sleep deprivation Hong Kong professionals

By John Corbett | Psychologist | Hong Kong There is a study I come back to more than almost any other in my work. Not because it's the most dramatic finding in psychology. But because it contains something that, once you really understand it, changes the way you relate to one of the central experiences of professional life. Here is what the researchers found. In 1998, a team at the University of Wisconsin surveyed nearly 30,000 American adults. They asked two questions: how m

By John Corbett | Psychologist | Hong Kong Let's start with a number. 43%. That is the increase in the risk of premature death associated with high stress combined with the belief that stress is harmful to health — a figure from a University of Wisconsin study tracking nearly 30,000 adults over eight years. But that's a different article. The number relevant here is this one: After 14 days of sleeping six hours per night, cognitive performance declines to levels equivalent to

Stress

Burnout

By John Corbett | Psychologist | Hong Kong There's a version of the entrepreneurial story that gets told a lot in Hong Kong. The pitch deck. The Series A. The WeWork hot desk at midnight that becomes an office of thirty people. The hustle, the exits, the LinkedIn post about lessons learned. It's an appealing story. It's also, in my experience, missing about half of what's actually happening. What doesn't make the LinkedIn post: the 3am anxiety that isn't about strategy, it's

John Corbett is a psychologist based in Hong Kong working with executives and senior professionals on performance, psychological wellbeing, and recovery.

By John Corbett | Psychologist | Hong Kong You run a tight ship. You're the first one in the office and the last to leave. You've built something — a team, a portfolio, a reputation — that took years of discipline to earn. Addiction? That's someone else's story. Someone with less control. Less drive. Less at stake. Except addiction has never been particularly interested in that distinction. In over a decade of working with high-performing professionals in Hong Kong, I've seen