Over the past few months, my bedtime has been getting later and later. Although I’m not getting up at 4:30am to go workout, as I did in the Before times, I still have kids who go to school and wake up early. As a result, I’ve not been getting as much sleep as I should be.
I’m trying to start slowly moving up my bedtime. Knowing that I cannot transition from going to sleep at midnight to going to sleep at 10pm overnight (sorry!), I’ve been making incremental changes over the course of this week. So far, so good.
I’ve definitely observed that sleep supports my recovery and overall wellness. However, I have not been as intentional as I want to be in prioritizing it. I think that it relates to the overall theme of downplaying. For a long time, I took it as a badge of honor that I could survive on little sleep. By sleeping less, I could do more. But, it wasn’t healthy and ended up being counterproductive.
I’m trying to think of sleep as a kind of fuel, like food. It is something that gives my body energy. As such, I need to make sure that I am getting a healthy amount of it. My new perspective on sleep is another sign of growth and healing. Another step forward.
From history major, with side quests in Medieval Studies and chemical engineering, to nonprofit finance leader, Big 4 tax partner, technologist, researcher, and now co-founder of Divine, nothing about my career has been linear. The throughline has always been systems: financial systems, organizational systems, technological systems, and human systems. I have an MBA in Operations and Supply Chain Management and a PhD in Organizational Leadership Psychology, and I’ve spent my career trying to understand how complex systems shape people’s choices, opportunities, wellbeing, and sense of belonging. Today, my work sits at the intersection of psychology, technology, human-centered design, and digital trust. I am co-founder of Divine, an open-source, decentralized social video app built to put creativity back in human hands and replace doomscrolling with joyscrolling. Divine is part of a bigger question I care deeply about: how do we create online spaces that support safety, creativity, identity, and belonging without defaulting to surveillance, extraction, or control? At Divine, I wear a lot of hats across engineering, finance, operations, and strategy, while helping shape the app’s trust, safety, and values work. I focus especially on teen online safety, human-generated content, participatory design, and healthier relationships with technology. I am a postdoctoral alum of Vanderbilt University’s Department of Computer Science, where I worked with Dr. Pam Wisniewski’s Socio-Technical Interaction Research Lab. I continue to write, speak, and research at the intersection of online safety, digital trust, decentralized technology, and youth wellbeing. I was named a Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for Data Integrity in 2023. In 2025, I had the honor of serving as President of Division 13 of the American Psychological Association, the Society of Consulting Psychology. I also live with major depressive disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. In 2020, I took a leave from PwC to focus on my mental wellness, and I now speak and write openly about mental health, especially in the workplace and in relation to digital wellbeing. This blog, Seriously Jerk Brain, chronicles much of that journey.
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