As humans, our superpower is a good night’s sleep, and yet we don’t protect it as much as we should. Sleep fuels everything we do in our waking life and helps us recover when our eyes are shut.
Want better sleep?
Dr Jemma King is an expert researcher in human behaviour and sleep science, and she gets to the bottom of why you’re not getting enough good sleep. You will understand how sleep impacts your physical and mental performance and why your phone is sabotaging your rest.
In this episode Dr Jemma shares:
- Why sleep is one of the most powerful performance tools available
- The connection between sleep, stress and mental health
- Deep sleep vs REM sleep and why both matter
- Why poor sleep impacts emotional regulation and decision making
- The role of the “midnight librarian” in processing emotions and memories
- How caffeine really affects energy and sleep
- Why consistency matters more than perfection
- The relationship between nutrition, blood sugar and sleep quality
- The impact of alcohol, doom scrolling and late night stimulation
- How wearables can help improve self-awareness and behaviour change
- Practical strategies for navigating high demand seasons and parenthood
- Cold exposure, naps and recovery protocols
- Why your phone may be sabotaging your sleep and stress levels
Key Quotes
“Once you disentangle your circadian alignment, every single function inside every process of your body is affected.”
“Caffeine does not give you energy. It blocks your tired signal.”
“Sleep is the foundation that makes everything else easier.”
Episode Resources
📖 PRE-ORDER For the Long Run by Jess Spendlove 👉 https://amzn.to/4t33BPh
Buy Dr Jemma King’s book here: https://shorturl.at/V9gMp
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-jemma-king-phd-76013328/
Jessica Spendlove Website – www.jessicaspendlove.com
Jessica Spendlove Keynotes – JessicaspendloveKeynotes – Jessica Spendlove
The High-Performance Profile Quiz https://jessicaspendlove.com/quiz/
Jess Spendlove Instagram https://www.instagram.com/jess_spendlove_dietitian/?hl=en
Jess Spendlove LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-spendlove-64173bb8/
About Dr Jemma
Dr. Jemma King is a stress, sleep and recovery expert with a PhD in Human Behaviour. She is a Fellow at the UQ School of Psychology and conducts research on the impact of psychophysiological factors on cognitive and behavioural performance, specifically in the areas of stress, sleep, recovery protocols, biometrics and emotional intelligence. She works as a specialist external advisor to McKinsey & Co and has consulted with the Australian Defence Force, the Centre for Australian Army Leadership, the Australian Institute of Sport, and the Australian Olympic Swim Team
About Your Host
Jessica Spendlove | Wellbeing Speaker & High Performance Strategist
Jess Spendlove is an international wellbeing and high performance speaker, coach, and advisor. With over 15 years of experience across corporate leadership, elite sport and the military she is known for helping ambitious leaders and teams optimise energy, build resilience, and sustain peak performance.
As one of Australia’s leading performance dietitians and a trusted voice in executive wellbeing, Jess delivers science-backed strategies that empower individuals, teams and organisations to thrive under pressure and achieve long-term success.
Episode Transcript
The following transcript has been automatically generated and not checked for accuracy
speaker-0 (00:00.076)
It is causing insanity. It’s a Molotov cocktail of madness just right there. Once you disentangle your circadian alignment, every single function inside every process of your body is affected.
speaker-1 (00:14.498)
There’s issues sleeping, but it also feels like sleep has never been more important. So how did we get here and what do we do?
speaker-0 (00:21.662)
I myself am a massive dopamine crackhead. I fully admit it, like I talk about these stuff, I research it, but I’m struggling myself. Caffeine does not give you energy, it blocks your tired signal. But when the caffeine wears off, you actually feel worse.
speaker-1 (00:39.008)
So sleep is my number one health and performance non-negotiable.
speaker-0 (00:43.726)
When you are a young mother and you’ve got a baby and you are so exhausted and you look at your partner and go, can’t you see? Can’t you see how exhausted I am?
speaker-1 (00:53.806)
Dr. Jemma King, welcome to Stay at the Top. So you’re a stress, sleep and recovery expert. You’ve done a PhD in human behaviour. You’re a fellow with the University of Queensland in psychology and you’ve worked at the pointy end of every high pressure environment that there is. Special forces, elite sport, large corporations. But you have your first book coming out with Wiley and
speaker-0 (00:56.75)
Thank you for having me.
speaker-1 (01:22.262)
It is all in sleep specifically, so why is sleep so important?
speaker-0 (01:26.722)
Well, to be completely honest, I hated sleeping. I would never go to sleep. I was always the last person standing. Drove my mother completely insane when I was a little kid. And I really was, you know, studying stress and looking at cortisol. And something kind of emerged out of the data. And I was like, I can’t ignore this. And I really found that there was not one person with a mental health disruption.
or disorder that didn’t have a sleep disorder. And there wasn’t one person who had a sleep disorder that didn’t at some stage succumb to some kind of mental health disruption. And I said, I can’t ignore this anymore. This is significant. There’s a strong correlation between mental health, wellbeing and sleep. And so I got really interested in looking at sleep and it just seemed to be like the missing piece of the puzzle, which I was like, why?
Why is stress so hard? Why can’t we do better? And then when I brought sleep into the picture, I was like, everything now makes sense. And we do it, hopefully, every day, everybody on the planet. So a little bit of a captured market. And everyone I meet is like, I’m having issues. I don’t know how to fix it, or I’m trying to, or I know I should fix it.
speaker-1 (02:48.448)
Yeah, it really, mean, the data shows it. And what I’ve seen is around 60 % of people are having issues either getting to sleep or falling asleep. Personally, and the people I’m dealing with, whether it’s in talks or clients, I feel that number is higher. And to the point of the relationship with sleep and mental health, like that’s my own personal experience. So sleep is my number one health and performance, like non-negotiable. And I’d love to say that’s just because it is.
but that is because I’ve had 30 years of a really complex relationship with sleep. I was a high level swimmer as a child and in my teens, which was early morning. So, ruined, scarred, started with the sleep anxiety, like if I couldn’t get to sleep. And then in my early to mid twenties, there was a situation like a traumatic experience. I had some PTSD for a period of time. But after that panic attacks and anxiety and
doing the work with a psychologist and working through it all, the definitive like connector for me was sleep. And then longer term, it was, well, which is the chicken or the egg? If I’m not sleeping, I’m more at risk of this rearing its head. And now moving into this season of life as a parent, it’s a different complex relationship. let’s talk about where we’re at as a society.
speaker-0 (04:01.198)
100 %
speaker-1 (04:13.504)
there’s issues sleeping but it also feels like sleep has never been more important. So how did we get here and what do we do?
speaker-0 (04:20.664)
Yeah, like, you we do have a mental health epidemic. We have a crisis. Like you look at all the kids that are medicated, all the kids. mean, like, you know, I’ve got kids who are in their early 20s and literally every second one of their friends has some story or is anxious or is, you know, medicated. And, you know, we’re not alone. This is, this is, as I said, epidemic proportions. And I really believe that in part it is a sleep deprivation epidemic.
When you look at all the things that will draw us away from sleep, all of the set up in our society, in our bedrooms, in our houses, and all the things that we eat, all the things that we do, everything is, I suppose, angling against us to having deep quality, long, uninterrupted sleep. And it is causing insanity. It’s a Molotov cocktail of madness just right there because once you disentangle your circadian alignment,
Every single function inside every process of your body is affected. We cannot deny the fact that our bodies are highly attuned to the sun. And if we don’t listen to it, we will be punished by mother nature. There’s just no two ways about it. And it’s really, really hard to get away from because, instance, our phones, these are like hypodermic needles of dopamine straight into our skulls. And that’s an addictive substance.
Not only do we have an attention economy, but we also have a biochemical entrapment that takes enormous work and enormous knowledge and help to get out of. I myself am a massive dopamine crackhead. I fully admit it. I just looked at how many hours have been on my phone and it’s disgusting. Like I talk about these stuff, I research it, I write a book about it, but I’m struggling myself.
speaker-1 (06:14.54)
You’re coming from a real world place and I think that’s nearly the best example because it’s like this is the research I’m on a mission to help people but I’m also struggling with this because I cross time zones and I have multiple projects on the go and just life so I think that comes from the best kind of place. Can we zone in a little bit more consequences of not sleeping properly from I guess the mental health side of things but the physical and even just the
day to day, so the now, but looking ahead as well, like from a future of health longevity perspective, what is this showing us?
speaker-0 (06:50.808)
Yeah.
Well, it’s interesting you talked about PTSD and there are some theories that PTSD could actually be a sleep issue because, you know, in the REM part of your sleep rapid eye movement, it’s the part of your sleep where you make sense of your emotional memories, you make sense of the day, but there is a very strong forgetting component that I don’t think people realise in the REM sleep. So there’s a lot of stuff that you actually don’t need to remember.
And I like to use the analogy of the midnight librarian. So just imagine, you know, your librarian has got a desk full of folders that comes in, it’s all very messy. And the librarian, he or she picks up these folders in REM sleep and goes, yep, need that, that will go in that box. I’ll put that one over here, that’s sort of related to that. This one, we don’t really need to know that one, chuck that one out. I think what happens is that sometimes these memories that come in are so emotionally evoking or just complex or…
have no real, I suppose, rational box to put them in, and the midnight librarian will wake up the boss and say, hey, what on earth do I do with this one? And I think that, you know, so people are waking up in that REM sleep, or they’re doing a lot of things throughout the day that are stopping them from getting into REM sleep for the appropriate amount of time, and they never really get to file away those memories. And so what you left is this lingering, this haunting memories that are very salient in your mind.
So this can happen with extreme cases, with yourself or just normal day to day aggravations or things that just make you irritated or things that make you embarrassed or humiliated. You just never get to really file those away and you just have this lingering anxiety for the rest of the day. That’s one thing. mean, the correlation between mental health and sleep, there’s like multifactorial. It’s like this constellation of things that all coming together will make you feel like you’re crazy.
speaker-0 (08:49.656)
So one of the big things is that during deep slow-wave sleep, that is we clean our brains. I think, you know, the glymphatic process of our brains where your brain gets cleaned, I think was discovered in 2012, it was not that long ago. And basically what happens primarily in the first two sleep cycles of our sleep, when you get into deep slow-wave sleep, your brain engages in maintenance, cleaning.
And so we know that your cells in your brain will actually reduce in size to like 60 % of their original size, sort of squidge back and we’ll have these like micro pulsatile squirts of adrenaline, which is basically your body is pushing the cerebral spinal fluid through the interstitial fluid between the cells, just cleaning out all of the gunk that builds up throughout the day. So it’s kind of like a gurney, know, to power washing the streets.
And the things that build up through the day, one of the things is called adenosine, which is the cellular exhaust from thinking. to just get a little bit sciencey for the moment. So if you think about what your brain runs on, it runs on adenosine triphosphate, or the explosion of that molecule breaking apart, releasing energy. So ATP goes to ADP, adenosine diphosphate. And what’s left over is the adenosine.
And this is kind of like Mother Nature’s dimmer switch, kind of builds up and it gives this kind of like this low, slow, know, I’m tired, grindy kind of feeling. And we know that this actually gives you an impending sense of doom feeling. It actually makes you feel overwhelmed. You know, when you’re tired, you’re like, everything feels so much worse. And we know that this product, this byproduct of thinking adenosine does this.
And we know it because it’s used for a heart medication for tachycardia. And when doctors administer this to the patient, they say, don’t worry, you’re not going to die. Because people are like, that feels so terrible. And so there’s only one way to get rid of that. Well, it is blocked by caffeine. And so we know that adenosine will sit on the receptor that adenosine usually sticks to. This is a thing that people don’t know. Caffeine does not give you energy. It blocks your tired signal.
speaker-0 (11:11.062)
adenosine gets blocked, but when the caffeine wears off, you actually feel worse. And now there’s only one way to get rid of that adenosine, and that is through deep, slow-wave sleep. And so a lot of people are missing that deep, slow-wave sleep for a multitude of reasons, and they don’t even know, and they go, well, I had a sleep, I think it was good. But unless you’re measuring it, you don’t really know how much deep, slow-wave sleep you get. And so if you’re not getting that, you’re not cleaning your brain,
cleaning away the beta amyloids, the towels, all those sticky plaque that build up over time that we know is implicated in dementia, Alzheimer’s. So that’s on a biochemical level why sleep deprivation makes you feel unhinged.
speaker-1 (12:02.766)
Do you think people just don’t even know what good feels like? you know off the back of that you’ve mentioned two really important things like the deep slow wave sleep which is the front half of the night and the you know I like to think of it like the housekeeper who comes and tidies everything up to make sure everything’s in order every single day and then you’ve also mentioned the librarian who’s filing in REM sleep which is in the the second part of the night more so. And I’m guessing that’s maybe where the 2 to 3 a.m. wake up.
comes in and it’s really impacting. So we’ve got these two critical restorative phases of sleep. People are missing out on one or maybe both, whether it’s quantity issue, whether it’s behaviorally impacting. How do we improve both of those? And I’m really happy for you to lean into wearables as I sit here with my whoop and aura on. To talk to me about
Do you have a preference for sleep and overall and how people can use them to get that data for both?
speaker-0 (13:06.062)
Yeah, well, so there’s three things that you’ve mentioned I’d like to bring up. So 100%, I think if you can’t measure it, you don’t know how to change it. And you don’t know the delta, the effect of your behavioral interventions. I think you need to, if you’re going to spend time, energy, money on something, you want to see an effect and you want to see what magnitude that effect has then translates into behavioral outcomes, how much better you feel. And so, you know, I’ve been using the WOOP.
since 2017. We were like the first Australians to use it. So when I was working with the Special Forces, there was a SEAL Team Six guy who got onto it and he reached out to Matt, was head of the Human Performance Wing back then and said, hey, you’ve got to get onto this. Because I was actually testing cortisol. So I was doing thousands of spit tests and it was gross and disgusting. And I was like, oh, there’s got to be a better way to measure stress.
And so then we found out that measuring your heart rate variability, which is what the WOOP does, was a non-invasive measure of stress. I was like, wait, this is like angels singing into my ears. I’ve got to get onto this. So then we started embarked on the journey of getting into wearables. that’s really when the whole sleep thing really started to, like the penny started to drop for me as well, because I could see the correlation between stress, heart rate variability.
and sleep. And so we would actually have, you know, many competitions because, know, back then, we’re looking 2017, it was still a badge of honour. Like, I’ve only had three hours sleep and I’m still operating. But then as we started to realise that being sleep deprived is akin to being drunk, that it was very, was, was an occupational risk to be tired, then we started really encouraging.
having competitions on who could get more REM or who could get more slow wave sleep. That was one thing we did. We looked at the wearables. Another thing that you mentioned, though, I wanted to bring up is that the anxiety around wearables, it is a thing and you have to know yourself. when I was working with the Olympic teams, there were a number of, not a significant, a few athletes who would wake up, see their data and go, I can’t do this. Like, it’s just throwing me because we know.
speaker-0 (15:28.334)
The greatest predictor of next day performance is actually, if you’ve had sleep deprivation, is how well you think you do on sleep deprivation. It’s not actually like how much sleep you did or didn’t get. It’s your perception of how well you think you operate on no sleep is one of the greatest predictors. That’s next day. I mean, after a few days of sleep deprivation, we do see decrements, like real decrements, but
your perceptions really matter.
speaker-1 (15:59.018)
around the deep and the REM sleep and how do we optimize or improve? Is there a protocol or what can people do to improve both? Because it’s not like we need one or the other. They’re both incredibly important as you’ve just called out for two different reasons.
speaker-0 (16:16.578)
So 50 % of your sleep architecture should be made up of REM or slow-wave sleep. So what determines that is what sort of day you’ve had. If you’ve had a very metabolically expensive, physiologically arduous day, you probably are more towards deep slow-wave sleep because it’s the more physiologically replenishing part of the sleep. If you’ve had bit more of a cognitively draining day or an emotional day, you probably see a little bit more REM sleep.
in between 24 and 23 % or something, depending on what you do. So the best way to get to optimize maximum amount of slow-wave sleep and REM sleep is sleep consistency. And I really didn’t realize how important this was until I started implementing it. Because you imagine with my schedule, sometimes in a different time zone, I’m like on a plane or just like doom scrolling like I shouldn’t be. And so…
Kristen, my PhD student, actually did her PhD on circadian alignment and looking at her data and all the data coming out of all the subsequent studies she’s done, it is frightening. If you don’t have sleep consistency, the follow on second, third order effects are brutal. And so the best thing, if you do nothing, is go to bed within a 15 to 20 minute window. Yeah, it is, and get up at the same time because
speaker-1 (17:39.615)
That’s tight.
speaker-0 (17:43.01)
Think about it, you’ve got, know, in every cell of your body, you’ve got a clock and it needs to know what time it is. And it has all these kind of metabolic processes and biochemical, quite complex processes that need to, you know, enact before the next one can start. And so I like to use the analogy. So imagine you were running a cafe and then you said to, your boss said to the staff, yeah, we’re opening on Tuesday.
and the staff were like, what time should we come in? And the boss says, well, I’ll tell you when we open. We’ll get. Yeah, like they’ll be like, are you kidding me? I’ve got kids to get to school. I’ve got a meal plan. I’ve got to do all these things. So you can’t do that in real life. You can’t do this to yourselves. And so the more I suppose heads up you give yourselves, the more efficient they are at doing those things and they’re not interrupted. So if you’re not going to sleep and you’re ignoring that sleep pressure, your brain’s like,
speaker-1 (18:16.502)
Stay tuned.
speaker-0 (18:39.49)
hang on a minute, what am I doing out of bed or out of the cave? There’s really only two reasons why humans would stay up out of the cave at night and it’s hunt or be hunted. Well, there’s one more reason. The fun stuff. But you get other goodbye chemistry from that. So what happens you get this second wind and that’s really the second wind is your brain and body going, I need to prepare for something and so I produce
cortisol and adrenaline and then you get this, it’s harder and longer for you to go to sleep. So even though you get into bed, you get this tired but wide, I think we’ve all had this, we’re like super exhausted, I’m dying to go to bed, just do one more episode of Netflix and then my God, I’ve got to go to bed. And you lie in bed and you can’t, because you’re like frazzled and your brain is going and you’ve just given yourself a biochemical shot of anti-sleep hormones and you’re wondering why can’t I go to sleep? Well, I’ve got anxiety and then the more anxious you get,
The more cortisol you produce, cortisol has got a 30 minute at least half life. So you’re lying there going, go to sleep. And then you produce more cortisol. And then before you know it, you’re in this like 3 AM spiral.
speaker-1 (19:46.018)
I’m so glad you brought up and use the term second wind because that is like exactly what I say to my partner. I’m quite tight on the time I go to bed and the recommendation I make, you know, my talks and my clients is don’t have a wake up alarm. mean, if you need to have a go to bed alarm. So you actually break the circuit because I definitely find if I miss that window, I do have that second wind.
If someone’s trying to anchor their days a bit more, be more consistent, okay, yes, I’ve heard it’s important, I’m really understanding why, should they start with a wake up time and work backwards or should they start, they should start in the morning?
speaker-0 (20:24.462)
Yeah, think LeBron James says that a good night’s sleep starts the minute that you wake up. And that’s really true. I think I really like the haptic. I’ve got an eight sleep, which is that mattress, which is cool. And a whoop. So you can set a window of an alarm where you can be woken up because you do not want to be woken up in deep, slow wave sleep. I think we’ve all had that experience where we just woken up and we are like groggy and like all weird and just feel like you’ve been hit over the head with a with a
piece of wood for, can sometimes last up to three hours. So that’s called sleep inertia. And so that’s basically because your temperature cools and you produce all these hormones so like you don’t act out your dreams and stuff, your body is not in a go state. And so you don’t want to be woken up then. So if you’ve got a haptic alarm, it’s basically will buzz like on your wrist or the bed will do that. And so it’ll wake you up when you’re coming out of your deep, slow wave sleep. When you wake up, you’re feeling fresh and you’re ready to go.
And so, you know, the first photon exposure after you wake up sets the circadian rhythm of when you will get natural sleep pressure and it’s around 16 hours later. So if you wake up and when you first get lightened your eyeballs, that’s when you go, okay, I can plan that in 16 hours, I’m going to need to be ready to go in bed. And then you can then you can go back from then when’s your last caffeine, when’s your last meal, when’s your last heavy exercise, because that also matters.
when’s your sleep routine, when do you turn the lights down, and when you get into bed, so you’re ready to go. And it sounds really like, I suppose, a little neurotic. Once you do it and then you realise that the second, third, or effect of having good sleep consistency is, I don’t feel like eating fatty, salty, sugary foods. I actually feel like going to the gym. I actually feel…
rejuvenated. I’m not getting sick as much. I’m actually able to lose weight. I’m actually able to get through like my boring hard work without sort of like getting a bit ADHD. When all these other things start becoming apparent, you’re like, wow, and that’s all I had to do was go to sleep at the same time. That’s nothing compared to the grind I’ve been trying to get myself to do all those other things like gym and eat well and do, you know, grind through work. And it is it just like this lightens your life. It really is.
speaker-0 (22:47.488)
incredibly dramatic. Like just if you can do one thing that easy.
speaker-1 (22:51.47)
I agree, you know, and it’s probably why my own work has evolved beyond nutrition. It started with the interest and the intersection of nutrition and sleep and the chrono nutrition piece, but then everything is just so interconnected. And for me in the work that I’m doing and want to be doing, it’s not serving the individual just to hyper focus in on that. That is of course the background and the specialty, but it is even how they all intersect, which I love that you’ve just mentioned.
speaker-0 (23:17.762)
and the gut button.
speaker-1 (23:18.946)
Yes, yes, and I’m really keen to dive into that. I just want to quickly, if there’s a protocol, you’ve just mentioned a few things like, you know, in terms of like cut the caffeine and stop the eating and you know, like you’ve mentioned a few things. Can you just go through maybe time points just so those listening maybe are clear on not necessarily going and doing this all at one time because you know, behavior change, but just so they’ve got what good looks like, what they should be aiming for.
speaker-0 (23:45.614)
It’s a really good point. I really don’t want to disenfranchise people and say, you got to do this and do this. And then everyone goes, are you kidding me? I can’t even like brush my hair sometimes as if I’m going to be able to do all that. So I really don’t want to sound like, you know, one of these neurotic, like intense people, like if you don’t do this, you’re not a good person. Like, because I do feel a lot of people feel it’s all too much. I’m doing it badly. I’ll do none of it. And then
they just sort of wipe out any kind of information about this. So as you said, behaviour change starts small, start, know, bite-sized, something that’s practical and implementable. And so, you know, if you were to really plan out your perfect day, you’d wake up, you would not reach for your phone because you think about, like, when you pick up your phone, you don’t know what you’re going to see. You could be getting all of the rage-batting, provocative nightmares that’s happening out in the world.
And I use this analogy, would you invite the most annoying person that you know to jump into bed with you and tell you all their worries first thing in the morning? And I’ve got a slide on my presentation of like the most annoying person sitting in bed, like, you know, talking to you. You wouldn’t do that, right? So don’t do that. Don’t invite that into your bed. So keep your phone away and just sort of wake up, you know, slowly. And of course, you know, the thoughts about what you’re excited about, what you’re grateful for.
Start the day with nice thoughts because we know that when you wake up you get your first cortisol spike about 30-35 minutes post waking. So you don’t want to be lying in bed and get this massive cortisol spike because you’ve just seen war or tragedy or school getting bombed or something like that. Give yourself a time for your natural go-go hormones to rise pleasantly like they should. Get light and try to start the morning
calmly if you can. I’ve got three kids so I’m saying things that I did not do. I wish I’d done more of it. I wish I didn’t spike the little, you know, adrenal glands so early in the morning because I was like, get ready, get your shoes on, get in the car. Terrible. But if you can, make sure that you’ve done everything the night before. Make the lunches, get the sports bag ready, get, you know, whatever you’ve got to get ready, get your stuff done the night before because you just want to really protect that morning time.
speaker-0 (26:02.474)
I really believe in eating heavy proteins in the morning. I would not be having carbohydrates, sugars, cereals in the morning. It’s so bad to, as you know, better than me. What you’re basically doing is setting yourself on this blood sugar seesaw throughout the day, which does affect your sleep. So we know that when you drop your blood sugar level, you produce cortisol. And when you produce cortisol, that does follow on effects for your sleep.
So I would just start the day with like a heavy protein. I would also start, if you can, have a worry hour in the morning when your cortisol is high. So basically this is the time where you push any of the dark thoughts of the night onto a piece of paper into tomorrow’s worry day. And I believe that a really good strategy is when you are making your worry.
hour that you’ve got times that you’ll do it. I’ll talk about that later in the evening protocols. But that is the time when you have got the most amount of biochemical energy, you feel fresh, you’ve cleaned your brain, and then you can deal with the hard stuff. Also, think make sure that you can kind of walk, see green. We know that seeing green, particularly seeing water and green drops your cortisol. There’s a study out of Oxford that the triple whammy
is to go for a walk with somebody else in green where you can see water with a goal. So like walk somewhere to go have coffee with someone. It really drops your cortisol. Have your protein during the day. That’s where you would know this is better than me. Because you don’t want to be having heavy protein at night. Heavy protein will compete with deep slow-wave sleep. Your body does not want a big chunk of decomposing flesh in your stomach. Sounds awful.
It wants to get rid of that. So it’ll prioritize digestion over deep, slow-waves sleep. So try and have your protein big meal during the day. I would also, you know, I talked about exercise. So if you can get your cardio done during the day, I think that’s better because research out of Whoop showed that if you engage in exercise that is 50 % above your maximum perceived output in the four hours before bed, you will increase your core body temperature.
speaker-0 (28:21.396)
and you will increase your cortisol, which will push back your sleep pressure and you won’t get as much deep sleep. So in the evening, the exercise should be gentle walks, yoga, stretching, swimming, something like a little more down tempo than high intensity fit workouts. yeah, would try and eat. And my student, Kristen, that she does
time restricted eating study and she found that those that ate their food within the daylight hours, all of their metrics improved dramatically, like statistically significant improvements in every single metric she measured. That’s a little hard, I think, for some people, particularly if you’re in South or Northern parts of the world. But so, you know, if you can try and have your main meal when the sun’s up.
and then later at night just have slight vegetarian snacks with tryptophan in it, that’s better. Her data actually said around 3 p.m. was the best time to have your last meal, which is really intense. I don’t do that. I’m a big believer of having fun, being engaged socially, having a laugh, not being too neurotic, not taking yourself too seriously, because the cortisol that you produce
speaker-1 (29:33.696)
I don’t do that.
speaker-0 (29:48.718)
from stressing about like this tight regime about doing this, doing that, can actually produce cortisol, which will ruin your sleep. So you’ve got to know yourself. Like, are you going too far? Are you becoming too militant? Are you becoming too neurotic about it? So you have to be always aware of, the neuroticism gripping you? It’s a fine balance. So, you know, in the evening if you can.
turn all your lights down. what I’ve done in my bathroom is have light activated strip lights underneath the sink or right down low with a warm light. when I walk in, I don’t have to turn on the fan like this, which will like set off your brain and set off your stress hormones. And so you walk in and it’s just like nice lights. I have a red light in my room, which is like I travel with it as well. So I don’t turn on the lights and have this like glaring light in my eyeballs.
So everything kind of like low activation, of low sensory input. If you can, if you’ve got a lot of worries, this is in the evening when you brain dump. This is when you push things to your worry hour the next day. And as I said, you put a time, I’m going to ring Sammy’s school. I’m going to do my tax at 11.15. So what this does, helps your midnight librarian like, I don’t need to deal with this now. It’s going to be dealt with at 11.15 tomorrow morning. And that really placates that midnight librarian.
And yeah, and do whatever I think it takes to get you to sleep. I’m a little bit dubious. I know a lot of athletes would have, say, friends playing in the background or some old TV sitcom. That would be really familiar and calming. It would make them feel better. But you’ve got to understand that if you’ve got canned laughter or shocks, or sound shocks in those programs, you get these K complexes, and spindle, sleep spindles, which are like the bounces of your brain, which will kick off, which is not good to be doing that.
If you do have any noise going throughout the night, white noise, pink noise, whatever, make sure it’s consistent and doesn’t have any like spikes. But so yeah, do whatever it takes you to get to sleep, phone out of the room, of course, cold, dark, quiet, 18 degrees is great. But you’ve got to run experiments on yourself. And this is where you have the biometric capture devices. You type in, doing this, I’m not doing that. I’m taking magnesium, I’m eating vegetarian, I’m having a massage, I’m going to bed at this time. And then you can see.
speaker-0 (32:09.1)
what works best for your physiology.
speaker-1 (32:10.862)
100%. I mean, there’s so much you’ve said there that I completely agree with. I am using the term experiments or A-B testing a lot because change the one thing, have a time point. You know, I recommend two week kind of minimum. And how are you observing that subjectively, you know, energy, appetite, performance, but also objectively, preferably, you know, with a wearable as well.
speaker-0 (32:34.882)
That’s what I put in my book at the end of it. I’ve got this like personalized sleep plan where you get asked these things and these metrics and you can create your own little science experiment on yourself. And these are all the certain things you should be aware of. like exactly what you said, you’ve got to have a metric of success. You’ve got to choose like what are your outcomes and in research your dependent variables. What are the things you want to see moved? And unless you’re measuring it and you’ve got like a daily diary of it, it’s really hard to remember. So you don’t need a wearable to do it. You can have like a
paper and pen diary. If you don’t want to be putting that money for a wearable, can be doing it yourself, little scales, one to five. How much more energy do you have? How much more anxiety do you have? How much more clarity of thought do you have? You can do all those sorts of things yourself.
speaker-1 (33:21.376)
I love that. it’s because for me that is a superpower of self-awareness and that is always available to the person to tune in. It’s just we have so much noise that it can be quite difficult to do that. I am keen to go into the biome because I mean so much of what you’ve just said there, the relationship with nutrition and sleep, one of my personal favorites.
statements that I make is that we all eat, we all sleep and we all breathe. And one of the big areas that intersects with, you know, those two or three is the microbiome. And you’ve also mentioned time restricted eating. And I know there’s some great research around that and the microbiome and the circadian rhythm. So what do we, what do people need to know that they probably don’t in the context of all of that?
speaker-0 (34:10.324)
Honestly, what you eat really affects how you sleep. As I said before, the heavy protein at night, your body will prioritise that. The amount of sugar that you eat, know that, this is whoop data, that people who snack on sugary snacks before bed sleep on average 26 minutes less than people who don’t have sugary snacks. I just see that it’s kind of like putting fire in the furnace. It’s kind of…
increasing your resting heart rate, it’s putting fuel in. And this goes back to my theory I’ll talk about later, brain rot. But I think that there’s a lot of research to say you’re either in cleaning or building. And if you’re putting food into the system when it’s supposed to be producing human growth hormone, it’s supposed to be engaging in repair, when it’s supposed to be doing all the housekeeping stuff, and you’re making it deal with food, you’ve got insulin spikes.
there is a competition of resources there and it would choose to get rid of food over the other jobs which is cleaning and repairing. I’m a really big, big proponent of eating well. I don’t eat sugar. I do drink red wine, much to my… But I know, again, I’ve worked out that red wine doesn’t get me that bad. If I drink white wine, oh my God, I’m dead.
speaker-1 (35:24.408)
their things.
speaker-0 (35:34.508)
So I’ve just realized that how much I can have without really impacting my sleep. But alcohol is one of the worst things you can do for your sleep. It’s really, really bad. And there’s so many people that are just giving up alcohol completely. The younger generation just don’t drink as much because it is just, when you actually see the data, it is horrific. is very, very, it ruins your REM sleep. Because it’s toxic to your body. So then it’ll get rid of that toxins before it’ll do all the repair.
you’re actually kicking everything, kicking the can down the straight when you’re
speaker-1 (36:08.782)
Again, so much of what you’ve just said, like what I see particularly from a nutrition perspective is people are very reactive, they’re not good at breakfast, they don’t like it and then there’s this flow on effect where the evening meal is bigger and they’ve missed pulses of protein and fibre across the day which satiate them and fill them up and therefore they want the sweet. So rather than focusing on what you don’t want to do, so many of the behaviours which are a byproduct of not being proactive with your day.
A tip I often give is focus on that front half of the day and if you start there, which for many might be actually then the night before getting to sleep, to win the morning, really to on the night.
speaker-0 (36:53.676)
There’s also short chain fatty acids as well, like you know about these, these are one of the best things for sleep. There’s a lot of gut biome that actually helps you produce things that might gabber, which is the neurotransmitter that slows you down. So there is a very tight coupling between the types of food, the certain gut biome that you will proliferate or not, and then they will actually impact the amount of serotonin that you produce, therefore the melatonin you produce.
Tryptophan, is one of the products that goes into making melatonin. You should know what foods are in that. Diet, I literally is everything. And then MSG, I’m going to do a study on this because every time I’ve had, I’ve so much data to suggest this, that monosodium glutamate, the food flavor, the thing that makes things taste delicious. Glutamate is a neurotransmitter, so you have these
absolutely crazy dreams and less slow-wave sleep and you wake up feeling really, really kind of thirsty and fried and really out of sorts. So I always say to anyone, any athlete, do not have any packaged food, don’t have takeaway, don’t have anything that’s got flavor enhancers the night before a big day because you will pay for it. Not everyone, but like I don’t think people realize just how bad one-acetone glutamate is for…
speaker-1 (38:17.198)
And I guess that’s where the tracking or the at least subjective tracking but in my opinion ideally the combination of the two is so important because you can see things if you can’t feel it you can actually see it within the data but of course making sure that that works for your personality and isn’t then you know stressing you out because you’re in a bit of sleep debt according to the algorithm etc. I’m keen to get really practical because there’s a lot of not
I guess a lot of what we’ve spoken about is the ideals, like these are the ideal conditions, which I think we want to know because we want to aim for. But the practicality of life in different, you know, high demand seasons, parenthood, nuances with men and women, I’m keen to kind of work through that and what practical advice you have, starting with people, high demand seasons of life. So whether that’s navigating time zones in a plane or on international calls.
Big projects, really career growth type of season of life. Couple of quick practical tactics to navigate that sleep with that season of life.
speaker-0 (39:24.27)
I think you’ve got to look at your life like a set of levers and there is, you know, there’s sleep, there’s nutrition, there’s exercise, there is social engagement, there’s intellectual engagement or meaning, you know, engaging in meaningful, purposeful endeavours. Not at any one time will you have all of them hitting green and like we cannot be naive to think that you can always get there. Some people may but they’re probably intolerable. So I think that once you
are on a work call really late at night and you’re doing heaps of like stuff so you won’t be able to sleep or you’ve got kids. Just make sure the other levers are in green or some of them are in orange. Like a lot of people go, can’t sleep so I might as well just drink and eat and you know bugger it all. But like no, just know that you can actually just like move these levers so the overall average of like the burden on your body isn’t.
that significant. But so know your levers and know where you’re at in each of these levers. And I cannot like underestimate the importance of oxytocin. So oxytocin is the biggest cortisol antidote. Oxytocin is the hormone that we produce like when we’re breastfeeding, when we have babies, when we have sex, when we hug, kiss, laugh, talk, be socially connected. I just think that that is a very, very important hormone and we should always try to get as much as we can.
particularly when you can’t sleep and when you’re strung out. So you have to be socially engaged. And if that means like you’re exhausted, but it means you’re to go out and have a laugh with your friends, I think go for it. It’s more dangerous to be lonely and sitting at home. Loneliness is the new smoking. I’m really big on that. But so another couple of hits is I think know your body, know your limits and measure it. And even if that means, you know, just having a wearable for say six months, just so you know,
that works and that doesn’t or that food, alcohol, that I can live on that amount of sleep for that long or not. But I also think that you really have to be incredibly aware of your mindset. If you are not in a good way and you really believe that, you will not be in a good way. But I think you can almost gaslight yourself out of things if it’s temporary. You can go, you know what, I’m the type of person who can cope. I’m the type of person who can just push through. I’m the type of person who knows how to get back into
speaker-0 (41:46.702)
really good health by education. I’m the person who has ultimate autonomy and control over my body. I can do this. That’s what I, when I, especially when I’m traveling, like I know I won’t sleep, I’m in a weird time zone, I’ve got to land, I’ve got to do like a three hour lecture. I just literally say, I’m the type of person who can do this. And like, honestly, if you sit there and go, I’m so tired, I’m so tired, I’m full like crap, I’m going to mess this up. You know what, you will. So I, I’m really strict on what
kind of thoughts I let run around in my head. Thoughts are not just these ephemeral things that go off into the ether. Thoughts create chemicals and these chemicals have biochemical and behavioral consequences. So you’ve got to be really, really careful about what you let run around inside your head. And I just cannot stand the feeling of being stressed. So I, like you said, you can’t give up something, you’ve got to take up something. So if I get a stressful thought coming in, I’ll have a bank of really good
positive thoughts that I’ve got ready to go that I’ll just pull out and just substitute, some big substitutes.
speaker-1 (42:51.852)
and maybe have a cold shower as well, just to snap out of it.
speaker-0 (42:54.158)
So I just got published in Nature Science of your reports was at the world’s biggest study on the Wim Hof method and we realized that there were so many people who couldn’t afford ice baths and they couldn’t afford to be like a wellness bro and spend all the time you know going into these you know ice baths in you amazing locations so it’s like we need to make this democratically available and see if it actually works for people who’ve got no time no money or no opportunity
And so we found that yes, having a cold shower does actually improve your cognitive performance, improves your mental alertness, improves your interoception, improves your ability to handle stress, discomfort, frustration, and improves your psychological safety, which is incredible. yeah, cold showers are a big one for jet lag. Don’t do it at night, first thing in the morning. So get into the shower, wash your hair, warm water.
speaker-1 (43:43.681)
any particular timeframe.
speaker-0 (43:50.978)
and then just brace yourself and turn it cold and then see how many like, I think someone used the term how many bridges you can jump over. Like that, this awful, and just like you get over it, start with 30 seconds and build up to two minutes. There’s a dose dependent relationship. The more you do it over time, the better the results are. So it’s kind of like hormetically micro-dosing yourself with stress. And it actually makes you stronger and braver in other parts of your life as well. So yeah, I’m a big proponent of…
Ice bath in cold exposure, 100%. Yeah, I never was until I did the research and I’m very big fan of it.
speaker-1 (44:26.21)
do want to talk about parenthood. mean, that’s a chapter I’m navigating at the moment. And I know for myself, the only way for me to get enough sleep is to be in bed a lot longer than what I would typically. And, maybe that’s a luxury. Maybe some people perceive that. But I’m prioritizing that over other things. So maybe I don’t get to have as much me time or maybe any me time, which I do see a lot of parents maybe having that. I just want to have the wine on the couch or
the chocolate and watch the series and then that’s eating into the front half of their sleep. Obviously you’ve also shared that you have three children and know, hindsight’s maybe a great thing. What advice would you give to yourself or to parents who are navigating this phase to try and you know, any quick kind of tips or practices that they can use?
speaker-0 (45:15.892)
Sell them on eBay. don’t know. I mean, like, just know that you’re going to be in pain for, a couple of years. absolutely will. yeah. Yeah, it is so worth it. I just loved, loved being a mum. Like, I was lucky that I’m not a big sleeper. I could cope on not much sleep at all. That’s a genetic thing. For people who don’t, so my other PhD student, was a gonk monster, nine hours a night kind of girl.
speaker-1 (45:25.1)
More oxytocin though.
speaker-0 (45:44.928)
and she’s suffering because she’s got a new baby and she’s on her own a lot. So I really do feel for people. So move near grandparents. Statistics say your marriage will, the first year of marriage is quite, sorry, the first year of marriage of a baby is a danger zone. And so the more help that you can get during that time, the better. I say outsource, outsource. If you can afford it, even if you can’t afford it, you know what you can’t afford? A divorce. It’s incredibly expensive.
the dissolution of a marriage, it’s like psychologically, generationally and financially devastating. Okay, so if you actually like do this some, you know, benefit analysis of whether or not paying for a babysitter, paying for a cleaner, paying for some help versus the long-term damage of having a marriage dissolution, it does not make sense to not get help.
Go without something. Give up your Netflix subscription. Give up something. But pay for help if you don’t have grandparents. Ask for help, ask for help, ask for help. Because we were never meant to be in an environment where there was a mother at home living alone, know, because, well, you whoever was at home with a baby, whether it be the father or the mother, where they had to cook, clean, shopwash, do everything on their own. That is like a recipe for insanity. You know, our ancestors, we go, are you serious? Like they always, you know,
foraged together, washed together, breastfed each other’s babies. There was always someone holding the baby. The babies never touched the ground. And we’re meant to do it all and be sane? It’s madness. So just know that if you are struggling through parenthood, of course you are, because we were never meant to do this. So get into a mother’s group, really ask for help. And ask the unaskable. Say, hey, why don’t we share? If you can’t afford it.
Why don’t one day you take the kids and then I’ll go do all the stuff I’ve got to do and then we’ll swap. Like really look for other women in your environment or other men and just know that it’s an imperative. Happy mother, happy breast milk. You get cortisol on your breast milk. Your baby doesn’t sleep, you don’t sleep and it can be this awful spiral. So just know that it is going to be temporary and it does get better and the calmer that you are.
speaker-0 (48:01.966)
the calmer your baby is. Because we know through chemo signaling that if you’re producing cortisol, your baby will catch it. And a baby’s neural architecture, their brain gets wired, thinking that there is a sort of a dangerous stress-evoking environment out there. And it does actually change the brain’s baby of the brain. So if you are stressed out, like try and give the baby to someone else so it doesn’t get in their breast milk and in their bodies.
On that note, if you can’t afford it, you don’t have family, I really think you should see parenthood like say the army is seeing a military operation. You have a picket system. You do sit down and you very precisely look at labour distribution in the house. And then also this is where wearables come in. You not only look at the time and you look at the energy, the metabolic output of
the labour distribution in the house. Now, breastfeeding a child is like running a 5K marathon. It is extremely exhausting. And so, you your partner may come home, so you’ve just been lying on the couch breastfeeding the baby. What, you know, I’ve been at work all day. I can tell you when you put someone who’s been at work all day’s whoop data up against a mother who’s been at home with a toddler and all breastfeeding, you know, we know who’s doing like the hard labour. So I think you have to be very
honest and very scientific and data driven about labour distribution. And sit down and you work it out. And you’ve got to understand that when you are sleep deprived, you are awful and you are irrational and you say things that you don’t mean. And you have to have, I suppose, give each other the benefit of the doubt and say, hey, I know you’re really tired and sleep deprived. I know you didn’t mean that. And just get over it. And you have to be kind to each other. you know, have this.
I’ll get I’ll do the dishes. I’ll get that. I’ll do that. You know, and have this upward spiral of appreciation for each other rather than getting this downward spiral. The Mexican stand up. Well, you didn’t do that. I didn’t sleep last night. Well, I cooked last night. Like you try and flip it where you feel
speaker-1 (50:15.554)
you’ve just described the last 12 months of my life.
speaker-0 (50:18.71)
Yeah, it’s awful. you get bone deep resentment. When you are a young mother and you’ve got a baby and you are so exhausted and you look at your partner go, can’t you see? Can’t you see how exhausted I am? Like that gets deep. That cuts your bones and it’s very hard to get over. So you’ve got to run your house like a business. You’re like, if I was your business partner, would you be letting the other business partner be working night shifts and paying for everything?
and doing it and then you just go and play golf? Like really, would you do that? That business part, would kick you in the ass and you would have no business. Is this how you’re gonna run your family? Like you’ve just gotta get really, I suppose, practical and logical about it.
speaker-1 (51:00.418)
Such great advice because it is when we kind of look at these areas, like you said, how you would run a business versus potentially, you know, navigating that chapter or how people look at maybe investing in their wealth in small amounts over a long period of time versus health, that’s just kind of having these analogies and looking at, well, how can we apply that there? Because everything you’ve just said makes complete sense. I think maybe then thinking about
differences with men and women and sleep and are there differences? What does the data say in terms of, I mean, and I appreciate individually, everybody, as you’ve mentioned, you you at that phase or in general don’t need that much sleep, but on a whole, are there gender differences, biological differences with sleep and what men and women need?
speaker-0 (51:44.778)
Yeah, so I mean, the data says that women need more sleep, but I think it’s more complex than that. You can’t just say women need more sleep. Women, sleep is more interrupted. Right. So. Yeah, so we actually it’s not that we need more sleep. It’s just that our sleep is not as protected as men’s sleep. So I think on average we need about 12 minutes more sleep on average, depending on what you’re doing, because we do have hormonal fluctuations, but also we’re breastfeeding. And also once you’ve had a child,
speaker-1 (51:54.782)
can attest to that.
speaker-0 (52:14.08)
your threat detection mechanism gets heightened and so you’ll awaken to the sound of the baby a lot more than a male would. So then you’re having a lot more micro distractions, interruptions, and particularly if you’re breastfeeding, gone, like your sleep is just ruined. So yeah, we do need more sleep because we are probably more interrupted in our sleep.
And I suppose we are thinking about, you know, a lot, we’ve got a very dense corpus callosum. So their left and right side of their brains are much more densely connected than men. So we actually do have like, I suppose, a lot more, as you call spaghetti thoughts that are all over the place, which can keep you up at night, particularly when you’ve got a multitude of things to worry about, like, you know, the baby, your job, your health, your, you know, the relationship, your, what your future like. So.
we do probably ruminate a little more on a multitude of different things than men do. So yeah.
speaker-1 (53:12.01)
I just pray every night that if I can get to around 2 3 a.m. and Millie hasn’t woken, and I guess it is because I’m getting enough of my deep sleep, etc., like I feel great the next day, but I know when we’re waking multiple times before midnight, it’s going to be a rougher day. But as you said, it’s that preparing yourself, having the other levers, controllables. I like to use a non-sleep deep rest in the mid-afternoon as a brain break.
at times as well as just I find that very restorative for me. I cannot nap.
speaker-0 (53:42.392)
I was going to say you’ve got to learn to nap. Napping is really good for young mothers, but there’s a science to napping. You can mess yourself up pretty badly if you get it wrong.
speaker-1 (53:53.912)
Can you give us that, if we’re going to nap, how do we nap well?
speaker-0 (53:57.326)
Yeah, so unless you’re an elite athlete, sick or a breastfeeding mother, you probably should not be napping after three. Yep. Because what it’s going to do is push a sleep cycle out. And then you’ve got these, you know, secondary effects where everything just gets shifted too late. And then you’re missing those two hours before midnight, which is incredibly important for that deep, slow wave sleep, the human growth hormone. So if you’re going to nap, make sure it’s either 20 minutes or close to 90 minutes.
Don’t be having 30, 40 minute naps because then you’re going to be woken up in that deep, slow wave part of your sleep and then you get that sleep inertia for the rest of the day. So we will really love the Nappuccino or the Nappespresso where you take a shot of coffee and then you lie down and go to sleep and then by the time that the caffeine hits your bloodstream it blocks the adenosine.
receptors and it’ll wake you up. But you can mess yourself up because it takes me, I’ve got such a busy mind, it takes me so long to get to sleep that I’ve taken the coffee, you know, 10, 15 minutes later still like, and then finally falling asleep. Then I’ve woken up in the, you know, the wrong part of my sleep. So you be careful about it. But napping is really, even 10 minutes, it can be completely restorative. And particularly if you’ve had alcohol, you want to go the full 90 minute nap so you can get into that REM sleep and process the
all those thoughts of like, did I actually say that last night?
speaker-1 (55:23.182)
Yeah, great, great tips. Okay, maybe I need to practice my napping. I guess as we get close to the end of the episode, I did want to touch on, because I do think, and you did briefly mention it before, the nighttime doom scrolling. We know it’s not good for us. Why are we doing it?
speaker-0 (55:39.528)
it’s so. Crack heads, that’s why. Yeah, mean, we do it. mean, there’s a lot of procrastination is just really an avoidance of an emotion. So we often will procrastinate into our phones because we don’t want to face the tough conversation we need to have with our partner or we’re thinking about all the things I should have done that day or the hard things I’ve got to do tomorrow or interest rates rising. So we will like go into procrastination because it’s such a rich, dense.
speaker-1 (55:43.753)
biologically what we get from it.
speaker-0 (56:09.262)
plethora of interesting things that will hit, they know exactly how to hit our biochemistry. And so, I mean, they’ve got us, these people who run the algorithms, they know exactly how to hit us in the right moments to get us to be addicted. So it’s not only that, you know, there’s the light. So the whole thing about blue light, the science is a little murky still. Some people will say it doesn’t really do anything, some will say it does. Also blue, I’m sorry, purple and
green light probably do things as well we don’t know, but the light is the big thing. Some people say anything more than three lux, anything more than 30 lux, which you can get a lux meter on your phone, it’s a free app, and just test how much light’s being emitted out of your device. anything more than that can hit your eyeballs, your retinas, and it will increase your stress hormones and dysregulate your circadian rhythm. It’ll push back the time of the melatonin onset.
So there’s the light in your eyeballs. So if I ever look at my phone at night, I actually do this weird thing where I’ve got it on grayscale and I look at it on the side like that. People think, you know, my partner goes, you’re such a weirdo, just put the phone away. But sometimes there’s these things I just want to look at. And so I know getting light into my eyeballs straight up is not good. So I’ll look at it on the side. But yeah, it’s also what you’re looking at. So, you know, I’d say to the Olympians, like before your race, the night before, would you leave your bedroom door open and let anybody walk in, say anything to you that you wanted?
No, because that could really affect your biochemistry, get your stress hormones up, and that will affect your race tomorrow. Being on your phone, you’re literally doing the same thing because you don’t know who’s going to message you, you don’t know what comments they’re going to say about you, you don’t know what you’re going to see. And so your brain has a hard time differentiating between seeing something and imagining it. So your brain’s like thinking, did I see that for real?
should I produce a bit of stress hormones just in case the bear’s going to come into my cave and do something to me? Or should I lie here looking at stressful things unprotected? And of course your brain will say, I’m just going to produce a few stress hormones just in case that scary thing I’m looking at is actually happening in my environment. I will do that. And so you could be lying there on your phone and your body is just producing these stress and they will not let you get to sleep or you’ll have disrupted sleep.
speaker-0 (58:31.618)
you’ll have waking afterwards. And so you’ve really got to protect your eyeballs. Not only the light getting in, but protect what you’re seeing. Because you have no control over that. And it’s dangerous. And it will set you up for a really hard time for your midnight librarian as well.
speaker-1 (58:51.606)
Look, I have to have my phone in the kitchen on a stand and I know a lot of people say I need my phone in my room because it’s an alarm. Get another alarm because I’m not above this. If my phone is with me, next minute I’m on whatever social media app or you know, you do, you just get sucked in because of all these biological reasons.
speaker-0 (59:09.737)
exactly how to do it. And if you look at you actually watch it, you’ll have something nostalgic, then something shocking, then you’ll have some a product that you like to buy. They’ve worked out your particular brain type and you’ll be fed an algorithm which is specific for your brain type. They’ve worked you out. Yeah, it’s quite terrifying actually. 100 % yeah.
speaker-1 (59:26.35)
They know you better than you know you. My very last kind of question I wanted to cover off was a rapid fire just to get a sense check on, you know, what you think is accurate, what is a myth, what people need to maybe reframe within themselves. So the first one I had was for the people who think coffee doesn’t impact my sleep.
speaker-0 (59:48.782)
Yeah, well, so many people say this, I can have five cups and I’m fine. I sleep like a baby. I’m like, sleep like a baby, like wake up every five minutes crying. Is that what you mean? No, but so we only know that that’s not true because now with the advent of mass biometric capture device use. So we actually have data from, you know, millions of people. And when you see that people who actually drink coffee, you know,
because coffee has got a six hour half life, or depending on your genetic disposition and whether you’ve got liver disease, whether you’re on the pill or whether you’re pregnant, the way you metabolize coffee will change. But what we see is that people have got around about five, six hours before the coffee gets out of their bloodstream. So if they’re having coffee, they will go to sleep because probably they’re exhausted. But what you see is a lot of micro arousals and the quality of the sleep is suboptimal compared to someone who’s had.
no coffee. that is an absolute myth. If you think you can sleep really well on coffee,
speaker-1 (01:00:49.73)
about the people who want or think they need a nightcap, know, not social, like social interactions aside, but the like, I just need a wine to wind down and relax.
speaker-0 (01:01:01.454)
I feel so terrible as a stress researcher. I used to say all the time, have a glass of wine to relax. And then I looked at the data, I was like, my God, I’ve literally been lying to people for years. So it is so bad. So people think that the feeling of sedation that you get from alcohol is sleep. It’s not, sedation is completely different. Sleep, you go through the cycles. When you sedated, you’re clonked out and you don’t engage in that.
the cleaning of the brain and the human growth hormone doesn’t get secreted. So it is not good for sleep at all. And in fact, if you are going to drink, I really recommend day drinking rather than night drinking and really no drinking. Yeah, or very little.
speaker-1 (01:01:43.742)
Definitely I don’t do it very much at all but I am a long lunch kind of person. I enjoy that. What about people who life is busy and the decision is do I get more sleep or do I get up in the morning and exercise? I have to make the decision on one or the other.
speaker-0 (01:01:49.336)
There you go, the doctor said.
speaker-0 (01:02:02.878)
I would go for sleep, I would sleep in. What happens is that when you do sleep in, you are actually much more intellectually efficient and you will free up more time for the potential to do exercise. And when you do like that bit more sleeping, you will take the stairs or you will, you know, walk home with your shopping bags instead of jumping in an Uber. You’ll be a cascading effect. When you sleep, you’ll probably not eat.
as much junk food so you probably don’t need to do as much cardio. 100 % sleep. Other people would not agree with me depending on what discipline you come from. But I say sleep first. That’s what the book’s called.
speaker-1 (01:02:47.724)
Yes, I think that’s a great place to finish up. So Sleep First is out June, July? July. July. Date?
speaker-0 (01:02:55.68)
I don’t think we’ve got an actual date yet, but yeah.
speaker-1 (01:02:57.966)
Well, pre-sales available now. So the link is in the show notes. I’ve already pre-ordered my copy. I’m very excited. The last question I ask all of my guests when they come on is a personal question and it is what three strategies, behaviors, tools, whatever you want to call them, help you, Dr. Jemma King, stay at the top.
speaker-0 (01:03:19.266)
a really stupid sense of humour. I do not like feeling stressed. So if I can make light of something and laugh and get oxytocin, I will. I feel like sometimes I’m like a nine-year-old boy in a middle-aged woman’s body, because I just love to be silly and to really not take myself too seriously. I’m a big proponent of middle road. Don’t get too neurotic. I mean, I did the pendulum. I went from being very unhealthy to being…
like super duper like nuts about stuff and then it’s got swung back and I just find that middle road is really good. really be voraciously, what’s the word, in life. So I think that if you can just read and really try and not think that this is my lot in life. Say you’ve been given a diagnosis, mental, physical diagnosis, just think, well, this is it, this is all I’ve got.
I like get out there and doctors don’t know everything and there’s so much new information coming out, particularly with the advent of AI. I think just be intellectually curious, read, study, look into how you can better your life for yourself and experiment and experiment, experiment. So I suppose they’re my little hacks.
speaker-1 (01:04:36.172)
Perfect. If people want to follow along with what you’re up to, where’s the best place for them to do that?
speaker-0 (01:04:41.266)
LinkedIn. I post the most on there about my research and articles and where I’m going to be and what I’m doing and stuff about the book. yeah, I think I’m going to be doing a short webinar for people who pre-order my book. I’m going to get online and people can ask questions about their own personal sleep journey. So I’ll be putting that out on LinkedIn. So it’s Dr. Jemma King on LinkedIn.
speaker-1 (01:05:07.49)
Well, the link will be in the show notes as well as the pre-sale to the book and your website. And yeah, I very much appreciate your time, energy and expertise. There’s so much gold there. Thank you for joining us. And on that note, I’ll be back again next week with a solo episode helping you not only reach the top, but sustainably stay there. I’ll see you all then.