Dr. Els van der Helm is a sleep neuroscientist and former McKinsey consultant who helps organizations boost performance by improving the sleep of leaders and teams. Her clients include McKinsey, PwC, Swiss Re, Meta, and AWS. Her work has shown to improve sleep quality by up to 50%, enhance performance by 21%, and reduce stress by 30%.

Dr van der Helm’s Speech Topics:

To complement her keynotes, Dr. Els van der Helm offers a Personalized Performance Guide, provided after a brief sleep assessment. Based on personal sleep patterns, it highlights peak times for focus, when to wind down, how to handle the afternoon dip, and more.

The Power of Sleep

The Power of Sleep addresses the fundamentals of sleep – how it impacts your brain, emotional balance and performance. Learn what the consequences are of sleep deprivation, how you build up your sleep debt but also what you can do to repay it.

Walk away with tips and tricks on how to start improving your sleep tonight and get crystal clear insights on how your daily activities influence your nights. Unlock your potential by harnessing the Power of Sleep!

Sleep & Sustained Energy

Sleep & Sustained Energy is designed for anyone who understands the importance of sleep but still finds themselves tired, unfocused, or running low during the day. Building on The Power of Sleep, this session uncovers why that happens — and how to feel more consistently energized.

Discover how your daily rhythm, light exposure, movement, nutrition, and chronotype shape your energy far more than you realize. Learn how to work with your natural energy curve, rather than pushing through it, and how realistic changes can help your days feel steadier, clearer, and more productive. This session is the perfect next step if you want to translate good sleep into lasting energy, emotional balance, and greater presence at work and at home.

Sleep Leadership – Building Resilient, High-Impact Leaders

In this keynote, Dr. Els van der Helm reveals sleep as the hidden lever of high-impact leadership, grounded in compelling science and translated into practical strategies that leaders can apply immediately. Drawing on the Sleep Intelligence framework from her upcoming book, she debunks the myth that achievement requires sacrificing rest and shows how sleep can become a true competitive advantage.

Leaders will gain insight into the real cost of sleep-deprived leadership and learn how with the six principles of Sleep Intelligence (Quantity, Quality, Chronotype, Consistency, Routines, and Resilience) they can strengthen their leadership impact, boost team performance, and help build a resilient, sleep-positive culture.

Sleep & Mental Health

Sleep is a cornerstone of mental health and emotional resilience. Quality sleep strengthens your ability to regulate emotions, maintain perspective, and cope effectively with ongoing demands and uncertainty. When sleep is compromised, resilience drops and even manageable challenges can feel overwhelming.

In this session, participants gain a clear understanding of the bidirectional relationship between sleep and mental health, grounded in neuroscience. You’ll learn how sleep supports emotional balance, stress tolerance, and cognitive clarity, and walk away with practical, evidence-based strategies to protect your mental well-being through better sleep.

Women’s Sleep – Unlocking resilience, clarity and high performance

Women face unique sleep challenges – ranging from higher rates of insomnia to the physiological shifts of the menstrual cycle and (peri)menopause. These disruptions don’t just affect health; they directly influence resilience, emotional balance, and performance.

In this session, we unpack the biology behind these differences and translate the science into practical, actionable strategies to help women strengthen their sleep, protect their energy, and perform at their best. This is a science-backed, empowering session designed to help women harness the full performance and health benefits of restorative sleep.

Stress & Sleep

Stress and sleep are deeply interconnected, often reinforcing each other in a self-perpetuating cycle. Chronic stress disrupts sleep, while insufficient or poor-quality sleep amplifies the body’s stress response.

In the Stress & Sleep session, participants explore how stress affects the brain and body, why it interferes with sleep, and how sleep can be used as a powerful tool to increase resilience to external stressors. By understanding the underlying physiology and behavioral patterns, you’ll learn practical strategies to break the stress-sleep cycle and restore calm, focus, and recovery.

The Future of Intelligent Leadership

Explore the future of leadership – where the real differentiator is no longer information, but energy intelligence: the ability to sustain focus, empathy, and creativity as technology accelerates the pace of work. Learn what neuroscience reveals about clarity, decision-making, and emotional balance, and why managing energy, not time, is becoming the defining leadership capability.

Discover how sleep and recovery fuel sound judgement, authentic leadership, and deeper connection. You’ll walk away with practical, evidence-based tools to protect and elevate cognitive and emotional energy – for yourself, your team, and your clients.

Reset Your Sleep — Practical Steps to Overcome Sleep Challenges

Reset Your Sleep dives into the real reasons why falling asleep, staying asleep, or waking up too early can become such a struggle — and what you can do to change that. Building on The Power of Sleep, this session explains the science behind sleep difficulties in a clear and accessible way, helping you understand what’s happening in your body and how to shift it.

Learn how your sleep system works, what commonly disrupts it, and how everyday habits like inconsistent wake-up times, late caffeine, or spending too much time in bed can unintentionally keep sleep problems going. Walk away with straightforward, science-based strategies that give you a clear and confident starting point to finally improve your nights.

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Bio:

Dr. Els van der Helm is a sleep neuroscientist and former McKinsey consultant who helps organizations boost performance by improving the sleep of leaders and teams. Her clients include McKinsey, PwC, Swiss Re, Meta, and AWS. Her work has shown to improve sleep quality by up to 50%, enhance performance by 21%, and reduce stress by 30%.

She began her career in neuroscience, studying how sleep affects cognitive performance (Netherlands Institute of Neurosciences) and emotional processing (Harvard Medical School). She earned her PhD in Psychology at UC Berkeley, then worked at McKinsey and served as Adjunct Professor at IE University in Madrid.

Her work has been featured in Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, Huffington Post, Inc. Magazine, McKinsey Quarterly, and more. Dr. Els van der Helm lives in Lucerne, Switzerland and frequently travels worldwide.

Dr. van der Helm is currently writing her upcoming book, Sleep Intelligence: The High-Performance Blueprint for Sharper Thinking and Leadership, which will be published globally in January 2027 by Penguin Random House.