Joakim Achrén had done most of the things founders aim for.
He built a mobile games company and exited to Netflix. He spent years as a VC. And still, there was one problem he hadn’t been able to solve: sleep.
That is what eventually led him to write Sleep Again (April, 2026), an attempt to understand what’s really going on beneath the surface for high-performing people who can’t switch off.
The problem isn’t stress. It’s stimulation.
For a long time, Achrén assumed his sleep issues were stress-related. That made sense during his burnout in 2019.
But what confused him was what came after recovery. The work wasn’t heavy anymore. If anything, it was the opposite. He wasn’t under pressure. He was enjoying it. And yet, the sleep didn’t improve.
At some point, that contradiction forced a different conclusion: “The job was fun. I wasn’t worrying. And I still slept badly.”
It wasn’t stress keeping him awake. It was something harder to switch off. “My nervous system cannot quiet for the night.” And the more engaging the work became, the clearer that pattern got: “It is so much fun that it becomes the problem.”
There’s a biological reason for this. In Sleep Again, Achrén describes how the body is designed to shift out of alert mode in the evening. Cortisol drops, melatonin rises, and the system prepares for recovery. But if you stay mentally active too late, that transition doesn’t happen. The body stays in “on” mode. Once that pattern repeats, the system stops resetting properly, even if you’re technically getting enough hours.
There’s another layer. Sleep isn’t just rest. It’s processing. Sleep researchers describe it as a form of “emotional metabolism.” During REM sleep, the brain processes unresolved thoughts and tensions from the day. Without that, the system never fully resets, as Achrén painfully found out.
Modern work makes this harder. In the 1970s, around 10–15% of adults reported insomnia. Today, it’s closer to 30%, the book shows. Constant stimulation, global work hours, and always-on expectations have made recovery more fragile.
Why high performers break their own sleep
Like many founders, Achrén approached the problem of sleep with data. He tracked it, measured it, and looked for patterns. At first, it helped. Then it became something else.
“I was looking at streaks. Consecutive nights of above seven hours.” What started as awareness turned into a game that felt obsessive. “That’s a compulsion loop that is not good.”
In Sleep Again, Achrén describes orthosomnia, the fear of not sleeping well. For him, it was reinforced by exposure to content like Andrew Huberman’s, which links poor sleep to Alzheimer’s and cognitive decline, a fear he describes as one of his biggest triggers. Sleep started to feel less like rest and more like risk management, turning it into something he had to get right, which made switching off harder.
The shift: from control to understanding
The breakthrough didn’t come from a better routine. It came after trying the obvious fixes and realizing they weren’t working.
At one point, Achrén experimented with melatonin. “It was like a poison for me. I felt like I didn’t sleep at all.” That forced a deeper question: what is actually causing this? Because the pattern wasn’t random.
When he looked closer, bad nights weren’t just about long days or late screens. They were tied to what carried over from the day. Sometimes anxiety. Often the opposite. “I’m just too excited about something that I’m doing… I can’t stop thinking about it.”
That shifted the focus. Instead of fixing sleep directly, he started looking at inputs. What he was working on. How stimulating it was. Whether his mind had any chance to slow down. Eventually, he created a detailed wind-down routine to calm his racing mind.
Another realization came from something more basic: when he actually worked best. For years, Achrén tried to follow the standard early-founder routine. It never quite fit.
In Sleep Again, he describes discovering he’s a late chronotype — and how a simple 90-minute shift in his sleep-wake cycle improved both sleep and mental clarity.
What actually helps (according to Achrén)
During the interview, Achrén shared a few pieces of advice for bad sleepers, and Listeds compiled the list below:
1. Track trends, not nights
“It’s more important to follow the trend.”
Use data to understand direction, not judge daily results.
2. Don’t gamify recovery
Once sleep becomes a score, it introduces pressure.
3. Focus on what you do, not just the screen
“Reading a book is very different from scrolling social media.”
It’s about stimulation, not devices.
4. Create a clear shutdown signal
End the day intentionally. Journaling, writing down tomorrow’s tasks, or switching to low-stimulus activities signals the system to power down.
5. Slow down on purpose
“I try to do everything at 0.5x speed in the evening.”
A direct way to shift out of active mode.
6. Anchor your wake-up time
“The timer starts at the same time every morning.”
Consistency in waking matters more than going to be at the right time.
7. Reduce evening intensity
Your brain doesn’t distinguish much between stress and excitement.
The real takeaway
Busy people with poor sleep often assume their biggest constraint is time. But Achrén’s experience points somewhere else.
The real constraint is your ability to switch off. Because if the work is engaging enough, it won’t happen on its own. At some point, the tradeoff becomes visible: “You have to decide: do you sleep better, or do you live this exciting entrepreneur life?”
For a long time, that tension creates pressure — the feeling that sleep is something you need to fix. What changed for Achrén wasn’t eliminating the tradeoff, but understanding it.
“It’s better to be informed and make the decision to sleep badly than not have any information and have anxiety about it.”
And with that shift, something unexpected disappeared:
“When you know what’s going on, the pressure goes away.”
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