People used to lose sleep over survival. War. Hunger. Grief. A sick child in the next room. Then there is motherhood, where even in safety your body never fully relaxes again. Sleep changes shape.
I became pregnant almost two years ago and I do not think I have slept properly since the final month of pregnancy. First came the discomfort of late pregnancy, then the baby phase, the fragmented nights, the feeds, the strange hypervigilance motherhood installs into the body. Even when the baby sleeps, part of your brain remains listening… even with the Nanit camera on, the breathing band wrapped around her tiny body, the Owlet sock blinking beside the crib.
I do not think men fully understand this biological rewiring. Your nervous system never fully clocks out again.
But recently another layer got added on top of that: AI.
Around seven months ago I started vibe coding seriously and something happened to my brain that I still struggle to explain properly. Ideas that had lived for years inside half-finished Figma files, scattered Notion pages, domains I bought impulsively at 1am, unfinished prototypes and research notes suddenly became buildable almost instantly. What previously required teams, funding, engineers, timing, permission, or technical fluency could suddenly be tested in one night.
At first it felt liberating. Then it became intoxicating.
I would put the baby to sleep, clean the house quickly, sit down with my laptop for “just one hour,” and suddenly it would be 2:17am and I would still be redesigning a women’s health interface, generating medical search logic, building migration tools, restructuring onboarding flows, deploying features, researching APIs, opening another tab, another idea, another possibility.
And underneath all of that there was this constant low-frequency fear:
if I stop now, someone else will build it first.
My body is screaming for help now.
I think many people are quietly experiencing this moment but few are saying it out loud. We are living through a period where the distance between imagination and production has collapsed dramatically. A woman in Brazil, a teenager in India, a designer in Dublin, an engineer in Nigeria, someone sitting in a tiny apartment at midnight with internet access can suddenly produce things that previously required institutional backing.
The internet used to reward access, but now it rewards speed.
And for people who spent years feeling intellectually trapped by lack of money, proximity, opportunity, or technical barriers, this moment feels psychologically overwhelming. Especially if you are ambitious. Especially if you are neurodivergent. Especially if you are a mother trying to reclaim some fragmented sense of self after childbirth.
Night starts feeling sacred because it is the only uninterrupted territory left.
During the day there is work, the baby, logistics, messages, emotional labour, dishes, forms, planning, feeding, invisible coordination. Then suddenly at night the house goes quiet and your thoughts finally arrive in complete sentences. You remember you are still a person separate from caregiving. You remember you still have ambition. You remember you can still build.
So you keep going.
One more feature.
One more deployment.
One more prompt.
One more iteration before bed.
The dangerous thing is that sleep deprivation is deceptive. Research shows people become progressively worse at judging their own impairment when chronically sleep deprived. Your reaction time slows, emotional regulation weakens, memory consolidation suffers, inflammation increases, insulin sensitivity worsens, cortisol stays elevated, executive functioning declines… yet psychologically you often feel strangely adapted to it. Your body normalises survival mode.
I started reading more about the relationship between sleep and lifespan recently and it genuinely frightened me. Chronic sleep restriction is associated with cardiovascular disease, metabolic dysfunction, cognitive decline, depression, immune dysregulation, and hormonal disruption. In women, particularly postpartum women, the effects become even more complex because the system is already recovering from enormous biological stress.
The irony is painful because I am building products supposedly meant to improve human life while slowly neglecting the biological infrastructure that allows me to think at all.
At some point I realised I had started treating sleep as if it were competing against ambition. As if rest was stealing time from me instead of sustaining the cognition I depend on. But sleep is not separate from intelligence. Sleep is part of intelligence. Creativity, insight, emotional regulation, strategic thinking, memory integration… all of these depend on sleep architecture itself.
And still, despite knowing all this, part of me resists going to bed because I am afraid of missing the moment.That is the real addiction, I think. Not productivity. Not hustle culture.
For women like me, especially immigrant women, women who grew up far from power, women who spent years being underestimated intellectually, this technological moment feels deeply emotional. Suddenly the barrier between idea and execution has weakened and there is this irrational fear that the portal might close again if we do not move fast enough.
But lately I have been questioning if constant acceleration is actually intelligence or just technologically assisted self destruction with a beautiful UI…Because the body always collects eventually.
So now I am trying something profoundly unglamorous. A bedtime. Not optimisation, not “rise and grind,” not biohacking. Just a hard stop around 10:30pm because my daughter will wake up around 6:30 regardless of how important I think my latest feature is.
Honestly… I suspect the real flex in this era may not be who can ship the fastest.It may be who manages to remain fully human while building.