Fix your sleep. Everything else follows.

Every day, primary care physician Barns Chaku, MD sees the same pattern walk through the exam room door: fatigue, weight gain, a mood that's gone flat, blood pressure that won't budge—and sleep, quietly, sitting upstream of all of it, unexamined and unblamed.

Protocols makes the case that sleep isn't one healthy habit among many. It's the foundation everything else is built on. Fix it, and appetite regulation improves, stress resilience returns, and the energy you've been trying to manufacture with caffeine starts showing up on its own.

This isn't another list of tips. It's eleven specific, sequenced protocols—each built the way a clinician actually thinks through a case: what the problem is, what's happening physiologically, the exact steps to fix it, and what Dr. Chaku tells patients in the room. From the science of why morning light matters more than anything you do at night, to the real difference between chronic insomnia and anxiety-driven wakefulness, to a 30-day plan for putting it all together—Protocols gives you a diagnostic lens for your own sleep, not a generic routine borrowed from someone else's.

Whether you're the wired-but-exhausted executive, the new parent running on fragments, or the patient who's tried everything and still can't fall asleep, this book meets you where your actual problem lives—and shows you the one change most likely to make every other change stick.

Sleep first. Everything else follows.