This episode is sponsored by TeamBuildr, yet another company that's doing great things for the first responder community.
As a strength and conditioning coach myself who also trains tactical athletes,
dissemination of wellness information is one of the biggest challenges.
Now Team Builder is the premier strength and conditioning software for tactical athletes, and there are several features that really impress me.
Firstly, there is a full exercise library, so you the personal trainer does not have to create that within your own department.
Secondly, you can send out programming, but also individualize, which I love. So you blanket program for everyone.
Now you can tweak based on someone's injury, someone's need to maybe drop some body composition,
rather than having to write a program for every single person on their own.
TeamBuildr also allows you to build custom questionnaires to collate health and wellness data.
It integrates with wearables, and I think one of the most important things is obviously it tracks.
To me, it's imperative that we as a profession start tracking our people from day one,
and then over the full span of their career, therefore catching potential wellness issues and injuries before they happen.
Now if you want to try TeamBuildr, they are offering you, the audience of the Behind the Shield podcast, a free 14-day trial to experience all of the features.
And if you want to take a deeper dive into TeamBuildr, listen to episode 1032 with Melissa Mercado, or go to teambuilder.com, and I'll spell that to you because it's not as you'd think.
T-E-A-M-B-U-I-L-D-R.com.
This episode is brought to you by Thorne, and I have some incredible news for any of you that are in the military, first responder, or medical professions.
In an effort to give back, Thorne is now offering you an ongoing 35% of each and every one of your purchases of their incredible nutritional solutions.
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Some of my favorite products they have are their Multivitamin Elite, their Whey Protein, the Super EPA, and then most recently, Cynoqil.
As a firefighter, a stuntman, and a martial artist, I've had my share of brain trauma and sleep deprivation, and Cynoqil is their latest brain health supplement.
Now to qualify for the 35% off, go to Thorne.com.
Click on sign in, and then create a new account. You will see the opportunity to register as a first responder or member of military.
When you click on that, it will take you through verification with GovX. You'll simply choose a profession, provide one piece of documentation, and then you are verified for life.
From that point onwards, you will continue to receive 35% off through Thorn.
Now for those of you who don't qualify, there is still the 10% off using the code BTS10, behind the shield 10, for a one-time purchase.
Now to learn more about Thorn, go to episode 323 of the Behind the Shield podcast with Joel Titoro and Wes Barnett.
This episode is sponsored by Global Medical Response, yet another sponsor that I have tracked down because they have a solution to one of the biggest problems we have in emergency medicine and health care.
We often hear the term 911 abuse, but what I love is the concept that this should be a three-tier system. ALS, BLS, and then the non-emergent element.
With the evolution of telehealth and telemedicine, that third tier is now possible virtually.
In 2018, Global Medical Response pioneered 911 nurse navigation.
In communities across the country, GMR's nurse navigators use evidence-based clinical protocols to screen a patient's current condition, providing an appropriate resource to meet the patient's unique health care needs,
whether that's dispatching a rideshare to an urgent care, an appointment at a federally qualified health center, or virtual care with a physician on the spot.
The five-level screening system ensures patients receive the right resource at the right time, in the right setting, to achieve the right outcome at the right cost.
So as a huge advocate for our first responders' health and of course the people that we serve, this solves three issues.
It allows the patient to have a far less expensive option when it comes to their non-emergent issue.
It stops a firefighter or a paramedic being woken up for that call, and it frees up an ER bed for a true emergency.
So if you want to hear more about how GMR can integrate nurse navigation in your 911 system, listen to episode 998 with Joshua Rose and Dr. Jared Troutman, or go to globalmedicalresponse.com.
Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast. As always, my name is James Gearing, and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on the show Dr. Ian Doonican.
Now what makes this conversation so pertinent and important is that Ian has spent his career working with shift workers, forging elite performance and longevity.
So we discuss a host of topics from his own journey into the military, transitioning into the world of mining, sleep deprivation, sleep research, chronic disease, the false economy of overworking the shift worker, forging performance through sleep, injuries, jet lag, his book, A Guide for Sleep Health and Shift Work, and so much more.
Now before we get to this incredibly powerful and important conversation, as I say every week, please just take a moment. Go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the show, leave feedback and leave a rating.
Every single five star rating truly does elevate this podcast, therefore making it easier for others to find. And this is a free library of well over a thousand episodes now.
So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women stories so I can get them to every single person on planet Earth who needs to hear them.
So with that being said, I introduce to you, Dr. Ian Doonican. Enjoy.
Well Ian, I want to start by saying thank you so much for taking the time and coming on the Behind the Shield podcast your morning, my evening.
No worries. Thanks for having me on, James. It's always good to talk to somebody from a different country who lives in a different country like me.
You know it's funny, I know you're based in the States. I remember when I worked for a mining company, I jumped on a conference call one evening and there was people from Denver and Salt Lake City and Montreal.
And I was like, I'm about half a foot through the call. They were like, are we talking to the right person? Because for an Australian, you sound like an Irish man. And I was like, that's because I am Irish.
That's so funny. Like when I heard like, you know, American people say, you know, when they heard a black bloke in Ireland or Scotland or England with that accent, they just blew their mind.
And it's like, yeah, but because we're English or we're Irish, regardless of our pigmentation, we're still from that country.
It's interesting actually. So I had, I've been in Australia for a little over 20 years and I've only been back maybe three times, three times, yeah.
And the second time I went back, so when I left Ireland in the early 2000s, it was only the start of multiculturalism. And so people have to remember that in Ireland, compared to England, we very rarely had different, you know, sort of people coming into the country,
never mind from France even, but even coming in from the Middle East or India or Africa was completely unheard of. And then when I went back in 2015, it was so funny because a lot of kids who had been born in Ireland from Nigeria and looked Nigerian, but had these really thick Dublin accents.
And I just couldn't stop laughing because it was the funniest thing ever to see a guy that was like, looked Nigerian with a real Dublin accent. He was like, how's it going? What are you looking for? Come on, we're getting the bus, right?
And I was just like, I just thought it was so funny to see it, you know, it's great, but it's just when you haven't grown up with it, it's so different.
And it goes opposite too. Like there's these white guys who grew up in Jamaica and there's, you know, full on rasta and everything. And again, we have these pigeonholes and it just jars with it. So your brain almost can't compute.
But it's, you know, that's the beautiful diverse nature of a global population.
Yeah. Yeah. I think it's brilliant. I love it. I love that. They're more interesting. Like I love talking to people who've got these weird and wonderful backgrounds. I remember talking to a guy at the hospital here.
He was Chinese background. His parents came from China and moved to Belfast. So he looked completely Chinese, but he had a really strong West Belfast accent and grew up in the Catholic area.
Yeah, I thought, man, man, my own drugs here in the hospital. Like this is crazy.
It's great. I love it. It's so funny. Yeah.
All right. We want to get to your origin story where you were born. But just before we do, for people listening, where are we finding you today on planet Earth?
So currently at this time, and hopefully I'll be here this evening again, if my wife doesn't kick me out, I am based in Perth in Western Australia, the most isolated capital city in the world.
And for your American viewers, it's a massive state, occupies about one third of Australia and is nine times the size of Texas. So if you think Texas is big, this place is even bigger.
They say everything's bigger in Texas. Now they're going to be sad.
They're going to be sad. I love telling Americans that, they get really pissed off.
There's no way it can be bigger than Texas. I'm like, man, it's nine times the size of Texas.
All right. Well, I want to start at the very beginning of your timeline. So tell me where you were born and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic, what your parents did, how many siblings?
Could be here for a long time, James. We've got a long time, so we're good.
So it was a cold, wet night. So I was born in Dublin originally in 1978.
And then I mainly grew up in a town called Athlone, which is in the dead center of Ireland. And most people have said to me, is that north or south? It's right in the middle.
So technically in the Republic of Ireland, but right in the middle, so halfway between Dublin and Galway. I grew up there, very working class environment, council housing estate.
And it was the 80s in Ireland, wasn't much money. Lots of people were either working in America or England. Dads were away. It was great fun growing up, all was outside.
Lots of fights, lots of sport, running around was brilliant. I played rugby as a teenager predominantly. No real aspirations to go to university, work part time in bars from the age of 12, which is great fun.
I probably had all my nightclubbing on me by near the 18. I left school in year 12, or the final year of school, to join the military and went into an infantry unit.
I spent five years in the military in the Irish Army. Spent a bit of time in the Middle East doing a peacekeeping mission to South Lebanon.
The Irish Army is a little bit different because we're a small army. We do a lot of aid to civil power. So we worked in some prisons as well, doing the perimeter security.
Any money that gets escorted around the country has to have a big money, has an army escort. We also brought explosives around to different quarries and so on.
So I did that for five years and then I left and went to work at a regional sports center. So I wanted to go into a kind of a career in exercise and fitness.
I met my wife, who's Australian, moved to Australia, came to Perth for three days after traveling in Africa for a little while and been here for a little bit over 20 years.
Went back to uni, did an undergraduate degree in adult education, worked for a mining company for about 10 years in sort of mining operation roles and then globally as well.
So kind of went through the ranks there to what was like a principal advisor for global operations. Ended up looking after sort of fatigue and human performance globally.
Along the way, I did a master's in business. I did a master's in mining engineering.
And then in 2014, I decided it was sort of an hour or never before I turned 40 that I want to keep doing this or I want to do something different.
So I went back to university and did a PhD in sleep and performance and elite combat and contact athletes with the Australian Institute of Sport and the Western Forest Super Rugby team here.
And then in 2018, I started my business, Melias Consulting and also Sleep for Performance, which is the arm that kind of provides the podcast, blogs, lots of free information.
Parallel to that, I also do Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I used to do a lot of ultra marathons.
Probably the biggest one I've done is the Leadville 100-Miler outside of Denver, Colorado in Leadville, so it's 100 miles at altitude.
Kind of got burnt out doing that, so now I'm doing a lot of ultra swimming, long distance swimming up to 20km in the ocean.
So yeah, I like to keep busy.
And then the last year or so, I've been learning the piano and trying to get a bit more creative in my middle age as I get into the second half of my life.
And yeah, I also still participate in research as an adjunct, which means I don't get paid by universities, so I get to do whatever I like.
And yeah, mainly kind of self-funded through the business. So I've got a really nice mix of a lot of different things.
And so when I complain about it at night, my wife calls, you've got the best job ever in your silicon plant. But it's great.
I like living here in Western Australia. It's pretty good. It's pretty casual. It's not a big city.
And then yeah, that's kind of a very brief overview of what I've been doing.
Beautiful. I'm going to go all the way back because I like picking apart.
People's journey usually find a lot of gold that then ties into what they do now.
Firstly, you made an interesting point because we don't think of Ireland like this normally. I think of the Philippines or some other, you know, Mexico,
where one parent is overseas trying to earn money in a place that pays better and then they're sending their money back.
What impact did that kind of element in Ireland have on the families that you saw?
Because I can imagine that even though the father or the mother is doing the absolute admirable thing,
that must have also come at a cost as far as the family dynamic as well. Yeah.
Well, my dad was home. He was in the military, but he went away sort of sporadically, but was generally home.
But I think it did have an impact on lots of kids growing up.
It's hard to kind of describe because some people get shocked at this, but I thought it was great.
We were all outside the whole time. It was not like there was no internet.
There was no technology, there's no computer games. People didn't even really have that many.
I think maybe less than a quarter of the houses had cars. Maybe one in every 10 houses had a phone.
You had to go to the public. I just found that was great.
But on the other side, there was lots of alcoholism, drug abuse, violence.
It was pretty tough when you think back now compared to kind of becoming more of a middle class person.
I thought it was great fun, but I think other people may have been greatly affected by it.
I think what it taught me was a lot of resilience and a lot of ability to negotiate,
even to lead and conflict management at a very young age because your parents weren't jumping in.
And so there was lots of, for right or wrong reasons, there was lots of conflict management on the street.
Did that send you into the martial arts those early years?
I think so. Growing up in the 80s, obviously, you may remember all those kind of like No Retreat, No Surrender, John Claude Van Damme movies.
There was still a hangover from the Bruce Lee stuff. I watched all of it.
Yeah, Aaron Schwarzenegger movies, you know, like Commando and all that. I kind of always loved that.
I always liked being outside and being physical. And I still like being sort of physical.
I still get up in the most mornings and go swimming like three or four kilometers and do martial arts and lift weights and stuff.
I like that. I like how it makes me feel. And it sort of settles me.
And I think as a young kid, that activity really helped balance me out.
I would say probably I have some form probably of ADHD.
And I think that just sort of like brings me down to a calm state where I get that sort of energy out of me.
If I don't exercise, I kind of start to go a bit loopy. So it's like kind of a lever for me.
A lot of people think that potentially I have some sort of obsession with body image.
I actually don't really care about body image. For me, it's pure mental health.
It's purely about getting myself to a neutral state really so I can perform for the rest of the day.
So very heavily heavily influenced by that.
And lots of the lots of the houses around us and lots of the people grew up in sort of
if the people that stayed at home would say we're military or factory workers.
So I was very kind of influenced by military.
And obviously, as a kid, you want to try and emulate your dad, don't you?
You want to be like you want to be kind of tough like your dad.
And military sort of stood out to me as that kind of, I suppose, toughness and being a man.
So, yeah, it's interesting because if you look at 2025 now and a lot of the combat athletes
that you work with versus the bodybuilders that we were told with the superheroes
when we were watching as kids, I was the same.
I exercise because initially I wanted to be a good firefighter and be able to, you know,
pull the hose and drag the person and climb the stairs and all the things.
And even when I transitioned out, it became well, you know, out in the real world now.
What if someone tries to attack my child or, you know, whatever the thing is,
it's still a physicality element along with the martial arts training.
But what that does is in turn, it gives you a physique.
So you're not chasing a physique through training.
You're chasing performance through training, which in turn, you know, you look fit.
I'm not looking trying to look like a bodybuilder.
But I think if you are, you know, a good tactical athlete, that is a byproduct.
That's a good byproduct of simply training to be able to perform out in the real world.
Yeah, 100%.
I think a lot of people get obsessed with like having a six pack or doing something.
And I see it a lot, you know, in the sort of the combat sports.
You see young guys coming into Jiu Jitsu, early 20s and they're ripped.
They've got a six pack and they sort of look at me and go,
there's a guy with white hair and a white beard and he's got a black belt on.
I'll go over there and I'll fuck him up.
And it's like, then they get they get fucked up.
And it's kind of like, well, it's skill, lads.
And it's performance around around a specific goal that you're chasing.
Just because you look the part, you know, it's like it's like you say in the Army, all show and no toe.
You know, it's like guys will look great, but can fall apart.
And so it's I think people don't focus on the scale or what they're trying to develop.
And also, there's a lot of stuff from doing ultra events.
I found it's it's mostly in your head because you've got to be able to sustain that.
And you know, that as a firefighter being on a scene for, you know, maybe hours or days on end,
it's a mental process as well.
Staying in the game.
And this is for military paramedics, endurance athletes, whatever.
And a lot of it is mental, too.
I think people miss that.
And they just want to look at the aesthetics because to see something on Instagram.
And I think even more so now, younger people are trying to chase that from Instagram going, I need a six pack or net pack.
Interestingly, I don't know, James, have you seen this?
It was on a documentary a few years ago to show the evolution of the G.I. Joe doll.
And so the G.I. Joe doll, when we were growing up, sort of had a flat stomach or the action man that we used to have probably in Ireland and England, had a flat stomach.
Now, as time has gone on, it's got like nearly a 10 pack and it's ripped and got like, you know, tubes over.
It's like it's on steroids.
So people look at that and then they think that's what being fit and healthy is.
You know, and I think that needs to be kind of a different approach as people, you know, get older as well.
It's interesting because there's been a full circle, if you look at fashion, for example, from back to the 80s and you look at the young kids now, they've got the perms and they got all the things that we have when we were young, the highlights and all that.
But that's one of the things that's a shame is that kind of body dysmorphia element that existed in the 80s has come full circle despite huge advances in nutrition and strength and conditioning and mental health.
But that's kind of one of those nasty kind of narcissism elements through social media that's permeating into our children.
Yeah. Yeah. You know, Zempik is like what Slim Fast was for us in the 90s.
Yeah. You know, people looking for the cheat codes. And this is something I say about a lot of health areas.
Like people ask me questions on different things and not that I'm an expert on anything outside my domain, but I just say to people, all this stuff you see about hacks and shortcuts, there's no biological free ride.
You're going to pay for it. You're going to pay for it. What you need. And it's boring, but effective.
And this guy, Jocko talks about in his podcast, and I love it because it's true. Discipline equals freedom. It gives you the time to do other things. And it's all about routine, routine, routine.
Routine is boring, but it's effective. And it's the way to get things done. Going through these cycles, these craze things of buying stuff and doing things.
That's why when people say to me, oh, what do you recommend for sleep and what vitamins and what supplements?
I don't recommend anything. Start with this. The very basic thing. And most people can't even do the basic thing for three weeks.
It's difficult. You know, and a lot of this stuff I think is around discipline. People are looking for cheat codes constantly. And again, it's a product of the internet.
What's the hack? What's the hack? I hate that word hack. There is no hack.
Biohack.
All right. Well, I want to progress through your journeys into the military. But just before we do, because I'm sure people are curious,
talk to me about the cultural element that puts a 12 year old into a bar, into a pub.
I knew you were going to pick on that. I told him I said it. He said pick on that.
And I'm drinking zero alcohol.
Yeah. So I suppose for people, because people get shocked at this. My wife often says to me, you shouldn't say this to people. It doesn't matter.
The difference is, and probably you've done this as well, James, from Northern England, the pub or the lounge or the bar is more like an extension of the sitting room in your community.
It's not this place where you go and sort of get, you know, liquored up and go crazy and have fights.
It's a lot of time these pubs will be in housing estates or near housing estates. They wouldn't necessarily be in town.
And so, yeah, I just got a job there and I was 12 picking up glasses and washing stuff and Friday, Saturday and Sunday night. I thought it was great.
You know, I'm wearing my little shirt and tie, but I was pretty big at 12. I was five foot ten and about 85 kilos.
So I'm probably bigger than I am now. So I didn't really grow since the age of 12. And I thought it was great.
And again, teaching is like, again, discipline, having some money.
You know, obviously, growing up in the environment, parents take a cut of your money as well. If you're earning, you've got to have that part of it.
But yeah, interactions, dealing with people, dealing with customers,
learning about stock rotation, stock management, cleanliness, all those type of things.
We were never sort of we were always sort of grafted, I think, as kids, even we would like at 10 or 11, we'd get a few sweeping brushes and a lawn mower and go around and knock on doors and say,
don't you ever clean your lawns mowed for like a pound or two pound? So because parents didn't give us a lot of money.
You had to go and sort of forage for it. So we're always come up with schemes.
So then we a lot of us start getting jobs like that at 12, 13, 14, working on milk vans, cleaning, doing anything we could.
And so, yeah, it was basically like, yeah, I think I was going into this bar to get my parents cigarettes out of cigarette machine.
And the guy said to me one day, are those cigarettes for you? I said no, for my parents, I don't smoke.
And he goes, you wouldn't be interested in a job, would you here doing some like cleaning and stuff and picking up glasses?
I said, yeah, sure. So that was it.
I worked there for a while and then I progressed on to working in another bar in town.
And that was great fun. And so I did that on and off because I was about 20 part time.
I think it was great. It's it's yeah, it was it was a great way.
But what was funny was when I actually turned 18 and went to the nightclub for my 18th birthday, the bouncer was like, you turning 18?
You've been coming in there for three or four years because I thought you were like 25.
So yeah, so I was sort of I was all done by 24.
Like my club and days were well behind me.
And it was interesting because most of my mates were probably around 30.
So like an old man before I started. Yeah, it was good fun. I enjoyed it.
Yeah, I was the opposite. I didn't have my growth spurt till I was 18.
So there was no way in hell I was getting anywhere underage.
Yeah, that's yeah. Well, I'd rather be like that now.
So when I was younger, I was like, oh, I want to look older. And now that I'm 46, I look like I'm 55.
I wish I could look younger. Everything is white and gray.
You look pretty good to me. I'm 50 myself.
So yeah, I mean, I think that's that's the testament of exercise and jujitsu, though. It does work.
Yeah, I think one of the biggest things James did actually was probably about 12, 13 years ago.
I stopped drinking and I gradually had ramped down over the years when I was doing ultra running.
And I just got to the stage where even like one or two drinks was like making me feel, you know, sick or depressed, even for two or three days, I'd feel gray.
And then I just took a break for six months. I felt so good that I just didn't drink again.
And it wasn't that I had a problem, but I was just and yeah, I just think I just did meet a world of good.
And then I started making some dietary changes as well over the last few years. And that's really helped me as well.
Those things as well really help you sort of maintain performance and functionality as you get older as well.
Because I see some guys and you're probably the same around the same age as us and just keep drinking and trying to paratelator 21.
You just can't do it. You can't burn the candle at both ends. Someone's got to give.
Yeah, yeah. It's obviously a big thing here because we have so many people that are overweight or obese and it's sad.
And I'm not saying that judgingly at all. It's you know, it shouldn't be the case.
We should have an environment that forges wellness. But yeah, I mean, you have a lot of guys by the time they get to our age.
God, if someone did try and grab your child, what would you be able to do?
You just literally watch them take them away. You wouldn't be able to fight back. You wouldn't be able to chase them.
So, you know, but there isn't really that messaging here.
Like, you know, it's almost like, well, I'm 40. That's why I'm on all these blood pressure pills and diabetes pills.
And, you know, well, you know, they put on put on new uniform every year.
Yeah, another two inches waist size and stuff, but that's not good. You know, I put on 100 pounds after pregnancy.
There's just there's no health messaging here in general.
So the environment is set up for people to get bigger and sicker and lose that very physicality that is such a gift.
Yeah, I think it's I I don't know what it's like in the US in the sort of fire service and paramedics and police.
But even in the military, there's annual fitness standards that have to be maintained and are obviously scaled by age.
So as you get older, like, you know, and it's generally like push ups, sit ups, some sort of timed run or pull ups and whatever it might be.
And it's not that you have to hit the same time as you when you're 21.
Like if you're 45, you might get an extra three minutes for a two mile run.
But that doesn't seem to be the case in a lot of countries.
You know, it might be a beat test for entrance or push ups or some sort of thing.
And then even then, people are getting in barely passing and I'm like, this should be something that is maintained year on year.
And if you don't meet those standards, well, then I'm sorry, but you shouldn't be there.
Now, there should be support to help people lose weight or gain strength and so on.
But I totally agree with you. I see police here in even Australia.
And you're like morbidly obese pulling up your trousers.
And if like, how could you even calm yourself to pull that weapon?
If you're breathing rapidly like how are you going to steady to take a shot?
How are you going to chase somebody?
How are you going to even have the ability to be composed under pressure?
I don't understand it for their own sort of their own safety in their role and their own performance.
Not to mention all the other negative health effects you spoke about and diabetes and so on,
which also is a precursor or correlate with sleep apnea as well,
which then people get themselves into these negative cycles plus shift work and so on.
So I don't understand why people just allow that to happen irrespective of the organizational factors,
but individually, how they allow that to happen.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I want to dive into the sleep deprivation a bit because that's part of the conversation.
Ownership is also part. Jocko talks about that a lot.
But you're also a product of your environment.
And for example, in the fire service here, if you're running calls 24 hours straight
and then you get mandatory to another 24 hours overtime, you told you cannot go home.
Then you have a 24 hour period to recover and then you're back at the station.
You know, that's not exactly an environment for you to be, you know, focusing on your wellness and catching up on sleep.
So but before we dive into that, when you were in the school age prior to the military,
was it the military you were thinking about? Was there something else as far as career aspirations?
Oh, every now and then I think about do I want to go to uni and do psychology or engineering?
But I just I didn't like being in a classroom, James. I just really didn't like it.
I thought I can't do more. It is. I just found it so limiting and so stifling and sort of I don't know.
Maybe other people's experience are different.
But in Ireland, it was just like basically sit there and rose and just listen to the teacher, you know, vomit information,
don't have a discussion. You can't answer back. You can't.
There's no it's all just they're aware and all with the quite.
I found 95 percent of my teachers to be basically ignorant. And I mean, ignorant of the world.
They were just like, this is the way they weren't open to anything or any discussion.
I didn't like that. I'm kind of inquisitive by nature.
You know, I always got in trouble as a kid for asking questions or having an ulterior point of view or, you know,
even by my parents or being told I had a lot to say.
But I'm just I'm just inquisitive. And that's what makes me, I think, a fairly decent researcher.
I just want to I want to find out. It's not that I have an agenda or a motive.
I'm just generally interested in lots of different things.
I'm not I'm not trying to chase a goal.
I'm trying to chase information and knowledge and try to understand what's happening with no specific goal, really.
So I think that's kind of just the way I'm wired. But the classroom environment didn't suit me.
I actually didn't do full time university until I did my Ph.D.
Before that, it was all like online, distance, part time.
I just couldn't even stand being kind of going to university full time for a year or two.
I'd obviously made it longer because I spent the goods of 18 years in studying nearly.
But it was just far more easier for me to do it that way.
Yeah. You mentioned about one of your duties in the military was bringing explosives to mines.
Is that how you were introduced to that career field?
No, not at all. No. And sort of by pure accident here in Western Australia.
So when I came here, I went to it.
So when we came to Western Australia, like I said, we came here to see a friend.
And my wife said, oh, there's lots of mines here, like lots of mining activity underground and open court.
So maybe that could be we could just look at that maybe in the papers and see.
And it was lots of jobs. And I actually wanted to go and do civil engineering.
So I went to TAFE, which is like before university, like kind of a community college will say in America.
So we'll do like diplomas and advanced diplomas, kind of an on ramp to uni.
So I went there and I spoke to a guy and he said, I think you really should look at health and safety.
A lot of military guys go into the health and safety stream.
And he goes, your background is really good for that.
And because I used to instruct in the military as well. And he said, this is really good.
So I ended up going down that path. And that's what got me into the mining industry.
So I was working for a consultancy group and then basically got into the mining industry via that way.
And then sort of bounce between business improvement and health and safety projects before I left 10 years in that business.
So, yeah, it was pure, pure accidental. I wasn't like, oh, I love mining.
Yeah, it's pretty interesting business, though. It's quite big.
The company I worked for was a British company originally called Rio Tinto.
It's the second largest company in the world for mining.
And I had a lot of sort of British military influence into the design of it from the ELEA Shack system with a stratified sort of management.
So there was lots of lots of that sort of kind of structure in the back of it.
I had defined career pathways. It was very good in terms of promoting to do further education.
It was a great company to work for. Paid very well. Looked after you.
Lots of perks to it. So it was really good. And so I just stayed in it.
But then after 10 years, it was time to again, like when I left the military, do you want to stay here or do you want to sort of exit stage left and do something else?
So, yeah. Well, the world of mining is connected to the fire service because our SBAs came from the mining industry.
So it's interesting because the instructors would tell us, oh, this is a 45 minute ball, but it's it is a 45 minute ball.
If you're lying on, you know, a pulling system and you just, you know, using your power to it.
But if you're taking 100 pounds of gear up a high rise building, then you're probably not going to last 45 minutes.
With that being said, also, we know we know of disasters and other things that happen in that industry.
What was the kind of the landscape as far as the influence on as we're going to get into shift work,
sleep deprivation on some of maybe some of the industrial accidents that you started seeing?
Yeah. So the company I worked for had a very good safety record in terms of that, probably one of the best in the world in regards to the effect on it.
But I think what we see probably is more if we think about in two parts, you've obviously got the acute or the short term or those safety incidents that you see occurring that may be due to sleep loss and impact via fatigue.
And then you have the long term health issues as well, which lead them to wake in and shift work disruption and so on.
So there are probably two areas to kind of focus on.
What we did see predominantly because it's obviously a shift working business was probably in some of the more monotonous tasks where people are driving, where you see those big haul trucks that kind of bring the iron ore, the coal.
It was more like vehicle to vehicle interaction where people would experience micro sleeps and probably many people, regardless of the industry they're in, would experience this if they're doing shift work between anywhere from 2am right through to 7am on the night shift.
So very much kind of center around this as well. And that's where we see some of these factors influencing this.
Or in the oil and gas industry, you see it as well long term sustained attention on task, like you were talking about, people doing overtime shifts, so extra days in a row, more consecutive shifts.
It might be scheduled for a 10 hour shift, but they've had to stay back every day for two or three hours to try and make it up because maybe it's a shutdown or a construction project.
So once you start seeing these kind of factors influence, build up, you can see this kind of cause of pathway towards these incidents.
I think it's very difficult to say from an incident investigation point of view that sleep deprivation or sleep loss or fatigue or lack of attention due to sleep disruption is the cause or the root cause factor.
It's generally probably more a contributing factor.
Unless you see in certain incidents where people have had a micro sleep completely where we've actually observed with technology and that person then has had that maybe because of a sleep apnea incident or something like that.
But even then people would say maybe they just were very tired, but it wasn't sleep apnea or something else and there's more testing that has to be done.
So yeah, it's definitely part of safety incidents. I think long term is probably where we're going to start seeing some stuff occur in the future.
Long term issues from sleep deprivation because people who do long term shift work generally gain more weight as we gain more weight.
We have more trouble with appetite regulation with leptin and ghrelin because they kind of sort of get all confused in terms of these appetite regulating hormones.
So people doing shift work generally will consume more calories.
Then obviously with that obesity then leads to diabetes, which then leads to lethargy during the day and other issues type 2 diabetes, which then can lead to sleep apnea.
And it's a certain causal change down that way that happens.
And so I think organizations have to start looking at that more so in terms of providing the testing support for the treatment and getting people back to work in a fit and healthy state.
And I know the obesity thing is such a big area to unpack on its own and I'm not an expert in that.
I know there's definitely multiple factors to go into from psychological aspects to it, to the change in food in terms of more calories in food these days, the availability, the price, cost of living pressures that come down to as well, the ease of cooking.
So many factors in that as well. So yeah, it's hard.
Well, we're going back to what we were talking about about first responders that have obviously become deconditioned. This is I think why we got to have this double sided conversation is yes, there should be punitive fitness standards.
Absolutely. And you look at the ocean lifeguards, you never see a fat lifeguard at the beach.
They're always incredible shape and there's, you know, one or two year recertification process.
So if you can't do the things that lifeguard needs to be able to do, you're not a lifeguard anymore.
You look at the SAS and Navy SEALs and Delta, you start packing on weight and refusing to exercise, you're not going to be a special operator anymore. It's just that simple.
So, but the way that we work our first responders, especially our firefighters here in America, it absolutely sets them up for failure.
And exactly like you're talking about, I mean, they are so broken down hormonally that, you know, there is an element that is not their fault.
They are going to gain weight, their testosterone is in the toilet, their leptin and ghrelins all out of whack, their pre-diabetic, you know, all these things.
And you've got this perfect storm then for ill health and you're taking away the motivation because the cognitive decline.
And it's, you know, it's a really hard thing. So a lot of our guys that are in great shape, it's really despite the environment, they work not because of the environment.
It's definitely difficult, James, and I empathize with people and I think, you know, there's two streams here we have to talk about as well.
Just like we said with the incidents, acute and long term, we have to talk about organizational factors from companies or organizations and we have to talk about individual factors as well.
And organizations needs to do a lot more, I think, in general, around providing the safe systems of work to allow people to work.
And so that includes from a fatigue risk management sort of system design is things like the shifts in roster design, the rules around overtime.
How far are people living from work, the commute duration? Are we giving people adequate breaks within the shift?
What's the length of the shift? What's the time between the shifts? What's the direction of the roster?
And all these things we address in the book as well around people who are designing rosters as well.
How we set people for success in that way, how we manage and support people with sleep disorders.
Are we engaging people? Are we doing risk assessments to identify all these other issues that may be there?
The other thing as well is that there's all these external factors that we have to consider in design of these.
So it's not easy because your life, James, might be completely different than mine.
I might be a single bloke in my 40s and I want to basically work really hard for two weeks and have two weeks off and go down to Cancun and have a crazy time.
You might have five kids and you're like, well, my wife is trying to work and I'm trying to do this and study.
And I need to be kind of just doing two days on and two days off so we can kind of share the load.
And so it's very hard to come up with like what is the best roster design because irrespective of the health aspects or safety aspects, it's what suits everybody's life.
So it's really hard. But we do talk about in the book some design principles that you can do that can lower the risk and sort of provide some guidance for people.
The other thing as well, I think if we talk about from a safety perspective, we often talk about the hierarchy of controls like eliminating risk and substitution, engineering, all the way down to admin.
A lot of people view like education and training as an admin control on low level.
But if we can educate people around these things and what to do, they can eliminate a lot of bad habits and behaviors.
And so we've seen with a lot of companies we work with here in Australia and some in the US as well, a massive change in behaviors of individuals when we educate them.
Because we've had people come up with and go, oh, I've been doing shift work for 25 years and I didn't realize I was doing all this stuff wrong.
And so what we try to do is educate people about making the right choices at the right time.
And we're not saying that people don't drink coffee.
We're not saying people don't go out and have a few beers or have a laugh or don't eat a chocolate cake.
But it's about the timing of that. So, you know, for example, coming off night shift is probably not the best time to start sinking six or seven beers, having chocolate cake and a big McDonald's before you go to sleep.
It's probably not going to be conducive to good sleep for that first day off after maybe doing seven night shifts in a row.
So maybe have a day off, get your sleep right, get back into it.
Then the next day go for a walk and have your beers and McDonald's and chocolate cake, whatever you want to do.
You know, but it's about it's about the optimization of these type of things.
So it's about education for people to make the right choices.
I think too often in the health area, we tell people don't do this and don't do that.
It's about tradeoffs.
I think people are pissed off being told what to do over the last few years because there was something going on in the world that I don't want to talk about.
When the populations that you've worked with, what was their hourly work week?
How many hours were they normally working in a single week?
So anything from I've worked with F1 drivers to UFC fighters to executives to shift workers.
And it's anywhere from the average of like, you know, the 40 hours, right up to 84 hours a week for shift workers and some probably up as far as 100 in the extreme cases.
And some of those have been very complex cases, including long travel, daily commute, travel across time zones as well, which results in jet lag or people trying to cut weight for fights.
Or in the case of F1 drivers, like doing media before an F1 weekend when you have practice and race.
Same with baseball. I've worked with some Major League Baseball players as well.
You know, 180 games in six months.
And even though they're not maybe pitching or batting or whatever they're doing the next day, they still have to go and sit in the Dildel with the team because we're a team, you know.
So all those kind of complex factors have to be addressed.
So yeah, anything up to maybe 100 hours a week from 40 to 100.
So yeah.
So those are different scenarios.
But if you've got a profession like the first responders where these men and women are going to be doing the same week for 10, 20, probably 20 or 30 years.
What would be the ideal length of that work week, number of hours in that work week, that duration unending with no sleep every shift?
Well, it's hard to kind of know without looking at it because it's all about trade-offs.
We use like modeling software to model out some of these things as well.
So in general, a good design principle would be to try to limit the shifts to no more than 12 hours, giving people a couple of breaks, you know, at least two half hour breaks.
But in that, if possible, that's allowing for an hour each way, a commute each day.
Generally advocate for no more than seven shifts in a row before they have a day off.
And these are some of the design principles we will put in because once we start going over these kind of limits, it's not that they're hard limits, but we start seeing an impact to performance.
We see reaction time being affected.
We see health being affected.
We see family being impacted.
So it's really hard for me, James, to say like this is the perfect kind of thing to do because it would depend on the time off and other factors as well.
The age of the cohort that's doing the shift work as well.
The type of work that's being done as well, whereas in first responders, you could be sitting there for 24 hours with no jobs or you could be going 24 hours like 100 percent depending on the call out.
So it's very difficult to kind of to balance out that workload.
Whereas a lot of paramedics, for example, particularly metropolitan areas are pretty steady across a 12 hour shift.
So they know they're going to be pretty busy and they may have a couple of extra hours at the end.
Firefighters are probably the hardest, I think, to basically to plan for because they could have a week of nothing and then it could be two weeks of craziness.
And I'm sure people are listening to this going, yeah, my station is just crazy.
I'm in the middle of, you know, like New York or LA and it's just constant every day.
So it just really depends on the workload.
It's really hard. I think even in the metropolitan area, each station will be different, whether they're central or in the periphery as well.
So it's difficult for me to give an answer on that. Sorry.
No, it's good. Well, I'll paint the picture in a different way.
So the way that the fire service started a long, long time ago, arguably before we ever even did the medic stuff, because we most of us now are firefighters and paramedics or EMTs combined.
So we do all of that. If this doesn't involve the police stuff, they're calling us, rope rescues, you name it.
And so back in the day when we were just fighting fire and we were literally in a fire station playing cards, smoking cigarettes, having a beer, waiting for a fire.
The 24 48, the one day on two days off is what they call it, even though it's mislabeled because a day is not 24 hours.
You know, that was probably fine. But 70s, 80s, 90s come in, we start doing the EMS now progressing.
And so it's certainly the 20 years I've been in the fire service. And it is literally what you said most urban suburban firefighters are running tens of tens of calls per shift, you know, and yes, there's there's periods where they'll get to sleep.
They might even have an anomaly where they'll actually sleep a whole night, even though, you know, you can imagine the quality of sleep is going to be terrible because it's just waiting for that call.
And so but what we've seen is everything from, you know, suicide, cancer, obesity, heart disease, strokes, you know, autoimmune disease, all the things and even childhood diseases were passing it on to our kids.
And then that's resulted in a recruitment crisis because, you know, people are looking at from the outside going this looks terrible, you know, 56 hours now you've got a recruitment crisis now they're short.
So now they're forcing the firefighters to say now you're at 80 hours, not sleeping now four of those seven days, for example. So what I'm trying to do and it's beginning here in Florida is to push for just simply another 24 hour period between the shifts, because the 24 48 48 hours off, you know, now it would be a 72.
So now we're trying to just get that brings it down to a 42 hour workweek. So it's still a full civilian workweek. But the way that we've done it with this 56 and 80 hour workweek is just it's not working as you know we're just dropping like flies.
It's trying to and it's interesting because like you said you haven't worked in the American fire and EMS system specifically it's a very unique system compared the rest of the world. Yeah, but the principle of giving these responders more time off between their shifts I think is the is the push.
Yeah, I think you, I, I'm just going to come back on something I said a minute ago when people working at four hours a week, that was probably, and they would do that for maybe two weeks and have a week off. So on average across the year to we're probably working between 56 and 60 hours that was the average
that would get blocks off which weren't encroached on, whereas what you're describing there is, is really can be encroached on and that's not sustainable so I would say for any organization where the average is 56 to 60 hours constantly, you're sort of at the red line.
And people can't maintain that you've also unpacked another interest in area there as well James that when we look at designing and this is when we kind of jump into this organizational factors and we talk about drew Dawson and Kirsty McCullough have this model at the
beginning of the years ago is the first level when you're looking at fatigue risk management systems is, is there adequate staffing.
And the first and so if the answer is no, which it sounds like there's not, you're just going to have this issue resonate through the business.
And so until you address that, so if you have to have 100 firefighters in your station for example I'm just making up something here people are probably going, there's not 100 firefighters but let's say we got 100, but you're running that 80 80% someone's
going to be in that shortfall, that's going to come with extra shifts over time at the end of the shift.
And then when people start doing that that's going to lead to people going, oh I can't do this anymore now that are in sick. Now, again, on top of that, if there's other games to be played in the business, we are people are getting double time or treble time for overtime
shifts. Does that then promote people to be ringing and sick, and does that promote more stuff and then the overtime budget starts blowing out as well.
And that may be influencing as well. So are people incentivized to do more, but then book in sick or book off sick, and under there.
But until you have the right staffing level.
If you don't address that all the stuff that you do is an organization educating people, telling people to eat healthy. Even the firefighters like, you know, avoid alcohol and caffeine and timing of these type of things.
It's very difficult to do it because if you're averaging more than 60 hours over let's say a quarter of the year.
You're going to start redlining your body, and my advice then to people would be like, then you need to have it if the organization is not serious about changing that you need to have a look and see is this career really suitable for you because you may be doing
long term damage to yourself. And I see people getting this getting caught between this, because they go I can't sustain this. The company is doing nothing here for me.
This could be any company not just a fire service, then the question has to be do you want to keep doing that. And I know sometimes people need the money they don't have other options, but then they might have to, and it's hard to break out of, because they don't have time to
retrain or jump into another area. It's very difficult and people can get caught in that sort of situation, especially if they're sort of over 40, and then they want to make a career change it's very very difficult.
So I again I empathize with people in this situation because it is hard to do, but I would say the first place we have to look as organizations, irrespective of their firefighters or police or anything.
If you are not adequately staff in your teams, you're going to have downstream issues with recruitment, retention, absenteeism, overtime, safety incidents, long term health, cost issues, productivity, response times, whatever those measures are that you have in your business, you are going to see them
impacted. It's like putting a football team on the pitch, you know, to play a game and you don't, you've like 11 soccer players and you've only got eight. You're going to get beaten, you're not going to win.
It's weird how organizations think, oh we just get by, but getting by is not optimization, you're just ticking boxes.
Got to solve the root cause, you know, and this is what we do in our consulting, we highlight the true root cause for businesses. We don't just go in and give them a template of things to follow. It's like what is the root cause here that's causing your fatigue issues.
Sometimes it's union agreements that are driving the poor behavior. Sometimes it's examples like this gems at your scent, and sometimes it's individuals basically not giving a shit about themselves and taking the piss out of the whole situation.
So it's not always, the answer to this problem is multifactorial and could be in any domain.
So yeah, I wish I had the answer to give everybody straight away, but it depends really on each situation.
Yeah, well I think I mean that's, you know, overall that is the answer, which is it's a nuanced conversation, but that doesn't mean that you disregard it and do nothing, which is what people say, oh it's complicated.
It's such that's the word of the coward in my opinion if you just shrug your shoulders and then walk away, you fix nothing. And there's like I said, the environment and the ownership.
One of the things that's maddening is there's such a false economy and exactly what you talked about well we'll just you know, they'll do over time it'll be fine or we'll just hire will lower the lower the standards and we'll just hire, you know, people
who are straight out of high school, and then you end up like you said with people who don't give a shit. What is maddening is you kind of underline some of the downstream costs of when you start destroying your workforce, you know the overtime the workman's comp claims
which is our kind of you know medical insurance, the loss of retention that all those people that you train that then walked out the back door.
Do you tell these companies like how do you illustrate the long term financial loss as being the very money that they need to fix the things that are broken in the first place.
So we go into an organization we have what's called a fatigue risk management diagnostic approach which got 14 elements that we analyze. So we look at all of these in the business.
Now we tried to draw as many different measures within the business as possible so we're looking for quantitative data in each of these boxes, and also qualitative, so we often advocate that we do focus groups with team members.
So we have to talk to everybody.
But we want some representatives to see what's happening on the ground because we often find that leaders and executives have one idea of the world, but the world is going the other way, you know, so it's, I don't have ever seen that show as the wire that was made in Baltimore.
I know of it, I never actually watched it. Yeah, there's a great quote in there I think by one of the detectives he goes, the world's going one way, we go, no one of the drug dealers he said the world's going one way and we going the other.
And I'm like, it's perfect because that's so many times.
And I've used that quote in businesses. I said it's exactly what they say on the wire because you guys think the world is this way, and it's going the opposite direction, because what you see on the ground is completely different.
I'm a big, I'm a big advocate of what the Japanese call Genbis shifts it's a go look see where leaders go out and spend time, you know, basically on the truck on the bus with people observing these shifts particularly on night shifts and seeing what happens across the workload
to understand what's happening. So that's one thing I would say as well as if for leaders to go out and do that it's a great way to engage with people it's also a great way to understand your business irrespective of what that business or organization is and we do that as well.
I don't know what a mining company actually at the moment, going to sit in their control on night shift and just talking to people and looking at what's happening.
So we do this fatigue risk management diagnostic we also use I'm software modeling tools to look at the roster risk or design of the roster and how that could be improved.
So that's really our approach to to unpacking where to go. Then what we tried to do is articulate, and the impact and the actions and the benefits across different pillars so this is where I kind of bring in my business
and engineering stuff. We look at safety as a pillar so health and safety as a pillar. We look at people and leadership as a pillar. We look at productivity and that could be, and that could be productivity slash operational excellence response times number of calls and close out of calls, whatever might be.
And then the final part is cost so we try to articulate across those four or five pillars depending on the business, because I know as well gems that some leaders are going to care about safety and others going to care about cost.
So we want to try and dangle out as many hooks as possible to show people where they can get improvements, because you might have, you know financial director, the HR director, they might be like oh if we can get absenteeism down and make me look really good the financial director
like if I can lower overtime like make me look really good. So we've got to kind of play the game in that respect. Also it's articulating overall business value and business benefit for people.
So the other thing I would say is that I would say 95% of organizations where I've done this. When I see a really bad roster.
It generally then has an impact into lots of absenteeism presentism poor productivity or organizational or operational excellence, and also an increase in cost.
So if you start kind of putting on a dashboard and looking at these measures, what's in the red, you know using just even using simple traffic light systems what's in the red what's in the green what's sort of on the wobbly wind.
Once you see that in safety, it generally echoes down through the rest of the business.
So I think this is where people have to look at safety about enabling performance to minimize costs as well. It's not just about ticking boxes.
You have to have an organization operation that's nice and even that basically doesn't react constantly and is in control. Now people will say but the fire service and paramedics and police is reaction by nature.
Yes, from an operational perspective, but if you have the right amount of people, the right shift design, the support systems in place.
So, not just having the right people in place or the right number of people, you may need extra as well accounting for overtime account sorry accounting for sickness accounting for leave accounting for training.
These things all need to be taken into account. So if the job needs 10 people, you may want to carry 11 or 12 people for that job to account for that.
And this is where organizations try to run lean and use this word lean. It's basically just like a PV or a poverty way of looking at, you need to have the right number of people in place to cover this job.
So, yeah, I think there's just a lot of factors to be considered in that but that's generally our approach, and that's always different for every organization.
One of the best compliments I get from organizations James is, you went across the road to XYZ company, and you told him a completely different way, and I go, yes, because they had a completely different set of problems.
If that was the case, I would just put a template on the internet and charge it download it and you just follow a template.
That's not what this is about. And it's like what you said it's nuanced. Every organization is different. Plus you have people involved, or biological beings were complex were difficult.
This is not an engineering approach so every situation and every countermeasure and every action is going to be completely different every time.
Another nuanced conversation I think is, I mean, God, it's so simple and yet so, you know, it's genius really, and it's again may not apply to every single department, but for the longest time 99.9% of us have gone to the station and we start in anywhere between 7 and 8am.
You put that in any urban department should always work. That's, you know, none of us can live in the cities that we work so it's an hour, hour and 15 minute commute for me.
And so now, you know, you look at some of the data and it's like we are sleep deprived before we even get to that first shift, because you know trying to just go into a dead sleep at 9pm for example is extremely hard, you know you've got to get up at five and not wake the wife and the kids and sneak out and drive 70 miles.
And so by simply changing that start time to say midday to noon.
Now all of a sudden, you know that first responder isn't sneaking out well if their families asleep but they sit there they have breakfast with them. They send them off to school and work and then they go to the station, and the person who they're relieving, who may have run calls all through the night.
Now gets to stay in bed and just catch up a little bit so when they drive home they don't drive into a freeway bridge. So I, this is my personal opinion I think that's a genius and completely free addition to the solution on top of making the work week shorter is to start the sensible
time because there's no reason for us and we avoid the rush hour either side if we come go there at lunchtime.
What is your perception on start times because obviously it's 24 hours so we always we're going to start and leave at the same time on controlling that start time for the long term and short term acuity for a first responder.
And so you're talking about like a 24 hour shift doing like 12 noon to 12 noon the next day. Yes, so we do 24 hours that's that's our standard thing so but rather than, because what would happen is we get in at seven.
And then, if we'd been up all night, the dispatchers would wake us up they were told to it was not their fault. And so then we, you know, let's say we finally got to lay down at 6am 7am the tones go off.
The new crew comes in, and then we're driving home, you know, maybe on on an hour sleep if that extremely dangerous so. So I think to me from both sides the the person going to the station the person at the station that noon is a completely free change but I feel like that
is going to play a huge dent into the sleep deprivation problem.
Yeah.
So, again, it would depend on a couple of factors so in general, and when you look at, and there's very little done on paramedics by the way on these type of rosters, these I don't I don't even know if there's, I can't recall any research specifically looking at these 24 hour cycles
that I've seen and looking at the impact on sleep deprivation response times and there's been some big survey epidemiology stuff done in in firefighters in the US but not really on this type of thing.
Now in general, most of the shift work research is actually done in the laboratory similar shift work. So that's that's a downfall of most of the research.
So my research will be doing mine is always feel best I don't like to do lab based work for shift work I think it's, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna say it's wrong but it's just not my area, I'd rather do feel best stuff.
In your area.
The first answer to that would be a normal other chrono biologist slash sleep scientist is going to say, no, you should start between six and seven in the morning, and then you finish next day at six or seven.
So from 12 to 12, you're going to impact, and particularly on the night shift, because then the person when you're coming up the next morning sun coming up you're going to have more issues rising courts all and so on.
That may be the case, but you're talking about 24 hour shift which is slightly different. So I think you'd have to look at the distribution of calls where the most of the workload is.
You're, you're onto something where basically the person is allowed to sleep optimize your sleep bank before starting the first shift so the night before. So they're not commuting and during rush hour traffic so potentially they might get, you know, at least
eight or nine hours sleep before to come in. It's relaxed start to the day they can exercise they can do some stuff they can get in sort of off peak hour.
The challenge will be I would say then is for after you finish your 24 hours. Did you get enough sleep before you drive home. So there's the workload even off where you can most of the time, get two or three hours before of sleep before you drive home,
the challenge and is between sort of eight nine 1011 in the morning, it is difficult to sleep as you know as a shift worker, because of rising courts all sons coming up circadian rhythms are starting to spike in terms of like, you know, being alert and so on.
So if you're getting home in the afternoon, and you might only get a little nap in the afternoon again, I would say it warrants merit to look at, and it may be better than doing six to six. The other strategy may be, should you even commute there in the morning,
potentially the organization provide off site accommodation, such as apartments or hotel rooms for the person can come the night before, get a good night's sleep and then walk to the station five minutes. And after the finished or night shift as well, candy, go there and sleep for a couple of hours,
that may require some logistical issues as well, but organizations do that and sort of control rooms and their stuff as well or people get together and buy stuff to do that.
So there's different ways of doing that. I think that strategy based upon that example would definitely warrant being looked at. Now most people say that's not scientifically correct. Yep, maybe not.
But this is a very different situation and we have to apply the tools from the science and the research to look at this in a different way. And so, and what I would advocate in that respect then James is to actually look at it like an experiment and go right, let's change this and let's measure it.
So people will go, how can I measure that we can look at the sleep beforehand. Let's look at sleep on people for a month before to do this. We can use actigraphy like Fitbits measure to sleep group all the sleep together, look at it as a group and say on average we're getting like seven hours of sleep per night or six hours, let's say six hours of sleep.
We're changing the start time. We're going to do this. Let's see if it increases in more sleep. And then also what's the quality of thing. Do people feel better have to go more time with your family as a working.
If the sleep is increasing and it's not getting worse than the previous condition or the current condition, then I'd say, let's do it. Like, it's like what Texan said, I'm from the show me step, show me, show me the data, show me the information.
This is where we have to go beyond the basic rules and start moving into what we call fatigue risk management systems and alertness management systems.
Too often we want to manage organization by rules that will shout not work here, that will shout not work this month of hours. Now people are going to say, but you said Erdogan in general these hours, yeah, they're like outer stakes.
That's where you start their boundaries. But then you can move on from basic fatigue sort of systems to safety management systems into fatigue risk management systems into alertness management systems and alertness management systems is what we do when we work with athletes, because they don't care about ticking boxes against codes of practice or union agreements.
They want to be ready for race day, they want to be ready for fight day, they want to be under game. So we start moving your organization that way, but you can do it objective measures, then you have a solid case to say to management, changing our start times from 6am to 12 noon and doing our 24 hour shifts increases sleep by one hour per night, which actually when we use some modeling that shows that we actually are 20% more alert across our roster.
Therefore being better firefighters. What's that going to cost your organization? Zero, because you're still doing 24 hours. It's just a slight change in terms of the start times and the finish times. And so that's like an what we call an innovative approach to these things, not a technological approach.
I love that phrase, don't wait for science to prove what you already know. Of course, like you said, you're trying you're observing but you I mean, you hit the nail on the head without even realizing it. There's no you know, research that you found and this is exactly it, you know, we literally lose so many first responders. And again, I'm not saying sleep is the only factor. But when we talk about cancer, all we talk about is contaminants in our gear. We don't talk about sleep deprivation, which is a known carcinogen. When we talk about the mental health,
Yeah, exactly. When we talk about the mental health side, we talk about oh, but you saw that horrible thing. We don't talk about the fact there's a direct correlation between sleep deprivation and all things mental ill health. So yeah, and the question is, well, why haven't we research and it's a damn good question. Why haven't we but they haven't so people say to me Oh, can you show me the data? I'm like, no, I can't. And it's not isn't that sad that I can't. But what I can show you is how the wrong way to do it. And then you can reverse engineer from that if you do it the way that we've done it, it's not a good thing.
And if you do it the way that we've done it, you'll end up with a recruitment crisis and burying firefighters every single week. So maybe if we start unpacking what some of the things are that are broken, we can use that data to turn it around in a different way.
Yeah, I think there's two things here, James. One is this this you kind of kind of touched on this. And this is something that drives me bat shit crazy.
When people say and American leaders have said this, and Australian leaders, and it drives me crazy when they say the science is settled, I want to rip their head off by virtue of the scientific method.
Science is never settled. It is currently what we know it is currently the information we have. It should be challenged each and every day. And as a scientist, that's what I want to do.
I have got no qualms about ripping my own research to shreds into shit and proving myself wrong. That is exactly what you should do as a scientist. So we should not rest on, oh, the science is settled. I cannot stand that. It drives me insane.
It is idiotic. The second thing is that like lots of things in this world, James, it comes down to money. And unfortunately, there is very little funding that's given out. A lot of people will think that the government just throws out money to research institutes to research wherever they like.
It's a very convoluted and complex process to get funding. That's why I don't do it. It's very difficult to obtain funding and to have a job at university, you have to get funding. That's why I just fund my own research through my business.
But that can get very expensive to do that. Then you have to engage with an organization or a firefighting organization or a team or a station to get people to participate in that.
And if you truly want to look at the information, you have to be open to that being the other way as well. Because in your example, what that shows that people are worse off.
Would people be more annoyed? Or do they still want to change even though it's worse? So it can be very difficult sometimes to do this stuff. But I do think you're right. I think first responders, and I use that term collectively for police, paramedics and firefighters, more research needs to be done here.
And even for nurses and doctors as well in hospitals. We've done some consulting work in this area and it's horrendous what some people do.
And then there's this sort of thing like, oh, well, we're educating this area or we've done this degree or we're a doctor. Doesn't matter. You're still susceptible to sleep deprivation and sleep loss. It's not about intelligence.
As a human, you're going to be susceptible to this. I don't care how good of a firefighter you are, how good of a military operator you are, you are going to be susceptible to these things.
It's not about your character. It's not about your IQ. You are going to be susceptible to sleep loss and sleep deprivation and it affects everybody different. So that's why we have to make these organizational changes and educate individuals as well to make the right decisions within these systems of work.
Well, it's interesting as well when you look at the origin stories and I'm going to use surgical residents as an example. Their work weeks were insane. These young student doctors are working again like 80 hours a week and these are people that are doing life saving interventions, sometimes neurosurgery.
And then you go back in history and you learn that one of the original professors would stay up for days at a time and that's kind of what started this. But it turns out he was on cocaine and that's why he was awake.
And this is a very well known story in the medical community. So at what point do you go, well then maybe we should change that. That's not founded on common sense. It may have seemed perfectly normal in the 1890s or whatever it was, but it doesn't fit today.
And like I said, when we're sitting around smoking waiting for one fire a week, then maybe 24 hours and then home for 48 made sense. But now fast forward to post, as you touched on the COVID, I mean the poor first responders after that just got worse and worse and worse.
If your workload has gone up exponentially, you're losing people, but you're hanging on doggedly to the old way of working. At what point do you just have to swallow your pride and say, it doesn't work. We have to go back and look at this and see where did this come from and does it match today.
No, it doesn't match. Then we have to make this change and turn these things around.
Yeah. And at that breaking point can be driven by organizations or people or so on. Just on your comment about the cocaine, have you seen that show called The Nick?
I haven't, no.
I think it might be a HBO show. It was two seasons. What's that English actor's name? Is it Clive Owen? Is that his name?
Yes. Yeah.
He played the doctor. He played the doctor and Bono from U2, his daughter was the nurse. It's very good. It must be 10 years old now. He did two seasons. It was about The Nick, which was a hospital in New York, background 1910 or something like that.
And that's exactly what it was. The doctor was like, oh, he's having cocaine. And then when he went into rehab to put him on heroin, he's just like, oh, Jesus Christ.
Break him down. But did there a point there that you were talking about, which I've just forgotten now. It just got on my head because I was talking about that.
I'll refresh my memory there, James.
The doctor wanted it was also again, the sitting around the fire station waiting to call.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, sorry. Another example. So back in 2003, four, five, six, when I lived in a remote town in Western Australia, I was a volunteer firefighter in the town. So because of the size of the country in Australia, we have lots of, and I'm probably the same in America, volunteer fire service.
We had volunteer paramedics and so on. And so I did that while I was living there. And then for the mining company I was working with, I was also part of the emergency response team.
So we were kind of like, like what you were saying, paramedics and firefighters there to respond to incidents. And we got trained up like to all the same competencies as a full time firefighter over the years. It was quite good fun.
And doing all the rope access and confined space stuff and BA and all that sort of stuff and incident management. But there was a town about 20 kilometers away called Carartha and that was run by a volunteer fire force.
A volunteer force as well, if you want to call it that.
And they just got to the point where there were so many call outs. They went, we're not doing this anymore. We've got full time jobs and families. And sometimes they were getting like 10, 12 call outs a night. And they were like, this is ridiculous.
And we would have to go and support them when they got really busy. And up around that area as well, you get lots of kind of grass fires and bush fires.
You know, there was things like had to go on to ships because of the big port there as well, ship incidents, ship fires, all sorts of stuff, road traffic accidents, everything.
And so basically they went, we're not doing anymore. And so the fire emergency services in Western Australia went, okay. And they put a full time fire crew in there because there was that many incidents occurring.
And they looked at the data and said, yeah, you're right. And now there's like full time firefighters up there. I think there might be four to six crews up there, I think I might have heard recently.
And a full time fire station has been developed. So sometimes people have just got to kind of go up, we can't do this anymore.
So I'm not a communist or a socialist, but sometimes I think the people have to revolt and go, we can't do this anymore. It's just not sustainable.
And so in that case, that's what happened. That's what happened there as well.
I'm not saying to people like just be obtrusive about stuff or obnoxious or don't do your work, but you've got to look at it and use data and use information.
And it can be hard sometimes because people think it's just the union trying to get more money or it's people just being pissed off.
So I'd say to people, if you're in a team or you're a leader, that's where the level supervisor, get as much objective data as you can across safety, HR, productivity, operation, excellence and cost, like I was talking about earlier on.
And try and paint that picture in a way where you can make improvements. So bring a problem, but also potential solutions as well.
And that's why I come back to the book as well, because we do talk about that in the book as well. There's many things in there that people can use.
And so the book is, I can get to my shameless plug now, is about 140 pages and it's nicely laid out and it's nice and easy with lots of pictures and sections in there for different things.
And, you know, we've made it easy to read. But what we've also done as well, James, in the back is we have 213 scientific references.
So throughout the book, if you see a number 52, you can go back to here and look up what study was number 52.
And then if you want, you can go and maybe find that paper. So for example, here will be this was a paper looking at sleep apnea, an independent risk factor for prevalent and incident diabetes in the bustling health study.
So like you can, it's all there for those people who want to do it. It goes through some myths.
The other thing in the book as well is that throughout the book, we have links out to other platforms, our platforms.
So for this one, for example, you'll see these QR codes here. I have a podcast called Sleep for Performance and we've got about 140 episodes.
This QR code will bring you that specific episode. So if you want to listen to my conversation with Christopher Barnes about basically sleep and leadership, you can go and listen to that for an hour.
So there's lots of resources off that as well. And it's not going to bring you to links that aren't going to work because it's our platform. It's our information. It's our stuff.
We talk about lots of studies in there. We've done lots of seminars as well. Again, links out to all those things that are applicable. We talk about circadian rhythms in sleep.
And it's a great book to kind of help people as well, not only improve their own sleep and sort of fatigue management, but also if they want to start developing a business case to bring to leaders, they can start using this information, citing some of these studies.
They can develop these things to make some improvements as well. And that's why I said to people, don't just bring problems to your leaders. Try to articulate a business case. What is the problem? What do you want to do about it? How are you going to measure and how are you going to do it?
So be proactive in that space because we all know as leaders, if we ever been in those positions before, someone coming to a problem is just like another pen in your ass.
So if someone comes in and goes, here's a problem, but here's what I want to do about it. You're like, OK, great, let's do that. And that's what the book's designed to try to help people to do as well as find solutions.
Beautiful. Well, even what you said with the volunteer firefighters, and it's interesting because that happens here in America and there's literally suburban neighborhoods in the Northeast that still rely on volunteers.
And just because they haven't said, we're not doing this anymore. And then they're like, oh, OK, we'll just put a full time fire. And then some of those guys, if they always want to be a career firefighter, now they can be because there's jobs.
But, you know, and the municipal side on the career side, it's not about walking away from the job. It's just saying this isn't working anymore. We need to go to, you know, for example, the 24 72 this work schedule.
And here's why. Here's how finance you'll save money. Here's how HR you reduce accidents. And like you said, setting all those different hooks, which is what I love.
So I just want to read the title of your book so that people know what we're talking about. So a guide for sleep, health and shift work, practical strategies for individuals and organizations.
And I love the fact that, like you said, it's educating an organization, it's educating the individual and their own personal sleep hygiene and habits. So it's all the things between the covers.
Yeah. And we've also got that website as well, sleep for performance, where people can go to James as well and delve into like we've got lots of blogs up there. We've got lots of podcast episodes. We ran three seminars over COVID as well, which people want to listen to for free.
So I think somebody said recently, there's probably about 400 hours of information there that people can access freely. And so people can access that, share that.
And there's lots of stuff on there. So if organizations don't want to use this for consulting, then that's fine. But we give out lots of info free as well.
And so yeah, then if you put my name at the YouTube, you'll find other podcasts I've done on this topic as well. So there's lots of free stuff out there.
Again, the book is designed to support people to make positive improvements. It's not about this is the way to do it.
So I don't want people to follow the book blindly and go tick, tick, tick. I've done all this and I'm still fatigued because again, we're trying to educate people around this area.
I do think though, like just listen, in this conversation, it really highlights the fact that people in this area, these first responders and in the healthcare profession have been basically overlooked so much and they make up such a component of our workforce.
And it's a bit sad really, you know, and I've seen this as well for myself is that we just don't get enough support in this area. It's a difficult job by nature.
We should be getting lots of support, like teachers as well. You know, it's a difficult job. You know, and people do it. A lot of people do it out of a passion to help people but then don't get supported by organizations as well, which is a shame.
So I think, yeah, I think for, again, I just reiterate, like if you want to try to make these improvements, use that kind of business case approach I've been talking about. Bring the problem statement but bring potential solutions as well and how you can do it.
Because I think if we do that, it's going to be better. Too often, people go to the union, then the union go in and go, well, we'll just get more money for you or the union become aggressive and they want to do something different.
So, yeah, sometimes I find that, I'm not sure what's like in the firefighters in the US but I just find sometimes unions can be a bit obtrusive to make an actual true improvement.
So, yeah, I think using a systematic approach is definitely recommended.
Yeah, well, I mean, my whole thing is if you get enough of the firefighters, educated and angry, as I say, you know, where they understand there's a problem and there is a solution and it really is an actionable solution that will have, you know, a multitude of benefits.
That's them will push their union, their administration, you know, if enough of them are on board. So this is the thing about, you know, the beautiful thing about what you've put out about these podcasts is we're debunking the myths that, you know, so many of us believe, you know, the
people who are coming in and taking a step back and going, wait a second, why don't I deserve to go home when I'm supposed to go home rather than being told to stay at another 24 and now I have to call my son and say, hey, I can't be there for dads for donuts after all because I'm working
another 24. There's a certain point where we say enough is enough and I think we're there now because we're, you know, we're at a recruitment crisis. So either we fix it or literally cities and counties will have to tell their people, hey, we don't have a fire service anymore.
No one wants to work for us because we refuse to fix the things that are broken. So it's a beautiful opportunity to turn it around. If there's courage and leadership and that's the big thing, you know, we're really seeing the real leaders now and the people that maybe should step down and let someone actually run in.
I think this is true for other organizations as well, James, and I said this to one of the guys that works for me a few weeks ago, because I'm going to make these changes, I said in 2025, you know, like when people come out to New Year, I put your New Year's resolution.
And I said like, it's not resolution, but this year I'm going to set boundaries because even though I like what I do, I love what I do, you can get into this thing where you just keep doing more and more and more and you give and you give and you give.
And then people just expect you to like do work for free or to do talks for free or to jump on a call at 8 o'clock at night because it suits them. There's no sort of balance.
So this year I'm going to set boundaries around that as well. And I think that's what people have to do as well in organizations. And we're seeing some stuff here actually, oh Europe and here in Australia as well, where people have the right to disconnect.
I might be seeing this sort of this coming into Trump's going to make its way into the US, maybe not under Trump, but people are basically saying, you know, like I work nine to five, that's what I'm contracted to do.
It's unreasonable for you to constantly be ringing me at 8 o'clock at night and asking me to respond to emails.
And that's the bad part I think about this 24-7 connected internet society is that people just expect that you respond to an email or a text message and people kind of get pissed off that you don't respond instantly or you know, we've all probably had it.
Someone rings you and go, well, I emailed you half an hour ago, you haven't responded. Well, I'm busy doing something else. I don't just see her waiting to respond to your email or your text.
And the same thing about work as well. I think people have to say like, right, it's five o'clock, I need to disconnect now or my shift is over. I need to stop. I need to go and spend time with my family or sleep or relax or do extras, whatever it might be.
I think people need to, there's a time obviously to kind of go to the extra when it's needed, but not every single day or every single shift.
Then it just becomes a norm. It's exactly what we're talking about here on. Then people just expect that and go, oh, well, they'll just stay and do it.
So sometimes we make a rod for our own back by constantly doing it. And then what happens is management just expects it then the whole time.
But hey, James, you had no problem doing 14 hour shifts, you know, six days a week for the last six months. What's changed all of a sudden?
And you go, oh, well, I've just can't do it anymore. Well, everybody else is doing it. Why can't you? Well, that's not my job, really. I'm not contracted to do that.
That's not what I'm supposed to do. And my family is suffering. I think that's what we see as well.
Lots of military first responders, shift workers, lots of marriage breakups, lots of relationship downfalls, family issues and so on.
You need to claw back some of that time because, yeah, the job's not going to be standing there looking at you when you're in retirement age or you're dead and buried.
They're not going to be like here lies James and Ian. They were great guys. They worked 80 hours a week. Yeah, they'll be a member forever. It's not going to happen.
You need to have time to do other things. And I think it makes you a better person as well. It makes you a better, you know, it makes you better during the day as well.
Go out and do different things, learn different things and interact. You bring it back in and make sure more fruitful and you're energized and ready to come back to work.
Not pissed off and angry and aggressive and, you know, getting down on it. You need time away.
Absolutely. Well, I want to get to sleep and performance. But before we do, because we've talked a lot about environment and the employer. One of the things that I get from chiefs is that, well, if you give them more time off, they're just going to work more, which I think is a very arrogant response.
Because, like you said, you don't own these people when they're not in the contracted hours. But I understand, you know, some of the thinking.
So, you know, understanding, for example, that when if you work on your days off, which is I don't have a problem with at all, but you're a landscaper or you're a mechanic or you're a personal trainer and you're doing those in waking hours.
There's no I don't see any problem with that at all. But if you take an overnight shift at a hospital or work at a private ambulance company now, you know, that's that's a very poor decision.
So for the individual, as far as sleep hygiene, as far as again, kind of owning those time, those hours when you're not working, what are the kind of principles that you like to impart on people?
Well, obviously, then it's going to come down to income because some people like I have to have another job. So ideally, not not to work a second job, but some people have to do that. So I understand that.
I think you touched on an interesting point there as well, so that the organization itself can set rules about not allowing you to come back in and work heaps of extra night shifts.
But then the other part then is advising people on the amount of hours that you should do. So if you're off for four days, for example, we would say to people, don't fill out with four 12 hour shifts like or at another company or definitely what like what you said is don't be working overnight.
So if you want to do some, let's say a part time personal training, maybe have it a four or six hours for a couple of days, but try and give yourself in that cycle at least two days off.
Because if not, you're going to burn out on both ends as well. And we've become in this society very kind of focus on money and sort of getting ahead, which is it.
And it's difficult. I understand that inflation pressures, you know, cost of living, people trying to pay off mortgage. I'm not naive to it.
It's not like I'm sitting here in a mountain of money myself and I know what it's like. And you've got to take these jobs and to come in. And as a business owner, I'm the very same as well.
You've got to make hair while the sun shines. But you have to again set some boundaries within that again, because you just burn out. And it's like I said, you just end up, you know, jumping into the grave and all the money is left behind.
And someone else is going to enjoy it. So again, it would depend on the time off, creating some rules around that, or not rules, but guidance around that. And then people can make maybe make some rules themselves and say I'm off for four days and we're going to work two of those days or three of those days.
But it's going to be six hours or four hours. I'm not going to do overnight shifts. Or I'll just do one overnight shift or whatever it might be. And again, everybody's going to have a preference.
And it might depend on the stage of life. You might be 28. You've got three kids and you've got a mortgage here that would choke an elephant. So you want to make as much money as you can.
You could be 50 and you've got no mortgage and you're cruising and going, I'm going fishing on my desk off. So it's going to depend on for each person again. So again, very nuanced gems. I'm not giving you a perfect answers every time. I'm aware of that. Sorry.
No, it's good though. Like I said, it doesn't need a black and white answer. Absolutely. Well, let's go into sleep and performance. Because a lot of the conversations I've had, obviously we talk about chronic disease and cognitive impairment and all the downsides of sleep deprivation.
But you're working with Formula One drivers and MMA fighters. So elite performers physically and mentally. So kind of talk to me about what it looks like in the world of an elite athlete when it comes to sleep.
And we can dive into obviously nutrition, hydration, that kind of thing too, but especially the sleep conversation.
Yeah. So generally we will take very similar to what we're talking about, like a fatigue risk management system overview in a business. We'll take a very similar approach to that person's lifestyle.
And we'll look at it. So if it's a fighter, we'll look at the training camp basically in the six weeks before the fight. And then we'll break that down into different phases as well. So what's happening in the week before the fight? Because we know that there could be cut and wait.
There's lots of media attention. It could be travel as well, international travel. Is the fight, what time of the fight? So are the fighting at nine o'clock because it's on a main card in the UK?
Or is it at 5 a.m. in the UK, which we saw in the UFC last year, so it caters for the American audiences? Or is it in Vegas where it's on at 9 p.m. Vegas time?
Or is it in Salt Lake City where it's going to be 8 p.m. for the fight, but now we're at a mild altitude? So take that into account. Or Mexico City, which is at 10,000 feet or more.
So all those factors get taken into account. When's the travel? And then we start working back from that. So we anchor the time of performance and we start working our way back.
And then we start looking at the training camp design. And then we try to start, depending on the time of the fight, we'll start trying to shift the person to optimize their performance for that time.
And so the classic example I've used on multiple podcasts and keep saying to people, if your fight's at 9 p.m., do not be getting up at 4 a.m. to go running because there is no benefit.
All you're doing is encroaching onto your recovery sleep and you're impacting your performance. And loads of people will be like, yeah, but that's what Rocky did. Well, Rocky was a movie. It's not real life.
What we're trying to do is get you ready for this as well.
And so this can be used strategically as well. Francis Ngannou, when he fought Anthony Joshua, spoke about this. I don't know what podcast he was on.
He might be on Joe Rogan's podcast. And he was talking about this because in Saudi Arabia time, it was supposed to be on at midnight or one o'clock.
And he had done his training camp for that, but he actually didn't get into rank like three or four o'clock in the morning. He said he was falling asleep.
So Clevero of Joshua, he actually probably kept pushing it. So it was like between three and six o'clock in the morning. So he felt tired. So he would have been sitting there using all that nervous energy.
So we have to take all those factors into account. And then we have to look at the type of training that they're doing, how many training sessions a day.
And then we provide advice on the timing of that training as well.
The other thing for MMA fighters, they might be traveling in between those training sessions. MMA did not advance where very few fighters are just in one location. They might go here for boxing, here for jiu jitsu, another place for wrestling, another place for shang-in-nishan, which is ridiculous, I think.
The athlete keeps moving around. So all those factors are taken into account. And then we generally measure their sleep across that training camp as well.
And we look at that remotely. And then we make adjustments as well on a sort of a daily or weekly basis. Depending on the pre-test probability, we may test those fighters for sleep disorders using polysomnography, which is what you would see people getting wired up like in a sleep lab.
We can do that remotely as well with like what we call level two. And so we may look for any potential prevalence there of sleep disorders that are impacting athletes.
So all those factors are taken into account. And then we may work with the coaches as well to change some training times and so on, which can be a bit of a battle sometimes.
And then they also have to take into account media considerations as well because they may have sponsorship and media duties to do as well. So all those factors are taken into account.
And the same with F1 drivers as well. Now, F1 drivers are a bit different because they are a bit like fly-on-fly-out workers in mining.
If you look at F1 season, they're doing 20-odd races over the span of probably 40 weeks. So they're constantly shifting between different time zones.
And then sometimes the rest are at 3 p.m. local time. So it might be like 3 p.m. in Silverstone, UK. But then they might be racing at 7 or 8 o'clock at night in somewhere like Singapore.
I think even the Vegas race starts at 10 p.m., I think, and even some of the practice sessions are on at like midnight.
So not only do you have this travel fatigue from traveling, you also have jet lag from crossing multiple time zones.
And then on top of that, you're going to have the timing of the performance as well. So all these factors have to be taken into account.
And again, not one size fits all, but you can probably see a bit of a pattern where we have a kind of a generalized methodology that we look at across our different elements.
And then we're collecting live data. We're looking at the design of the shifts in roster, the travel element, the potential sleep disorders, the external factors that they have to deal with.
And we're kind of trying to balance all those things as well. Plus, we also look at sleeping environment, the location of the hotel, the type of room that they have, the location of the room as well.
We want to make sure that nobody's encroaching on that sleeping environment. So these are all different things that we look at.
Then we also look at timing of caffeine, because we want to use that caffeine to try to help people adjust to that time zone and using that on alcohol as well.
So avoidance of alcohol at certain times. So these all form part of this strategy for adaptation and performance across time.
And so we may need to make some changes on the fly as well from the data we can see remotely from a kind of a wearable device like a Fitbit and give some more tailored advice to people as well.
And then sometimes people just have like a bad night's sleep or they just have a really shitty day.
So we have to then talk to the coaches or the staff about lowering the intensity the next day as well. Just working out what's best to do.
That was a lesson. It took me way too long to learn. I used to have that mentality of if I had a rough shift and barely slip, let me just go and do a red line workout at the gym and I'll sweat out all the stress.
And then one of my SEAL Team Six slash strength and conditioning coach friends said, hey, you walked in already in a sympathetic state.
And then you added a bunch of stress. What do you think about that? And I was like, oh shit, I never thought of it that way.
So talk to me about that. You got a firefighter that's done 24 hours. They just got murdered.
I mean, so many of these poor firefighters in LA at the moment just getting destroyed 24 hours at a time.
But then they go to the gym and they got this mentality that I just told you about.
How important is it to sleep a little bit more or have a low intensity workout for that sleep deprived tactical athlete?
Yeah, I think it's very important. And I think probably people like us, Gems group in that time where it's like, you know, work harder, rise and grind, push, push, push.
You know, that was kind of the thing in the 80s and 90s as well.
And I think that's making a resurgence as well, because people listen to podcasts and they hear someone going, yeah, I just get off playing.
I just do a hard workout. That's how I beat jet lag or I take this tablet and I do this. That's all just bullshit, really.
And another thing as well, I'd say to people is believe less of what you hear and more of what you see, because people talk a lot of shit on podcasts, but they don't actually do it.
There's a heap that goes on as well. They don't actually do it. It's just all talk. And generally, they've got something to promote.
So you just need to be very careful about the advice you take from people, including me as well.
So I think. Can you remind me what we're talking about there again?
Because I went off in a tangent there again. Yeah, well, I lost that talk.
Oh, yeah. About coming off a shift without sleeping, the importance of maybe taking a nap or certainly lowering the intensity of a workout versus that old school mentality of just crushing it right after that.
Yeah, people are listening to this going that guy keeps on. I know I've been up since half four, so I probably haven't done that.
But the problem is I got too many things going on in my head and I lose track.
So I think you're right. I think if you come off like a night shift and you're kind of redlined, adding more stress onto it is not the way to do it.
And I see two things happening. People going on just going to go and have a hard work on blow the cobwebs out or two.
I'm going to go and have a bunch of beers because I need to relax. That's generally what I see people doing. And both are not good.
So I often say to people like think about your recovery day or post shift in terms of like a green, amber and red. So if you're red, like you said, you don't want to add more red to it.
That's the time then maybe you want to do some stretching, some yoga, maybe go for a walk, relax, maybe some meditation, those kind of light things.
Whereas if you feel really good, then you might want to go and redline your body in terms of the upswit, the green flag.
However, I would say for most people coming off night shift, if you've done lots of work overnight and you haven't slept, I would generally go with sort of I'm in the red zone today.
I need to chill out and maybe get some extra sleep that day. And then maybe that evening, then you can use that because maybe that exercise in the evening will help obviously reset you.
It might tire you out again so you can get back into a routine as well. But I think you're dead right.
Coming off 24 hours of hard work and just going crazy is not going to do it.
Yeah, you need to be mindful of that and everybody's going to be different.
But in general, I would say for most people coming off that 24 hours and the night shift, like you said, high intensity exercise or high volumes of alcohol is going to be for 99% of people, not good.
You mentioned jet lag before. I do the transatlantic crossing going home a lot, going back to the UK and that return is just brutal.
It's a red eye, it's a short flight. And the most successful one I've had recently, if I remember rightly, I didn't drink on the plane.
I didn't have the breakfast and I booked us into a hotel at the airport where you could check in at 9am. We went to sleep, woke up at 2pm. I've never felt so good after a flight.
So what are the, and that's just my observational thing versus drinking on the plane, having to get up and then get trained the next day and feeling awful for like three days.
What are some of the tricks, tips and tricks that you use with these athletes to try and minimize the impact of the jet lag?
Yeah, so we have a whole section devoted to that in the book as well. So jet lag occurs when people cross more than three time zones.
So generally there's an argument that in the US or here in Australia that we don't really have jet lag because three hour time difference from LA to New York, Sydney to Perth, same thing as well.
There's an argument, but you may have what's called travel fatigue, spending five, six hours on an airplane in a stationary position, not very comfortable.
So you're going to have travel fatigue. And if that's overnight then as well, you're going to have what we call sleep loss or sleep deprivation because it's not conducive to getting good sleep overnight.
So you might have more of that occurring. So for most people in the US, for most people in Australia, we're going to have some sort of sleep loss, sleep deprivation and basically being uncomfortable.
So it's not technically jet lag. But in your example, going from, let's probably like London to Miami, where it's like, what is that, five hour time difference or four?
Five, yes.
Five hour time difference. You're going to have more time, you're going to actually have more jet lag going in the easterly direction.
So moving from, let's say, Miami to UK, you're flying in an easterly direction is more difficult to adapt to when you land.
Whereas when you go from east to west, it's going to be easier. So the general rule is, general rule, for every time zone you cross in an easterly direction, it can take you up to one day to get used to that new time zone.
So when you land in UK, it could be four or five days before you feel good. Conversely, on the way back, it'd be two and a half to three days.
But what you did was probably, you probably flew overnight, landed in Miami or something like that, 9am in the morning or 8 o'clock in the morning.
And we're like, I've had such a shit night on this plane that I need to get some sleep before getting the car in drive.
And you did the right thing, three or four hours sleep opportunity before you get in the car and drive or move on.
And that is the key to do it because some people will go, I'm just going to power on through the day.
And then that circadian desynchronization of what jet lag is and basically underlying physiology between jet lag and circadian rhythm disorders or shift work disorder is virtually the same.
It's the very same thing that's occurring within the human body.
And so what you did was you basically reset yourself like you came off a night shift, get three or four hours and then I'm good to go again.
The other great thing you did there, James, as well as avoidance of alcohol.
Too many people go, well, I'm on holiday, I'll come back, I'll just have a drink. You'll be more dehydrated.
It's going to affect any sleep you're going to get on the plane or after as well.
And I know some people actually advocate not eating on the plane as well.
Or if they are going to eat, they bring their own food, not to be eating that sort of high caloric, high salty, high sugary food on the plane as well and adequately hydrating as well.
Again, there's no definitive research on the best diet for alleviate jet lag.
I've been involved on two papers, one looking at systematic review on interventions to combat jet lag and travel fatigue in athletes.
We virtually found nothing.
I've been involved in the writing of a consensus document in the British Journal of Sports Medicine on travel fatigue and jet lag as well.
And so there's no one size fits all.
But I can tell you that avoidance of alcohol, minimization of caffeine and adequately hydrating is very beneficial when you're flying as well.
And if you can't sleep, getting up and moving about the cabin every sort of half an hour to an hour is beneficial also as well for blood flow and feeling better.
However, that can be difficult because cabin staff are probably a bit like nurses don't want to keep you in an early sit and cheer.
So this can be hard as well. Yeah.
I want to get on to wearables quickly before we close out.
But just before I do one topic that I haven't touched, I think it's important as well.
Children. When we look at, for example, Finland, which arguably is usually at the very top of the chart when it comes to best educational systems,
it's a much more holistic look at the child and their day. They begin usually later. They have shorter days.
And even if you look at the most acute end, if you start picking apart a lot of the school shootings that we have,
almost every single time amongst other elements, they are gamers.
And we all know that, you know, with energy drinks and video games, there's the sleep deprivation element, which, of course, is going to contribute to psychosis as well.
So what just overall, you know, in the modern society in 2025 with this bizarre electronic world that you and I weren't born into, but our children are.
What are some of the what's the advice when it comes to sleep, whether it's school times, whether it's when kids should go to bed that you would give to the parents listening?
This is a very interesting topic.
And I think people are going to be surprised about what I said, because we are currently involved.
We are leading a study on meta analysis, which is basically a review of all the studies ever done.
So joining all these studies together and looking at all the data pooled.
So a systematic review of meta analysis on the effect of electronic devices and its impact on sleep.
Now, electronic devices can be anything from laptops to games and so on.
The data that we've looked at so far and we're still in the process, but the early science with think about in two, two, two different arms.
One is subjective, self-reported stuff, either from parents about their kids or the teenagers or adults going, I feel like when I play video games, I sleep bad.
I feel like when I watch Netflix, I have poor sleep quality.
The other side, the objective side, stuff we've done in laboratories, looked at PSG, polysynography, actigraphy or wearables.
And they're actually completely opposite gems. That's the early indication.
So the subjective data is showing an impact. The objective data is showing very little to no impact.
Now, I'm not saying that electronic devices don't have an impact on sleep.
However, so far, we're not seeing a big effect.
Recent data I've seen from kids at a big study that was done in, I think it was in New Zealand, where it had body cameras on kids.
Again, if the child was looking at an iPad or playing a game before bed, no impact on sleep.
But if that electronic device or iPad was brought into the room, then it was replacing sleep time.
So they weren't going to sleep, they were staying up. A bit like adults going, I watch one more episode, I watch one more episode and it's replacing sleep time.
It's not that electronic device have an impact on sleep. And again, it comes back to what we spoke at the start. Discipline.
I go to bed at nine o'clock. I don't care if there's one more episode of Game of Thrones or Sopranos, wherever it is.
I need to stop it and move on. That's the benefit, I think, about today's world.
We actually do have the ability to stop it, but most people don't want to keep going one more, one more.
So this is an interesting area because I don't think, I think this is going to cause maybe a bit of a stir.
Then there's other research, which is just looking at light exposure in the evening, as Sean Kane has looked at at Flinders University in Adelaide.
And that's shown an impact on people long term.
So it may be not the fact that the light is directly impacting everybody's sleep, but it might have long term consequences on people's health.
The other thing to take into account is chronotype. Some people like to get up early and go to bed early, such as younger kids.
Teenagers are the opposite and an old chronotype to get up later and go to bed later. So these things need to be taken into account as well.
And so all these factors are interesting to look at.
What I would say for most adults listening to this, not just for themselves, not sorry, not just for their kids, but for themselves as well,
the electronic device may be an impact on someone, but what may be more of an impact is the type of activity before bed.
It's one thing, James, sitting and looking at Netflix and laughing at like, I don't know, some episode of
either Keeping Up With The Kardashians or something like that that people watch. I don't know.
And then there's another thing sitting there watching MMA fights before you go to bed or a kid playing some.
What's this one that kids play where they Grand Theft Auto? I don't play games.
I don't. So it's crazy. And there's like people shooting and prostitutes and drugs and whatever.
So that versus sitting down and watching I'd not play in Super Mario Brothers might be showing my head there.
It's completely different. And so it may be this activation of cortisol because when cortisol is high, people can't release melatonin.
So it's that pre-bed arousal that may be happening and that may be impacting sleep more than anything else.
So just like what people do with young kids when they're very young, it's time for a bath.
You're going to read you a story. We're going to lower the lights. We're going to have a calming environment.
That should be the same for adults and it should be the same for kids of any age.
And so adults can do this by maybe reading a novel before they go to sleep.
You know, they could be just kind of having this wind down period or the last show to watch before they go to bed is, I don't know, a show on pottery or something.
Whatever it is, right. But watching some. Yeah.
Well, my show at the moment I love is The Great Pottery Throwdown. That's my thing. I absolutely love that.
I don't watch reality shows only that one. That's the only one I watch for some reason, which is a bit weird.
I don't know why I like pottery so much. I'm watching it. But I find it relaxing.
But yeah, it's going to be different for everybody again. And so again, it's not one size fits all.
So it may be dependent on the person, but I would say to people is that look at the activity before bed as a post-electron device,
because I think it's going to be very difficult for us to get away from electronic devices.
And the other thing is look at the ambient light in the room as well. So not having all the lights on,
maybe having some softer lamps on in the room at night time as well, lower the light levels.
People will have different light sensitivities as well. Some people may be exposed to light and be fine, go straight to sleep.
Other people may actually promote, again, arousal. And so again, lots of differences with people as well.
Yeah, I found some of the basic sleep hygiene stuff that Kirk Parsley told me and a lot of the other sleep people that will be on the show,
blue blocking glasses at night, lowering the temperature to 67.
We just have one single bedside lamp on in the living room. Everything else is turned off and it works. It really does.
And even my son, I've never put a television in his room. Now there's times where, yes, he's on his phone later.
I mean, he's 17 now, so he's not a kid. But I mean, it makes perfect sense. That gamer kid, you've got that.
Grand Theft Auto is a perfect example. You know, you're basically conditioning kids to be OK with killing prostitutes and cops.
And then they're staying up throughout the night. So, you know, you've got the same thing in the first responder.
High cortisol levels and minimal amount of sleep. And we wonder why we see suicide and sometimes even murder suicide in our profession, too.
So this correlation does make a lot more sense than just simply the light itself.
Yeah, I think the other thing to realize was that the blue blocking glasses are not, you know, it's not like, oh, I got these glasses on to do whatever I like.
You still have to relax. You still have to look at the activity as well.
You can't put those glasses on and then open up your laptop and start working on an engineering spreadsheet before you go to bed.
It's not like a fix all for everything. And the research on those glasses has been mixed as well.
So for some people, it's actually shown no impact, no benefit.
So, again, come back to that discipline and routine before bed is key for humans, regardless of their age.
Absolutely. Well, the glasses I wear have got lenses in them.
You know, my wife's actually about to graduate as an optometrist.
So it's more really about just protecting the eye from any light and then being able to see the TV properly.
It's not just like the yellow ones.
I suppose the comment I'm making there, Jim, some people go, well, I wear blue blocking glasses before and I do two hours on my laptop before I go to bed.
But I wear these glasses. You're still activating.
You're still like you're still making yourself kind of wound up before bed.
You know, it's still it's not going to have the impact.
It's not going to. It's not a fix all, is what I'm saying.
And this is the problem in this area.
And particularly in human biology, people are looking for the one thing that can fix everything.
There is no silver bullet. Absolutely.
Well, I it's been a while ago, a while ago now, and I'm going to get him back on.
But I had Russell Foster on the show and we were talking about wearables.
Do you want to do you want to do you want to know something interesting about Russell before you go on before you do?
Please carry on. Please, please.
So a couple of things is one, Russell. Russell was my PhD examiner.
Oh, really? Two. Russell and I have spoken at multiple events together.
Three. He is he is involved on that meta analysis on electronic devices as well.
So I speak in a Russell a couple of weeks ago.
So, yeah, I do a lot of collaboration with Russell. So before you bag him out, I'm just letting you know.
No, it was amazing. I was introduced to him through my dad.
My dad's a veterinary surgeon, retired, and he worked with him.
I think it was why college or one of the British universities for a bit.
So he told me about him. I'm like, well, that sounds like the perfect person to get on the show and talk about sleep, especially when you hear that, you know, he really was, you know, the man that discovered the chronoreceptor.
And I know a lot of very famous, you know, scientific personalities that talk about when you get up, look at the sun. I've never heard anyone mention Russell and credit him for being the person who discovered that in the first place.
Well, the ophthalmology, you know, profession laughed him out of their room time.
That's right. So, yeah, credit where credit's due.
But he was talking about the EEGs and some of the things that we would consider the advanced way of looking at the brain. And he described that almost as like a white belt science.
So with that being said, not to devalue it at all, but what are the limitations of these regular wearables when it comes to actually analyzing sleep?
Yeah, the first thing is that when you buy a wearable device like a Fitbit or a Garmin, whatever the name is, it is not not a medical device.
That's the first thing. So people go, oh, I bought this and should it. It's not a medical device. It will not improve your sleep.
The analogy I often use is, do you think the invention of the weigh-in scales and the widespread use of weigh-in scales in every bathroom across the world has lowered people's body weight?
No, it hasn't. It's a measurement tool. And that's all it is.
It has FDA approval in America as a physical activity tracker. So it's not a medical device.
Now, that being said, there is benefits of it. One, you can collect longitudinal data of sleep habits and behaviors, which is great.
Time you go to bed, time you get up, average sleep duration, some of the times you wake up and so on.
What it's very poor at is the sleep stages. It's very, very poor at those.
And so generally, I won't even bother looking at the sleep stages on those for people because two things.
One, they're not very accurate. And two, you can't do anything about it.
If I put a wearable device on UGEMS and it says you only get 10 percent REM and you should be getting 20 percent, I can't tell you to bang yourself on the head four times to get more REM.
The body gets what the body needs in terms of when you go to sleep.
And the only way to do that is increase or manipulate the timing of the sleep.
So it's not going to fix all those things for you.
But what it's great to do and what I like to do is look at it on a three week window of what's the average sleep for a person from three weeks to a month.
So if I look at that and I go, oh, on average, James is getting seven hours per night.
That's pretty good. But on the weekend, he's getting 10 hours. OK, now we have a conversation and go, James, why is the weekend sleep so big and so good?
But during the week, it's not great. Then you might say to me, well, I'm a first responder.
I have to do five, 12 hour shifts. It's difficult to fit everything in.
So we might look at how do we balance that and make some changes?
Do we change out your exercise regime on the weekend because you're doing heavy sessions during the week?
Maybe you want to do those heavier sessions on your days off to try and balance out and get more sleep.
We'll do shorter kind of hit sessions during the week or whatever it might be.
The other thing that we might look at as well is what we call social jet lag.
What's the timing of your sleep? And this is where it's great.
And some of these devices actually show you on the app or plot out like a little bars or little line graphs.
You went to bed tonight at nine, then 10 o'clock, then eight o'clock, then 11 o'clock, then 12 o'clock, then 11 o'clock, seven o'clock.
I go, what's all that variation for? Oh, well, I had to go to a school play.
Then my wife and kids went out, so I went to bed really early.
Then I had to stay up because my sister was ringing from Glasgow or wherever it might be.
So what I tried to do then is try to reduce that variance with you and say, look, can you start going to bed between nine and 10?
So this is your window of optimal sleep.
And then we try to reduce that variation and then get some consistency into the time you get up as well.
And so that's what's called social jet lag. We want to reduce that variation.
That social jet lag, irrespective of doing night shift, has been linked with pre-diabetes and also weight gain as well from work out at the University of Colorado, Ken Wright and a few others.
So there's lots of work around that as well.
And so we see that the more social jet lag, the more issues people have.
And it also links into depression, anxiety.
Also now, James, people will be going, well, that's easy.
And if someone's to work on nine to five, I'm a shift worker.
I do X amount of days, X amounts of afternoons or night shifts.
You still can have consistency within that inconsistency.
So, for example, if you're doing day shifts and you're doing six AM to six PM, maybe you want to be going to bed between nine and 10 and getting up between four and five.
When you're doing afternoon shifts, maybe you want to be going to bed at two AM and getting up at 10 AM.
Night shift the same as well.
So you want consistency across those different shift types as well.
The more variability you can take out of your sleep habits and behaviors, the better it's going to be.
And that's what wearable devices are great for.
The second major thing I think they're great for is when we were talking around about looking at changing the shift start times from like six AM to 12 noon.
They're great because you can aggregate that data.
So I could have 30, 40, 50 people in a group.
And I might be trying to measure that change for a leader or a coach or an organization.
And I can go back and say, look, on average, in the current study or the current phase when people were doing six AM to six AM the next day and this 24 hour shift, people were averaging five and a half hour sleep.
By simply moving the shift start time to 12, this group now gets an extra 45 minutes or an hour sleep per night.
So you can use in that group de-identified data to make those kind of data based arguments or evidence based arguments to make those changes as well.
And this is where I think they can be very beneficial and very powerful.
But again, like the glasses, this will not fix your sleep.
And also as well, I've had a few guys come to me that have got these over Christmas from guys at the local Jujitsu school.
Oh, this thing is telling me to go to bed at six o'clock.
Don't go to bed at six PM.
Don't follow that watch religiously.
Look at your sleep habits and behaviors over time.
And don't look at it night to night.
Don't wake up in the morning and go, oh, I just had a really bad night sleep and I was snoring and I was awake here.
How do you feel?
How do you operate during the day?
And again, looking at on that three week window is best to do.
Start reacting to it day to day and it's probably going to make your sleep worse.
And you potentially develop what's called orthosomnia, which is like an obsession with the metrics.
And you've probably seen people like this, James, the guys that are obsessed with body fat or the cycle of biking, they want to get a really light or
they're taking this supplement.
People can get like this, get crazy with these devices as well.
So use it as a tool to help you to track and measure and then to monitor those improvements that you make.
I was talking to Russell about this and I'm sure the answer is the same.
When I first got into this, I've listened to Kurt Posse, so we're talking, you know, eight, just over eight years ago.
I bought, is it William DeMent, the kind of grandfather of sleep medicine?
And it was really interesting because he was talking about the metric of sleep really being sleepiness, like how tired do you feel?
Is that still the metric that you're using today ultimately?
No, I don't really just rely on that in terms of sleepiness because people can be sleepy and still perform.
So and these are arguments that people have.
And actually, there's a tool called the upward sleepiness scale that was developed by Dr.
Murray Johns and Murray Johns actually just passed away in the last few days.
He developed a technology called Opti-Alert here in Australia.
And Murray was a great sort of advocate for this area and around shift work as well.
So in the last year or so, William DeMent and Murray have passed away.
But I know Murray's had, I've had some discussions about with Murray about drowsiness versus sleepiness and so on.
We don't tend not to boil it down to one measure.
I try to look at overall sleep health as well.
This leads into the conversation about sleep quality.
There is no consensus on what sleep quality is.
So people will often use sleep efficiency, oh, you went to bed for 10 hours, but you slept there.
That's 80 percent sleep quality.
No, that's 80 percent sleep efficiency or utilization of the bed.
It doesn't actually mean sleep quality.
So it's very difficult. So again, we look at this holistically, the timing of sleep, the prevalence of sleep disorders,
the average sleep that people are getting and then what's the impact on their performance during the day?
Because some people can get seven hours each night and perform brilliantly.
Then other people are getting five or six hours and say that they've got no problem with performing,
but they could be making terrible decisions.
So it's going to come down to an individual approach as well.
So again, there's a massive amount of variation between people when it comes to this and the impact on performance as well.
So there's not one size fits all, which is probably like a good title for this podcast.
Yeah, but I think the impact on decisions is an important conversation, too.
And I'll give you an example. I don't know the facts. I think a lot of the facts have just discovered have been withheld from the public in general.
But we had a local fire crew responding to an unknown emergency as known to them, but not to the rest of us.
They were at a railroad crossing. One, I think it was a freight train had passed and they actually ended up driving around the barriers
and a bright line, a fast train came and just smashed the hell into it.
Thank goodness no one was killed and it hit the back of the truck. Had it hit the cab, we would be burying firefighters.
There's no question. But I can't think of an emergency that warrants that kind of risk.
And I'm not in any way, shape or form, blaming the firefighters solely.
This, I think, is another example of what was the sleep deprivation element, how many hours that they worked,
that maybe if they were fresh, they would have been like, no, we're going to wait.
So this is, I think, a big part of this conversation as well. The impact on our acuity.
We may feel like we're OK, but how many times on the news do you see an emergency vehicle strike a minivan full of people at an intersection
or the paramedic that pushes the wrong drug or intubates the esophagus instead of the trachea?
You know, this cognitive acuity is a big, big part of this whole conversation because, as you mentioned earlier, lives do depend on us.
And if we don't tie that belay line right or the cop doesn't let go of that rear naked choke before the person actually dies, you know, it's life changing.
Yeah. And we definitely see this, that sleep deprivation or sleep loss results in more risk taking behavior, which results in more incidents and accidents, exactly as you said.
So we know that people are more, you know, take more risks when they're in this situation or try to like shortcut things.
So it's definitely definitely a challenge. Yeah. Hey, James, can I take a break for like two minutes? Really go to the bathroom? Yeah. Yeah.
And we'll close up after. Take time. Go to the bathroom. We're just going to do some closing questions. I'll let you go.
I don't want to piss me off. No worries. I'm going to do the same thing.
Yeah.
All right. Let's finish this up. It's 10 o'clock here.
All right. I can think now again. Yeah, I know. Trust me. I've had to stop many. Actually, there was a World War II veteran I had on. He outblathered me. He was 98. I forget, 98 years old. That was really bad.
Really? That's I'm currently sort of in the development phase of potentially writing a book on World War I. Oh, really? Yeah. I want to look at I reached out to a few historians in the UK. It's hard to research.
I want to look at the impact of sleep on the kind of work in title is the impact of sleep and dreams in World War I and the impact it had on sort of people.
There's a couple of different things because it's related to shell shock. I've also been investigating the shift work component of the trenches as well, which is quite interesting.
So you do four days on the reserve, four days on the secondary line and four days at the front line. But then that didn't always work out like that as well.
And so there was a whole kind of a rotation or that like a shift work design. But then there's a whole impact on the munitions factories as well.
There's some documents have been written about people doing permanent night shift and this is not going to go away and to make all the munitions as well to supply them.
There's also been then cases about people hallucinating during the Battle of Mons where basically they saw angels come out and stop the bullets because the people were so so asleep and deprived in the battle to start imagining things.
And then there's a whole linkage then in with them from published memoirs on the German and English side about the impact of sleep in terms of like the different sleeping environments where they slept on the ground or in trucks.
And so potentially want to try and carve out a bit of a narrative around different topics about the sleep and World War I.
The challenge is like when you start looking at sleep in the military, people kind of jump to like World War II onwards, which is all basically kind of amphetamine based.
I don't want to touch that. I don't want to touch that. I want to look actually just World War I. So it's quite interesting because we're very different people.
People sort of walk like days and days to get somewhere and it's more kind of physical and it's pretty interesting.
So I've been talking to some some people on that. But World War II gets lots of research. But World War I doesn't.
World War II is kind of cool still. But World War I, a lot of people I want to dig into and there's not as many books written about it.
So it's hard to kind of get stuff and there's no research on it like from in the in history or so it's weird.
Yeah. So it's a hard one to do. But I'm currently in sort of development phase since I stopped this book now since I got this book out before Christmas.
So hopefully I can try and write that one this year. Yeah.
Now that sounds fascinating. I can't wait to read it when you put it all together. Hopefully I can. Hopefully I can get something over. Yeah. We'll see.
All right. Let me get you to the closing questions. All right. So I'm just talking about the wearables and everything.
Okay. Well, I want to be mindful of your time. So I've got a few closing questions to throw at you if you have time for them.
Yep. All right. The first one I love to ask, we talked about your book and we'll get to where people can find that in a moment.
Is there a book or other books that you love to recommend written by other people? It can be related to a discussion today or completely unrelated.
Oh, God.
That's yeah.
I've got so many different weird reading styles that I have. I suppose I'm just looking at my shelf. See, my top shelf is all like military history. My second shelf is all philosophy. And my third shelf here is all sleep. So I don't know to read.
I think the book you held up was great. Lifetime by Russell is very good. It's a very good book. So Lifetime is definitely one.
There's also I'm currently reading, I've read recently, I'm currently reading Al Pacino's biography.
Okay.
Sunny Boy. That's not bad. So if you're a fan of The Godfather and stuff like that, that's not a bad book to read. That was quite good.
There's another one, a couple of other ones I read.
I'm always in sort of the philosophy bracket. I'm a big fan of stoic philosophy. So Marcus Redd is in Meditations, a great book.
Leading on from that, Victor Frankl's A Man's Search for Meaning is very good. Ending by Nietzsche.
Got that right here.
Yeah, yeah. Victor Frankl, great book. Ending by Nietzsche, big fan of Nietzsche. A lot of people look at Nietzsche and go, oh, he's very nihilistic. I think he's the opposite.
When I read Nietzsche, I just want to go and lift weights and fucking break things. That's how I feel.
I go, oh, let's go. Nietzsche makes you kind of just go for things.
I also like Albert Camus, if you read any of his stuff.
No, I don't recognize him.
Albert Camus, C-A-M-U-S. Albert Camus was an existential writer. He won the Nobel Prize. He's very good.
He writes fiction. Not really a lot of fiction, but he grew up in Algeria. Ending by Camus is very good. I would highly recommend The Outsider or The Stranger, it gets called in some countries.
And then the final author I'm going to recommend is, again, this guy was crazy. Do you ever hear this guy called Yukio Mishima?
It sounds familiar, but I don't know why.
He had a book called Sun and Steel, which was basically about getting outside in the sun and lifting heavy shit.
But he also, I think he won the Nobel Prize for literature too. He was crazy. He wrote a great book.
He wrote lots of great books.
But the one I read recently was about the Golden Templar, the Golden Pavilion.
He was a lunatic. He basically started a militia. He was married, but he had gay lovers and he started a militia and then tried to overthrow the Japanese government.
And then he killed himself.
It does sound crazy. What era was this? What period?
1950s and 60s.
Post World War II.
I think he won the Nobel Prize in the 50s.
Yeah, for literature. He is a lunatic. He would not already get nominated. Now I'm getting mixed up.
So that's good as well. But he was a crazy guy as well.
So I kind of read all over the place.
And then Winston Churchill's six volumes on World War II are quite good as well.
Which I believe he dictated from the bath.
I just watched a three-part Netflix documentary on him. It was from World War I, pre-World War I, his service into World War II.
It was interesting. Even the things that they had gone through, the British people, British and Irish people at that point.
And leading when really we didn't have many allies at toil at that point.
To then the power shift when the Americans and Russians came in and how Churchill almost had to take a back seat.
It was really interesting seeing that because you always think of Churchill as like, yeah, he helped us win the war.
But when the Russians came in, for example, there was a lot of lying.
And they were promising all these things and then it didn't happen. They just totally reneged on it.
So yeah, it was a lot more nuanced than the Winston Churchill that I thought of until that point.
Yeah, he's quite an interesting cat. He wasn't that great when he was in the military.
He was always sort of at the back. But he had these grandiose ideas of himself growing up.
He said someday he was going to save the British Empire. He even said that when he was quite young.
He's quite an interesting character. I've read a lot about him and listened to a lot about him as well.
I didn't like the Irish though, but he called it savages or something.
It was a crazy time. I think a lot of people don't look at that period from about 1880 right through to about 1930.
I think it often gets left behind. Neil Ferguson, Niall Ferguson has written a great book called A Pity of War,
which I kind of lead up into World War One as well.
But that era, I get kind of fascinated by that era because Germany was so advanced, became a country.
We had all those kind of great philosophers and classical music coming out of central Europe.
Then there's that whole lead up from the Boer War into the Great War, all the stuff that was happening politically across Europe.
Such an interesting time to look at. Yeah, it's fascinating, all the kind of crazy.
How much has shaped our world today? But it doesn't seem to, like I was saying, World War Two gets lots of work.
But this era here, it's like that 50 years has been so, you know, so changeable in terms of how it's affected our culture today.
It's bizzare, yeah. Yeah. What blows me away, I think it was about 10 years ago now, I think,
where I realized I have been alive as long as World War Two was prior to my birth.
It was only 40 years older than it was. And I was like, oh my God, that's so much more recent than I realized.
Because as a kid, you think World War Two was a million years ago. It was a dust-coated dinosaurs.
And so what's sad, and even with the Irish thing, I don't understand how people on this one rock thought that the people,
you know, literally a rowboat journey across the Irish Sea were a completely different group and we're going to treat them differently and divide the country.
I mean, for me personally, I see myself as a member of those four countries combined. That's my people.
But there's just like these lessons from history, you know, and you have World War Two. And, you know, this is my stance on it.
I am appalled by what's happening in Gaza now, where especially the women and children are being murdered by not the people that were liberated in World War Two,
but some of the people that are related to the people that were liberated, you know, are making these decisions.
And it's just, why do we not learn from war? We have these documents. We've watched documentaries, you know,
these lessons are just slapping us in the face, and yet over and over again, we let the tyrannical few rise to these positions where they drag our children into war.
It's an interesting, and this could be an hour podcast on itself, because you start talking about this subject and people get very irate, you know, about this.
And I think you're right. Some examples you've said. But the challenge is trying to look at these problems from both sides.
You know, you take the position of you look through the lens of Israel and you think about an example, you think all the things that happened to the Israeli people across the years.
That doesn't justify that. But then you look on the other side, you think, well, what's happening in Gaza?
People forget what happened, you know, a year ago or so when people went in and basically kidnapped people out of Israel.
They act as if like it came out of nowhere. So there was a stimulus for the response. And again, it's not saying that's right.
I think the response to it has been completely disproportionate. It's crazy. But you make an interesting point.
Why do we not learn like the great war, World War I, the war to end all wars? And within 20 something years, we are back at it again.
And now some historians like Neil Ferguson say that we are technically in World War Three.
But because we are so intertwined economically, it won't be like a world war we've seen before.
It'll be this kind of collection of skirmishes that we see. Because money is at the back of it.
You'll still see people like Russia and America in this kind of Cold War II and slash World War Three.
But they'll still be trading behind the scenes. It's weird.
Like people are it's a very weird way we are today because we're so global and intertwined.
And that's why people are like, oh, well, if China goes into Taiwan, the West will attack.
I'm like, well, if the West attacks China, it's all over. That's because the whole system is going to collapse here in Australia.
We ship so many minerals and iron ore and different things to China.
We are so interlinked with China in terms of our economy. The Irish will fall over here.
Probably will in America as well. We can't afford to do it.
So it's going to be a very weird way of going forward. But I do agree with you, James, from reading a lot of history and philosophy,
but particularly history and military history. I'm like, we are idiots. We just keep repeating the same patterns.
And what's interesting, too, is that over the last few years, we see people are quite happy to have tyrannical leaders on the left or the right.
Because it seems to me, as I get older, is that people are quite happy to be led by idiots in government or where else,
ones that their life isn't encroached upon. So if I'm having a beer on a Friday night and my taxes are moderate and my life is OK,
I'm happy to just give away my rights or just hand over things and allow to be controlled.
I find it quite fascinating that people are so easily, I don't know, led by this or just kind of go, well, this is the kind of social contract by,
as John Jack Russo says. But I don't know. I just feel like we're losing a lot of individuality.
And I think the other thing I'd say as well was earlier on, I said, like, I like multiculturalism and that's great.
And I love different cultures. I love visiting places. We've come we've kind of all come into this big homogenous group as well.
You go out to any country. I was in Kazakhstan a few years ago and I said to the people at the hotel,
can you bring me to somewhere I can just go do some shopping? And they brought me to a shopping center.
James, I might as well have been in London, Dublin, Sydney or New York. The shopping center, every shop was the same.
A Starbucks, a Hugo Boss shop, you name it, whatever the chain was, it was all there.
Everything is just the same. It's weird. We just we just all kind of every high street or outer suburbs,
the outer suburbs here in Perth are starting to look like outer suburbs in the US. Big like kind of Walmarts.
Like, you know, we got big K-Marts here, big homeware stores.
Like it just looks like we're in the outer skirts of Denver or something. It's weird.
And so we lack that individual individuality. And we're just quite happy to become this big kind of homogenous group,
just trudging forward and go, well, once my life's not a problem,
I'm happy to give up all this sort of freedom and individuality as well.
Now, I know some people are probably saying, oh, you're being a bit extreme there, Ian, and maybe I am.
But that's just I'm just not one to follow the crowd, probably.
I'm not in the group think, as you might know.
I mean, I think, you know, what really saddened me, but what demonstrates that point is we have a virus come
and I'll just choose America because it's where I was when it happened, you know, and all of a sudden it's literally like World War I.
There's two trenches. Are you pro or anti-vax? Pro or anti-mask?
And where, you know, the normal people stand in the middle going, hey, this is killing people.
Yes, there are anomalies, but this is basically killing people who are already sick.
So the real truth in all of this is let's make the country as healthy as we can as we go through this.
You know, you can't run from it. You can't hide from it.
You know, the vaccines, I don't believe that it's 100 percent efficacy and you can terminate fucking, you know,
first responders and military members because they didn't take it.
But what we can do is get people to sleep well, get them to exercise, get them to actually be together
because that community is so important for mental health.
Get outside, go see the ocean, go for a walk and then, you know, and get people less sick.
So if you do, when you get this virus, there's a higher chance that you won't die from it.
But that was heresy. The most censored group by far is the middle road these days.
What you just said there, James, is anti-vax talks right away.
Exactly. You see what I mean?
So, you know, but then also if a guy gets an arrow through his eye and I got another group telling me that it was the vax that killed him.
You know what I mean?
Oh, yeah, yeah. It's lunacy on both ends. I agree. And there's no.
And again, it's a whole thing as well. Like what you were saying there.
It's really interesting to watch people do this. And it's like if and I agree, we should have learned over the last few years that
taking ownership of your own health is more important now than ever because we've seen that.
And this is what drove me mad. It was like people going, but there's like even here in Western Australia, there's millions of people dying.
There's not millions of people dying here. There's not. People are like, oh, there's not seeing that nursing home.
A man in his 90s died. Yeah. Well, I think like and no disrespect to the man in his 90s.
But if I was in my 90s, a sneeze or a fart had probably killed me, you know, especially if I've got like underlying conditions like diabetes and I'm overweight and X, Y, Z.
And I got Parkinson's. Like it's just there's this kind of narrative and this kind of again, this group thing that forms around it.
And it became crazy. And I agree with you. It's just there's no people just don't want to.
It's again, come back looking for that one solution. The facts will solve every vaccination, solve everything.
Maybe it won't. Maybe there's other things that need to happen. And yeah, not everything's going to work for everybody.
Just like all the information I said on sleep. That's the general consensus of what we know.
And that's why I said at the very start, the science has never settled.
So we have to constantly keep trying to find out what's working and what's not working and shaping that and what's going to basically help different groups and different people.
So that's why it's about education and providing guidance and not given like this is the one thing you must do.
And we all must march and step towards this. That's idiotic, I think.
Well, and also people aren't saying that millions of people are dying from cancer and heart disease and fentanyl.
There's no ticker on the news for that. There's no one concerned. There's no one.
You know, there's no conversation at all. So people are still dying by the millions.
But now you don't give a shit because it's not on the news.
So this is how easily we divided and this how you end up with war because you don't think for yourself.
It's like the whole alcohol and drugs thing. Oh, people are going, oh, yeah, drugs are really bad, aren't they? Why?
Because the government said so. How many people die of cannabis every year? Zero.
How many people die of alcohol poisoning? At least 6,000 a year in Australia and maybe 20,000 or more are affected by it from all the social issues.
But alcohol is the weirdest drug because it's the only drug you have to explain why you don't take it to people.
When you say to someone, no, I don't want to drink. I don't drink. Why don't you drink? What's wrong with you?
Straight away, he must be an alcoholic or he has got a problem. It's weird.
Well, I often go to people. I don't do heroin either. Yeah, well, I hope not.
I've always said as well, like if you had a dodgy curry, the prawn curry, and you threw up and shit yourself for 48 hours the next two days,
you are not going anywhere near curry probably for months, if not years.
But you can have the same exact reaction from alcohol. And it's probably like 2 p.m.
You're like, maybe I'll just have a beer. You know, it is such a such an associate drug when you look at it and socially promoted as well.
It's like it's expected that you will do it. Yeah, it's expected that you know, you just partake in this kind of activity and get fucked up.
It's weird. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I want to go to a couple more closing questions. I'll let you go.
The first one I always ask people, is there a person that you'd recommend to come on this podcast as a guest to speak to the first responders,
military and associate professions of the world?
Oh, is that on any particular topic?
No, any anything, anything that you think someone would be great to come on for?
There's a great guy. He's actually based in the US that I've been involved with and wrote a chapter on one of his books and going to speak at a conference with him.
He's at the University of Arizona. He does a lot of stuff on mental health, especially on athletes.
He's the I believe the director maybe or the associate professor in sleep medicine or behavioral sleep medicine.
Sorry. His name is Michael Gradner. G-R-A-N-D. N-E-R. Michael would be very good.
And he's done a lot of research there and a good guy as well and pretty positive outlook and kind of a can do type of guy.
He's really good to talk to in the US. Yeah, definitely.
Brilliant. I appreciate that. All right. Thank you.
Well, then the very last question before we make sure everyone knows where to find you and the book online. What do you do to decompress?
What do I do to decompress? I'm trying to learn the piano.
So I upgraded you might see here on this side. I had electric piano, electronic piano last year.
And then last week I had this beautiful Yamaha U1 piano delivered, which is an upright piano.
And that was actually the same age as me for the odd years. So I bought that second hand. It's quite nice.
And I really like that. I find it kind of meditative and I enjoy that.
And then the other thing I've gotten into over the last year or so, which has been very, very enjoyable, is free diving.
And that's I find that very meditative as well. I used to do a lot of trying to do a lot of meditation.
I've been on meditation retreats, but I find like I generally am better relaxing through a type of a focus activity.
And if I just sit there and meditate, my mind goes off into la la la and I fall asleep.
So, yeah, piano and free diving, probably the two things to decompress. I like to read a bit as well.
Have you ever tried combining the two piano playing the piano whilst free driving?
I don't know if that's going to work. It's interesting. I went actually went on a free diving charter last Saturday and I came back and I wasn't seasick.
It was pretty rough. But when I came back that evening, I went to sit down because I hadn't practiced that day.
And I tried to get some practice in every day. I was more seasick sitting at the piano than I was on the boat.
Because I don't know. It's just like everything was going like that when I came back. So I couldn't, I think I went like 10 minutes and I nearly threw up.
But yeah, maybe maybe maybe some day we can try and do the boat or maybe put the piano on the back of the boat and see. Yeah, there we go.
All right. Well, for people listening, firstly, the book, A Guide for Sleep Health and Shift Work, Practical Strategies for Individuals and Organizations.
Where can they find it? So it's on Amazon and it's on all the Amazon stores, US, UK and so on.
For people in Australia, you can buy it on Amazon or you can buy it through our website over at MeliusConsulting.com.au.
You can buy it there. And it's Kindle version available as well.
So, yeah, I know some people have had trouble finding the stores.
We've paid a bit extra to promote it a bit more.
But I can give you some links, James, to point to show notes for US and UK listeners if they wish to find that.
But yeah, it's in there in paperback or Kindle version.
That'd be brilliant. Thank you.
And then for you personally, if they want to find Sleep for Perform or reach out to you, where are the best places to do that?
Yeah. So jump on the website, sleepforperformance.com.au or go over to Melius Consulting if you want to engage us to do work.
We work globally. And so, yeah, those two areas there.
And then you can get links to the podcast, Sleep for Performance.
We have two online courses as well.
One is called basically Sleep and Thrive, which is about fatigue management.
So a lot of stuff we've spoken about here for shift workers.
There's an online course there that people can buy.
It's pretty cheap. I think it might be like maybe 60 US dollars for access to that course.
There's also one on combat sports as well if people want to go and do that one as well.
And then obviously you can access the book through there as well.
So anybody can jump on there and purchase those.
And then you've got the podcast, like I said, like 130 episodes or more, the seminars, YouTube, all that sort of stuff.
Or you bang my name into Google as well. You'll find lots of other stuff that I've done.
So there's lots of free stuff out there for people to use.
Brilliant. Well, I want to say thank you so much.
We've been talking for almost two and a half hours now.
And just the fact that your work focuses on shift work specifically is very, very rare.
There's some people out there talking a lot about sleep, but they're rarely looking at our professions and our kind of working environment.
So it's been such an incredible conversation.
So I want to thank you so, so much for being so generous with your time and coming on the Behind the Shield podcast today.
No worries. Thanks for having me on, James. It was a great chat, much.
We spoke about lots of different things, so I really enjoyed it.