The Night Shift

Welcome to The Brighter Side of Everything.

This newsletter serves a simple purpose → To help you build optimism, resilience and a solution-focused perspective.

Each week, I’ll share actionable insights that not only brighten your day but position you to be a leader within your own life and seize life’s opportunities.

Read time: 20-30 minutes.

Hello, Brighter Side readers! ☀️

Thanks once again for making room for a little optimism in your week.

Did you know there's a cleaning crew that gets to work inside your head?

They only clock on once we're asleep, and until this year nobody had ever watched them while at work.

This week we’re exploring the night shift.

What gets washed away while we're unconscious and why going to bed too early isn’t always a better option than going too late.

Be warned though, this week is a tad science heavy, as I geeked out and found myself down a research rabbit hole.

But it’s worth it, given the importance of sleep as a fundamental pillar of our overall health.

We also meet Boyan Slat, a young man who asked why nobody was cleaning up the ocean and then went and did it himself.

Along with an album recommendation that was built from hundreds of other records, and finish on why problems grow when we leave them in the dark.

Here's to a good nights sleep! 😴

See you on the Brighter Side,

Chris

P.S. Please feel free to send me feedback on how I can improve. I respond to every email.

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Sleep tends to be the first thing we’re willing to trade.

We'll rise early for a meeting, or stay late for a deadline we have to meet, or a workout, or a dinner with friends.

But sleep?

Sleep is the thing we steal from when anything else in our life runs long.

It's the only appointment we cancel without telling anybody.

And we get away with it, because nothing really breaks.

Or so it seems.

We wake up, we function and we get through the day with a slightly shorter fuse and a slightly duller mind.

Then we give it a pass for being part of a hectic week.

For a long stretch of my life, that was me.

Not for lack of knowing.

I've understood how much sleep matters for years.

Ask me at any point in my thirties and I'd have called it one of the most important things you can do for yourself.

And I'd have meant it.

I just didn't act like I meant it.

Knowing something matters and treating it like it matters, are two distinctly different skills.

About five or six years ago, I started to bridge that gap.

Eight hours became my non-negotiable, and I've been in bed around the 10pm mark most nights since.

Two years ago I wrote about a wake-up call I received from my body.

I had a sudden realisation I could no longer touch my toes, and was losing my breath while playing with my kids.

Sleep doesn’t provide that same courtesy.

Nothing had really announced itself and nothing seemed broken.

Until my more positive sleep habit built slowly and consistently over time.

Until it stopped feeling like a chore and started feeling more like just the way I live.

The outcome revealed to me that I hadn't realised it was possible to feel like this.

I was sharper.

Calmer.

More present with my wife and kids.

More present (and patient) with everyone I interacted with each day.

Waking up well before the alarm.

Thinking clearly at six in the morning.

Reaching the end of each day with plenty still in the tank.

I found all of this by being incredibly boring about my bedtime, along with my ongoing fiocus on diet and exercise.

I should admit something here though, because it makes this path a smidge easier for me than I know it is for a lot of others.

I've never had trouble falling asleep.

Ever.

On a plane I don't even need to put the seat back.

As soon as I feel the hum of the engines, I drift off.

Then we take off and I'm sitting bolt upright, chin buried in my chest (or on my neighbour’s shoulder), and I wake up somewhere over Greenland wondering where the time went.

How much of that is luck and how much is six years of the same bedtime?

I honestly couldn't tell you, probably both.

What I do know is that plenty of people I care about do everything right and still lie awake for hours.

If that's you, the timing and consistency aspects mentioned below will still help you.

The falling asleep aspect though, is a different problem to the one I've faced.

For most of medical history, our brain has proven to be quite the puzzle.

We’ve known for many years that during the night, our brains clean out any toxins that build up while we’re awake.

The question that remained, was how?

Every other organ in our body has a lymphatic system, a network of vessels that carries away the waste our cells produce as they work.

Our brain though, seemed to lack these qualities.

Which was strange, because our brain is the hungriest organ we own.

Representing just two percent of our body weight, but burning twenty percent of our energy.

All that work produces waste.

So where does it go?

In 2013, a team at the University of Rochester led by Maiken Nedergaard published a study in Science that offered an answer.

During sleep, the space between brain cells expands by around sixty percent.

Cerebrospinal fluid floods through the widened channels and flushes out the metabolic waste built up during the day.

This includes beta-amyloid, one of the proteins associated with Alzheimer's.

They called it the glymphatic system.

Glia being the brain's support cells and lymph, the body's waste removal.

Put the two together and you get glymphatic.

An ugly word for a rather remarkable thing.

That our brain waits until we're offline, then opens up the channels, and washes itself.

Running the night shift as we sleep.

For over a decade, nobody had been able to witness this take place.

The evidence came from studies on mice, usually with dye injected into the brain.

Never from inside a living human head.

This year, that changed.

In March, researchers at the University of Oulu in Finland published two studies, one in PNAS and one in Advanced Science, describing a way to watch it happen in a living person.

Ultrafast MRI, tracking the movement of water molecules within their cerebrospinal fluid.

No injections required, just a five minute scan.

What they found was oddly beautiful.

The flush is driven by three rhythms pulsing through our head at once.

Our heartbeat through the arteries, our breathing through the veins, and a third, slower wave that most have never heard of.

At least I know I hadn't.

A vasomotor wave, rippling through the walls of the blood vessels at less than a tenth of a cycle per second.

When we fall asleep, the mix shifts.

The breathing and the slow waves speed up, while the heartbeat pulsations slow by about a fifth.

Stranger still, the logic of our brain somewhat reverses.

Awake, our brain cells fire first and the blood flow follows to feed them.

Asleep, it can run the other way, with the movement of the fluid shaping when the cells fire.

It's like the plumbing starts driving the wiring.

Which matters for more than just our curiosity.

Brain fluid circulation declines as we age, and that decline has been linked to memory disorders.

The ability to measure it within five minutes opens the door to tracking it, and one day perhaps improving it.

I find that incredibly hopeful.

For the first time we can now see something that was, until recently, entirely invisible.

In 2024, a team at Imperial College London published findings in Nature Neuroscience suggesting the opposite.

Using a different technique, they found brain clearance was reduced during sleep, and that being awake and active might clean the brain more efficiently.

These findings landed like a brick through a window but once again they had the same limitation most others in this field have had.

It was a study using mice.

Then in January this year, Jeffrey Iliff and his colleagues published the first proper human test in Nature Communications.

Based on thirty-nine people, measuring one night of normal sleep against one night without.

After the normal night, their blood held more amyloid beta and tau.

The two proteins that clump together in the brains of those with Alzheimer's.

More present in the blood meant there were now less in the brain.

They'd been washed out overnight.

Exactly as the theory predicted.

These findings won't end the arguments but it does mean that the research has finally moved from mice to us.

I mention these two sets of findings because I'd rather you trust the information you’re reading each week, rather than be impressed by it.

The broader overall case for sleep and it’s benfits never rested solely on this element anyway.

Sleep is widely known to postively impact memory consolidation, immune function, hormone regulation, emotional processing and heart health.

None of that is in dispute.

For too long I'd assumed the key to good sleep was the number of hours.

We’ve all heard it for years, aim for seven to nine hours and we're golden.

I’ve since had to correct myself.

In 2021, researchers analysing data from over 88,000 UK Biobank participants found that when you fall asleep matters independently of how long you sleep.

Compared to falling asleep between 10 and 11pm?

Falling asleep at midnight or later carried a twenty-five percent higher risk of cardiovascular disease.

Interestingly, falling asleep before 10pm carried a twenty-four percent higher risk.

That second number stopped me in my tracks.

Researchers suggest the sweet spot is alignment with your circadian rhythm, rather than an early bed time for its own sake.

Drift in either direction and you're out of sync with your own body clock.

This made me question an assumption of mine, that earlier is automatically better.

Then came the finding that really opened my eyes.

In 2024, a study in the journal SLEEP analysed more than ten million hours of data from nearly 61,000 people, comparing how long they slept against how consistently they slept at the same times.

Consistency won.

People with regular sleep patterns had a twenty to forty-eight percent lower risk of death from any cause.

Regularity predicted mortality risk better than duration did.

Same time to bed.

Same time up.

Every day.

Including the days we'd rather not.

A few months back I featured a biography on Fauja Singh, the man who ran his first marathon at 89 and became the first centenarian to finish one at 100.

His formula was simple.

Light food, early nights, regular exercise and community.

No convoluted or complicated hacks, just the same things, done at the same time.

For a veerrrry long time.

Then there's the weekend.

Depending on who you are the week can look like five nights of borrowed time, followed by a big weekend sleep in and the books are square for the week.

Right?

I'm sorry to report it doesn’t work that way.

As much as I’d like it to.

Studies on chronic sleep restriction suggest recovery is slower and less complete than most of us assume.

Mood, alertness and cognition all return to optimum levels at different rates.

Cycling between short weeks and long weekends (or the reverse) appears to offer far less protection than it feels like it does.

More to the point, catch-up sleep restores how alert we feel without fully restoring how well we perform.

Attention and reaction times bounce back quickly enough.

But judgment, planning and emotional regulation lag well behind.

So, the risky part of sleep debt, is how comfortable it feels at the time.

We're running at eighty percent and our internal instruments are telling us everything's fine.

We don't notice the slightly shorter fuse with our kids, or the meeting where we were half a step slower than usual.

Sleep debt will never send us an invoice.

Instead, it takes its payment in patience.

And it takes it from the people closest to us.

If you choose to change one thing about your sleep, consider your consistency because it does most of the hard work.

Here are some simple lessons I've leaned on in recent years:

Choose your wake-up time first: Most of us set a bedtime and then negotiate with it late at night, which is the worst possible moment to be making the decision. Flip it around. Pick the time you want to get up, count back the hours your body needs, then add thirty minutes for winding down.

Put it in the calendar and defend it: "Should" is a promise written in pencil. Easy to smudge, easy to erase. I have a nightly bedtime reminder at 9:45pm and it’s worked a treat.

Hold the line on Saturday: This is where many consistent weeks come apart. Sleeping in a couple of hours shifts our body clock as much as flying two time zones on Friday and flying home on Monday. Researchers call it social jetlag, and it's why Monday morning can sometimes feel a bit off.

Notice when you borrow: Every time you stay up for something that could have waited, acknowledge it. Not with guilt, just notice what you consider as worth the trade.

Be kind to yourself: Judge your results in October, not next Tuesday. The shift for me took months, but when it arrived, it arrived the way compound interest does. Slowly, and then all at once.

If you’re someone who lies awake at night, none of the above addresses that, as it hasn’t been part of my expereince.

But the wake-up time and the weekend aspects still apply.

And they're often where the improvement can begin.

We spend a third of our lives asleep.

That's a lot of years to treat as the space left over once everything important is done.

For decades I’d assumed I knew what feeling good felt like.

Turns out I'd only ever been measuring against my own tired baseline.

Thinking back to the Oulu research, something really stands out.

Those slow waves rolling through the walls of our blood vessels only take over once we've stopped.

Once we've shut down.

They can't do their work while we're awake.

While we're thinking, operating our bodies and holding the day together.

Each night, our body waits for us to get out of the way.

And every night, we choose whether or not to let it.

So many people spend their energy trying to improve themselves through better habits or better routines.

Meanwhile there's a process ready to operate inside us.

One that’s been refined over millions of years and asks for nothing more from us then to lie down and stop.

Eight hours a night, across the next thirty years, is roughly ten thousand nights of maintenance on the only brain we're ever going to get.

The brain holding the image of every face we love, every moment we want to hang on to and every dream we dare to chase.

Looking back my kids won't recall what time I went to bed.

They'll remember who I was when I came down the stairs the next morning.

I’m off to bed, night all 😉

Jeff Iliff co-discovered the brain's cleaning system, then spent the next twelve years proving it works. This video is him explaining it back when nobody had heard of it:

🧘 Seven Strange but Science-Backed Ways to Stop Stress Before It Starts - From seeking out awe and imagining a hug to slow breathing and ten minutes with a dog, this roundup gathers the quirky, research-supported habits that build resilience before the pressure hits. Read more → (BBC Science Focus)

💭 You Can’t Argue Your Way Out of a Limiting Belief - A behavioural scientist explains why the stories that hold us back don’t yield to pep talks—you loosen their grip by quietly building new evidence through small, repeated actions, until the old belief runs out of ground to stand on. Read more → (Big Think)

👷‍♀️ The Women Demolishing the Barriers in Kenya’s Construction Trade - Women make up just 3% of Kenya’s construction workers, but a Nairobi nonprofit called Buildher is training them in carpentry, tiling and painting—and graduates are lifting their daily earnings five- to six-fold within a year of finishing. Read more → (NPR)

🦌 The Quiet Global Boom in Wildlife Bridges and Tunnels - From a giant overpass in Colorado to rope bridges for orangutans in Indonesia, countries are stitching back together habitat split by roads—cutting collisions by up to 90% and, as one planner put it, making it feel like “the whole world is open to wildlife now.” Read more → (Good Good Good)

💧 A Floating Capsule That Purifies Water With Nothing but a Shake - Give it a three-second shake and set it afloat, and this sub-$25 device cleans a litre of water in about 20 minutes—no power, chemicals or batteries—a potential lifeline in disaster zones and for the two billion people without safe drinking water. Read more → (New Atlas)

🤟 A Disney Animator Built a Free ASL App—and Vows to Keep It Free Forever - Frozen and Wreck-It Ralph artist Josh Staub fell for the Deaf community while researching a new series, then created Small Talk ASL, where a fully animated character named Oscar teaches sign language you can rotate, slow down and actually enjoy learning. Read more → (Upworthy)

At sixteen, Boyan Slat went diving off the coast of Greece and returned to the surface with an observation he couldn't shake.

His intention was to see fish.

What he saw instead, was plastic bags.

More bags than fish, drifting through water that’s meant to be pristine.

We've all experienced a feeling like that at some stage.

A flicker of disgust, or an internal "someone should do something," and then we go on with our lives.

Boyan though, he chose to ask a simple question.

Why don't we just clean it up?

He was a Dutch schoolkid with no money, no lab and no standing.

The question should have gone nowhere.

Instead it lead to the largest ocean cleanup in human history.

He then decided to turn the plastic into his high school science project.

After it’s completion he stood up and talked about it at a TEDx event in Delft in 2012.

The idea itself was a bit cheeky.

Rather than chase plastic around the ocean with nets and boats, burning fuel and years, he would let the ocean do the work.

Anchor a long, curving barrier in the current, and let the water itself funnel the plastic into one spot to be scooped out.

He called his talk "How the oceans can clean themselves."

It went viral.

And at eighteen, Boyan walked away from his aerospace engineering degree to chase this goal full time.

He founded The Ocean Cleanup in 2013, on the back of $2.2 million in crowdfunding.

With a staggering level of contribution from nearly forty thousand strangers across 160 countries who’d decided this teenager was onto something.

The part I respect most in his story is what happened when it didn't work.

In 2018, after years of engineering and a great deal of fanfare, his first full-scale system was towed out to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a slick of floating rubbish twice the size of Texas.

It struggled.

The plastic it gathered kept slipping back out into the ocean.

Then an eighteen-metre section snapped clean off and floated away.

The headlines that followed were brutal.

Leaving the critics who'd called the whole thing a naive fantasy feeling vindicated.

Boyan though, he didn't hide from any of it.

He hauled the broken system back to shore, took it apart, and spent months working out exactly why the weld had failed.

Then he built a better one.

I want to be upfront about the criticism, because it's real, and leaving it out would be dishonest.

For years, scientists argued Boyan was aiming at the wrong target.

Scooping the middle of the ocean, they said, is far harder and less useful than stopping the plastic at its source.

The smarter move was rivers.

And the deeper fix was making less plastic in the first place, before it ever needs fishing out.

He listened, well, at least a little bit.

In 2019 the project launched Interceptors, solar-powered machines that sit in the mouths of some of the world's dirtiest rivers, like the Klang in Malaysia, and trap plastic before it can reach the sea.

Some critics still say the ocean systems are an expensive distraction from the real problem.

They might be right.

But the machines are in the water now, and they’re pulling plastic out by the tonne.

Which can’t be a bad thing.

The rebuilt system, which was nicknamed Jenny, went back out to the garbage patch in 2021, and this time it held.

Across just three months it gathered close to thirty thousand kilograms of plastic from the water.

And this time it did the one thing the first system couldn't: it held onto everything it caught.

By 2026, The Ocean Cleanup had removed more than fifty million kilograms of plastic from the world's oceans and rivers.

Read that again 🤯

Nobody has ever removed more.

Nineteen Interceptors are now working across eight countries, and the stated goal is to clear ninety per cent of floating ocean plastic by 2040.

All of this grew from a curious question a sixteen-year-old asked while underwater.

Ask the obvious question anyway: "Why don't we just clean it up?" is exactly the kind of thing adults learn not to say out loud. Sometimes the naive question is exactly what nobody has properly attempted to answer.

Fail where people can see you: His system broke in front of the whole world, and he repaired it in front of the whole world too. Most of us would rather fail quietly and reappear once everything was fixed. He did his repairing in plain sight, and that's a big reason why people trust what he's built since.

Work with the current, not against it: His entire design was about using a force that was already there, rather than fighting it. It’s worth asking where, in your own life, you're paddling hard against something you could be letting carry you.

Boyan Slat wasn't a name I knew until I went looking for one.

Maybe that's part of why he stuck out.

He found a problem most of us have filed under "just the way things are” and absolutely refused to leave it there.

I don't know whether The Ocean Cleanup will hit its targets.

Plenty of clever people doubt it, and he may well be wrong about the ocean systems.

But the worst case scenario, is that he’s cleaned the plastic from our oceans, and that’s a significant step forward in addressing environmental pollution.

While there may be challenges and unforeseen consequences, the positive impact on marine life and ecosystems will be substantial.

Paving the way for other innovations and collaborative efforts to make further breakthroughs.

It's the choice he made at sixteen, though, that holds my attention.

He could have felt the disgust, shrugged, and got on with his life like the rest of us tend to do.

He chose to face the problem instead.

Anyone who looks at the Earth that way, and then actually does something about it, has my respect.

Whether his work ends up clearing ninety per cent of the ocean or nine, he’s already done more than the millions of us who saw the same plastic and chose to swim past it.

If you'd like to hear Boyan lay out his ideas himself, the following is the talk that started it all:

I’ll admit it.

I got this one wrong the first time around.

When The Avalanches broke through in Australia, the song everybody was talking about was Frontier Psychiatrist.

I wasn't sure how to place it.

It's an odd track, made up of chopped-up voices and not much else, and while I found it unique and interesting, I didn't enjoy it.

Initially.

So I filed The Avalanches away and continued on with my life.

It took me the better part of 10 years to come back, and when I finally did I absorbed the whole album rather than just the one track.

Heard that way, Frontier Psychiatrist just flows by as part of the experience.

It's been one of my absolute favourite albums ever since.

Since I Left You came out in November 2000 on Modular Recordings, and it was built almost entirely out of other people's records.

Robbie Chater has estimated the album contains more than 3,500 samples, though people who've since gone through it carefully put the figure closer to 900.

Either number is ridiculous.

Chater and Darren Seltmann made it in two near-identical home studios, sampling records onto tape, passing the tapes back and forth and building on whatever the other one had come up with.

They kept no list of what they were using, because it never occurred to either of them that anybody outside Australia would hear it.

That oversight is the reason the rest of the world had to wait until 2001, while a sample clearance expert worked backwards through the entire record.

What made me feel better about my slow start is that the band had the same problem I did.

They found it genuinely difficult to choose singles.

Because none of the songs sound as good on their own as they do as part of the album.

‘Since I left you’ began life as a concept album.

Chater described the idea as a love story stretched across the globe.

A man chasing a woman from country to country and forever arriving one port behind her.

They dropped the storyline in the end, worried it was becoming too obvious.

Though the feeling of it stayed.

The album still moves like a journey, with one track dissolving into the next without much of a seam.

By the closing minutes you feel as though you've actually been somewhere.

What keeps it timeless, I think, is where the raw material came from.

The samples are pulled from forgotten records spanning decades and continents, so the album was never tethered to the year 2000 in the way most electronic music of that era was.

It doesn't sound like a period piece because it never really belonged to a period in the first place.

A few ways to get the most out of this album:

Play it start to finish: It was built as one continuous piece and a good deal of its joy lives in the transitions, so shuffling and skipping defeats the purpose.

Give the odd single another chance: If a song has ever put you off a band, try it again in its proper home. It may have been the wrong introduction rather than the wrong song.

Use headphones at least once: There's an enormous amount buried in these tracks, and much of it only surfaces when nothing else is competing for your attention.

Look up the samples afterwards, not during: Let it wash over you first. Then go down the rabbit hole, because the list of what they borrowed is an education in itself.

I nearly wrote off one of my favourite albums ever, on the strength of a single I didn't enjoy.

At first.

This happens more often than any of us would care to admit.

And not only with music.

We meet something at the wrong angle, decide fairly quickly that we know what it is, and move on without ever giving it a fair go.

Chater once said the record still sounds to him like a 23-year-old kid in his bedroom, and I think that's exactly why it has lasted.

Two blokes from Melbourne with no real expectation in front of an audience, making something solely because it delighted them.

Twenty-five years on, it still sounds like nothing else.

I'm just sorry it took me so long to notice.

Please share; I'm always keen for great suggestions.

This week's bright idea is one I've tested regularly throughout my entire life.

And it keeps proving true.

Most problems don’t become larger because they're hard.

They grow because we leave them alone.

The email left unanswered or the awkward conversation we keep rescheduling in our heads.

The decision we're almost ready to make.

Left untouched, a problem will rarely remain the same size.

It grows in the dark.

And the strange part is that action, even a small and imperfect one?

Usually shrinks it back down to what it really is.

There's a common myth that we need to “feel ready” before we move.

That the motivation will arrive first, and action will then follow.

Most of the time though?

It works the other way around.

You take one small step, and the step itself creates the momentum you were waiting to feel.

Researchers who study motivation, like Harvard's Teresa Amabile, have landed on something reassuring.

What most reliably lifts how we feel on a given day is progress.

Not a reward we’ve earned or a win.

Just the sense of having moved something forward that matters to us.

Progress feeds motivation.

Motivation feeds more progress.

Inaction causes the same loop to run in reverse.

The longer a problem sits, the heavier it feels.

And the heavier it feels, the longer we leave it.

Procrastination researchers like Timothy Pychyl point to why.

We rarely put things off out of laziness.

We put them off to escape the bad feeling a task stirs up, and each time we dodge it, we hand ourselves fresh proof that it was worth dreading.

Avoidance will never settle the problem, just compound it.

Here are some simple ways to start taking action:

Shrink the first step: Don't try to solve all of it. Find the smallest action you can take in the next ten minutes, and take it.

Name it out loud: Say or write down exactly what you're avoiding. Vague problems feel enormous, while named ones are much more workable.

Make the call: When you catch yourself deliberating over something small, choose and move on. Most small decisions cost less to get wrong than to keep putting off.

Personally, I've noticed a simple pattern over the course of my life.

When I take action on something, it generally starts to resolve.

When I sit on it, it does the opposite.

The problem stretches out, gathering unnecessary weight.

And the cost of dealing with it climbs.

Almost nothing improves from being avoided.

The good news is how little it takes to break the spell.

One phone call.

One honest sentence.

One thing crossed off your list.

The moment you move, the problem stops being something happening to you.

And starts being something you're handling.

Transform your daily routine with my specially crafted gratitude journal.

Start (or end) each day with a moment of reflection and positivity.

As you develop daily your gratitude, you're also helping grant wishes to children facing critical illnesses.

It's a powerful cycle of hope and optimism.

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