What One of the Greatest Basketball Player of All Time Can Teach You About Sleep and Closing Out the Day.

It was Friday, May 12, 2023. LeBron James woke up knowing what he had to do.

The Lakers had started the season with a miserable 2–10 record. They weren't in sync. Their shooting was lazy. Nothing seemed to be right.

Six months later, they found themselves hosting the Golden State Warriors in Los Angeles for Game 6 of the semifinals. The Warriors were the defending champions. Future Hall-of-Fame shooter Stephen Curry was on the other bench.

Win, and the Lakers went to the Western Conference Finals. Lose, and they flew to San Francisco for Game 7.

LeBron was 38. It was his 20th NBA season. One of 12 players to ever compete that long. The Warriors players trying to guard him had spent part of their childhood watching him on television. He was their idol before he became the enemy.

He made 10 of 14 shots. He scored 30 points, grabbed 9 rebounds, handed out 9 assists, got 2 steals, and blocked a shot. It was a blowout for the Lakers — winning 122–101 and clinching the series 4–2.

Crypto.com Arena came apart at the seams. Purple towels were in the air. Teammates ran toward him. LeBron paused to hug Curry at midcourt. Pure ecstasy. Everywhere,

The Lakers had beaten a team that had spent most of the previous decade ending other teams' dreams. It was a winning day by any reasonable measure. The box score says so. The building says so. The confetti on the ground says so. The highlights on ESPN still say so.

But the part that really matters begins after the cameras turn off and the fans leave. The interviews end. The locker room thins out. Somebody from the team begins asking about the flight, tomorrow's treatment, the next opponent. There is food somewhere. There are family calls, messages, trainers, people who need a minute with the person who had just carried an arena on his back.

Then, eventually, it gets quiet. And LeBron has to go to bed.

Going to bed is a skill he has perfected by working with his longtime trainer Mike Mancias. He needs 8 or 9 hours of sleep. Sometimes more. And he protects it.

Each part of his routine is specific, tested, and constantly being improved.

He keeps the room cool, between 68 and 70 degrees. The phone and television go off 30 minutes before bed — the phone is placed in another room. If his brain is still spinning a little too quickly he turns on nature sounds. The sound of rain on leaves never fails to settle him down.

This is not the glamorous part of being LeBron James. Nobody builds a shoe around getting sleep. Nobody hangs a poster of a dark hotel room. Nobody tells a kid to put their phone in the other room because it makes for a great commercial.

But it is a key reason why he has played more basketball in minutes, games, or seasons, than anyone else in NBA history, while the rest of his draft class had long since moved into the television booth, the front office, or just regular life.

The part of his career that looks the least like work is the part that made the rest of his accomplishments possible.

Most healthy adults need at least seven hours of sleep regularly. That comes from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and Sleep Research Society, two U.S. sleep-medicine organizations. It does not mean every adult needs exactly eight. Illness, pregnancy, athletic training, your stage of life, and sleep problems can change what you need.

Still, 7 hours is a useful target. Too many people turn 5 or 6 hours into a silly flex about toughness — or how committed they are to achieving their goals.

The evidence is shocking.

A controlled study by Hans Van Dongen and colleagues put healthy adults through 14 consecutive nights with four, six, or eight hours in bed. The people in the four-hour and six-hour conditions showed cumulative losses in sustained attention, working memory, and cognitive speed. The people assigned eight hours in bed did not show the same progressive decline.

What is especially interesting is the short-sleep groups did not report feeling impaired in a way that matched the full drop in their actual, measured performance. In other words, you can think that you're OK and even sometimes feel like you're OK; but you can't perform at your best without getting enough sleep.

That study does not say every person who sleeps six hours has the same deficit. It studied healthy adults in a laboratory. It measured time in bed. But it does cut through the claim that repeated short nights are harmless if you can still drag yourself through the next day.

This is where culture gets slippery. We praise the person who is visibly tired and still available. We do not see the missed detail, the sharp reply, the task that took twice as long, or the bad decision that looked fine at the time.

We call them heroic instead of asking what the fatigue is costing.

The cost of exhaustion can be punishing.

Arianna Huffington, the founder of HuffPost, has told the story of April 6, 2007 many times. She collapsed from sleep deprivation and raw exhaustion. She woke in a pool of blood with a broken cheekbone.

Sometimes the cost is even higher.

On June 7, 2014, a Walmart tractor-trailer hit a limo van in slowed construction-zone traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike near Cranbury at full speed. Comedian, Tracy Morgan, was nearly killed. His friend, James McNair, died.

The National Transportation Safety Board found that the Walmart driver's fatigue, due to not getting enough sleep before working, was the reason for the crash. They found that the driver had been working for almost 33 straight hours and that fatigue delayed his response — with deadly consequences.

The same thing was found for the fatal crash of Flight 3407. In its investigation of the 2009 crash near Buffalo, flight detectives concluded that fatigue impaired the pilots' performance.

None of this is intended to be a scare tactic. You don't need to pretend that a rough night makes you dangerous or broken. But you need to be clear that repeatedly ignoring sleep will make you less of a high performer while still convinced that you're making good decisions.

You need a way to close the day. To end this 24-hour period and regroup for the next.

It's all too easy to treat sleep as whatever remains after you have worked, worried, answered messages, and stared at a screen long enough to get tired. You can label it a full day because you have been busy from morning until night.

But busy is not closed.

An unfinished conversation follows you home. So does a snotty answer you gave somebody. So does an invoice you avoided, a meeting that went badly, a promise you did not keep, and that stupid little thing you said that you wish you could pull back into your mouth.

You know that sleep matters, but you struggle to get to sleep because you don't have a repeatable process to finish the day first. You don't need a fancy nighttime ritual. You just need a way to unpack the day before it consumes the hours you should be sleeping.

My simple routine starts with a notebook and post-it note that I can throw away when I'm done processing. Some nights I work it all out in 3 minutes. Some nights I need more time. The point is not to make the page pretty. I want honest insights, a way to let it go, and a mission for tomorrow. Then I want to reset and do better tomorrow.

It's three separate, simple skills that combine to help you close out the day:

Look back. Let it go. Look forward.

Start with an awareness of how the day went.

Joel Gascoigne, the Buffer co-founder, often shares he has a regularly scheduled 20-minute evening walk that he starts at 7:30. It's his way to signal a technology cutoff and a way to disengage from the day. Asking himself the hard questions about the day.

What went well? What was hard? What did you avoid? Where were you generous? Where were you defensive, scared, present, or absent?

Write down one word or one short sentence that highlights something positive you accomplished. A hard conversation you had. The workout you finished. The task you accomplished before fear had time to talk you out of it. Maybe you completely bombed on an assignment but stood tall and kept going.

Don't stop there. Write down what went wrong too. A sharp answer. The hour you spent dodging work to be done. A promise you missed.

It helps to use plain sentences: "I got defensive." "I avoided the work." "I let one bad moment ruin the afternoon."

Talking about it in those terms is useful because owning the behavior allows you to do something different about it tomorrow.

By the way, you can name a mistake you made without needing to make a verdict on who you are as a person. Good people can have bad days. Elite performers can do things that are inexcusable.

Being aware of where you can improve doesn't mean you need to improve right now. Practicing awareness puts you in the honest headspace to tweak our behavior before little issues become obstacles that stop you from achieving your goals.

Feel free to use the two questions that I ask myself when I am looking back at the day.

Don't force an answer. And don't make any judgments about yourself or anyone else. Just unpack the day. Stack the facts. And be honest about where and when you could do better.

There is a parable about a traveler on a long journey who comes to a river that blocks his path. With no bridge in sight, he sets to work: he fells a tree, strips the bark, and shapes the wood. After several days of effort, he has a small, sturdy boat.

Confident in his craftsmanship, he pushes off and reaches the far bank safely. But as he prepares to continue on foot, a thought creeps in:

What if there are more rivers ahead?

The boat might prove useful again. So instead of leaving it on the shore, he ties a rope around it, loops the other end around his waist, and sets off — the boat dragging behind him through dirt and mud and rocks.

Days pass. His rations dwindle. Each step costs twice what it should, the hull catching on roots, gouging the earth, tearing at his hips where the rope has rubbed him raw. The river is long gone.

He walks slower. He sleeps worse. And one evening, staring at the dark shape of the boat lying beside him, the truth finally lands: holding on is killing him.

The hardest things to release are not the ones that hurt you. They're the ones that helped you once, and now they're just dead weight.

You can't hold on to everything that happens in a day without it slowing you down. You have to find a way to let it go.

Take a minute to process the emotions that you are feeling — especially the negative feelings that you are still carrying: the anger, the guilt, the grievance, the argument you keep having in your head.

I use a Post-It. The same cheap paper that I use for my morning routine. And throughout the day. I write down what I am upset about. I name names. I get angry. And then I write the words "letting it go". And I tear it up. And put it in the trash.

It is a small physical act. It does not attempt to change the facts of what happened. It is my way of reminding myself that carrying this emotion only slows me down in the race for tomorrow.

Forgiveness does not erase facts. It does not excuse harm, remove a boundary, cancel an apology, or replace repair. If I need to make a call, document what happened, pay a bill, tell the truth, or apologize, I write that down for work to be done tomorrow.

Forgiveness is my way to stop resentment from growing.

The number one target for my practice of forgiveness? It's me.

Not the person who cut me off in traffic. Not the client who ghosted. Not the friend who let me down. Me. For the sharp answer. For the avoided work. For the afternoon I let one bad moment ruin.

As a relentless high-performer, I keep expecting myself to be perfect in a day. No low moments. No performance below my best. But we're human. The expectation of perfection is unrealistic — for each of us.

Let it go. Forgive yourself. So tomorrow you can wake up unshackled by the feelings and events of yesterday.

Planning ahead is a powerful, proven strategy to achieve consistently improving results.

Morning routines get all the attention. But a morning routine is just the payoff for whatever you did the night before. If you don't close today, you can't properly launch tomorrow.

In 1918, Ivy Lee walked into the offices of Bethlehem Steel to meet Charles Schwab, one of the most powerful industrialists in America. Schwab wanted more productivity from his executives. Lee, a consultant with a reputation for cutting through noise, offered something almost insulting in its simplicity.

"Give me fifteen minutes with each of your executives," he said. "Pay me whatever you think it's worth after three months."

The instruction he handed them was almost embarrassing in its plainness. At the end of each evening, write down the six most important things to accomplish tomorrow. Rank them by importance. In the morning, start with number one and stay with it until finished. Then move to number two. Anything unfinished carries over to tomorrow's list.

That was it. No system, no software, no framework. Just a pencil, a piece of paper, and the discipline to plan and prioritize.

Three months later, Schwab reportedly mailed Lee a check for $25,000, a staggering sum in 1918. The figure may have grown with each retelling, as legends tend to do. But the strategy is effective.

Start by eliminating surprises. Open your calendar and look at the first meeting that cannot be ignored. What time is it? What needs to be in your hands before it begins? Do you have enough time for your morning routine?

Everyone does this a bit differently, so try a few different ways until you have a rhythm that works for you:

Personally, I decide whether I am exercising in the morning, which is my least favorite time of the day to do that, and what time I need to get up in order to have enough time for my morning routine.

Then I look at the big events: the meeting, the trip, the presentation, the conversation, the surgery, the moment where being unprepared will cost somebody something.

That is enough for me. A wake time. The first thing that matters. My next move prepared.

Don't let preparation become another work shift. Once tomorrow has a first move, power down.

The old version of discipline says that sleep is what you sacrifice to prove you want it badly enough.

LeBron's career argues for something harder and smarter. Protect the part of your life that lets you return.

On that early May night in 2023, he had the party, the box score, the win, and the trip to the conference finals.

Then the lights came down.

Somewhere after the noise, the biggest decision of the night was no longer about basketball. It was whether he would close the day in a way that gave him a chance to meet the next one.

You have a smaller version of that decision tonight.

Write down what went right. Put down what does not need to come to bed with you. Pick the first thing tomorrow is for. Put your phone somewhere it cannot keep reopening the day.

Then sleep.

The goal is not to manufacture a perfect day.

The goal is to have enough of yourself left to build another one.

Look back. Let it go. Look forward. Then rest long enough to rebuild.

Resurgam.