CEO Sleep Rituals: Practices for a Restful Night

Most CEO sleep advice stops at “get eight hours,” which is the wrong metric. As the co-founder of a sleep clinic, I optimize for how my sleep is aging me, not just how long it lasts.

The one ritual that changed my sleep most is a hard wind-down cutoff about an hour before bed: no bright screens, no email, no heavy decisions, and I cool the bedroom down. That drop in core body temperature is the physiological trigger for deep sleep, so cooling the room does more than any supplement.

I also protect the first three hours of sleep, when the deepest, most restorative stages happen, by keeping a consistent wake time every day, weekends included. Consistency beats duration.

The uncomfortable truth for driven people: you can feel fine and still be sleeping like someone years older. At Dumbo Health we turn sleep biomarkers into a single SleepLongevityAge score, and seeing that number changed my habits more than any wearable ever did.

Running a wellness tech company comes with an odd irony: I spend all day thinking about other people’s sleep, breathwork, and recovery, but my own evenings used to be a mess of scrolling through user feedback and half-finished Slack threads at 11pm. It took me embarrassingly long to actually apply what our own practitioners preach.

The one thing that’s made the biggest difference isn’t some elaborate 10-step routine – it’s moving my workout earlier and changing what kind of workout it is. I train most evenings, and for years I defaulted to whatever felt most efficient: quick, intense circuits to burn off the day’s stress. What I didn’t realize was that I was spiking my cortisol right before bed and then wondering why I’d lie there wired at midnight.

Now I do strength-based supersets with dumbbells – slow tempo, controlled reps, nothing that leaves my heart rate through the roof. Think two exercises back to back, a proper rest, then repeat, rather than sprinting through a HIIT-style session. It still feels like real training and I’m still building strength, but my body isn’t flooded with adrenaline by the time I’m trying to wind down an hour later. That single shift – intensity of the workout, not just timing – did more for my sleep than any supplement or gadget I’ve tried.

After that, my actual “ritual” is intentionally boring. I meditate, even if it’s just ten minutes, because it’s the one part of my day where I’m not solving a problem for the business. No phone in the bedroom. I keep the room properly dark and slightly cool, since I’ve noticed temperature affects me more than I expected.

If I had to give one piece of advice to another CEO reading this: audit the intensity of whatever you’re doing in the two hours before bed, not just whether you’re doing “something relaxing.” A lot of us think we’re winding down because we’ve swapped emails for a workout or a podcast, but if that activity is still activating your nervous system, you’re not actually decompressing – you’re just changing the channel. Sleep quality followed once I actually separated stimulation from recovery in my evenings, rather than assuming any non-work activity counted as rest.

As a founder, I learned the importance of good sleep the hard way. In the early years of building Naarg, I worked almost all the time. Even when I wasn’t physically working, my mind was constantly occupied with client deliveries, project execution, team management, and thinking about how we could do better.

Over time, I realized that no matter how much you accomplish, there will always be another challenge to solve, another opportunity to pursue, or another goal to achieve. The work never truly ends.

That realization changed my approach. One practice that has made the biggest difference is creating a mental “shutdown” routine before bed. About 30 minutes before sleeping, I put away my laptop and phone, write down any unfinished thoughts or priorities for the next day, and consciously give myself permission to stop thinking about work until morning.

I’ve also learned that having a routine and structure helps you achieve far more than simply working longer hours. A rested mind makes better decisions, solves problems more creatively, and leads people more effectively than an exhausted one.

Today, I don’t measure productivity by the number of hours I work. I measure it by the quality of my thinking, the clarity of my decisions, and the impact I create. Ironically, learning when to switch off has made me a better leader than constantly staying switched on ever did.

I’ve found that shutting down the day with a simple gratitude walk around our campus in San Benito helps me unwind better than anything else. At Sunny Glen Children’s Home, we pour everything into restoring hope for kids who’ve faced abuse or neglect, and that work doesn’t clock out easily. After long days supporting build care and residential services or checking in on youth at the Allen House, my mind still races with next priorities. So I step outside, phone off, and name three things that went right: a breakthrough moment tied to counseling at the Poenisch Counseling Center, a kid smiling at dinner, the quiet strength of our team. It’s not fancy, but it clears the noise fast.

We’ve been at this since 1936 and have served more than 25,000 children across the Rio Grande Valley, so you learn quick that rest isn’t optional if you’re going to keep showing up with the energy these kids deserve. That short walk signals my brain the tradeoffs of the day are finished. I protect sleep the same way we prioritize work when resources run tight: lock in what matters most so tomorrow stays strong. No screens, no scrolling emails about refugee support or family needs. Just the walk, a glass of water, and lights out.

This practice has been particularly effective because it builds the same trust we aim for with our kids: clear boundaries, honest closure, and room to breathe. I don’t need a complex routine. This one habit has improved my sleep quality more than any app or gadget ever could. When morning comes, I’m ready to lead with the conviction that drives our CARF Accredited mission of holistic care rooted in Christian love. You can’t pour from an empty cup, and kids in crisis need us full. Protect that wind-down window like it’s non-negotiable. It works every time.

To get ready for an enjoyable night’s sleep, I have developed a consistent pre-sleep habit, consisting of gently stretching for 10 minutes prior to entering into bed. I take slow, passive stretches to loosen tension in my hips, lower back, and shoulders.

The physical routine is very successful in reducing the accumulated physical stress and stiffness from sitting at my desk all day. After loosening my muscles physically, I am able to easily quiet my mind and enter into a state of sleep. A major improvement has been reduced nighttime rolling and flipping over. In addition, I now fall asleep quickly and awaken with no discomfort or muscle tightness, which has greatly increased both my morning energy level and overall sense of well-being throughout the day.

I’m Cody Jensen, founder and CEO of Searchbloom. Honest answer, I don’t have a candlelit wind-down ritual, and I’m skeptical of CEOs who claim they do. My practice is simpler and harder. I protect my bedtime like it’s a client partner meeting I refuse to cancel.

Here’s why that matters. I start at 6am, every day, because that’s the only stretch where the noise hasn’t started yet. I get three hours working on the business before anyone else is awake, and that hour is worth triple what a 10pm hour is worth to me. The catch is you cannot steal from tomorrow morning by staying up tonight. So the ritual isn’t what I do in bed. It’s the discipline of actually getting there on time.

The other piece, I eat one big dinner early, around 4:30 or 5. I’m not going to bed fighting a full stomach at 9pm, and my body’s settled long before my head hits the pillow.

People chase sleep gadgets and miss the obvious. Guard the boundary, right? A protected bedtime beats every hack on the market.

For years, I treated sleep as something that happened after the work was done. Running two companies across multiple time zones taught me that approach doesn’t work. Now I treat sleep as something I actively prepare my nervous system for, and that shift has made a measurable difference in how rested I feel.

The one practice I don’t skip is a 20-minute vibroacoustic session before bed. Instead of trying to “switch my brain off”, I use sound vibrations as a physical cue that it’s time to transition from work mode into recovery. I’ve found that giving my body a consistent somatic signal is far more effective than relying on willpower to stop thinking about tomorrow’s decisions.

One lesson I’ve learned as a CEO is that you can’t think your way into rest. You have to give your nervous system a physical reason to believe the workday is over.

My most effective habit is keeping work and rest in completely separate rooms. I have a dedicated workspace, and my bedroom is strictly me time, nothing work-related ever comes in with me. I read once that separating rooms like this trains your brain to link the office with productivity and the bedroom with switching off, and it genuinely works. The moment I walk in, I can feel myself start to calm down.

From there it’s a slow wind-down. I make a cup of chamomile and lavender tea, read a proper book, and keep the phone well out of the bed, because one quick check always turns into a lost hour. The other small thing that helped more than I expected is switching to warm yellow light about two hours before bed, which quietly tells my brain sleep is coming.

Running an agency, my head doesn’t switch off easily, so having a routine that eases me into rest rather than expecting me to flip a switch has been the real game-changer.

I have taken a very serious approach to ending every single of my days, by spending at least the last 15 minutes reading either fiction books, historical biographies, etc. and then shutting off the lights. Reading a story that has absolutely nothing to do with work is a way for me to separate myself from all the daily business thinking and strategic planning I do during the day. Since implementing this new practice, my head is much quieter and less active when I go to bed. This slight shift in cognition removes the brain-fog feeling from all those late evening brainstorming sessions and prevents those nagging project ideas from floating around in my head. This is an amazing example of how focusing on your ability to relax, can improve your overall quality of sleep. It allows you to get great restful sleep each and every time you go to bed, so that you will be able to get back up the next morning and attack whatever challenges lie ahead with clarity and purpose.

After my doctor recommended I get at least 6 to 7 hours of sleep, which was 2 to 3 hours more than usual, I devised a new pre-sleep routine, which helps me sleep longer and better. I don’t drink caffeinated beverages after 3 PM, and near bedtime, I avoid streaming devices and screens. I shake off the day’s conversations, deliberations, and challenges with yoga stretches and conscious breathing exercises.

I retire around the same time every night. If I find myself staring at the ceiling, I’ll listen to a guided meditation on YouTube. I typically fall asleep during the meditation. An additional benefit is that, while I’m relaxing in an alpha brainwave state, the meditation topic takes root in my subconscious mind, which helps me incorporate strategies, such as maintaining a calm state in difficult situations, into my daily life.

It’s ironic and kind of fitting that I run a company dedicated to helping people sleep better at night, and I’m a CEO who has to work at powering down at night.

Through 20 years of working with individuals whose sleep is impacted by incontinence, I’ve learned that whatever prevents someone from sleeping soundly is rarely physical. What keeps people awake at night is mental clutter: Will I wake up in the middle of the night tonight? Will I? There’s anxiety around not being able to talk about what’s bothering you. That realization from our customers became my philosophy on my own nighttime routine: it’s not about having the perfect routine; it’s making sure you clear your mental clutter so it doesn’t spill into bed with you.

For me, the key has been finishing my day by watching or reading something that will make me laugh—not a brainstorming meeting, not reviewing my day’s metrics, not responding to that last email. I mean, really laugh. We’ve built a business centered on using humor to normalize one of the most taboo health topics out there, so I can personally attest that laughter can do what no other productivity ritual can: it breaks the cycle. Harvard studies we cite all the time in our messaging have found that every minute you sleep you can add to your life. Literally, minutes equals years. So for me, powering down starts with powering up on laughs.

My honest answer is that the ritual which improves my sleep does not happen at bedtime, it happens at lunch.

The usual advice is a wind-down routine, no screens, tea, reading. Those are fine, but for a founder they treat the symptom. The reason a CEO cannot sleep is rarely the hour before bed. It is a head still running on the day’s problems, and no amount of chamomile fixes that if the underlying pressure has nowhere to go.

Two things actually work for me. The first is daily exercise, which I do at lunchtime, not at night. A session on the treadmill or stair climber doubles as a mindfulness reset. It clears my head, lowers my stress, and burns off the restless energy that would otherwise keep me up. By the time night comes, the day has already been metabolized.

The second is separating real problems from imagined ones before they follow me to bed. A lot of what keeps founders awake is not an actual issue, it is the fear of what people will think if something goes wrong, a scenario that has not happened. When I catch that, I name the real, fixable problem, write down my first instinct and what I do not yet know, and turn it into something I can act on in the morning. A concrete problem waiting for daylight is far easier to sleep on than a vague dread with no shape.

If you want one practice, move your unwind earlier. Handle the stress in the day through movement and by turning worries into defined problems, and bedtime takes care of itself.

Every night I check in with myself mentally and reflect on the good and the bad of the day. This helps me process my feelings and psychologically detach as I get ready for bed.

The good days and the bad days come and go, and the nightly reflections allow me to stay focused and grounded. CEOs must always keep in mind that we are not defined by our failures or successes.

When you detach, you can see mistakes just as missteps without exaggerating their negative impact. You can see success for its ephemeral nature and not get caught up in it. You get to start each day fresh, detached from the sting of yesterday’s failures and unaffected by the comforts of past successes.