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Hi, and welcome to the Safety Guru. Today, I’m very excited to have back with me Dr Nick Mabbott, also sometimes called Dr Nick. He’s a fatigue risk expert. His episode on distracted driving was quite the hit. We’re here for a follow-on conversation with a slightly different twist today, going into a couple of other topics related fatigue. So, Dr Nick, welcome to the show. Welcome back.

Thank you very much, Eric. I really enjoyed the last podcast, and I’m looking forward to this one, too.

So, why don’t you get us back into a little bit about your background and how you got into this space of sleep fatigue and the impact on safety.

It wasn’t the direction that I was attempting to take at the time. At 32 years old, I was a mature middle-aged student going to university to study psychology. My main aim was to just become a general run-of-the-mill psychologist, but I was fortunate enough to have a professor that I did a lot of work with who was in the fatigue and transportation space. He organized a lot of conferences in Fremantle, the International Conference on Fatigue and Transportation, which was heavily attended by a lot of Americans, Canadians, and Europeans. That’s where I really got an interest in the fatigue side of psychology, and then a bit later on, sleep as well. The move into psychology to start off with, I was working as a timber worker for 18 years. At that point, I then had twin daughters, and after five weeks of virtually sleepless nights, I handed my notice in I quit at the timber mill while I could still count to 10, and decided a career move is imminent. Now, after attending a few of those conferences, I got busy doing some work with that professor, writing some journal articles with him, and investigating drug use, or stimulant use, on heavy vehicle routes I went all over WA interviewing long distance truck drivers and found out that the pretty poor reputation they had at that time, I don’t believe was Not as bad as it should be as it was spoken about.

For example, roughly one third of the drivers were using a stimulant, but a lot of that was over the counter, such as caffeine, the things like Red Bull and No Dose and things like that. There were still a few cowboys around who did use some pretty strong illicit drugs, but they have become less over the 28 years that I’ve been doing this. I’m very pleased to say that a lot of the work I’m seeing now in transport, they really have cleaned up the drugs a lot, and they’re doing much, much better on the road. So that’s how I basically got into the fatigue side. After about 10 years of delivering talks on fatigue, I come to the realization that it’s absolutely no value telling people to get seven to eight hours of sleep if I can’t convince them of two things. One of them is that sleep is very important to your life. And the other thing is how to get the seven to eight hours, because as we grow up, we tend to forget how to sleep.

And the first one is interesting because after our last episode, I shared one or two of the stories you had shared, and somebody challenged me saying, I don’t need sleep. I’m good on an hour and a half. I promptly fell asleep in front of me, but it was fascinating. Let’s get into the science of sleep, because I agree with what you’re saying. First, we got to realize that there’s a need for sleep and its impact. But tell me a little bit about some of the science of sleep.

Absolutely. In the last podcast, we spoke about how when we sleep, the brain produces tomorrow’s fuel. A little reminder about that part. And very importantly, for every one hour of sleep, we produce roughly two hours of brain fuel for the next day, which is what keeps us ticking along nicely and if we don’t get enough, well, then the brain will attempt to fall asleep at inopportune times, sitting in a desk, sitting behind the wheel of a car, and so on. But let’s get deeper into the science. When we sleep, well, let me just pre-amp that with the brain with its roughly 100 billion neurons, uses an enormous amount of brain energy every day. And In burning this fuel, it produces a lot of waste products. One of the waste products is microscopic toxins. You can’t see them, but if you do not clean them out with sufficient sleep, your brain will suffer a slight swelling, which will end up in you having a quite serious headache, not that different from having a hangover. Because a hangover headache is a head full of toxins making your brain swell. And when your brain swells, it’s encased in a bony skull.

It can’t go anywhere, so it hurts instead. So, a head full of toxins. And I was reminded of this last year when my daughter rang me up after doing her very first night shift at a hospital where they do not deliver any sleep and fatigue management training. And she said, hey, dad, I did my first night shift. They didn’t tell me about the headaches. What’s that all about? So luckily, I was able to jump on a plane go over and give her some education. And as far as I know, her group of nurses that she works with is one of the very few groups of nurses that have ever been trained in sleep and fatigue management. That concerns me a lot because we put our life in their hands. Some of the doctors work much longer hours than they do, and it’s quite scary.

It’s concerning shifts and patterns Plus, you’re often working a night shift, and in some cases, shifting between sleep patterns.

Oh, absolutely. The days to nights in nursing are too rapid. The change over from day shift and night shift. And the brain just cannot handle that. We are equipped to have a circadian rhythm, which you can alter, but you can’t permanently change. But the quicker you alter it, the more trouble you get into with fogginess and the brain not knowing whether it’s day, night, whether you should be asleep or awake, and so on. Getting back inside the brain, when we sleep, we have a system called the glymphatic system. It’s a combination of billions of glial cells within the brain that have a channel which opens when we sleep, drawing out microscopic toxins and some of these nasty proteins, which is also another waste product. It also gets flushes of cerebrospinal fluid to assist with that process. It drops the waste products into the lymphatic system of the body, which is then filtered and eliminated. So basically, as we sleep, we are cleaning the brain ready to make more mess tomorrow, so to speak. And people will feel it. If they don’t get enough sleep in the night, the next day, they will experience some fogginess in the brain and inability to think clearly and quickly and efficiently.

And basically, it’s just a day of brain fog. So, cleaning your brain out is very important. And now my selling tips for people, when I deliver fatigue training, which is normally a three-hour program, it sometimes goes to four hours to really drive home all these messages. When you sleep in stage one, stage one is not true sleep. It’s a mechanism that the brain puts in place for about seven to 10 minutes to warn the person, you are about to fall asleep, you should choose to go to bed. If you’re sitting on the lounge, your partner might turn around and say to you, hey, you haven’t heard a word I’ve said. And if you go back to your partner and say, well, that’s a funny way to start a conversation, you have been in stage one sleep because your senses are starting to drop out, which includes your vision. Now, worse than that, if you’re in a vehicle, you will feel drowsy, where you will struggle to keep your eyes, you’ll be yarning. You’ll get down the road and you’ll go, wow, how did I get here? I don’t recall the last 10 kilometers. That’s your brain shutting down your senses in an effort to put you to sleep.

And importantly, the brain has a hierarchy of needs. It’s trying to put you to sleep because it needs more brain energy. And its need for sleep is in the hierarchical levels a little bit higher than your safety, which is why people do fall asleep at the wheel, even with a really good effort at trying not to. So, the thing is, when you are drowsy, your brain is incapable of knowing what’s coming next. And most people who have a microsleep will wake up and go, wow, I didn’t know I was asleep. In fact, I hear that at the end of crashes, where someone has crashed, and they’ll say comments like, I don’t know what happened, but I woke up and the car was rolling over, and things like that. So, getting Back to the science side. Stage one is a preparation for you to go to sleep. If you feel drowsy at any point, the best thing you can do is be laying down, because when you hit stage two sleep, that is complete sleep, and you are losing contact with the rest of the world. If you’re in bed, that’s fantastic. That’s where you want to be.

If you’re in a car, you may go off the road for two or three seconds before you even wake up and realize that you were asleep. So, stage two is to be only done in bed. Well, stage one, preferably as well. In stage two, one of the very clever things that the brain does is during wakefulness, we store short term memories. Listening to this podcast, you will gain little bits of information, and you will store that in the hippocampal region of the brain. There’s one on each side of your brain, and it’s short term only. When you get to sleep in stage two, you empty out the hippocampus, and those short-term memories will then travel to the cortex of your brain and will be logged as long-term memories. This is part two of learning, and it’s very important for parents to know that their child’s sleep is incredibly important for their learning at school. And if you go back a couple of decades, a lot of children were wrongly diagnosed with ADHD because they were poor sleepers. And Children who are poor sleepers cannot remember things. They cannot lay down memory. They’re not getting enough sleep, and they have trouble with their behaviors because of the emotion regulation associated with deep sleep, which is the next phase of sleep.

Once we’ve done stage two, we move into deep sleep, and I call this the health and wellness component. When we’re in deep sleep, as long as we eating reasonably healthy and we have good gut health, none of these things are stand-alone items. Everything is in combination. Thirty minutes of physical movement every day, and especially walking, very good for your gut health. Eating the right food is good for your gut health, which is in turn good for your mental health because we have billions of neurons that extend from your brain into your stomach and can actually sample the food. And the best way to test that theory is to go and get yourself a really greasy pizza or burger or something, consume that, and half an hour, your stomach is going, really? What were you thinking? I feel horrible. So, if you are eating healthy, and let’s just focus on good servings of veggies, bit of fruit, and a handful of protein with each meal. Nothing crazy, no special diet, eating healthy. And there is nothing that can really be a good healthy Mediterranean diet that gives you good gut health, good sleep health, and everything’s interconnected.

And with that as a baseline, in deep sleep, your brain will produce, well, your body will produce serotonin, which will flood your brain. At that day, not only will you be quite happy, but you’ll be very resilient to things that go wrong. And a lot of people have a lot of things go wrong on a daily basis. How they react to that occurrence, maybe like driving on the freeway where everything’s backed up and you are concerned, you’re going to miss a plane and things like that.

Sure.

You can either get really grumpy and do stupid things like drive down the emergency lanes at 100 KS an hour where you shouldn’t, or you can go, okay, well, I’m just going to call ahead and let someone know that I may miss this flight and be better organized and things like that. In the workplace, it’s how you address your colleagues. In your personal space, this becomes a very important part of your mental health. And I have a lot of mental health colleagues around Perth that I can’t say I work closely with, but they use my YouTube series called The Wonder of Sleep, which has 22 short videos in it regarding how to get good sleep. And they show that to their clients to help them get better sleep, better deep sleep, more resilience, and that helps them with their mental health growth. Sure. An incredibly important part of your sleep is to produce the production of good serotonin to give you a fantastic day. And those days that you walk around with a bit of a spring in your step and a big smile on your face and people wonder what you’re on, I often say, I’m on sleep.

And with that comes a good dose of serotonin. I remember a gentleman in a training course yelling out one day, Can I get a supplement for that? And I said, Well, you can. It’s known as an antidepressant. Not sure you want one of them because of the stigma attached. But if you want more serotonin, take a walk in the sun, synthesize some vitamin D with your skin, eat well, sleep like a champion, and you’ll do the best that you can for your mental health in that side of things. Now, also in deep sleep, human growth hormone, any damage to your body from injury, from illness, human growth hormone will fix as much as it can overnight. And important to understand that, for example, if you’re an Olympic athlete, and you just work so physically hard, you might not need seven-and-a-half-hour sleep. You might need up to nine hours. For example, Usain Bolt, fastest man on the planet, would often sleep nine hours. And then before an afternoon meet, he might also have a 20-minute nap. And the benefits of that, I mean, his This whole day of work is over in under 10 seconds, and you’ve got to get absolutely every step right.

So, I mean, if anyone is going to promote great sleep, Usain Bolt and others are very much like him. I’ve trained some people in athletics WA, and these are the 19, 20-year-olds quite often who get on a plane fly to US or Europe, so the other side of the planet, and they will perform well for two days if they have three good nights of sleep in a row before they get on the plane. That is the build-up of this human growth hormone and the resilience to put up with, Hey, I’m 12 hours behind here, and things like that. Now, also in deep sleep, this one is incredibly important. Anyone listening to this, tune in. With the human growth hormone, we get a release of the hormone insulin growth factor I. This hormone gets into every cell of the body, it promotes the perimeter of the cell to become more permeable to glucose and insulin. And then when we eat food, we convert it to glucose. A little bit of help from insulin, it gets pushed right through the whole body, absorbed into cells, and converted into energy. And when that happens, you are having a good day, and you feel energized.

Now, when you don’t get enough deep sleep and enough insulin growth factor one, what happens is the cell walls will toughen up a bit and become impermeable to glucose and insulin, and that cell then becomes glucose-intolerant. And a lot of people have heard that term, but they don’t know where it come from. If your body is largely glucose is intolerant, then anything you eat that day will get converted to glucose. It will travel through your body. And because it’s not used, it will then be converted to glycogen and stored as fat. And studies all over the world have shown that as society reduces its amount of sleep, that same society increases weight. I remember back in 2005, so 20 years ago now, I did a study on crashes on the way to and from coal mines in New Wales of Australia. Sure. Interestingly, and this is something I see all across mining because of the reasonably long hours, because of the shift week, and because a lot of people don’t really put enough focus on sleep, the body mass index of miners is slightly larger than the general population. For example, at that time, the general population of New South Wales, 66 % were overweight and obese, but in the mining sector, that was 77 %.

And in the year 2000, 15 years later, that number had increased to 81 %. Now, that particular population generally work a 12-and-a-half-hour shift, but a lot of them live an hour to an hour and a half drive each side of that. So, they can have a 15 hour a day driving to work, working, and driving back home, which only leaves you nine hours to get home, greet the family, do everything you need to do, and try and push out seven and a half hours, which generally they do not do. Usually, it doesn’t. They will live on six hours because then they see their family, and they still sleep, and they think that’s okay. But the build-up, unfortunately, does cause a lot of crashes, does cause a lot of illness. The only thing that we can do about that is to either move closer to the mine, or, as I jokingly say to the mine owners, move the mine closer to the Coast wherever the mine lives. Not going to happen.

A little bit harder to do.

Just a bit. Moving a hole that size is a bit hard work.

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So, deep sleep is incredibly important because it sustains your mental health and your physical health. And there was some great work done by Dr. Eve Van Korter from the University of Chicago in 2004, where she got a group of 22-year-old males who were fit and healthy and had perfect blood sugar levels. For six nights, she cut their sleep down to four hours a night to see what would happen. And after six nights, their blood sugar levels went from five millimoles glucose per liter of blood to six millimoles, which is now prediabetic. In less than a week, we converted perfectly healthy people into prediabetics.

And that was- Just by cutting sleep.

Just by cutting sleep, nothing else. They exercise, they ate healthy, they just lost four hours sleep a night, roughly. So, at the end of that week, they had lost a total of 24 hours of sleep. But then they were told to go home in free sleep. They still recorded their sleep, and they averaged 9. 3 hours of sleep for seven nights in a row, thus paying back 13 of the 24 hours of sleep they missed. And back then, we had a belief that you cannot pay back sleep. But what we realized through there was by paying back just over half of the sleep they missed; they got all of their health back. They went back to not diabetic at all.

Interesting.

And what I tell a lot of people in workplaces, and this, again, is incredibly important, if you work shift work or if you think it’s okay to sleep on six or less hours of sleep, please get tested for your blood sugar levels at least once a year. And when you get that test, you get the three-monthly average to make sure that you’re okay. The finger prick test will only tell you what’s happening right now. But the three-monthly average will tell you if you’re healthy, prediabetic, or terribly diabetic. And I’ll give you a case later on where someone just didn’t know how unhealthy they were, but we managed to fix that person through technology. So, yeah, deep sleep, health and wellness. And then towards the end of your first cycle of sleep, which is 90 minutes, you do a little bit of rapid eye movement sleep. Second cycle of 90 minutes, you do a little bit more rapid eye movement sleep. At the end of the third cycle, you start doing larger amounts of rapid eye movement sleep. And that’s where the brain goes from being quite inactive in deep sleep, which is a flood with hormones, is into becoming incredibly active, sorting out your problems, concerns, worries, anxieties.

And I was at a conference just two weeks ago in Sydney, and I was saying all my fellow presenters would have woken up at four and a half hours after going to sleep thinking about, have I got my presentation right for today? And all around the room, you see people going, how did you know that? Where were you? Importantly, in rem sleep, I’m not sure of the mechanism. This is the one thing I don’t know, and we need to study it a lot more. For some reason, the brain is capable of rehearsing what we need to do to get through tomorrow safely and efficiently. For organizers, for example, they will wake up thinking, I can’t forget to do this tomorrow, and they might write it down, or they might think, oh, I did forget this today. Now I’ve got to go and fix that tomorrow. But I also remember, especially with When I worked in a timber mill, rehearsing what I needed to do to keep safe around some of those sores. And it really did pay off because I can count to 10, unlike some of my colleagues. And when you don’t get enough rem sleep, your brain is capable of making silly mistakes.

And that’s the thing I think we really should study a lot more, and it would be quite easy to study because all you need to do is set a person up with EEG monitoring. And when they get to rapid eye movement sleep, just give them a little nudge and maybe wake them up out of that. I know that will disturb their sleep. But if they don’t get any rapid eye movement sleep, and then just see how well they go on cognitive tasks the next day in a safe environment, of course. But let How do you put this in layman’s terms. Unfortunately, some people who don’t get enough rem sleep the following day will have brain farts, which is where they just make the silliest mistakes and they go, Where the hell did that come from? And this happens on the road. It happens in workplaces. And it causes those incidents where people shake their head and go, Wow, you’re an idiot. Why would you do that? Well, no one is an idiot. No one really wants to get hurt on the road or at work. But they just don’t realize that if you cut down rapid eye movement sleep, and all you have to do is cut your sleep down to five or six hours, and you will miss out on big chunks of rem sleep and be quite…

Well, you will produce incidents the following day, whether you like it or not. You may or may not notice it.

You’ll be much more error prone.

Yeah. You will trip over things that you normally don’t. You will put your hands where they shouldn’t be and bump into people on the road and things like that and go, wow, why would I do that? So that is incredibly important. Now, let me explain the way that your cycles work. You do 90 minutes cycles, and you encase all of those stages within those cycles. In a perfect sleep of seven and a half hours, which is five cycles, you will do roughly two hours of deep sleep in the very first half of your night. You’ll do roughly two hours of rapid eye movement sleep towards the end of the back half of your sleep, and the rest is bolstered with laying down memory and things like that. Now, as soon as you cut that seven and a half down to six, which is five cycles down to four, that last cycle, which is mainly rem sleep, is missing, and tomorrow, you are error prone. And then the next night, and this is what is incredibly fascinating, the brain, the The following night will go, Hang on, we need more rem sleep. And instead of getting deep sleep at the start, it will go into what we call rem rebound, and it will make sure that you get your rem sleep before your deep sleep. 

And then if you still only get six hours, you don’t have enough time to catch that rem sleep, the deep sleep at the end. Sure. And so that day, you’ll wake up, your glucose-intolerant, You’ll put on a fraction of weight that day, and you’ll increase your blood sugar levels. And because of the lack of deep sleep, you’ll be grumpy, not resilient, and your blood pressure will increase. So that’s the problem with thinking six hours is okay. Every second day or every second night, you’ll get more deep sleep than rem. And then the next night, you’ll do the rem rebound and not enough deep sleep. And that keeps chopping and changing because the brain takes what the brain needs. Whenever I do a six-hour sleep, I will always follow that up the following night with just under nine hours to pay back that little bit that I missed. Sure. And the next day, I’m fully caught up with all of my mental and physical health intact, and it’s just a great way to live. I guess that covers most of what the sleep deficit will do to a person, health and wellness or safety. Either one will take a hit depending on the day.

What organizations can do is supply good training. And when I say training, I’m guilty of years ago, supplying fatigue management training, which is going in saying, you need seven, eight hours of sleep, and this will keep you safe, and things like that. But then I slowly transitioned into this is how important sleep is, this is how you get perfect sleep. And I’m going to tell you something right now that has changed the lives of literally thousands of people. I have trained more than 34,000 people so far, mainly in mining. I would love to do more in health.

Sure.

But I have a theory which is basically 16 hours and 10 minutes after you wake up in the morning, your brain will get its first small dose of melatonin, which can have you asleep within five minutes without even trying. Sure. 6, 10 hours and 10 minutes, it is a first dose of melatonin, which after 10 minutes, tends to withdraw. And again, this needs research. Because if you miss that first sleep wave, even by a few minutes, we all know it takes at least an hour to get to sleep. That’s a great example is when your partner taps you on the shoulder, you’re watching TV, and they say, hey, wake up and go to bed. And you get up and you go to bed, and you can’t sleep. And that’s because you’ve missed that first… Well, you use that first wave, but then you wake up. You’ve got to wait at least another hour for the second wave, which comes around about 17 plus hours after you wake up. And that first dose of melatonin is only small. Use it wisely. 6: 00 wake up for me this morning, 10: 00 past 10: 00 tonight.

I’ll do a series of two or three yawns. I’ll be in bed. I’ll be asleep by 10: 00 past 10: 00. And people go, I’m envious. Well, sit in one of my training sessions and learn what to do, because that 6: 10 hours, 10: 00 rule works an absolute charm.

What about somebody who’s working? You mentioned before in mining where it’s essentially a 15, 16-hour shift, right? When you do your 12-hour shift plus you’re driving. What if your shift, because there’s some industries where I’ve seen definitely in health care, the shift can be 16 hours.

Incredibly important that maybe you do one of them and then you say to your employer, I cannot do two in a row because I will be dangerous on the road and in the workplace. I have said that to some employers that have wanted me to do a day shift and then a night shift, only four hours a time. But if I knock off at, say, 11: 00 PM, I’m not going to get enough time to get up and be at work for 6: 00 AM. Sure. And I’ll say to people, I practice what I preach, and I will not do that. I will not put my own life at risk on the road. There was a group that actually did a survey after my training sessions, four months after the training sessions, to see if they got any improvements in sleep from hearing this information, and mainly the 16-hour, 10-minute rule. I also spoke about sleep maintenance insomnia, where you wake through the night, have trouble getting back to sleep. That one there, just for all the listeners, try and get back to sleep for 10 minutes. But if you can’t get out of bed, read a boring book until you feel sleepy enough to get back to sleep.

Because if you lay there awake for more than 10 minutes, your brain literally thinks Bed is for being awake, and that causes sleep maintenance insomnia. That normally takes about four to five weeks to rewire your brain. Bed is for two things only. One of them we won’t talk about on the podcast, but the other one is sleep only. The results of the survey at this mining place, the four-to-five-hour group of sleepers went down by 70 %. They all lifted their sleep. The more than seven hours of sleep every night group increased by 52 % just by going to bed at the right time.

Sure.

That’s how important that formula is, 16 hours and 10 minutes. On night shift, again, there’s a few other tips and tricks you can do, but the most important one on night shift is before you go to bed in the morning, have a nice bowl of low glycemic index porridge and add some berries and things which are high melatonin. And that way, when you wake up to go to the toilet after 4: 00 four and a half hours when your brain gets into rem sleep and says, How’s your body? Oh, blah, blah. If you keep your eyes closed and go to the toilet, keep your eyes closed, go back to bed, because you’ve still got carbs slowly released in your body, you will not wake up hungry, and you can go back to bed and get more sleep. When I introduced this, they said, really? You want us to swap making an egg for porridge? Well, surprisingly, they tried it, and the increase in the more than seven hours of sleep everyday group, up by 61 % from eating porridge instead of bacon and eggs. Those numbers blew my mind. I thought, wow, they tried it.

In fact, the camp where they were staying, they went from half a pot of porridge every morning to two full pots.

Oh, wow.

And they increased- No bacon eggs. Well, just less bacon and eggs. I did say, look, if you’re a diehard fan, you can have your porridge and then a little bit of bacon and eggs on the side, if you must. It’s not going to wake you up. But that’s what an organization can do to increase both the performance and safety performance, and also things like absenteeism of people is to just really give them good training. And in the training area, you do get what you pay for. Some people will just come in and say, get eight hours of sleep. Other people will say, this is why you should get eight hours of sleep, and you should help them get it. That can make an absolute huge difference to the workforce. I work group also needs a fatigue management plan so that their rosters all fit in well. They’re well considered and well discussed. I also like to have what I call a sleep improvement program because one of my colleagues from the US, Rich Hanowski, in 2003, at the very same time, I was producing a report. Both of our reports What showed that 20% of the organization will produce roughly 80% of the fatigue errors.

And what I said to this group that I was working with, if you can get that 20%, half of them will probably have undiagnosed sleep apnea, which we can fix very quickly. And the other half will need some sleep coaching, which I do. And within months, we were fixing up that 20 %. One of the gentlemen, they fitted eye detection technology in the truck. And in one night, he had 27 microslips. He Obviously, the next morning, we had some words with the supervisor who should have got him out of the truck, but the driver convinced the supervisor that he didn’t really fall asleep. It was the technology error. It was glitchy. Which it wasn’t. It was 27, he might have got to sleep. Anyway, we tested him. He had severe sleep apnea. On top of that, he was terribly diabetic and didn’t know it. He also had severe sleep, high blood pressure, sorry. He was possibly only going to maybe live another 10 years. But they got him a CPAP machine, continuous positive airway pressure, to treat the apnea. I gave him some coaching on how to use it well and how to get good sleep.

That man, a year later, has lost 25 kilos. He’s no longer diabetic. He is no longer having problems with his blood pressure. They have possibly added 15, 20 years to his life by intervening on his sleep errors.

Very interesting. Now, those are pretty amazing elements because when you think about it, a lot of organizations, as I mentioned, this one person I was talking to who thought an hour and a half is all he needed per day. He convinced himself that he was superhuman and had super abilities compared to others. But I think this element of understanding the impact of sleep, we know that sleep has significant impact in terms of serious injuries, fatalities. You talk about in the last episode around distracted driving and the impact there. We know in aviation as well, there’s been quite a few incidents where some impact of sleep impacted. There was a plane crash near Buffalo where both pilots apparently had very limited sleep. One had flown in a nightery the night before, and the other one had slept on a bunk at the airport instead of getting in a hotel room. So, you’ve got all these different impacts that have serious consequence. We know we make more mistakes, yet we have shifts in some organizations that don’t allow for proper sleep. We often don’t train on sleep. And it’s an odd report for a business because I can’t control what you do in the bedroom.

No, that’s wrong.

I remember one executive I was talking to, he says, I can’t install sleep machines in all my employees’ bedrooms. You absolutely can’t. But what you’re saying is essentially you can train people, get them to understand the need for sleep, understand how to get better sleep, to have better impacts.

Absolutely. That is probably the best thing any employer can do for their workforce.

Any closing thoughts? Nick, it’s been great to have you back on the show. I know last time we were very focused on the distracted driving side. Here we went much deeper in terms of why sleep’s important, how it impacts our health, our well-being, the choices, the decisions, the actions that we take, and how we can address it. Any closing thoughts?

Well, I will deliver the same closing thought that I do in every class. Eat well, move often, sleep like a champion, and be the best version of you that you can possibly be. And as soon as you do three days in a row of really good sleep, that’s when you really notice, wow, this is incredible. And that is my challenge for people. Do three nights in a row, seven and a half, half hours, and wake up to really enjoying life. It makes a huge difference.

Sleep like Usain Bolt. Is what you’re saying? Yes. And then you can be Usain Bolt. Maybe not.

Yeah, absolutely. Don’t sleep like a baby. They often wake up.

And if somebody wants to get in touch with you, what’s the best way to do that? 

Probably the best way… I mean, you can go to my website, but look me up on YouTube for four webinars, five podcasts, and 22 short videos that you can share with your family. Please look up, if you’re going on holiday, my top 10 tips for safe holiday driving and enjoy your holiday instead of having a catastrophe. Please. Excellent.

Thank you so much for joining me again.

Thank you for having me, Eric. I really have enjoyed these two podcasts. Thank you so much.

Thank you for listening to The Safety Guru on C-suite Radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the past. Grow your success. Capture the hearts and minds of your teams. Elevate your safety. Like every successful athlete, top leaders continuously invest in their safety leadership with an expert coach to boost safety performance. Begin your journey at execsafetycoach.com. Come back in two weeks for the next episode with your host, Eric Michrowski. This podcast is powered by Propulo Consulting.