Shift work can be brutal, but it doesn't have to be. Welcome to a healthy shift. My name is Roger Sutherland, certified nutritionist, veteran law enforcement officer, and 24-7 shift worker for almost four decades. Through this podcast, I aim to educate shift workers using evidence-based methods to not only survive the rigors of shift work, but thrive. My goal is to empower shift workers to improve their health and well-being so they have more energy to do the things they love. Enjoy today's show. And welcome back to another episode of a healthy shift podcast. Now, today's comes out of numerous conversations that I have with clients and also with people through my DMs on social media. A lot of people say to me, I'm a really bad sleeper. I just can't sleep. And majority of these people are people who work in frontline health and emergency services. So today's podcast, I'm going to explain a number of things to you as to why it is that you either can't go to sleep or why it is that you don't stay asleep. And I'm going to give you a four-minute shutdown routine that you can do every single time you go to sleep. And I will practically guarantee that it will put you to sleep. But you've got to follow each step. What you might want to do for this one, have a listen to it, but you might want to come back to this one with a pen and paper and just jot it down because it's called the sleep routine, as in S L E E P routine. Now, I want you to remember this. Majority of our frontline health workers and our first responders actually don't have a sleep problem. There you go. I said it. You don't have a sleep problem. Now you're going to argue, you're going to meet, no, Rog, you're talking rubbish. You don't know what you're talking about. I have got a sleep problem. No, what you actually have is you have a shutdown problem. What you're doing is you're at work and you're going from this adrenaline surge, which is you're up and about, you're focusing on your work, you're going flat out, and then you jump in the car, you're driving home with your Duff Dorf music going and you're rocking away and all the rest of it. You jump into bed, you're scrolling, and then you can't sleep. Or you pass out exhausted and then you wake up. Now, you're exhausted, but what you have forgotten is your nervous system is still out there on patrol. And that state is what actually crushes your deep sleep. Now, this deep sleep is your restorative sleep. This is the sleep that we need to get the maximum amount of because this is where the most benefit in sleep actually comes from. Now, we're going to fix this today for you. And all you got to do is follow the bouncing ball. No, you're not going down to the pharmacy or the drugstore and buying supplements. And we're not going to buy any gadgets either. And I'm not even going to tell you that you've got to go to bed earlier. Deep sleep improves when your nervous system gets a clear single signal that the shift is over and your body is safe. What you need is you need a transition. You don't need more time in bed. I know you think, oh, I've got to catch up on sleep. I'm missing out on sleep. You already know my thoughts around that. And let's be quite clear it's not about the length of sleep, it's about the quality of sleep that you get when you're actually getting to sleep. So you don't need more time in bed. What you actually need is a better handover from the operational mode into recovery mode. And let's get into it. Here is a four-minute reset. S L E E P. It's a biological shift from that adrenaline rush and stress into recovery. Let's start with the S. S. Same time nightly. Oh, but Roger, I'm a shift worker. I can't go to bed the same time nightly. Listen to me. Start the ritual at the same time at the end of every shift when you're home. After night shift, after afternoon shift, after day shift, when you're going to bed. Consistency is what trains the nervous system. We want the same sequence every night, the same order, same time. Every time you go to sleep, we're going to go through the same sequence. Because over time, what you actually do is you start to train your brain to associate that pattern with, oh, this is safety, this is sleep. It's why I'm so critical of people that climb into bed and watch TV in bed and then tell me that they can't sleep. I'll tell you why. You've actually trained your brain that this is what we do when we go to bed. We watch TV. That's what we do. We lie here thinking. This is what we do. But what we're going to do is we're going to change that. We're going to go through a sequence and remember the S. Same time nightly. So the same time as in not clock time, but the same actual time leading into going to sleep. Whether it's an hour before or a few minutes before or whatever it is, it's the same. The next one is L. Light. Light plays a massive, massive influence on our melatonin production, natural sleep and deep sleep. So what we're going to do is we're going to go through this light dimming. When we get home from work, we're going to drop the lights. We're going to lower them right down. We're going to go to warm tones only. Now, if you don't control the light, you don't control your melatonin production. I want you to remember this. If you take nothing else away from this podcast, I want you to remember this one here. There's a big difference between falling asleep from melatonin and falling asleep exhausted. Falling asleep exhausted means you are burnt out, and the adenosine has literally built to a stage where it has forced you to sleep. There's a big difference between melatonin elevating and putting you to sleep, signaling darkness to the body and putting you to sleep. Keep this in mind. Remember, melatonin is our free radical eradicator. It plays an enormous role in us when we go to sleep. So we want that melatonin. We don't just want to pass out because we're exhausted. We want the melatonin sleep. Now, after a high alert shift, bright kitchen lights, bedroom lights, and whatever reason it is, and I've never understood it. Why do we go into the ensuite and turn on the brightest light in the house to clean our teeth before we go to sleep? All that does is give the signal of light to your brain and keeps your brain switch on because you are giving it that signal. Oh, we need to be awake. We need to be alert. Dim it down. Turn the lights off. Dim the lights. Tell it the threat is gone. Go to my website and on my website, healthyshift.com, up the top is a menu item that says resources, and you can go down there and it's got recommended products. Block Blue Light makes some amazing products to help you with lighting both in and around your house to help you to go into this zone. My God, it makes a massive difference. Cutting that blue light out and getting things like the bio lights, which are the um zero blue down lights, the the uh bed light, the bedside lights, the sensor light that we've got in the en suite, sharing with that zero blue sensor light is amazing. It just is so calming and it puts you to sleep. Then you'll realize just how much stimulation light actually has on you. All right, that's the L light dimming. So go to the website, have a look at the lighting there. Do yourself a favor. There's little lights that you can get that will make a massive difference to you in and around your bed. The next one is E. Ease your breathing. You don't realize just how much your breathing is informing your body that we are not safe. Mouth breathing, breathing rapidly. We need to slow this down. So after you've had this hot shower, you've got yourself into bed, what we want to be doing is we want to go through a series of four, seven, eight breathing. Now, this means we inhale for four through our nose, through the nose for four. And then we hold for seven. Now we're breathing down into our belly. So when you get into bed and you're lying there, you're putting one hand on your navel and you are breathing through your nose down into that hand on your belly. Because what this does is it encourages, it's tactile. It encourages you to breathe deeply down into your stomach. And we're going to then hold for seven. A count of seven. Whatever that looks like to you, a count of seven. And then what we're going to do is we're going to exhale for a count of eight. Now you can do this one of two ways. You can do it through your nose, or even better, you can do it through your mouth with a sigh. As in, it sounds like this. This is what it would sound like is it inhale, hold for seven, exhale. Sorry to those that were listening to that, and you probably thought, what's he doing? That audible tone actually stimulates the vagus nerve, and what it does is it actually calms our body. It signals calmness to our body. Slow breathing, especially the long exhale, shifts your body out of that sympathetic drive, which is our fight or flight, into a parasympathetic state, which is um rest and digest. Clients of mine that are important that have included this 4, 7, 8 breath, and I've got one particular client, and she knows who she is. She can use this 4, 7, 8 breathing and she can fall asleep on a train going to work just doing this. This is how powerful it is when you master it and you do it well. Get into bed, you'll only find that you'll do, if you do it correctly, you'll only do probably four, maybe five cycles of this, and you will be gone. The reason why this works is because you have to count. You can't think of anything else while you are counting this. This is why it works. And it's relaxing you and it's informing your body that it is safe. Your body needs to feel safe to sleep. You're telling your body the job is done. It's time to relax, it's time to go to sleep. Our second E is to eliminate stimulation. Please, no phones when you're in bed, no news, no replaying the shift, no chatting with all your colleagues from work, no scrolling. Your brain is already loaded from the shift. Let's give it a chance to shut down, get the good sleep, wake up, and then get on with it. More input is going to keep your brain in operational mode. Just by looking at your phone, you are stimulating your brain. Let it go. Everything that's there is going to be there the next day. You are not missing anything. What we want here is boring. I'm bored. Yes, you are. That's what you want. Bored. Because this means that you are bored and you'll go to sleep. Recovery needs disengagement. You need to disengage. And the P this is the very important one. And it's called progressive relaxation. This only takes 90 seconds. Start at your feet, tense your feet up and release. Move up your body, tense your calves, release. Your quads, release. Your hands, clench your hands and release. Your shoulders, tense them, release. Biceps, your jaw. You can't stay in fight or flight while you are actually physically letting go. Muscle tension drops. Ural drive will also drop with it. Now, here's what changes when you do this nightly. Cortisol drops instead of lingering on into the night. Core body temperature falls, and that drop is required for that deep sleep. And melatonin rises without force. It actually comes on naturally and supports the signal of darkness to the body and shuts it down for sleep. And deep sleep expands instead of getting squeezed into this tiny short window or becoming non-existent at all. Now, sleep labs see a fantastic pattern when this pre-bed routine is applied consistently. You've got to remember it's the same bed, it's the same hours, but it's a completely different signal. I want you to remember this, and it's really important that you do. It's not that you're a good sleeper or you're a bad sleeper because deep sleep is not luck. It's what happens when your nervous system gets a clear off-ramp from your work. It just gets an off-ramp. Bang, let's go. And as a first responder, you can't avoid adrenaline on shift. In fact, we chase it most of the time. But what you can do is you have to and not can do, but you must do is you must control how you come down from it. So for four minutes, that's all it takes. Same time, dim light, slow breathing, no stimulation, squeeze and release the body and train that shut down because your recovery is depending on it. Keep that one in mind. It only takes you four minutes, and remember this you're not a bad sleeper. You just don't hand over your body into a calm state and tell it that it's safe for sleep. You do that and watch what happens. Thanks for joining, and I'll catch you on the next one. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe so you get notified whenever a new episode is released. It would also be ever so helpful if you could leave a rating and review on the app you're currently listening on. If you want to know more about me or work with me, you can go to ahealthyshift.com. I'll catch you on the next one.