Mental Fitness Starts in the Dark…

Sleep is the first agreement I make with myself every day. Everything else—discipline, patience, kindness, that mysterious thing we call “mental fitness”—is built on whether I honored that agreement last night or tried to negotiate with my Apple Watch like a hostage taker who thinks ten more minutes will fix a lifetime of poor choices.

I used to believe I was just “not a morning person.” Then I spent months walking across the country, sleeping in a new place almost every night—strange rooms with stranger noises, church parking lots that felt like silence with teeth, a cheap motel where the air-conditioner rattled like it was filing a complaint, a hammock named Maple strung over a creek while frogs heckled me like tiny drunk comedians. Some nights I shared a wall with a midnight television preacher. Other nights it was a pack of raccoons. I learned quickly that morning fog wasn’t a personality trait. It was biology waving a red flag.

Here’s the unsexy truth: when you wake and go back to sleep, your brain can tumble into another round of sleep processes—light stages if you’re lucky, deeper if you’re not—and then you rip yourself out of them again. That choppy “sleep, yank, sleep, yank” isn’t rest; it’s whiplash. The groggy, clumsy, “why does my toothbrush feel like a power tool” feeling has a name: sleep inertia. It’s the hangover you didn’t even get a good party for. Snoozing doesn’t erase it; it lengthens it. If mental fitness is our daily gym, sleep inertia is the twenty-pound ankle weight we forgot we put on.

I met sleep inertia properly one morning in West Texas. My Apple Watch buzzed, I heroically tapped snooze, and ten minutes later I woke up feeling like my soul was three feet behind my body, waving for me to slow down. I tried to start walking anyway. Every step felt like I was assembling myself from spare parts. Decision-making? Slower. Patience? Thin. Humor? Missing, presumed asleep. That day taught me something the hard way: your brain doesn’t care how charming you are or how much grit you pack; if you shortchange sleep and then play ping-pong with wake-up signals, your brain will turn you into a friendly zombie with opinions.

The science doesn’t need theatrics. Sleep runs in cycles—roughly an hour and a half-ish, a little more, a little less—and the depth of the sleep you’re in when you wake matters. Rip yourself out of the deeper stuff and the fog is heavier. Stack that on top of road-trip exhaustion, new-bed-every-night chaos, and the emotional labor of being a human who cares about other humans, and you’ve got a perfect storm. I don’t need a lab coat to tell me the morning after poor sleep is exactly when my thoughts spiral faster, my tolerance shrinks, and my kindness budget gets slashed.

Eventually, I ditched the nightly watch altogether. I taught myself to wake naturally, no buzzing, no digital chime, just my own body deciding it was time. And something magical happened: my circadian rhythm caught on. The sun started waking me with its quiet persistence, my eyes opening before light even fully filled the sky. No fog, no fight—just a slow, certain shift from night into day.

Travel taught me the difference between sleep and stillness. Sleep is non-negotiable maintenance. Stillness is alignment. On the road, I grabbed both where I could: five minutes on a church step watching the horizon exhale; two minutes with my eyes closed while the sun warmed my face; ten calm breaths with my hands on Gertrude, my emotional support chariot, promising myself I could take the next hill. None of those moments replaced sleep. But they stitched together my unraveled edges and kept me from spending the whole day at the mercy of my moods.

There’s this myth that mental toughness means we can out-work biology if our character is shiny enough. Cute idea. Biology accepts no coupons. The bravest thing I did some nights was admit I needed quiet more than I needed to be impressive. I started treating sleep the way athletes treat recovery: not as a reward for doing well, but as the thing that makes “doing well” possible. My performance—miles walked, conversations held with grace, decisions made without emotional tax—rose and fell on that single variable. When I slept well, I could find the funny in a flat tire. When I didn’t, a paper straw could start a war.

The stillness part is where mental fitness becomes a practice. A lot of people hear “stillness” and think monk on a mountain. My version looks like shutting the door on doomscrolling and giving my nervous system a hallway pass. It’s three minutes of breathing where the exhale is longer than the inhale. It’s telling my brain, “Not now. We are off duty,” like I’m the manager of a very dramatic theater troupe. It’s noticing when my thoughts feel like a crowded bus stop and choosing, on purpose, to let one bus leave without me. Sometimes it’s a square of dark chocolate on my tongue, letting it melt while I breathe and reminding myself this body is a home, not a project.

People love to complicate sleep with gadgets and hero routines. I’m not against tools; I’m against outsourcing common sense. Darkness helps. Cool rooms help. The same wake time most days helps more than you think. Light in your eyes in the morning tells your brain what planet you’re on. Room noise? Earplugs are tiny miracles. If your life is loud, schedule your quiet like it’s a meeting with someone you respect. And if your mind is sprinting at night, don’t bully it into silence—write the list, download the thought, then tell it you’ll handle it in the morning when everyone has their shoes on.

Discipline shows up here in the gentlest way. Motivation is an emotion; it comes and goes like weather. Discipline is a choice we pre-make while we’re calm. I pre-made a lot of choices on the road. The watch slept on the other side of the tent—until it didn’t sleep there at all. Maple knew she’d get fifteen minutes at dusk, even if I was tired, because that quiet paid me back with interest the next morning. When I broke my own rules—because I’m not a robot, I’m a person—the next day reminded me why the rules existed.

There’s a secret dividend to caring for sleep and stillness: your kindness comes back online. I can muscle through a day on grit, but I can’t fake being grounded. Sleep is where I refill my patience for strangers and loved ones alike. It’s where I get the bandwidth to choose the generous story when my brain is auditioning for worst-case scenarios. It’s where the edges of grief soften enough to carry, and hope grows strong legs. When I’m rested, I don’t need the world to behave so I can be okay. That is freedom disguised as a bedtime.

If you’re reading this with heavy lids and a calendar that looks like a Tetris board, start small. Go to bed ten minutes earlier tonight. If you’re still using an alarm, put it where you can’t pet it. Or, when you’re ready, try waking without it. Let the sun do the honors. Drink water. Open the curtains and let the morning tell you a story. Give yourself one pocket of stillness midday, even if it’s the length of a traffic light, and breathe like you’re on your own side. You won’t wake up every day feeling like a sunrise advertisement. Some days you’ll feel human and messy and miraculous all at once. That counts.

I used to chase “optimal.” Now I chase “enough.” Enough sleep to give my brain a fair fight. Enough stillness to hear myself under the noise. Enough recovery to keep going with humor intact. On the days I honor that, my mental fitness isn’t a trophy case; it’s a quiet competence. I can do the next right thing. I can meet hard mornings without negotiating with a piece of wearable tech. I can be the kind of steady that holds when the wind shows off.

Sleep is not the finish line; it’s the start gun. Stillness is how we aim. Together they turn our days from reaction to choice, from stumbling into the world to walking toward it on purpose. And on the mornings when the world wakes up cranky and I do too, I remember that a foggy brain doesn’t mean a failed life. It means I owe myself what I would offer anyone I love: a glass of water, a deep breath, and another honest night of rest.