Sleep First #author Dr Jemma King

Sleep First: Sleep Smarter, Think Sharper, Feel Better

Sleep shapes everything: how you feel, think, perform and live. 

Yet most of us treat it as an afterthought, something we'll get to after everything else is handled. The reality? Nothing works properly without sleep. Not your focus. Not your mood. Not your health. Not your relationships.

In Sleep First, Dr Jemma King, expert researcher in human behaviour and sleep science, reveals what's really going on when your head hits the pillow ― and why optimising those hours changes everything that follows. You'll learn why your brain needs to clean itself every night, why you keep waking at 3am, how your coffee changes your neurochemistry and why your phone is sabotaging your rest. Most importantly, you'll build your Sleep First Formula: a personalised strategy based on your own daily habits, challenges and goals.

Whether you want to perform at your peak or just feel better every day, this book is your guide to making sleep work for you. Good sleep changes everything. Sleep First will help you get it.


To connect with Jemma ....
www.linkedin.com/in/dr-jemma-king-phd-76013328/
https://www.instagram.com/dr.jemma.king/
Website: jemmakingbio-pa.com.au

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

It's good afternoon. Dr. Gemma King, welcome to Yellow Shelf. Thank you for having me. Oh, it's my pleasure. We were just talking uh off camera. I love sleep, so I'm gonna be excited for you to share about your latest book. Sleep first. Tell us all about it. Well, I actually hated sleep and I never used to do it.

SPEAKER_01 0:25

I'm like, I used to put my mother to tears, always the last man standing. Just thought there was so many other better, more interesting things to do rather than close your eyes. I just thought it was a huge waste of time. And so I started my career really as a stress researcher. And I did a lot of um research of thousands of people taking cortisol and looking at stress, what stressed them out, looking at emotional intelligence, all these factors. And I decided to see something in the data that I could not ignore, that every single person who had a mental health disruption or like feeling a bit wonky or off also had sleep issues. And every single person that I met who had sleep issues eventually or at some stage had succumbed to mental health disruption. I'm like, there is a huge correlation here. And so then I started doing little experiments on myself, like just seeing so much data, and and I was I was supervising PhDs who were doing their research in you know, time-restricted eating, circadian alignment and stress. And I was like, okay, I I have to start living, you know, what I what I'm reading. And then I became really interested in it. And now I travel a lot, but now I'm like pretty, I'm pretty disciplined because I just the second and third order effects are just so amazing that yeah, yeah, I just do what works, not because you know it's the right thing to do, but it it actually really works. So everything becomes easier when you just get this one thing right.

SPEAKER_00 1:53

Yeah. Yeah, and I don't, I think when I was thinking about talking to you today, I was like, you know what, I love sleep. So I love I've always loved sleep. But different times in your life, it doesn't matter if you love it, things happen, things crop up, but the flow on, like you were mentioning, is the mood and the energy that it doesn't always like complement the next day or the next week, whatever.

SPEAKER_01 2:18

So tightly wound, and that's why in this book I've got a whole thing on all the different um sleep throughout the different stages of your life. Yeah. So like from when you're a baby to teenagers to when you're you know um middle-aged or when you're when you're having babies, when you become a parent, then you know, perimenopause, menopause, and then old age. Because yeah, we all we need sleep all the time, but you know, the your experience of it changes, and the difficulties and and the remedies on what you should do when you're having sleep difficulties changes as well.

SPEAKER_00 2:51

Yeah. And Jimmy, do you want to share with us? I mean, you have a fascinating career journey and study, and you know, um, tell us a bit about you as an author, like what inspired you to then write the book?

SPEAKER_01 3:04

Well, I was single mum, studying, doing a PhD, had three kids. You can imagine, like, even though I didn't like sleep, I had no time for it. And, you know, studying stress, and I studied stress because I was like stressed out, there has to be a different way. So I was looking at all the different ways that we can help, you know, make make our lives more enjoyable and and really use stress as a um, I suppose as a competitive advantage. And so I was really lucky to go and work with some amazing populations throughout my career. So I was asked to go and work with the Australian Special Forces. So I went down there and I learned from you know guys who had been in the most stressful, sleep-deprived environments. Like, what did they do and how did they cope? And then I took that information and I then created a package and taught that back to the younger commandos coming through the reinforcement cycle. Then I was asked to go and work with the Olympic swim team in the lead up to Tokyo, and I went and worked at the Australian Institute of Sport, helping uh these guys perform under pressure in um in the Olympics. And then uh, you know, corporates came knocking, and I and then I became an advisor to McKinsey, and I still work with them extensively and do lots of research, and then you know, I became a research fellow at the University of Queensland, School of Psychology, and I supervise PhD students, so anything to do with sleep stress, um, cognitive performance, performance enhancement, anything like that. And so I've had a really kind of varied uh populations of people who I work with, just really unusual. But the unifying thread between all these people is that they're high performers, they're under a lot of stress, and what is the best way to make them the best people? And I always say that you know, the the cheapest, freest, democratically available, most effective human performance, legal human performance enhancing protocol is sleep. Yes, simple as that. And you know, Mother Nature gave it to us. Um, it's you know, hopefully we all do it at least once a day at another night. So, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:08

Yeah. And Gemma, tell me about the process of writing as an author. I mean, you are a very busy human and a mother and juggles. What was what was writing like?

SPEAKER_01 5:19

Well, I was actually on stage with one of the Olympic swimmers who I work with and the guy who started this mattress company called Eight Sleep, which I highly recommend. And we I was just talking about sleep and and all the things that you know that I write a book. And this woman from R Wiley ran up to me and she's like, Oh my god, you've got to write a book on sleep. And I'm like, No, I guess I don't sleep, but enough as it is. I I said, I'm so busy. She said, Don't worry about it. You know, you just put down dot points and we'll we'll help you. That was not true. I actually had to write it, and it was in uh I was insufferable. It was extremely painful. Um like like all the authors out there, yeah, like it what it the idea is great, but when you actually sit down, and it's I mean, I'm I'm lucky, mine was a lot about data and some, but it's quite revealing that you have to really put yourself out there and what you think. And you're so worried that you get it accurate, and particularly when there's more research coming out that sort of discounts old research. So you've got to be super careful that what you're writing is legitimate and it's true, and and also not making it boring, putting your own experiences in. So I actually wrote 140,000 words and that you weren't like slow down, cut and they cut they cut it in half.

SPEAKER_00 6:34

So wow, yeah. Well, there might be another novel in the future, another book, who knows? I mean, I really appreciate you sharing the journey story because I think it's fascinating when you know you see a book on the shelf and you know it's like, oh, this resonates with me, sleep first, and then you get a share from the author like that to say, you know what, it's it's uh it's it's yes, it's a labor of love, but it's not always you know easy to juggle and to get it out there. So well it's like having babies, you're like, I'm never doing that again. And you know, I got three. And you know, it can be so intense, can't it? You know, I can imagine that when I talk to authors, it's such an intense process. So Gemma, well done. I I really hope when people see this book on the shelves, you know, they really it really resonates to think about prioritizing sleep and and what your book does is it really lays out the challenges and the different stages of life, like you and I were talking about. Yeah, even though when you love sleep, you've got to understand, you know, different stages of your life. Sleep's gonna present very differently.

SPEAKER_01 7:40

Yeah, and I think what I really try and highlight in the book is that there's a lot of people walking around and they're like, I feel depressed, or I can't lose weight, or I just seem to be getting bronchitis every second month, or I just don't feel like I'm really on my game at work in terms of like my cognition. Like, you know, there's something else, and and when you actually look at what are the antecedent behaviors that they're engaging in, you go, Oh my god, this is actually a sleep issue, where they will go and spend money doing all these other things and going to doctors and you know, thinking that they're depressed or thinking that their marriage is over, or thinking that you know, whatever, and they're they're failing. When you go, hang on a minute, just why don't you just go to bed same time every two hours before midnight, get that you know, really important deep slow way of sleep, clean your brain. Uh, make sure that your body's got the time, the window to do all of the regenerative processes it needs. And then people are like, oh my god, is it was it that easy? And you know, everything else seems so much more available, like so much, they've got so much more bandwidth for doing it. And this is what I do in the book. I have a um, you know, it's a system, it's a sleep, personal sleep formula where people can identify what are the things they're doing they might not necessarily know are affecting their sleep. Yeah, and then creating little experiments that are you know doable and you don't feel so you know disenfranchised and overwhelmed. You can actually do these little experiments and see the results for yourself and sort of fit into your life because as you said, like your husband's a shift worker, yeah. Not everyone can have these like amazing eight hours of beautiful sleep. So it's about fitting in sleep into your lifestyle in a way that works for you and a way that you've kind of chosen to do it because you've done many experiments that you can see the outcome.

SPEAKER_00 9:24

Yeah, and look, I just wanted to say, like, I feel like you know, when you read, you know, about you maybe a person who's got a profile who only gets four hours of sleep of night, and you know, they world leaders, you know, and I think I that gene, maybe that deck two gene. Yeah, it's like, oh my god, is this helpful? But yeah, I'm a big fan of sleep, so I love supporting your work. Gemma, thank you so much for joining us here on Yellow Shelf. Thank you for having me. Cheers.