Look at how a well-run company protects its leadership team.
It carries key-person insurance on the executives it can’t easily replace. It has a succession plan in case someone leaves or can’t continue. It invests in cybersecurity so one compromised laptop doesn’t take down the business.
Every one of those is a smart, responsible decision. And almost none of them touch the thing the whole structure depends on: the health, energy and vitality of the executives themselves.
The company has a plan for losing its leaders. It rarely has a plan for keeping them running well.
The risk nobody’s covering
Key-person insurance is a policy a company buys on an owner, a top executive or another critical person, to protect the business from the financial hit of losing them. Succession planning does something similar for continuity.
But both are built for after something has gone wrong. Neither does much to make that outcome less likely.
Meanwhile, look at the sleep numbers.
According to the CDC’s latest data, 30.5% of US adults got less than 7 hours of sleep on average in 2024. Seven hours is the minimum the American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends for adults. Among adults aged 35 to 64, the prime years for most executives, it’s about a third.
That’s not a fringe problem. That’s a third of the leadership bench running short.
Now, about you
So let me stop talking about companies and talk to you.
Whether you’re a CEO, a CFO, a VP running a region, a partner at a firm or a founder wearing every hat, your organization has probably already decided you’re worth protecting. There may be a policy and a succession plan with your name on them.
None of that will help you sleep tonight, think clearly in tomorrow’s leadership meeting, or notice that your energy has been sliding for six months.
That part is on you. It’s also the part you can actually control.
The part you won’t feel
One small study from 2013, with just 12 people, looked at what happens when you take caffeine at different times before bed. Participants took 400 mg of caffeine, roughly two to three cups of coffee, at bedtime, three hours before bed, or six hours before bed.
Even at six hours out, measured sleep dropped by more than an hour. And here’s the part that stuck with me: participants mostly didn’t notice. Their own sleep diaries didn’t pick up what the sleep monitors did.
It’s a small study, so I wouldn’t build a philosophy on it. But the pattern is worth noticing. The afternoon coffee before your last block of meetings can cost you sleep you never realize you lost.
That’s what makes this kind of risk dangerous. It doesn’t announce itself. It just builds.
Why executives miss it
You’re good at spotting risk. You do it all day, in the market, the pipeline and the P&L. So why miss this one?
Tired becomes part of the job. When the whole leadership team is exhausted, being exhausted starts to feel like proof you’re doing it right.
Pushing through gets rewarded. The all-nighter before the big close gets retold as a war story. Nobody tells the story of the executive who went to bed at 10 and made a better call the next morning.
The decline is slow. Energy, focus, mood, recovery. None of it falls off a cliff. It slips a little at a time, slowly enough that each new level feels normal. You don’t notice you’re running at 70% because you can’t quite remember what 100% felt like.
If a key metric in your business drifted like that, you’d catch it. You’d have a dashboard and a monthly review. For themselves, most executives have nothing.
Underwrite yourself
You don’t need a total life overhaul. You need the same discipline you already bring to the business. Here’s where I’d start.
Get a baseline before something feels wrong. Baseline labs give you a reference point. If you only test once you feel off, you have nothing to compare against. Numbers mean a lot more to a clinician when there’s a “before” to look at.
Treat a wearable like a smoke detector, not a diagnosis. Sleep and recovery trackers are useful for spotting trends. If your sleep has been sliding for weeks, that’s a signal to pay attention. It isn’t a diagnosis, and it doesn’t replace a conversation with a licensed clinician.
Set a caffeine cutoff and actually keep it. Pick a time that fits your schedule and treat it like any other company policy. The point isn’t to give up coffee. It’s to stop letting the afternoon cup quietly decide how you sleep.
If “just tired” lasts more than a few weeks, get a real workup. Not a fourth coffee. A proper look at what’s going on, with someone qualified to interpret it. Ongoing fatigue can have a lot of possible causes, and guessing isn’t a strategy.
None of this is complicated. In health, like in business, the boring, consistent habits usually lower risk the most.
Don’t run yourself without data
You’d never let a quarter go by without knowing the numbers.
So don’t run yourself without them either.
Your company already decided you’re worth insuring. Take the same view of your own health: measure it, watch the trends, and act early when something drifts. And if you help decide how your company protects its leaders, it may be worth asking whether health belongs in that conversation too.
That’s why we built The Vitality Collective the way we did. Everything starts with data, through custom labs and genetic testing. Labs give you and a licensed clinician something real to work from. For anything medical, including whether any treatment makes sense, talk with a licensed clinician. We’re available nationwide.
If you want to talk through where to start, you can request a private call here: https://book.thevitalitycollective.co/book
And I’m curious: what’s the one health metric you wish you’d started tracking sooner?
Educational only, not medical advice. I’m the founder of The Vitality Collective, not a clinician. Talk with a licensed clinician before starting any treatment. Some medications a clinician may prescribe are not FDA-approved. Individual results vary. Available nationwide.
Sources
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics. “Short Sleep Duration and Sleep Difficulties Among Adults: United States, 2024.” NCHS Data Brief No. 559, April 2026. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db559.htm
- American Academy of Sleep Medicine. “Late afternoon and early evening caffeine can disrupt sleep at night.” November 2013 (on Drake et al., “Caffeine Effects on Sleep Taken 0, 3, or 6 Hours before Going to Bed,” Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, 2013). https://aasm.org/late-afternoon-and-early-evening-caffeine-can-disrupt-sleep-at-night/
- Investopedia. “Key Person Insurance: Essential Guide for Businesses.” https://www.investopedia.com/terms/k/keypersoninsurance.asp