Finally. Five Hours of Sleep.

Last month, Japan’s prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, described how she spent a rare day off. Read policy papers. Cleared her inbox. Ironed her underwear. Then, almost as an afterthought, she mentioned finally getting five hours of sleep. Her usual is closer to zero to three.

Five hours. Finally.

Finally implies you had to earn it first. Fight for it. Explain yourself before you could let your head hit the pillow.

I’ve heard that too much lately, from women I coach and advise. Percentage-wise, seven out of ten of my clients are women. The leaders I consult with are split more evenly, which makes me wonder if men have a harder time asking for and accepting coaching help. The women I coach run divisions. Whole companies. Turnarounds and product teams that would crush most people. One did this while undergoing cancer treatment. Another went through a divorce and cleaned up the wreckage alone. One watched a parent die slowly, every night after work. One gave birth and raised kids while running a large team at the pace of two full-time jobs.

Men just have it easier. I see it up close through the women I love, serve, and work with. Stereotypes? Yup. Generalizations? Sure. But work with enough women and the pattern becomes impossible to ignore. Men pay their own price, too, so keep reading.

A woman starting chemo turns in her treatment calendar and coverage plan to her manager, unprompted. A man facing the same diagnosis simply announces, “I’ll be out.” Both end up getting the time off. One of them didn’t have to build a case for it first.

What’s missing from that calendar is the drive home — or back to work — after treatment, alone, white-knuckling the wheel so the guy at the next light won’t see them shake. Need that much, and you’re unreliable in the wrong culture.

Researchers who study parental and medical leave found that women need it more than men, take it more than men, and still report wanting leave they never took. Men spend their leave keeping their resumes sharp and staying visible. Women spend it caring for family — the actual point of the leave. They come back with less experience logged, less face time banked, for doing exactly what the leave was built for.

Pew found that six in ten caregivers juggling kids and aging parents are women. Nearly two-thirds of them are burning out. Some left paid work entirely last year to care for someone else. Others pull from savings to cover care at home. None of it shows up on a performance review.

Researchers tracked almost a million marathon finishers. Men blow up, quit, or don’t finish at far higher rates when a race turns hard — heat, humidity, whatever raises the stakes. Women pace through it and hold on. Another study followed thirty thousand people passed over for a promotion. Men left or threatened to leave far more than their female counterparts. Their company paid to keep them, or another company paid more to take them. Women stayed. Not a dime changed hands when they did.

I know burn-till-you-drop first-hand. For years, I pushed way past healthy — it became the only way I knew how to work. I built my whole career on being the guy who could do it all. In the company I built and ran for 23 years, I used seven sick days total. What used to be a badge of honor now reads like years without calling in sick, run by a leader too stubborn to rest when he needed to — who, unfortunately, modeled that for his whole team.

It’s called white knight syndrome: the need to fix, to save, to be the one everyone needs. Underneath it sits one loud fear — becoming unnecessary. Each rescue proves you’re needed. The crash is the cost.

McKinsey’s latest Women in the Workplace report found this: six in ten senior-level (VP to C-suite) women say they burn out often. About half of senior-level men say the same.

I can’t stop hearing that word, finally, as if Sanae Takaichi was robbing those five hours from her country instead of just taking them to rest and recover. I want to help build teams and companies where nobody has to earn rest like a prize, where “I need a break” is a complete sentence. And people can just take it.

If you want a more trusting team, a culture of belonging or a magnetic brand that attracts more of the right customers, I can help. If you'd like to explore if working together makes sense, drop me a line.

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