I am so excited to do today's podcast because it is basically the foundation of our relationship where it comes to me being one of your clients for a sleep program that you ran and run. So
it was instrumental for me as a firefighter because the fire service is silently burning itself out from the inside.
The root of that burnout, the real hidden hazard behind so many of our struggles, is that it's not the trauma or the workload, but it's rather the chronic sleep deprivation
and the way that it erodes mental health from the inside out. So the fire service has changed so much. Just in my career, I had 14 years in. And you still being a firefighter today?
It's slowly wearing itself out where it's getting busier and busier and we're getting chronically more sleep deprived when it comes every single shift, every single day, and it spans out over a year. There's we're going to come into statistics later in this episode where we talk about the fact of that, and let's just go to a simple everyday shift.
So can you tell me your experience or what is the most sleep deprived like you have actually been in your career? I think there was a night that I worked at station 11 in Portland and you know, there are pockets of crazy busy and generally they're in, you know, areas of higher poverty. And I think we had nine after midnight that night.
And I've heard, guys who have nights, you know, they're just nights from hell where you literally just go like the big storms call after call after call, call. But like on a normal night where you're not really expected doing something like that, you know, 13 after midnight would just crush your soul. So, interestingly, I think my worst night on shift was actually after I had found all of the sleep interventions that I had.
So I would go back to my room and do my little practice and actually fall asleep, and then we'd get a call, you know, 20, 40 minutes later and get up and like, do the whole thing again. But the next day, I didn't even feel that terrible. But all of my poor crewmates were just dying. They were so cranky.
They were so tired. They were so. And I just felt so much compassion for them. And I felt so bad for them that they didn't have the tools that I had. Prior to this, I would say, you know, even the five six calls call nights were horrible. And I'd go home having this headache, you know, headache in my eyes and in my head, and I'd feel nauseous and just almost that dissociative disembodied state where you just don't feel like connected to reality and time.
What is time in that space? Exactly. And so it's funny that I, I remember that night in particular, but even with it being after the sleep, interventions like it's still is hard, right? But the difference between when you have those and you don't have those is, is monumental. And I'm curious, because I came into the fire service post-Covid landscape, you have more time.
So after Covid, how did you see those numbers and that experience changing? Covid was so different in the fact that not only did we have our shifts, that we were supposed to be on our regular schedule now, we had mandatory overtime and extra shifts where we can go home because there was such a shortage and we had people out on being sick and Covid leave.
And so that changed drastically when I went from 24 hours. And especially for me, having gone through your program, I had the tools in place. So just like you, compared to my crew, whom I had a lot of compassion for as well, they were so tired and I could relate so much, especially with a small toddler at the time.
But it changed because we were going on so many more sick patients. So already we run 80% medical. And then you add on top of that that extra illness, that extra chronic Covid worrying us too, because people weren't necessarily sick. But any sign or symptom they're calling 911 because they're so afraid. So our calls doubled overnight. And I mean, it was just so fast and trying to keep up with that drastic going.
And it wasn't even harder. Calls. It was just the number of calls, the volume, the volume, and went from 2 to 4 calls. And I which you could get, you know, maybe four hours of rest in between there to having to do double that. And now they're spaced out just enough where you can't actually rest in between. So now if you run three calls in a four hour window, you don't sleep that whole four hours versus before we ran one call in that four hour window.
So it changed drastically after 2020. And it's so interesting that prior to 2020, it was this dream job. And now the numbers and the demand is still high. Like it. Covid completely changed that landscape. So much so, so many more people are regularly calling the 911 system and the low mood has not lessened. We still have people retiring, we still have people going out sick.
And like you said, there's just not the workforce in place to, to bolster that response. I know for Portland, they did
an audit, like a third party audit of the number of stations. We have, the run volume per population. And it said we missed like eight firehouses for the city, for the demand, like for for optimal firefighter health.
And what would help alleviate some of that? Volume eight more stations. So eight stations would alleviate that volume on the firefighters. But if you think about eight stations, that's every that's three crews, 12 people, per station times eight. That's that's a lot of money. That's a lot of people. That's not going to happen. It's not it's not going to happen.
Yeah. It's not possible. No. So again we have this massive demand and we just can't fill that demand fast enough. So we have more night calls and more getting up and ultimately we are we are not sleeping as much as we need to sleep. And it's so interesting that I don't know why we forget that sleep is a necessity.
We have to sleep. We have to sleep. We, our bodies and biology are designed so that 30, almost 35%, you know, a third of our life is supposed to be in sleep. That basal 7 to 9 hours of our day is supposed to be in sleep. And then you have all these people who are in really busy firehouses.
And I do want to touch briefly on it. So interesting that police and nurses and EMS all struggle with the same thing as well. So they also aren't sleeping as well, even though we are the ones who are responding in the middle of the night because of the shift work aspect and the load that it has on the body, the other first responder field struggle with that as well.
Yeah, and we talked a lot about sleep and deprivation and what that it's like. I'm just curious, why does it matter so much that the change has been brought on and the fact that we are sleep deprived and like, what is it about that that is so important to our health? Sleep is the foundation to every aspect of our biology, our every organ that goes to work for us, our brain, our mental health, our cardiac, every, every aspect of our biology is not is affected by sleep deprivation in really, really dramatic ways.
And when we start getting less and less sleep, if you think about when we get sleep, we are filling our bucket. Right? So we have this this bucket. I'll take my water bottle as an example. We start out in the career as a healthy, vibrant, fit individual. So our our bucket is full. And as we begin to get less and less sleep, the bucket diminishes.
Is someone on a normal schedule? As their bucket diminishes, they're able to go to sleep in their bed at home where they're not interrupted like we are, and they're able to fill their bucket back up for us. As that bucket diminishes. When we're on shift, we're still waking up, so it starts diminishing even more, and then we go home.
We bring it up a little bit more, but then we go back to work and we diminish it. So we're constantly playing catch up to being behind, and the more it diminishes, the less we feel able to actually fill that bucket up. And so when this happens, the body starts compensating because survival, as we've talked about before, survival is the body's ultimate goal.
So when we don't get enough sleep, the body says, okay, we didn't get enough sleep, but that's okay. We can handle it. We're just going to prioritize, not, losing any extra fat. And so we start developing metabolic conditions. The body can't be in sleep debt and be healthy. That is literally just not possible. As the body adapts it prioritizes.
Operating as best it can. But it's not going to be able to you know fit that like longevity thriving goal that we're after. When it it cracks me up when all of these fire dudes are looking to get gains in the gym and they talk about being so sore or they had a horrible night of sleep, but they're still crushing it.
You know, that morning workout there is almost zero point to that, because the body will not it's not even it it it cannot, it cannot and will not prioritize recovery and muscle growth whilst it's in sleep debt. And that's, that's why it's such a terrible, Matthew Walker, the sleep doctor, says it's very it's a deleterious, issue because nothing that we do can actually outpace sleep debt.
If we're not getting sleep, there is nothing that will intervene enough that we can still keep not getting sleep. At some point, the body stops adapting and starts shutting down, which is why we see sleep debt leading to burnout.
Because the body is just full shutdown mode. And it's in that that place of full system. What did you call it? It's not free, is it? Foreign state funds. They where everything just stopped.
That's where we come to the complete dorsal vagal collapse. So completely collapse of everything you can do nothing. And stress plays such an insane role in this, because for every two hours of stress, you need one hour to recover for every hour of sleep that it takes.
An additional is that for it takes for every for every hour of sleep loss. It takes four days to recover. And then just one hour. Just one hour. And then to eliminate sleep debt for those who let's say they had one really bad night, a normal person, it can take up to nine days to reverse that.
Wow. That we people looking at those numbers and like, how can you not say like we are we are left there is how is there any way we go to work every third day? So how is there any way possible to recover within three days that is why over 40% of firefighters is the number is probably higher. Now.
This was something this number was back in the 90s. 40% of firefighters had some sort of sleep disorder and 80% of that group was completely undiagnosed. They had no idea. Or they just label them as shift related sleep insomnia. Yes. Because I was labeled, one of my sleep studies and I was really struggling, and they just kept prescribing me for not even melatonin, but the Ambien and La La Tuta and this other sleep medication just to help me sleep at night.
And when I went in for my study, they just came up with, yeah, you have an overactive mind. You, you used to working at night so your brain doesn't shut off. That's your natural rhythm now, and that's where. Yeah. And that's why I left walking out of the office. And it's not encouraging. It's not encouraging at all. And it's like okay, so my biology and the fact that my job go against each other, that's just where I'm left.
There's no solution. There's no alternate method. There was no discussion of sleep practices or rest. It was just keep taking your sleep pills and good luck. Yeah, maybe get a new job. That's it. And I'm curious, when you mentioned firefighters because I know me, including we go right to the gym after shift and I go in for optimal performance, and we're getting our gains or losses and a lot of our cases, like, what is it about our biology and itself or our circadian rhythm, which we hear about?
What is it that it's so effective about actually reading into that and feeding onto your actual biological rhythm that you're supposed to be on? What is so important about that shift work is really, really, really hard on the body because, again, we're designed to have that portion of our 24 hour circadian rhythm where we get that rest and recovery.
So during sleep we have different brainwave states. Those brainwave states trigger certain happenings in the body. So whether that is, you know, cleaning out the lymphatic system of our brain, removing the plaque that can be built up, that causes dementia, whether it is the repair and, recovery of our organs or releasing human growth hormone, testosterone, all of these, all of these things happen when we are sleeping.
So if we're not sleeping to your point of going to the gym in the morning, if we didn't sleep the night before, our body did not release the human growth hormone. If we didn't get to that sleep stage and our body couldn't release that human growth hormone to actually rebuild the muscles. So hence it's really hard to make those gains.
You will feel sore all the time because we're not actually setting our life, up in a state that supports those. Those priorities. And with shift work, you're getting up in the middle of the night over and over and over and over. So when we go to sleep, initially, the normal person, a normal person, a civilian goes to sleep, and then they go through several sleep cycles.
And in those sleep cycles you spend a certain amount of time in each sleep stage. To your point. If we get four hours of sleep in a night, we are severely limiting the amount of time and ability we have to go into those, sleep stages and there's no real way around that because shift work. As such, we are responding in the middle of the night like your doctor, but your mind is going to be on alert, overactive because it's rhythm is getting up in the middle of the night.
It's really interesting to this point. You know the body because the body likes, patterns and this, you know, predictability. We can train it to be and operate in certain ways. So you, you know, the old 2448 schedule that a lot of departments have moved away from. Now, every third day you're working. Well, even when you took that third day off, you still got in the middle of the night.
Often because the body is burning up. It's the third day I should be at work. And it's wild that even if you're on a break, even if you weren't at work, that was still going to happen. So with our circadian rhythm, where we wake up in the middle of the night when cortisol is high, melatonin is actually low.
And that means that, you know, in about the, 6 p.m., 7 p.m. or so, our body, is supposed to be releasing melatonin to get us ready for sleep. But when we go on calls, whether or not we can feel it, acknowledge it, our body is releasing that adrenaline and cortisol to respond because we don't know when the tones go off immediately.
If it's going to be a fire, it's going to be a no nothing medical, no nothing fire. We don't know that in those first few seconds. And the body is so wise because it just knows, oh, it's time to respond. So it gives us this boost of adrenaline, cortisol, which if we were thousands of years ago and a lion jumped out of a bush, that would be useful and a real threat, a real threat.
But it's not that way. The body doesn't realize that, right? Like we have not evolved to that point yet. And so we get a call, we get this dump of response hormones. That immediately means that our melatonin is going to dip. So when we go back to lay down and go to sleep after the call, we have to spend anything from 5 to 20 minutes in the dark before our melatonin actually begins to increase again.
So if we get another call, exactly. If we get another call, then okay, our melatonin is just basically depressed or suppressed. And fascinatingly enough, suppressed melatonin levels are linked to cancer metastasis. So not only do we have problems with cancer from the carcinogens and the exposure, big melatonin actually plays a role in fighting cancer. And that removal of that important hormone affects us even more in that way.
So some crazy, crazy statistics, a one night of six hours of sleep or less increases our chances for a cardiac event. Anything from 200 to even 600%. This is why, as I've said in the past, you can be. You know, you have these super fit dudes who go out on a fire and come back home. They're just doing something normal and they have a heart attack.
The build up of all of those nights of lack of sleep is affecting their heart, and it has nothing to do with the level of superior fitness or not. Right? I'm not saying don't workout. I'm not saying firefighters don't need to be fit. However, there is a way larger, theme that we have to pay attention to. So that's cardiac.
And these are all the top killers of firefighters with cancer are natural killer cells, which we use our body uses to fight cancer. One hour of only four hours of sleep reduces that activity by 70%, which is massive because firefighters are already at a 300% increase of cancer overall. Exact. General. Yeah. So we have just one night.
We have the melatonin dysregulation. We have the one night, which I honestly think it's pretty generous to say a night at work, you do get a solid four hours of sleep. I think it's much less for most people. So essentially every third or fourth night that you're alive, your natural killer cells are suppressed. Then with suicide, individuals who have these insomniac related issues are 1.4 times more likely to die by suicide than even people with depression.
That is such a sad, statistic to me because in addition to that, insomnia more than doubles suicide. Thoughts of suicide? Well, it's all related to you're depressed because you're so tired and you have a lack of sleep and you're insomniac, and then it leads to ultimate diagnosis, like me with PTSD. Yeah, it's it's a chronic. I mean, it's just gone from this small thing to manifest and to this area where it's consumed my life and it led me down this path of suicidal ideation for a long time, just from the lack of rest and recovery I had along the road.
I mean, it fed my depression like fuel on a fire, and it all goes together so much now that I'm separated from where I was. It's amazing how it all ties together. So I know for me, I retired and you still being in the service hearing these numbers, how does that make you feel as far as being prepared for the rest of your future in the fire service?
I have learned it from my prior health experiences that like if you don't have your health, you don't have anything. Yeah. And operating in the world where there is so much to live for and so much to be a part of, it is so discouraging that not sleeping, not sleeping well affects your life. And that is that really was a huge motivator for me.
I did not find any pleasure or satisfaction or, pleasure from getting a bad night's sleep and then hitting the gym just to feel, you know, supremely worse. Two hours later like that. I was not not into that. See, I was supremely worse to me, meant I was productive and I was on track and was where I needed to be.
And so many, so many firefighters do feel that way. And it makes sense to a degree because, you know, going to the gym, you get the release of endorphins, which are feel good hormones and sleep, sleep debt actually reduces those feel good hormones. Sleep debt. One bad night of sleep increases your amygdala activity that fight or flight region of your brain by 60%.
So you you see everything as a threat. And, you know, people go to the gym to make them feel better. They think they're going to work or work it out, calm them down. And, I was listening to this podcast about sleep performance for athletes when athletes are in a bad state with their sleep. It was so interesting because the scientists essentially said that for the average person, you can go have a workout and kind of reset your system a little bit after a bad night of sleep.
But you can't do that long term. It like stops being effective after a week. So for us we create this lifestyle around that. My whole lifestyle was around that specifically. And it just makes things worse. Yeah. So for me I think that is so much a part of why I'm so motivated. Put on the retreats that I put on and to run this program like it's a lot of work.
It's a lot of time, it's a lot of energy. And also, it's my goal to be a part of a movement that, you know, recovery and longevity and resilience actually become more a part of the fire service because I find it so sad and so disheartening that the vast number of us in first responders live feeling left up, exhausted, burnout, when we are in a field where we give so much to the community and it's so interesting.
I work with someone at my department who is is just, a beast, right? Like quintessential firefighter, the type of person that everyone says they're born to be a firefighter. You know, just everything comes naturally to them. And it was I was floored because, this person doesn't they don't nap on shift. They don't, you know, they'll wake up at 640 unless it's a real bad night and they'll try to sleep and.
But this person, I asked them, do you like, how does this affect you? Like, how do you go home? And and he just looked at me. He was like, I go home exhausted. Yeah. Like I am like, how could you grade? How could you not be? And it was just so interesting because he never talked about it. He never mentioned it.
I had to specifically ask. And yet that is his reality. So it it's not talked about. There's not that dialog and that language happening in the fire service. But hey, if we go, we all go home super wiped. Maybe it would be wise to like, not stay up watching movies until 1 a.m.. Yeah, perhaps scrolling on our phone doomscrolling like that.
Maybe you talk about life before bed 20 minutes before bed. The last thing I look at on shift when it was my phone, I mean, I'm guilty of it. It was the last thing I do. I time I finally get in my bed, and even if it was to look at my book and I put on my headphones to put in my book or a meditation trying to put the healthy things in place, I'm still looking at my screen and I'm, you know, putting myself in those lights.
So how can we not be affected by that?
We can't not be affected by it. And it's so insidious because like you said, doctors have no clue how to help firefighters. And that's because of this aspect of hypervigilance. So what most of the world doesn't realize when it comes to firefighters and and sleep debt.
Sleep debt produces its own set of issues. But those issues completely mirror the issues that come up with chronic hypervigilance. And so you have this, you know, kind of like quadruple whammy, so to speak, because not only are you dealing with sleep debt, you're also dealing with hyper vigilance, which makes it worse. And then the longer you are in that sleep debt actually can predict burnout.
And burnout itself deepens sleep loss. So it's this cycle that to your degree, you how can we even get out of and the answer we get out of it by addressing not simply that circadian rhythm. Right. Which doctors are like, well, your circadian rhythms off so you'll never be able to sleep. Well. Now, all of the studies that they're doing with firefighters across the country, they're bringing these traditional sleep modalities to firehouses and coaching firefighters through improving their sleep.
And they're finding a lot of it isn't working because it's not addressing that up regulated state. And even like as we've talked about with the nervous system before, we want this nervous system flexibility where we can go, you know, from one, from one tier to the next, we can go from blue to yellow to red to back to green and the longer we're in this state of hypervigilance, we can't be in that and rest and digest at the same time.
So the longer we're in this fight or flight, hypervigilance always on, always ready, the harder it is for our body to go back to a state of green, of true regulation. So we have to start addressing the nervous system and the hypervigilance and if we don't do that,
we will never have an answer for sleep in the fire service because.
Our body is always going to choose survival. It is. And if we are in the firehouse like we always are, and we're responding to calls in a state where we are taking in some and the scene, and our body is essentially trained that in that environment we aren't safe, we're getting all these cues that we have to respond.
We have to be ready. The body interprets those to a degree incorrectly, right. Because it's it's more sensitive. And then it essentially burns itself out because it's not going back down to that regulation. And so if we don't address that, we'll never be able to actually get good quality sleep. It's so interesting. This is why I'm sure you've heard of bosses like they retire and there's two groups.
There's one group that a couple of years later they they pass away. There's the other group that suddenly they're thriving and they're doing all the things. And they said it took a year to get their sleep back good and right. And when they did, all of a sudden and they look like five years younger, two, they look great.
I've seen a lot of my battalion chiefs come in later, and they've been retired for five years. And it just seems like they look younger than when they left. They have this like brightness about them and this joy and the smiles, and they're just like sleeping through the night and they're no longer you know, reaching for their bunker pants in the middle of the night, which I find myself still doing.
And I only had 14 years. And it's like I still find myself doing that. So once you get past that hurdle, yeah, life looks completely different from there. I know the work that you do, the work that I do so much is revolves around the nervous system. For these reasons,
I'm so appreciative of our bodies now because with the right training and the right number of reps, we can train our bodies, do anything, anything, anything. And so it is possible for us to,
re foster that nervous system flexibility. But it takes time and effort. And to your point before it's really hard because you can't just take a pill.
Yeah. Which would be the solution. And everybody would if it was that easy you imagine, like I'd be a millionaire if it was me that came up with it. If all we had to do when we went back after a call is pop a little pill? I mean, like, yeah, get sleep in between calls. We would literally make so much money.
But that's not the case. So our, our bodies can't adapt with this state of chronic hyper vigilance. In fact, if I found this, this number wild. So
Because hyper vigilance affects sleep so much. And then this circadian rhythm challenge, we every third day being on shift, getting four hours of sleep, we will miss 36 accumulative days of sleep every year, every year, every year.
And that's again, if we are going to be generous and say we get four quality hours of sleep and in a row because there's many nights I could say I've got four hours, but they're in one hour, two hour increments. That's not factory overtime, that's not factoring trades. That's so it's it's less that kind of sleep debt. Harvard size increases all cause mortality by 40 to 50%.
Meaning that puts us at risk for not just these other conditions, but actually dying sooner, faster. And ultimately, the body. The body can't outpace not sleeping. And then you add the demand that we put on ourselves. Right? As firefighters, we like we're like A-listers. Okay, I come home, I do my construction project. Yeah. My kids. Yeah. Take care of the kids.
You know, four kids up in the middle of the night, up early, taking care of the kids. So we have even more demand in our personal life. We're not recovering. And those those numbers are just going to get higher and higher. Our, our percentages of the ailments and the deficits that our systems have, they are only going to get worse.
I be so curious to see what the facts and data tell us around parents and firefighting, because you take the stats of being a new parent and sleep deprivation and how that affects our mental health. Look at postpartum mental health, illness and other factors. You take that and then you add that on to a career firefighter, you know, like myself and then becoming a single mom on top of it, the amount being hit at both ends, like burning the candle at both ends.
That's an expression that definitely I lived through and I experience, and it's amazing to recognize a high vigilance that I felt in my system every day as I went through life. And then you go to lay down a bed, and my body didn't know how to come down. And the hypervigilance, I'd hear the fan click and my mind would tell me what it could be.
The 100 things that could be. It's interesting to see how that is played into the lack of sleep or rest, or just been an underlying tone throughout my everyday life. It's interesting, but I would love to see the stats and how that increases our risks as well. I'm sure it's massive, and although it may be a couple year window when you have the sleep deprivation of an infant and then they get older into the toddler years, that doesn't factor in the stress on top of it.
So I I'd be really curious to see what a study looked like about that in itself. Well, and then you have firefighters who do so many firefighters have partners who have the 9 to 5, or they're also shift workers. A lot of the time they're in the hospital. Exactly. Or a nurse or some other kind of mental health or medical field.
So they're ships passing in the night, and a firefighter comes home, takes the kids from the other parent, but hasn't slept at work? No. So then what do they do? Go right back to it, right back to parenting. Because there's no alternative. I know there was a time I came home after a double and I hadn't slept, but like, let's say maybe two hours, I had rest in the 48 hours and I came home.
My daughter was very small, like under two years old, and I just dumped Legos in the middle of her room and laid at the door jamb, so across the door so that if she she couldn't leave the room, she'd have to wake me up. And I took a nap. And I don't even know how many hours I slept in.
She was entertained and played, but I learned that hack from another firefighter who was more experienced, more senior to me, and who had already lived through that. And it's so sad to me, looking back, that that was my solution. I, I mean, think about the interrupted sleep and the quality laying stretched across doorjamb with the anxiety of my child.
Maybe they're going to crawl over me and I won't wake up. Like. Or what if they decide my daughter's a cleaner? What if she decides to climb up the bookshelf like that? The hypervigilance that you experience in that moment before you actually rest? I wonder how what level of rest I actually experienced, although it benefited me in the moment.
It's it was never reparative. It was never even catch up. It was just simply to get by. And you're not the only person I've heard, like I've heard so many other firefighters that that is what they do. And that's how I learned it. I mean, being a new parent, you go to other firefighters who are parents and you're like, what do you do?
What do you do when you go home? Your life works, what do you do? And you just take their tips and tricks and you implement them in your own life. And that's how we perpetuate the cycle of normalizing that. It's okay to feel not okay and to be tired and exhausted. Exhausted. We normalized that. That's the norm. Just by continuing the advice and the cycles.
It's like, let's intervene. What if we sought out some other method, or got childcare, or had a friend and did swaps? And there's so many other options available and you actually go into it? I think it takes it takes courage to and raw realism to say this is where things are and I have to start making changes. For me, even as you know, a sleep squad person at work, it still takes courage to say like, hey guys, you want to watch this movie?
Like, let's watch it this afternoon instead of tonight? Yeah. Because the mode of operandi has been, oh, we have dinner. Oh, let's watch a movie. Yeah. And now it's like ten, 11, 12. Right. And changing what happens? The habits, the routines in the firehouse is really hard when for a lot of people, you know, they've been in 20 plus years, that's a whole career that essentially they're they would have to undo those habits.
And it's just uncomfortable. And I will invite my crew to do bedtime yoga, you know, before, before bed. It's really cool. I will say, though, as as you have the determination to say, I have to prioritize this, you'll notice in some ways the universe meeting you two, that you have this resolve and maybe you get people Pooh poohing you.
Maybe you get people you know, oh, you're going to bed already, You're the next call will be on you, mama. Exactly. That's what I, at the same time they see you across the table the next day in a good mood. Yeah. And rested and ready to face the day. And they see they will see that contrast.
And at some point, you continue practicing what you preach. You will see those shifts happen. I, I did a little sleep presentation to my new crew, and it was so funny because, one of my crewmates went to the East Coast and then came back. And his first day back, he was like on East Coast time, which means I feel like it's later.
So I'm going to keep this up and I'm going to go to bed early and take advantage of it. And it was so hilarious. It's been so hilarious to not be the first person to go to bed. And that's how have have this dude this, you know, he's a, just a great firefighter saying like 730 comes around, okay, it's going to be time to read.
I'm going to try and be asleep by 8:30 a.m.. That is such a great feeling that we're all in it together. Like we forget how much we can affect each other positively and sometimes it just takes one person to start saying enough is enough to create the change that the whole shift needs. The whole house needs. And no, it's not always easy being that person.
But nothing ever worth doing is easy. At the same time. Yeah. So, I know that all of this information can be really disheartening and discouraging, but I have seen so many people take the hard look at their life and say, all right, it's time to move some things around. It's time to reprioritize. It's time to shake things up, and they start putting these practices and these tools into place, and everything changes for the better.
And, The next episode that we do, I will be stoked to bring in, you know, just a little glimpse of what we have tried that actually has worked for each of us on improving our sleep, improving our sleep in an environment where it is not held sacred, it is not seen as necessary. And giving that hope, giving that inspiration.
Because I from the get go, probably from being a coach, I have seen information doesn't change your life. It's the implementation, it's the practices, it's the experiencing of it that changes your life and building the habits. But stories are the best way to do that. And so hearing your story and how you've done that and then, then our audience hearing my story and how I've done that, I think will be the, will help balance out the scales.
But we can't we can't see where we need to go until we see where we are. And sometimes where we are is lost and really hard and really sad. But when we can look at that map and say, okay, this is where I am, we can plot the route of where we need to go. And I'm excited to go over that and kind of discover what that plot looks like in our next episode and just talk about the practical tools, what works, what doesn't work.
And just because it doesn't work for us doesn't mean it won't work for our listeners. So what practical tools are there out there? And I'm excited to go over kind of more the positive side and the light side and the what does it look like when the offices are put into place, and how does that actually affect our you know, mental, emotional, physical health thereafter?
Yeah. And surprisingly, it's totally doable, right? Like it's doable. It's not overly complicated, but we complicate it of course. And it's so simple it seems like how can that really work out like it's it's keep it simple, stupid. That whole expression. It really is like these five minute practices I find myself doing. And it is such a simple, silly thing for me to do in the moment, but it really you reap the rewards when you actually put the time in and experience what it gives you.
It's just it's funny that we tell ourselves or talk ourselves out of a five minute practice by the fear of judgment or what it looks like, or the fact that we need it. Well, because I think it's such a it's such a big deal issue. We think a big deal issue equals big deal change. Right. And routes or interventions, where the big deal is because we just have layer after layer after layer after layer of things that are making it more complex.
But when we strip everything down, it's the right tools, the consistency, it's the mindset and the willingness to make changes, even the simple change. I was talking to my my crew about this just a couple shifts ago. We had a seven call night, which for us, that is. That's not a great night. There are places in this city that that are that busy on the regular for us.
We average maybe for a night. And, you know, the the guy is. This might have been like, call for the guys for just, Oh, man. How long is it going to take me to go to sleep this time? Was barely asleep. You know, when that call came in and they were just, like, moaning about it. And I told them, you know, things started shifting for me in a really interesting way when I changed my mindset.
And I just felt like, you know what? I'm so excited to get back in bed and get cozy. Yeah. I can't wait till I get to put my head on my pillow. Yeah. So if I have seven calls I'm getting cozy again seven times. And it's just that like instead of looking at it as this horrible negative impending doom kind of thing, you have the mindset of like, oh, I'm, I'm going to look forward to this thing.
This is so nice. And that completely shifts, how your body responds, because that also is paired to an emotion. Right? Like when you're angry, when you're frustrated, when you're upset, like anybody who's had a fight with their partner and then tried to go to bed knows that that does not work. No. Never mind. Is raising a hundred bucks into the.
Exactly. Yeah. You feel like the pent up energy of that. So if you can remove that and shift into like this soft, not excited, but like looking forward to and, being comfy, that completely changes how your body is going to respond when you do get into bed too. So simple, tiny shifts like that can even make a massive difference in the ability to go back to sleep or, you know, it's so funny.
One of my clients, I coached him on this point too, because he used to get so upset that way on this nothing call. And this person called us again and like, you know, just more and more upset. And, we talked about, you know, in that moment, let's practice gratitude instead and just use it as an experiment.
What would happen if so? For a week, there was every time they got a call in the middle of the night, he was like, I'm so grateful for a job that pays for me to live where I want to live and provide for my family. Or like, I'm so grateful that I get to be there for people on their worst days.
And over the course of that week, he said by the end, he noticed a dramatic improvement of going back to bed and being able to fall asleep faster. So things like that, we're not we're not going to get from a doctor. I no, not all right. We're not we're not even going to get that advice from a fellow firefighter friend.
But those are the kinds of tools that just very simply can change everything for us. Thank you, John, and I am looking forward to learning more about the gratitude or the simplicity of the type of tools that we can implement in our everyday life. And I think it's so valuable to point out consistency is the biggest part because like you said, over a week, your coworker experienced that.
Well, it took the week of, you know, micro moments where he took the intention to put a moment of gratitude instead of taking himself down the normal thought process. We would normally go down during that situation, taking a moment of gratitude and reflecting on something different over a week. The number of times he did that, let's say 300 different moments throughout the week, which maybe totaled an hour of two hours at the most huge and adds up huge impact and it adds up so much.
I mean, it's like a prescription. It's like here, here's your prescription. Five minutes of gratitude every single day. It's going to improve your life. Well it will. You just have to do it. You can't be. I'm grateful this day. And then ten days later, I'm grateful for this and then wonder why it's not working. It's the consistency. Yeah, but I look forward to that in our next episode for sure.
