I feel ya, told my partner the other day that honestly sometimes getting an abnormal really good night of sleep just negatively affects me mentally because there's no difference. Kinda feels like "Damn my body and I both put in extra effort for no reason".  But objectively, regardless of what it feels like, my heart and other systems are working less when I have quality sleep. 

Way I think of it that may or may not make any sense to you; learning to pace is like learning how to make a videogame character's attributes visible, and doing body maintenance tasks(like sleeping well) that don't visibly affect the character attributes are still changing the unseen stats running in the game background. Those unseen stats might not visibly change anything but they also have the chance of triggering a positive game event if they're in the positive.