours of sleep per night for just two weeks test like they're legally intoxicated, even though they think they're fine. And if you're one of the people who says, "I'll sleep when I'm dead", recognize the irony there. You will die sooner. Your healthspan and wealthspan will suffer along the way.
For those who say "I've tried everything", I ask whether you've treated the right problem. If you snore, wake with dry mouth, a sore throat, have morning headaches, or your partner watches you stop breathing, you don't need a lavender scented pillow, you need an evaluation for sleep apnea. A CPAP isn't a badge of failure. It is a precision fix for someone with obstructed airflow.
If your legs buzz at night and you must move them just to get relief, you probably don't need a better evening routine, you need an evaluation for restless leg syndrome. If you're taking medications with stimulating side effects, no amount of morning daylight is going to out-compete them. The right diagnosis will take you from "I've tried everything" to "I finally changed the right thing".
But let's circle back to why sleep debt will drain your wealth, not just impair your health. Chronic sleep deprivation doesn't just push weight, blood pressure, and glucose in the wrong direction. It raises the odds you're going to be paying for more doctor's visits, scans, prescriptions, and procedures. Poor sleep degrades judgment in a way that no financial strategy can fully protect you from. You'll be more impulsive, more distractible, and less strategic. You'll click "buy now" more often and read contracts less closely.
And the worst scenario, loss of independence, becomes more likely. Not just because of the diseases we fear, but because of falls. Falls relate directly to muscle imbalance, remember, which relates directly to sleep quality. That first broken hip is often the beginning of the most expensive years of a person's life, financially and emotionally. If a tiny investment of adjusting your environment and habits can lower that risk, the return on that investment beats most index funds.
So my challenge to you today, pick a wake time you can live with for the next seven days. Set an alarm for it. Also set an alarm for your evening wind down. Tomorrow when that alarm goes off, get into real daylight and move. Eat enough protein at breakfast and lunch so that you don't need a rescue snack or a nap at 4 p.m. When that evening alarm goes off, treat it as a last call for screens and snacks. Close the kitchen, dim the lights, pick a couple of calming rituals that you could enjoy, every night.
Expect that you might have a few messy nights while your body adjusts to the new rhythm, but keep a consistent wake time no matter what. Use a sleep log to track a few basics if it helps. You'll notice patterns. If you keep a log, you might notice, for example, you sleep better on days you exercise, days you don't drink alcohol, or when you read instead of doom scrolling. Most people are going to start to feel improvements by day five to seven. Almost everyone sees results by day 14, if they're truly running the experiment.
If you do these basics and you still struggle, escalate like a scientist. Rule out sleep apnea, restless leg syndrome, that sort of thing. Review your medication labels. Treat any kind of menopausal night sweats or hot flashes with hormone therapy. Use technology like sunrise alarms or white noise machines where it helps. Just keep it simple. Wearables can be useful, but just know that they do estimate sleep architecture fairly poorly. So use them just as a compass, not as a tyrant.
Treating insomnia is not just about "sleep hygiene", it's about improving the relationship between your bed and your brain. Sleep should be pleasurable, not painful. Something you look forward to, not something you dread. Importantly, sleep is foundational to your best Next Act. It extends your healthspan and wealthspan by reducing your healthcare costs, by sharpening your mind that makes money choices, and by helping you maintain the strength and balance that will preserve your independence. You wouldn't skip maintaining the foundation of your house, so don't skip maintaining the foundation of your body.
And hey, I know sleep can be challenging. If you'd like some support putting this "sleep reset" into practice, or you're dealing with a more stubborn problem and need a tailored plan, book a free discovery call with me. You'll find a link in the show notes. We'll get your circadian clocks realigned and protect your most important assets, your brain, your strength, your independence, and of course your wealthspan.
Until next time, my friends, live well, love more, age less.