Across the modern workplace, a quiet cycle has taken hold: stress fractures sleep, and fractured sleep amplifies stress, until the very faculties we rely on for leadership — judgment, emotional regulation, clear decision-making — begin to erode from within. A psychiatrist who studies high performers argues that what organizations have long mistaken for dedication — the midnight email, the four-hour boast — is in fact a slow degradation of the very capacity they are trying to cultivate. The evidence, built over four decades of neuroscience, points toward a counterintuitive truth: rest is not th