Sleep Leadership - Why It Matters webinar

0:00 Thank you, Sarah. Uh K to everyone. Uh welcome. We'll I think start with the elephant in the room that obviously texts that and I we're used to
0:09 presenting in person and with people. I have flamboyant hand motions going on, so I'll try and like pull those in. Um
0:16 but yeah, it's going to be really interesting walking through something where we don't have an interaction. Um we're going to try our best. So,
0:24 uh Koda, uh my name is Flight Lieutenant Amy Davis. I am a psychologist that is based in Wakia
0:33 and I'm flight attendant Campbell Tashira. Most people know me as Tex. I'm the base psych for Fenuai. Uh and today
0:40 we're going to be talking to you about sleep, but probably not in the way you might be expecting. Uh this isn't a presentation about sleep hygiene or
0:48 trying to convince you that military people should never work while they're tired because it's not a zero sum game.
0:55 In fact, we find the reality can be the opposite. Military personnel, we have always operated under demanding
1:03 conditions. So, you know, we work shifts, we deploy, we respond to emergencies, uh we fly through the night. So, we operate when the mission
1:12 demands it, not necessarily when our body clock says it's convenient. Um, and so because fatigue isn't it isn't something we can completely eliminate.
1:22 um often it plagues every um touch of the operation that we do. Uh the question then changes to well how well
1:30 can we understand it and where if possible how can we work with it or mitigate the costs of fatigue.
1:37 So let's start with a simple question that we'd like you to think about uh in terms of who would you rather have making an important operational decision.
1:48 Person A who is highly motivated, highly experienced, but they've been awake for about 20 hours straight, or person B
1:56 who's maybe averely motivated, averageely experienced, but they've had a full night's sleep. Who's likely to be
2:02 making a better decision with more sound judgment?
2:07 And look, I've been around along long enough and had enough conversations to know that some of us instinctively believe that motivation can be biology.
2:16 And I get it. I really get it because military culture reinforces this belief all the time. We are trained to push
2:22 through. We have to keep going. We are trained to get that job done. And the truth is, well, we absolutely can. And history, I think, shows this, right?
2:32 It's full of extraordinary examples of military people uh pushing through um especially while they're exhausted. So, this presentation, it's not about
2:41 proving people can't perform because we know they can. We live it, right? The question that we want to put to you
2:48 today is what is the cost? So what are we spending when we ask people to keep performing while they're tired? And
2:56 perhaps more importantly for our leaders, when is that cost worth paying and how do we reduce it when we can?
3:05 And so that's what we'd like to explore over the next little while uh by answering a few questions. So first, how
3:12 do we know that fatigue is biological and not just motivational? Second, what happens when work is scheduled against
3:20 that biology? And finally, what part of that risk belongs to the leader? Because if fatigue is predictable, and the
3:28 science tells us that it is, uh, then leadership isn't just about removing fatigue, it's about understanding it well enough to manage that risk.
3:37 And a quick disclaimer before we're going to jump into all of this. You're going to hear a few analogies throughout this presentations. Um the analogies,
3:44 they're just simply stories that make sense to us because people remember stories far better than you're going to remember all the graphs and figures and
3:52 everything we're going to put on the screen. So if you don't like the analogies we use, swap them. Use whatever analogy works for your context,
4:00 but the science behind it is going to stay the same. The second disclaimer of today is that this presentation is not
4:08 about making you full-on sleep scientists. Our job today is to try and make the science simple enough so that it's useful for you. So if you're hungry
4:17 for more of the stats or research findings or you want to get into the weeds, absolutely we welcome that. But probably more in an offline conversation
4:25 so we don't confuse the people who are maybe just clinging on for their life to understand what we are talking about.
4:31 [laughter]
4:32 So the goal for today and what we hope we can get across is leave everyone with an understanding of why fatigue behaves
4:39 the way it does and then everything else we're going to talk about is going to start to make a bit more sense.
4:45 So with that being said, let's get into it. Uh throughout today, we'd like you to think about fatigue like the charge of a battery. So as humans, we aren't
4:54 flash like the new lithium batteries that you can drain to 0% and recharge no problem. We're more like an old lead acid battery. A lead acid battery
5:04 doesn't stop working when it reaches half charge, but the more it discharges, the worse it is for the battery and it's
5:10 functioning. Fatigue works much the same way, right? We don't suddenly stop performing because we're tired. We simply have less cognitive reserve and
5:19 it becomes harder to perform at that level.
5:23 To understand why, we need to understand those biological systems uh that control sleep. So the first that we're going to talk through is a process called uh
5:32 sleep pressure or process S as it's sometimes known as. Uh and that tells us how long have you been awake. Every
5:41 minute you're awake your brain is working, thinking, learning, making decisions, processing information. And
5:48 as it works, it produces a bunch of waste chemicals. But one of them is called aden adenosine, which you might be familiar with. If you're not, you
5:57 don't need to remember that name. Uh just think of it as your brain's way of quietly keeping the score. The longer you're awake, the more adenazine uh
6:05 builds up, the more of those waste chemicals are floating around your brain, and the stronger your biological drive to sleep becomes. And the
6:13 important bit is that you don't get to vote. You don't get a say over that matter. Uh you can't out discipline it.
6:19 You can't out motivate it. If you're awake, sleep pressure is building. That biological chemist chemical waste in
6:26 your brain is building. And some of you may be thinking, what about coffee? Uh, and no, coffee doesn't make sleep
6:34 pressure disappear or any sort of stimulant or amphetamine. Um, rather coffee blocks your brain from noticing
6:42 it for a while. It's a bit like putting tape over the battery monitor that tells you how low your battery might be. the battery hasn't magically found more
6:50 charge. You've just stopped looking at the warning light. So eventually that caffeine wears off. The adenazine is still there and your brain remembers
6:59 exactly how long you've been awake. Uh and the only thing that genuinely removes that sleep pressure is sleep itself. So while we sleep, adenazine is
7:08 carried away. Sleep pressure falls and we wake up with our cognitive reserve restored. Your brain is a little bit like a muscle in that when you're awake,
7:17 it's tense and waste builds up and it's hard for that waste to escape. Uh but during sleep, it's like the muscle relaxes and the waste is able to flush
7:26 out. So, put simply, uh sleep pressure builds while you're awake and sleep removes it.
7:34 So, if sleep pressure was the only thing controlling fatigue, life, it would actually be pretty simple, right? The longer you stayed awake, the sleepier
7:42 you become. the end. But we've probably all experienced that that's not quite how it works. So, have you ever been ready for bed at 7:00, you're falling
7:50 asleep on the couch, and then suddenly you find yourself wide awake at 9:00 p.m. with a second wind? Well, that's not random. That's because there's a second biological system that's at work.
8:01 And we call this the circadian rhythm or process C. Uh so if sleep pressure asks how long have you been awake, circadian
8:10 rhythm asks what time does your brain think it is. So think of this as your body's internal 24-hour clock. Unlike
8:19 sleep pressure, you don't decide where that clock sits. It's largely set by your biology and synchronized by light
8:26 and darkness. So every morning your exposure to daylight, it resets that clock ready for the next 24 hours.
8:33 During the day, your body clock naturally promotes wakeness. So you can see there the alertness grows during the day. As daylight starts to fade, your
8:43 brain releases melatonin. Now this I just want to bust a little bit of a misconception that I often come across.
8:50 Melatonin doesn't make you fall asleep.
8:53 Okay? It simply tells your body, hey, it's nighttime. We need to start preparing for sleep. So melatonin itself
9:01 initiates or releases a cascade of other processes and hormones that help you get to sleep. So what you can see on the
9:08 graph there is that during the early hours in the morning between 2 and 6 a.m. that alerting signal is is at its
9:16 weakest. Uh and so even if you're slept well, this is when your brain is naturally at its lowest level of alertness. So more mistakes are likely
9:24 to happen in this window. Um we see this a lot actually in um research uh focused
9:31 around um doctors, nurses, emergency departments, everything like that. I always say if you got to get something big done, do not do it between 2 and 6
9:40 a.m. because even if it's an emergency, they have the biggest rate of u mistakes that happen in that time. And this is
9:47 one of the processes that would speak to that. So if sleep pressure is the amount of charge left in the battery, your
9:54 circadian rhythm is like the operating conditions, right? Our lead acid batteries, they are sensitive to operating conditions. They don't like it
10:03 if it's too cold, for example. Um, and there'll be like less capacity in that battery. It's going to charge slower.
10:09 The same for us is having low alertness in the early morning. Right? So, a circadian rhythm, the the conditions,
10:17 the time of the day make it easier to perform a task. Whereas, if we asked you to do the same task when your circadian rhythm is the lowest, you might have a little bit of a harder time doing that.
10:28 So, these two systems, it's important to note, they never work in isolation. Your performance is just a result of both the
10:35 battery charge and the operating conditions. So let's put them together in a little graph and see why certain times of the day it carry much greater fatigue risk than others.
10:48 So thinking back to that battery analogy, sleep pressure is your battery charge and the longer you're awake, the less cognitive reserve you have. Your
10:56 circadian rhythm is the operating conditions and sometimes those conditions support performance and sometimes they make the same task much
11:04 harder. The higher the highest fatigue risk isn't caused by one or the other.
11:10 It's when low battery charge and poor operating conditions happen at the same time. That's what the shade area on this graph represents. And during those
11:19 periods, your brain has less reserve and your body clock is working against you.
11:24 That's when alertness, decision- making, and performance are naturally at their lowest. No matter how much you wish you
11:31 were superhuman, once you understand this, uh, fatigue stops looking like a motivation problem and starts looking like a predictable biological process.
11:41 So, the obvious answer to this, well, will don't work during those high periods. And if it only was that simple, great, solved. We'll see you later.
11:50 [laughter]
11:51 But we know in defense and a lot of other industries, there are times when the mission needs to come first or the task needs to come first. with
11:59 operations, exercises, maintenance windows, deployments, emergencies.
12:04 Sometimes we have to do work even when the biology of our of our whole sleep cycle would rather we didn't. And so
12:12 again, just reinforcing that this presentation, it's not about pretending these demands don't exist. And it's certainly not about scaremongering you
12:20 or telling you what to do, i.e. don't work at those times. It's just about understanding the biology well enough to make informed decisions because when you
12:29 understand fatigue, risk is naturally higher. You could start asking better questions like, okay, we have to work when we know we're in our little danger
12:37 zone between two and six. So, do we need more cross checks? Who's going to do them? Can we postpone some big bad
12:45 decisions to a time where we know we're going to be a little bit more alert to make some good, educated decisions? um
12:52 is there an opportunity to sleep bank before and after? Um you can all you can't always change that mission or the
12:59 requirements of the task but we can change how we prepare for it, how we manage the risk and how we recover after
13:07 we've paid the cost. So before we jump into u models and talk about some solutions and things you can do, we're
13:14 going to look at what the research tells us um will happen to performance when we push through these biological limits.
13:22 So we've established that fatigue isn't simply about motivation or willpower. It's a predictable biological process.
13:29 The next question is what does that actually do to our performance? Then over the next few slides, we'll have a look at some studies that are really
13:37 useful for demonstrating and conveying what we know about sleep, fatigue, and human performance. Rather than getting lost in the statistics, I'd like you to
13:45 have a think as we go about how this might relate to you and your people in your context.
13:52 So, the first study uh asked a simple question, what happens if you lose sleep just a little bit night after night?
14:00 Healthy adults were given different amounts of sleep over seven consecutive nights while researchers measured their reaction time and performance each day.
14:09 So on this uh figure you've got like the blue line which is showing people that had unrestricted sleep 9 hours good to
14:16 go. The next line below that the green is restricted to seven hours. The one below that is restricted to 5 hours. And then the red is restricted to 3 hours.
14:27 And on the left you can see their reaction time as as their performance.
14:32 Uh and as those sort of conditions went across those consecutive nights, uh their performance got worse and worse.
14:41 So yeah, the the fatigue didn't appear overnight. Fatigue accumulated. One slightly shorter night didn't make a
14:48 dramatic difference, but several okay or poor nights in a row gradually reduced that performance. And the less sleep
14:55 people consistently had, the greater the decline. Fatigue is like our battery charge. Sometimes one appliance can use
15:03 a lot of battery. Other times, it's a series of smaller power drawers without enough time to recharge that gradually leaves you running on empty. That's
15:12 important because most of us don't become fatigued from one terrible night, although that can be horrible and you can feel pretty fatigued. uh but we can
15:20 become fatigued through those several nights that seem good enough.
15:25 The second really interesting finding about the study is if you look on the far right there in the recovery period.
15:32 Um the after seven nights of restricted sleep, they then let everyone go to bed and have three nights of full eight
15:40 hours in bed. Um and you can see performance improved quite quickly there, which is good. That's the good news. But I want you to note that even
15:48 though the performance increased, it is not returning to where they started from their baseline. Right? So one to three
15:56 good nights sleep, it helped, but it did not completely erase a week of accumulated fatigue. So what this means
16:04 and the takehome for us is that recovery is a process. It's not a single night event. If you've been pushing hard for one week and then you're like, "Yes, I'm
16:13 going to sleep tonight. I'm good to go tomorrow.
16:16 probably not, right? There's maybe some more thought that needs to be in there.
16:19 You're going to improve a little bit um for sure, but you're not going to be where you would be if you're fully rested.
16:26 So, the research here, as we can see, it shows us that fatigue accumulates. Okay, we can slowly burn through those cognitive reserves over several days
16:35 without fully replacing it, even with uh a good chunk of recovery there. So the next obvious question is okay well if
16:44 our performance is declining like this surely we would notice and that is exactly what this next study
16:51 uh by Van Dongjen and colleagues they looked to investigate. So they restricted uh people's sleep over
16:59 several days and then they measured their performance. So again if these graphs overwhelm you just listen to what I'm saying. We're going to give you a
17:07 bit of a summary on the next slide. Um but what they did is re restricted their sleep over several days and measured
17:14 that performance right. Um and we can clearly see that whether they slept zero hours so total sleep deprivation for 3
17:23 days uh 4 hours of sleep over 2 weeks, 6 hours of sleep over two weeks or eight hours of sleep. the baseline. Um the
17:32 performance apart from the 8 hour group, the performance again was slowly starting to decrease or get worse as we
17:39 went on. Um so that's not where they stopped, right? They had another question that they wanted to know as
17:47 performance is decreasing or as they're going through these days, they also asked the participants how sleepy they felt as they went on.
17:55 So while those results showed that performance continued to decline day after day, that reaction time slowed, attention to det uh attention dropped,
18:04 and mistakes increased. A key finding is that people's perception of how tired they felt barely changed. So when
18:11 measuring people's perceived sleepiness, uh that that kind of plateaued, right?
18:17 They felt a little sleepier at first, then their ratings leveled off even while their performance continued to get worse. Those who had missed an entire
18:26 night's sleep generally knew they were tired. They felt awful. Their performance reflected it. The more concerning finding is that group that
18:33 was getting just a little not quite enough sleep night after night uh that
18:40 they adapted to how tired they felt and genuinely believed they weren't sleepy.
18:46 But the objective testing told quite a different story that their performance continued to decline even though their perception of it did not.
18:54 So think back to that battery analogy, right? So now it's like that battery monitor. It's gradually becoming less reliable. It's telling us we have good
19:02 charge when we're far from it. So fatigue doesn't just reduce performance, it reduces our ability to recognize that
19:10 our performance has declined. And I think this is one of the biggest clinical takeaways um and lessons from the sleep science space.
19:19 It means asking someone are you tired is useful but it shouldn't be our only measure of fatigue because they might not know how tired they are or how under the influence of fatigue they are.
19:31 Instead we should also be looking for the behaviors. So are there more mistakes, slower thinking, mischecks, irritability, changes in communication?
19:40 So our second lesson is that fatigue doesn't just reduce our performance, it also makes us poorer judges of our own impairment.
19:48 Uh so if anyone's kind of been in the situation where they've been out drinking uh and the thought about whether it's safe for them to drive, you
19:55 might have experienced the thoughts that the more you have to drink, the more confident you feel that you are to drive. But that's not the case, right?
20:04 You are impaired by alcohol at that point. Lack of sleep is not so different. So what is fatigue actually doing inside the brain that causes this?
20:15 So if there's one study that I think every leader should understand, it's this one. Um and if you've been around me enough in Ohakia, I'm always tapping
20:23 on about this. So when we come to leadership, leadership is it's not just about performance, right? It's about judgment. We've got communication. We've
20:31 got relationships. How the team functions together, how they function under pressure. There's so many puzzle pieces to it and I love this study
20:40 because it explains why fatigue can actually affect all of those things and what's going on in the brain. So um in
20:48 this study the researchers they wanted to understand what sleep deprivation does to the emotional centers of the brain. So they used an fMRI which is a
20:57 big fancy machine you go in you know and they're scanning your brain um allows us to see which part of the brain becomes more or less active when someone is
21:06 performing a task. Um they scanned adults after a normal night's sleep and then they scan those same people again after one night of sleep deprivation.
21:17 when they had had the sleep, so had the the fMRI going, they showed them negative images, right? And they were
21:26 rating how much the brain was responding to those images. Then again, once they were sleepd deprived, they showed them more negative images and they scanned
21:34 how much the brain was responding to this. Before we get into like the exact what I'm showing you here on on um the
21:42 graph, there are two areas in the brain that we need to understand for this study, right? So the first is our amygdala. It's our emotional um decision
21:51 making or not our decision-m sorry it's our emotional part of the brain. Um so it fires off. Think of it like um it's
21:59 your guard dog, right? It tells you where danger is. It puts your system on alert. Uh it's it's a very important part of it. But there's another part of
22:08 your brain right at the front called your prefrontal cortex or in this case they looked at the medial prefrontal cortex right here. Um, and this part of
22:17 the brain is the one that calms the amydala down. It looks at the situation and says to the dog, "All good, not
22:25 danger." Right? The dog's barking at everything that's going past. The preffrontal cortex is shushing that brain, telling, "No, it's not a threat.
22:33 We're okay. Move on. Make a better decision." So, that's our kind of higher cognitive functional um decision making
22:40 part of the brain. So what you can see here in the brain is that after just one night of uh no sleep, that amygdala,
22:48 which is those two areas, one on each side of our brain, it's firing a lot more in the red um than the brain on the
22:56 left when they've had sleep. And the graphs show us it's not just firing a little bit more, it's firing about 60% more strongly to those negative images.
23:07 Right? So people are having a reaction to those images at a way higher rate than they were when they weren't sleepd
23:15 deprived. And I think that's the kicker in this research when we go into this next um slide is that they were looking
23:24 at what parts of the brains were talking to each other when they were fully rested and not. So when they had sleep, the medial prefrontal cortex, it was
23:33 talking to the amydala, right? It was the human saying, "Calm down, calm down, dog. we don't need to bark at everything. It was put in context. It was saying we don't need to be too
23:42 worried about these images. What they found after that sleep deprivation was that medial prefrontal cortex connection
23:49 into the amydala was essentially severed. So there was nothing telling the amydala like slow down. We don't need to worry about this. It's just an
23:57 image. It's not real. All that kind of stuff. That part of our brain um became a lot quieter, right? our thinking part
24:05 of the brain, whilst our diseotional part of the bra brain became a lot louder.
24:11 And I want to caveat that you haven't had sleep. The this research doesn't say you're going to walk around flying off the handles every 10. You're not
24:19 running around yelling and losing it, right? But you are more likely to hit your threshold of when you get annoyed, when you're going to react emotionally.
24:29 Um, you're going to do it at a faster rate than you normally would when you're well rested. So sleep deprivation doesn't just make us slower or more
24:38 forgetful, but it actually changes how we can respond to our environment, how we respond to people. And when we we place this within team environments,
24:46 well, what does this look like? You know, we'll all have stories biting each other's heads off at the end of deployments or exercises. Most people be like, "Oh, I just want to get home. I'm
24:55 done." Right? But actually, if you think about it, you're probably quite fatigued. So your amygdala is probably ruling the roost. It's making a lot more
25:03 decisions for you there that are quite emotionally driven, right? Um, we see this a lot in parenting. Surprise.
25:13 You know, people who have had children often describe that first 6 months, 12 months, whatever, that fatigued period,
25:20 your relationship with your partner comes under enormous pressure. Uh, and of course there's lots of other things that that feed into this, but this study
25:30 I think shows us a lot that there's a little bit of our brain is making us a little bit more reactive because that medial prefrontal cortex has gone
25:37 offline. And this is why I think this study of all of them is is really one of the cornerstones of sleep leadership.
25:45 Understanding that fatigue doesn't just change performance. It changes how we lead. It changes how we turn up to work.
25:52 It changes how the team functions together.
25:56 Okay. So, we've learned that fatigue accumulates. We've learned that we can become poor judges of our own impairment. And we've seen that sleep
26:04 loss changes that balance between our emotional brain and our rational brain.
26:09 So, the next question we want to look at is does that change the decisions that we make? So, this study looked at exactly that. They brought healthy
26:17 adults into the laboratory after a normal night's sleep and again after 24 hours wake. And while they were lying in
26:24 an fMRI scanner, participants completed a series of gambling tasks that required them to weigh potential rewards against
26:32 potential losses or costs. This allowed the researchers to see not only the choices people made, but also how the brain processed that risk and reward.
26:42 What [clears throat] they found was really interesting. Sleep deprivation didn't simply make people reckless. It changed the way the brain evaluated
26:51 risk. Areas of the brain linked with anticipating reward became more active.
26:57 At the same time, areas involved in responding to losses became less active.
27:02 Think about what that means. Then potential gains start to look more attractive while potential losses or costs don't carry the same emotional
27:11 weight. Now they found that uh but they did find that risk preference didn't change but there was evidence to suggest
27:19 that uh it became progressively more cognitively demanding to overcome those riskreward pathways and avoid risk and kind of make the uh sensible decision.
27:33 So the decision hasn't changed but the way the brain comes to that decision and values that decision has. So that
27:41 doesn't mean people suddenly become poor leaders. It means they're making decision decisions using a brain that's
27:48 waiting brisk differently and having to work harder to do so. But what else happens in their decision-m? What
27:55 happens over more than one night of sleep restriction?
28:00 So this brings us into a beautiful study by Selfie and colleagues and when they
28:07 looked up what happens in um full full sleep deprivation and then partial over
28:14 five um over several nights and they
28:17 [clears throat]
28:18 instead of looking at brain activity they focused on what people actually did. Right? So they weren't focused on what the brain's thinking they were focused on what decisions people
28:27 actually made moving forward. And so healthy adults, they completed decision-making tasks after a normal night of sleep, after one night without
28:35 sleep, and again after several nights of restricted sleep. Uh tasks measured two simple things. Number one was how much
28:42 information people gathered before they made the decision and then how willing they were to accept the risk.
28:50 So uh the findings actually they were remarkably practical. So after sleep loss, uh people gathered less information before making a decision.
28:58 they became a little bit more impulsive um in terms of they made decisions faster. They would just go with something straight away rather than
29:06 necessarily that they were going to do crazy, reckless, impulsive um behaviors, right? It's more around decision-m. Um
29:14 and in this study, they did find that they were became a little bit more willing to accept risk um based on
29:21 chasing that reward pathway. So the with this the finding that really stood out to me was actually the changes weren't
29:29 seen in the people who were naturally impulsive. So they had a look at the people they measured them and went these are our more careful decision makers.
29:35 These are our more impulsive decision makers on any normal given day. They saw that the people who are normally the most careful and reflective decision
29:44 makers, they had a bigger difference, a bigger shift in terms of how much uh or how less information they gathered
29:52 before making a decision, how much more impulsive they were in making those decisions. And I think this is a really
29:58 useful reminder to us and to leaders that many sleep studies show fatigue, it affects our newest skills, right? It affects the things we've learned most
30:07 recently. So we normally look to newest members of our team, people still under training and we worry about them and we try to put things around them. That's
30:15 still correct. But this uh study and likes of this shows us that experience
30:23 doesn't make us immune to the biology of fatigue. Just because you've done a decision or or an action 500 times doesn't mean you might just take a
30:31 slight shortcut or make a slightly different decision once you're in that fatigue state. So again, our experienced leaders, you're not suddenly becoming
30:39 poor decision makers. It just means that like everyone else, you are making decisions with a brain that's operating
30:47 under fatigue. And something that's worth recognizing, taking a moment to pause. If you know you're tired, ask
30:54 yourself some more questions like, "Hey, have I gathered all the information I need? Could I gather some more? What
31:01 other options haven't I considered or what else might normally sit here? Um, am I making this decision because it's the best one or because fatigue is
31:09 making me want to get to an answer more quickly? So, they're just simple questions, uh, but the little ones that could help change the quality of a
31:16 decision- making. Um, and you're leading with the same brain as everyone else, right? We're all humans here. The
31:23 fatigue, the effects of fatigue, they'll get you too. And [clears throat] good leadership isn't about pretending that you're unaffected by fatigue. It's about
31:31 recognizing when biology might be influencing our judgment, creating and then creating conditions or resources
31:39 that help both you and your team make the best decisions possible if you are operating under fatigue conditions.
31:47 So, we've covered a lot of research over the last few slides. Uh, apologies if you've been bamboozled with research. Uh but a few of the key takeaways that we
31:56 hope that you what one of the key takeaways we hope you consider is the position of influence that you might hold as a leader and what you might be
32:04 able to do to protect the workplace and enable performance. We've seen that fatigue accumulates. We've seen that we
32:11 become poor judges of our own impairment. We've seen that it changes how we regulate our emotions and how we process information, judge risk and make
32:20 decisions. None of that is about motivation. None of that is about commitment. None of that is about wanting to be better. It's simply how
32:28 the human brain works. But the good news is if leadership can contribute to fatigue risk, leadership can also look
32:36 to reduce it and protect from that. We can't eliminate fatigue from military operations, but we can lead in a way
32:43 that reduces unnecessary fatigue and manages its risks. That's what sleep leadership is all about.
32:51 So what can we actually do about it?
32:53 Well, fortunately, we haven't had to start from scratch. Okay, our friends over at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, they've spent uh many, many
33:01 years studying sleep and operational environments. And from that work, they have developed a simple framework with an acronym called sleep. So, [laughter]
33:10 so easy to remember. Uh but listen, we're going to present this to you. It is not the be all and end all. It is a model. If it is useful and helpful,
33:19 great. This model is structured on recommendations that is rooted in research. Um, and so there are strategies that they're just presented
33:28 in a format that hopefully is a little bit easier to remember. It's not about creating the most perfect conditions. We know that's probably an impossible task,
33:36 especially in defense, but it is about giving leaders practical ways to just think about and have conversations and
33:43 reduce unnecessary risks whilst remaining or bolstering operational effectiveness.
33:51 So when we get into the model, our first S in our sleep acronym is set the conditions. So as leaders uh we
33:59 influence many things that either support or interfere with sleep. That might mean reducing unnecessary evening
34:06 tasks, protecting time for recovery where possible or simply asking does this really need to happen tonight, the
34:13 night before the mission or leading into something else that's big. It also means about thinking about the sleep environment itself. So where
34:22 operationally possible, I know sometimes you don't get a a decision of where you're sleeping, but it's probably a
34:31 smaller amount of time than where we are normally sleeping in operations that we could look at, okay, where our people are sleeping. Is it cool, dark, quiet?
34:41 Can we reduce unnecessary noise? Can we reduce interruptions? Can we reduce light? Remember, working on that circadian rhythm. small changes to that
34:49 sleep environment, they can have a surprisingly large impact on sleep quality. Uh and we can't always predict, right? There will be times where sleep
34:57 is disruption is unavoidable. We get that. So this is just realistically do the checks, do the math, do the balances
35:04 ecause when sleep is restricted, it should be because the mission is demanding it or the task is demanding
35:11 it, not because we're running into work that could have been avoided um because of poor planning or because of conditions that could have been improved.
35:21 And so that's the S. And if we bring up the L as well. Yep, it's up.
35:29 Sweet. Um, the second behavior is lead by example. So whether we realize it or not, people watch what you do as a
35:38 leader. Uh, if we celebrate surviving on 4 hours sleep or regularly send emails at 11:00 at night, we quietly
35:46 communicate and normalize uh, a poor sleep culture that to be a committed leader, you have to wear yourself down.
35:54 Now, there will always be extenduating circumstances that can come up where you might need to work late. But if your team is at home asleep and there's no
36:03 expectation that they'll act on that work or email before the morning, consider what you can do to role model
36:10 uh a positive sleep culture. So whether that's leaving it in your drafts until the morning, scheduling a send time, or
36:18 even making it explicit in the email why you've had to sacrifice your own performance of tomorrow to get this work
36:24 done now to avoid normalizing the idea that sleep is optional or a nice to have. It's a small action, but it sends
36:32 a very different message about what's expected. More broadly, uh, model good recovery, talk positively about planning
36:40 ahead, and show that protecting sleep is part of being professional, not a sign of weakness. The way you behave as a leader quickly becomes the expectation of the team.
36:53 The E is for educate. So, as we said at the beginning, you do not have to become sleep specialists, right? But there is a
37:02 level of understanding that's going to be really helpful. And so learning and diving into this um this world is is
37:11 important, right? Understanding a few simple things like how does caffeine affect sleep? Uh why alcohol doesn't actually improve your sleep quality? Why
37:20 being why feeling that uh you know I'm I'm used to feeling tired. It's not necessarily meaning you're performing at your best, right? Uh hopefully we've
37:29 provided some some of the science to convince you to dive into this area more and understand these simple things.
37:35 We've deliberately focused on the leadership aspect today and we haven't gone into the sleep hygiene, the practical tips and tricks around coffee
37:43 um around caffeine and alcohol and things like that because um in the sleep series, Lieutenant Colonel Steve Kearney
37:51 and Major Dave Edgar um are doing a fabulous job in the space. So go back and watch their videos. Um, also the NZDF health website. Go on to Google,
38:01 type in NZDF sleep. Um, and it will come up. There are so many resources on that page including little videos, uh,
38:08 walkthroughs, things you can print, takeaway, have a conversation, all of that is there. Um, I think they've done a fabulous job in updating this
38:16 recently. So the educate space it's all about, you know, building your own competence and then just having those 5
38:25 10 minute conversations because that might be enough just to shift an assumption or shift um a piece of climate that's contributing to the culture that isn't promoting good sleep.
38:36 So we will lead next on to the next E.
38:41 And so this one is for encourage. So, as a leader, uh, making sleep a part of everyday conversations about readiness.
38:49 Instead of only asking, "Are you okay?" consider asking, "How have you been sleeping?" Notice some of those changes in mood, communication, decision-
38:58 making, or small mistakes, because those are often the first signs of fatigue.
39:03 The goal is to create a culture where speaking up about fatigue is seen as good judgment and encouraged, not as being a lack of commitment or service over self.
39:13 And then finally is P for prioritize and plan. So sleep should be treated like any other operational resource. We
39:22 wouldn't launch an aircraft without enough fuel. Yet all too often we expect people to perform at their best without giving the same thought to a key
39:29 resource that the brain relies on that being sleep. So good leaders don't wait until people are exhausted before thinking about fatigue. They think about
39:37 it during planning. They ask the questions like when are people going to sleep? If sleep is going to be restricted, how long for? Can we build in opportunities for strategic naps?
39:48 What recovery will people need once this phase of the operation is over? The reality is that there will always be periods where the mission comes first
39:56 and sleep has to take a back seat. But those periods should be planned, deliberate, and temporary with adequate
40:03 recovery, not simply accepted as the normal way of operating.
40:10 One of my favorite quotes that came out of the Walter Reed work is that the first night of an operation should not be the fourth night of sleep
40:18 restriction. And I think as leaders, we might not always be able to give people more sleep. You can't directly control that. But we can stop taking away from it unnecessarily. We can plan earlier.
40:30 We can remove work that doesn't add value or work that has a higher human cost than we need to accept. uh we can protect recovery where possible and when
40:38 sleep restriction is unavoidable we can recognize it, plan for it and give people the opportunity to recover afterwards without scheduling more on
40:47 top. Um and that that is what sleep leadership looks like.
40:52 And so to kind of round off and finish up, we want to take you back to this uh person A, person B. So now that we've
40:59 seen that fatigue is biological, not motivational, we've seen what happens when work is scheduled against that biology. And hopefully we've seen that
41:08 leaders have a real opportunity to influence that outcome.
41:12 And our encouragement to you is is to take away today what you've heard that you think you can apply to your own team
41:19 or even just start have an accord have a conversation with your teams about what does some of this mean? How do you function? How do you work? Um because
41:27 sleep it can become another tool for the toolbox, right? It's it's is it is a leadership tool here. It can improve readiness, decision- making and
41:36 performance. So it ultimately sleep poor sleep isn't just a health issue. Good sleep isn't just a health issue. It's a
41:43 it's a readiness multiplier. Um so thank you very much for tuning in u and attending today. Uh Kakitiano. Um we
41:53 will take any questions now. Um, I'll leave it