January 5, 2025 • 55 mins
Discover the transformative power of sleep with insights from Dr. John Cordle, a Naval Academy graduate and former nuclear surface warfare officer. Dr. Cordle shares his journey from unexpected Academy acceptance to becoming a leading advocate for sleep management in the Navy. Explore the cultural shift within the Navy, moving away from glorifying sleep deprivation to understanding its catastrophic impact on performance and safety. Learn how tragic incidents catalyzed significant policy changes, underscoring the necessity of prioritizing crew endurance and effective watch rotations.
Uncover how wearable technology is revolutionizing sleep awareness and management, even within the demanding 24/7 operations of the Navy. Hear how devices like the Oura ring highlight the effects of alcohol on sleep and aid in optimizing crew performance. Despite the challenges, a new generation of officers is embracing improved sleep practices, promising a healthier and more efficient fleet. Dr. Cordle's experiences illuminate the importance of quality rest and offer strategies for establishing a sleep-friendly routine amidst modern distractions and systemic challenges.
This episode also emphasizes personal responsibility and accountability, essential traits for both individual and organizational growth. Listen to engaging anecdotes and practical tips that highlight the role of sleep in maximizing both physical and mental performance. From military training to athletic endeavors, we explore how better sleep elevates learning, immunity, and overall health. Join us in advocating for wellness and support within the naval fleet and discover how prioritizing sleep can transform both personal and professional lives.
The mission of Academy Insider is to guide, serve, and support Midshipmen, future Midshipmen, and their families.
Grant Vermeer your host is the person who started it all. He is the founder of Academy Insider and the host of The Academy Insider podcast. He was a recruited athlete which brought him to Annapolis where he was a four year member of the varsity basketball team. He was a cyber operations major and commissioned into the Cryptologic Warfare Community. He was stationed at Fort Meade and supported the Subsurface Direct Support mission.
He separated from the Navy in 2023 and now owns The Vermeer Group, a residential real estate company that specializes in serving the United States Naval Academy community with nationwide consulting and connection.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to season two of the Academy Insider podcast.
Academy Insider is a 501c3nonprofit organization that
serves midshipmen, futuremidshipmen and their families.
At its core, this podcast isdesigned to bring together a
community of Naval Academygraduates and those affiliated
with the United States NavalAcademy in order to tell stories
and provide a little bit ofinsight into what life at the
(00:22):
Naval Academy is really like.
I hope you enjoy it.
Thank you so much for listeningand reach out if you ever have
any questions.
Hey, everyone, and welcome backto the Academy Insider Podcast.
In today's episode, we'retouching on a really important
subject, which is sleep and theimportance of sleep when it
comes to the life of themidshipman and continuing
through as a junior officer inthe fleet, and so I am joined
(00:43):
today by Dr John Cordell.
He was a Naval Academy graduate, a former nuclear surface
warfare officer and had commandof multiple different ships, and
since his retirement, isactually transitioned in this
back, still working for theDepartment of the Navy as a
human factor engineer and anadvocate on all things sleep and
human performance, and so thisis going to be a really cool
episode, diving into one theimportance of sleep to the
(01:06):
factors and things that havehappened in the Navy as a result
of sleep deprivation, and sowe're going to talk about why
it's important for shipmentespecially to really prioritize
and take their sleep extremelyseriously, and so if you want
this insight, you want somerecommendations from Dr Cordell
on all things sleep, then checkout this episode.
I think it's a reallyinteresting insight into some of
(01:28):
the factors of high-level Navypolicy, but also the impact and
what it means for a midshipmanor what it means for a junior
officer on how to really attackand take their sleep really
seriously, and so I hope youenjoy the episode.
If you have any questions, letme know, and if you are big on
LinkedIn, again follow Dr Kortel.
He's really fun.
Follow on LinkedIn and talksabout a lot of these topics, so
(01:48):
make sure to check him out.
Otherwise, if you have anyquestions, let me know.
Enjoy the listen.
Thank you so much.
The Academy Insider Podcast issponsored by the Vermeer Group,
a residential real estatecompany that serves the United
States Naval Academy communityand other select clientele in
(02:09):
both California and Texas.
If I can ever answer a realestate related question for you
or connect you with a trustedAcademy affiliated agent in the
market which you're in, pleasereach out to me directly at
grant, at the vermeergroupcom.
You can also reach out to me onmy LinkedIn page, grant Vermeer
, and I'd be happy to respond toyou there.
(02:29):
Thank you so much, and nowlet's get back to the episode.
Hey, john, thank you so muchfor taking the time today to
join the Academy Insideraudience.
If you don't mind just giving alittle bit of context and
background to who you arebasically, where you're from,
how you ended up at the NavalAcademy, a little bit about your
naval career and currently whatyou're doing now.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Okay, awesome.
Well, hey, thanks a lot.
So I grew up in a militaryfamily.
My dad was a limited dutyofficer, came in the Navy of
World War II enlisted.
I went to officer candidateschool and retired as lieutenant
commander and JT cordial and heretired to Rome, georgia, which
is where I went to high school.
And at about the four-yearpoint in high school I had
decent grades.
I was in a rock band.
I was going to band practice onenight my senior year and dad
called me in to sit at the tableand he said, son, have a seat.
(03:12):
And I said what's up, dad, hegoes here's how this is going to
work.
You have a high school degreecoming up, you've got good
grades.
I'm not paying for college.
You can live in the basementfor 500 bucks a month if you
want and be dinner with thefamily every night and be home
by 10 pm on the weekends, or youcan fill out this application
to the Naval Academy.
And so I was like what's theNaval Academy?
(03:33):
Because I had no idea.
I thought the Army-Navy gamewas some soldiers and sailors
that played a football game, andso basically, he goes.
Well, here's the deal.
Here's one for Georgia Tech andone for US Naval Academy.
Here's the deal.
Here's one for Georgia Tech andone for US Naval Academy.
You fill them out and you canleave for the night.
And so I sat down in one sessionand opened up these packages
and wrote everything down andsealed them up and got accepted
to both and at that point mydecision process was stay in
(03:57):
Georgia or get out of Georgia,and I chose kind of a.
It sounds kind of funny when Isay it, but I typically, when
presented with two options, Itypically choose the most
difficult one, just because it'sthere.
And that's what I did.
And so, really sight unseen,with no knowledge of what I was
getting into, I showed up forI-Day on June 7, 1980, which is
(04:18):
40 years ago, so I just went tomy 40th anniversary homecoming
up there.
But yeah, that's how.
All I knew was the Navy.
When my dad was growing up, hecame home smelling like diesel
fuel and gunpowder and he was inVietnam for two and a half
years.
I didn't see him from like mysixth birthday to my ninth
birthday, but I knew what it waslike when he came home and we
had Navy stuff all over thehouse and it was just kind of
(04:40):
there.
It was part of my life prettymuch for my entire childhood and
it just seemed like a naturalfit.
And so I went into the NavalAcademy, ocean engineering.
Actually I was a history majorand my grandfather had heard the
Glee Club sing and said youshould join the Glee Club.
So I did that and I was ahistory major for a little bit.
And then I went home forChristmas and again my granddad,
(05:01):
who was a teacher at Universityof Tennessee, he goes.
You know, john, the academy iskind of an engineering school.
You might want to get a degreein engineering.
And so I shifted from history tothe ocean engineering, which,
like nobody does right, theyusually go the other way.
But it was cool.
Ocean engineering is, if you'renot familiar, is kind of
bridges and docks and landingsand beaches.
And so they had a cool labthere where you could build ship
(05:27):
models.
We built like a model of abeach and then they would have a
wave machine, simulate like 50years of erosion and see where
your design stood up.
And so I did all that.
And then again come surfaceselection time, I went to.
All you know, I'm still thesame, it's cartramid or
protramid or whatever.
And so you get a sampling ofaircraft, submarines, surface
ships in the Marine Corps.
So the Marine Corps.
(05:48):
I fell asleep in the woodswhich we'll get to in our topic
today and was woken up by thesound of machine gun fire and I
said, well, maybe that's not forme.
And then I went flying in an A4aircraft and threw up in the
cockpit and I'm like okay that'snot for me, yeah, and then I
went underwater on the submarine.
I'm like that's definitely notfor me, and so surface warfare
was pretty much it.
(06:08):
But that was my dad's legacy too, so I was kind of that I was
already, and then they offeredme the nuclear power program and
one of my best friends from theacademy was a systems engineer
number two in the class and theythey campaigned pretty hard for
john and he was like, if it'sthat good, why?
Why do they have to sell it sohard, you know?
And but I fell for it and so Iwent up, did my interview, came
(06:28):
back from on the bus feelinglike a complete moron, Like that
was that's the dumbest I'veever felt was coming back from
that nuclear power interview.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
And.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
I'm like God, please don't take me.
And they did.
And then I went to the, thepower program, and the rest is
history.
So, yeah, that's my, that's myelevator speech for how I got
that kind of came in the door,but we can certainly get into
some more details about myexperience there.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
Yeah, no, absolutely.
And so, and so you went throughthat process of again becoming
a slow nuke and made your way upand took multiple commands.
Do you mind talking a littlebit about your command
experience out to sea?
And how some of the experiencesyou took there are now
translating to what you're doingnow today.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Great, great question .
So I grew up in the surfaceNavy in the 80s and 90s and into
the 2000s, in a time when kindof sleep was an afterthought
Right.
In fact, it was almost to thepoint where lack of sleep was
almost a badge of courage.
You know, it's like if you wentfishing well, I caught a fish
this big, oh yeah, I caught onethis big.
Well, I went 24 hours withoutsleep, oh yeah, I went 36 hours
(07:31):
without sleep, and it neveroccurred to us that that may not
be good for you.
And so I grew up divisionofficer, department head, xo,
always tired In the nuclearpipeline.
I still remember in nuclearpower school or no, in prototype
we were in this crazy rotating12-hour shift seven days in a
row and we were on the mid-shift.
(07:52):
And actually we found that ifwe snuck up into the captain's
office there was a nice leathercouch and there was nobody up
there at night.
So that's the place we would goto catch a nap, to get back up
on step for the next watch, andso sleep deprivation had been a
part of my life pretty much.
Growing up I read an article inProceedings Magazine which I'm a
big fan of at the Institute,called Ready Around the Clock by
(08:14):
a gentleman named Lenny Capellowho was a cruiser CO, and he
had divided his ship into bluegold crews and said, okay,
you're on for 12 hours, sixhours of watch, six hours of
work and you're off for 12,.
And say, okay, you're on for 12hours, six hours of watch, six
hours of work and you're off for12, workout, sleep, whatever.
So I tried that on USS OscarAustin.
Ddg Destroyer was my firstcommand tour and we failed
miserably.
We had a plan.
(08:35):
It was mainly built around thewatch day and not the work day,
and we didn't change thestandard routine, and so people
who were up standing watch atnight still had to get up and do
stuff during the day, fortraining or, and basically the
crew mutinied and said this isnot working.
You know, great idea, boss, but?
And so we went back to kind ofthe old way of what we call fire
the dimes five hours on, 10hours off, but rotating so
(08:55):
you're sleeping at a differenttime.
When I got to the end of thatdeployment that was the
operation Iraqi freedom.
So we were there during the warlaunching Tomahawks and sort of
focused on the mission, and itwas a relatively short
deployment, but I said, hey, ifI get a chance to do this again,
I'd like to do it right.
I did Went to command again atUSS San Jacinto in 2010 and met
(09:17):
Dr Anita Shattuck, who ran thepostgraduate school crew
endurance team, and she set usup to do a sort of a watch
rotation circadian watch it'scalled, so basically you sleep
at the same time, stand watch atthe same time.
This particular one was afour-section three hours on nine
hours off instead of five hourson 10 hours off and so we
(09:40):
shifted to that after a fewweeks into deployment and it was
like you had just lifted off ablanket a wet blanket off of the
crew.
People were more awake, theywere more alert, they were more
focused, they started to workout more, they could plan their
day and it was really in 20years at that point 25, the most
revolutionary thing I had seenon a ship in my entire career,
(10:01):
and so I came back from that,wrote a message about it for the
safety command.
We won a safety award.
Dr Shattuck and I won the SNAsurface literary award.
Everybody's talking about itexcept the Navy.
And so the surface Navy waskind of like eh, you know, we
need more data.
We don't want to tell thecaptain how to do things, you
(10:21):
know, let's kind of sit back andlet this develop.
And so, from then until Iretired in 2013, I kept trying
to push it forward, but therewas a lot of resistance.
I continued that after Iretired, sort of in my free time
, writing articles like I sharedwith you, and talked about a
couple of those, and one of themwas called Fatigue is the
Navy's Black Lung Disease, right?
And so we were talking abouthow the health effects of sleep
(10:44):
affect you.
So, at the end of the day, theNavy was very resistant.
Then 2017 happened and theMcCain collision and the
Fitzgerald collision.
One of the root causes whenthey dug into it was, say,
fatigue, in some cases, fatiguecombined with new systems that
weren't very well tested andtrained, and which fatigue just
(11:05):
made it worse, right?
And so suddenly there was thisinstruction, which had been
floating around in draft foryears but not signed, got signed
out in a matter of like threeweeks.
So if you ever worked on astaff, a three-star staff,
getting a major instructionsigned out in three weeks is it
doesn't happen.
But this, you know, fleet thefleet had picked up on this.
(11:25):
A lot of folks were doing it,but they were kind of doing it
piecemeal.
Just the watch.
Fitzgerald had a circadianwatch, but they were not
adjusting the daily routine tomatch the watch schedule.
The ceo of john s mccain but youlook back at the report, he
actually was thinking aboutsleep when he delayed stationing
the detail when they went intoa high traffic area.
In doing so, though, he tookall the risk upon himself, and
(11:48):
so, at the end of the day, itwas my command tours that sort
of shaped it, but it really feltfor a while there, like Dr
Shattuck and I were just a voicein the wilderness of hey, you
know, if it's that simple and itdoesn't cost anything, there's
no way it can be effective,right, and I find that as an
often and sort of a buzzkillkind of thing.
(12:09):
When you bring a new idea tothe table, if it's not expensive
and won't take a long time todo, people dismiss it, even
though we have proof that itworks.
So, yeah, that was kind of howmy command tours.
I just you know, I knew it frommyself that when I don't sleep
I'm not at my best, and I made acouple of bad decisions, which
I could talk about, based onsleep deprivation.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
Yeah, no, absolutely.
And so, if it wasn't clearalready today, you know today's
episode really is going to beall about sleep and the power of
sleep and the importance ofsleep, and especially as it
relates to the achievement atthe naval academy.
And then officers out in thefleet and just general again our
service members out in thefleet doing the lord's work, and
so you know we're going tobring it back.
Can you go back to your time asa midshipman, right, kind of
(12:54):
kind of tailoring this back tobeing a midshipman at the naval
academy?
Do you ever have any, anysleepy, like sleepy days,
falling asleep in class?
Was that a thing?
While you were going through itas well, pretty much all of
them.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
Yeah, you know it's fine, so your timing is great.
So I just spent the weekend upwith my both of folks from 14th
company.
Uh, we're all in our 60s nowand the big joke was the guy who
was the last one to formationwith rack burns on his face and
always falling asleep in classand now has a phd in sleep
science and you know it's likethe face of navy sleep, you know
.
So what better qualificationthan sleeping a lot?
(13:27):
But uh, well, you know, thisgrant I mean when you're at the
naval academy, even when you cansleep, you don't necessarily,
right, you're now.
You all probably had likethings like radios and tape
players and stuff.
We were there as plebs, youknow, back in the last pleb
summer, which was 1980, that'sreal right we weren't allowed to
have radios or tape players.
So I had this little tape, Ihad one cassette tape it was
(13:48):
ACDC, back in black, and everynight you would get taps, turn
off the light, put the coversdown, put your headphones on and
listen to this one tape.
And so we were tired all thetime and then, like I said, when
I went on to Nuke School andbeyond, so yeah, it was not
something that you just took itfor granted that being a
midshipman means being tired.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
Oh, my gosh, does that sound familiar?
Oh, it sounds so familiar.
If there's one consistent, asmuch as again, the academy may
change or stay the same.
I think exhausted midshipman isgoing to be one of the
constants that that goes throughtime.
I just like for me.
I remember I had never known itwas possible to fall asleep
standing up until like I was,until I was a midshipman.
(14:34):
I was like the amount of timesmy, my classroom progression
went from like sitting at mydesk for about five minutes and
doing the head bob, like noddingoff, then standing up in the
back of the class and getting areprieve for about 10 minutes
where I'm like all right, I feelokay, and then it was like I'm
like now I'm head bobbing,standing up in the back of the
classroom, like I had neverrealized Find something to lean
up against.
That's exactly.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
But I want to come back to that because, just like
in the surface Navy I've thatdoesn't have to be that way.
Right, we can talk about somethings that could be done at the
academy if we chose to.
That might mitigate some ofthat, and I know there have been
some studies.
Dr Shattuck did a study at theMilitary Academy and there have
been some changes implemented totry to reduce that.
(15:16):
And if you think about it Idon't know anymore, but I think
TAPS was at 10 o'clock at nightand Reveille was at 6.
So technically you've got eighthours to sleep, but, like I
said, when you're 18, youprobably don't.
But part of that's education,which I think this podcast kind
of gets at is I thought I knew alot about sleep and still I
started actually studying it andrealized that it's a whole
(15:37):
science in and of itself andthat there's a lot you can learn
about it, about your own sleepand about your sleep in general.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
Yeah, and I do want to dive into some of the science
of it, but you mentioned itearlier.
Something you said early on inthe episode that I think I
really resonated with, which waslike it was almost a badge of
honor right To like not sleepmuch Right.
And so I think there was acertain aspect because,
especially while I was amidshipman as well, like that
was one of those things thatlike people would joke about,
but it was also like kind oflike you're saying, almost a
(16:03):
badge of honor, almost like abragging right to be like oh,
look at me, like, look how I canfunction, and I only I only got
four hours of sleep Right.
Like there was like a badge ofhonor and almost like resiliency
or toughness of being like ohyeah, no, I slept for three
hours and I can still.
I can still function.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
You know what I mean and so that's my analogy to that
was.
You know, when my dad wasgrowing up, people said the same
thing about alcohol.
Right, oh, I've had five drinks.
I can drive, you know, andwe're way past that, and I can
show you data that says that ifyou drink five beers and I stay
up for 36 hours, we will scoreabout the same on an aptitude
(16:39):
test or one of those drunkdriving tests and things like
that.
So that's one of the thingsthat I talk about when I go to
ships and talk to the sailors ishey look, if you should have
drunk for a watch, you'd begoing to captain's mast.
The degradation of performancethat you experience from sleep
deprivation is equivalent.
About 24 hours of sleep putsyou at about a 0.08.
24 hours without sleep puts youpretty close between 0.05 and
(17:02):
0.08 blood alcohol content, andthey've repeated that in
multiple studies with multiplegroups, and so it's pretty
compelling data.
But yeah, it was like that andI get the sense.
It's kind of like that now tosome extent.
But they are getting, I think,as part of the warrior toughness
curriculum, they get a littleexposure.
But I certainly think that theacademy could benefit from a
(17:23):
little more targeted educationon what sleep, what it really
means to you and why it'simportant.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
No, absolutely.
And what are some of thoseadditional data points that
we're talking about?
About the effects of sleep adegradation, quite literally,
from a data analyticsperspective, of how it affects a
human being when you are notsleeping enough or consistently
(17:50):
Right?
Speaker 2 (17:51):
right.
So there's really two facets tothis.
One is the quantity of sleep,which is typically for most
humans seven to eight hours in a24-hour period.
Now there's some science thatsays that can be broken into two
sleep periods.
That kind of goes back to ourcaveman ancestors.
And the other is the quality ofsleep.
So am I sleeping at the sametime so that my body gets in
that cycle, and then am Isleeping in a place that's cold,
(18:13):
dark and quiet so that I getsufficient rest?
Because I'm not going to gointo sleep science in detail,
but there are phases of sleep.
There's REM sleep, there's fourphases and if you don't spend
some of your time in thosephases where your body is really
kind of shut down, you don'trecover.
So to your question there'sreally three answers to your
question.
There's the short-term effects.
(18:39):
When I was at the academy youknow, pulling all-nighter, you
study for a test and you passthe test and then you just crash
right.
And so in the short term, inthe first 24 hours to 36 hours
of sleep deprivation, you becomeimpaired, just like you were
drinking.
In many ways You'redecision-making reaction time.
So translate that to awatchstander on a ship If
there's an incoming missile orthere's a spark that's going to
be a fire and my response timeis delayed.
Now I've impacted my ability tofight the ship, my ability to
(19:01):
stand a watch, so there'simmediate impact within one day
on your ability to stand a goodwatch or respond to a casualty.
So that's kind of the mostimportant thing is your reaction
time.
When you get into asleep-deprived state for months
or weeks at a time, youaccumulate what they call sleep
debt, which basically means thatyour body sort of stabilizes
(19:22):
out at a lower level ofalertness, a lower level of
profness, a lower level ofproficiency.
Your mood starts to get bad, soyou're angry and you sort of
develop kind of a laissez-faire.
So your overall performancejust goes to.
You're just saying let's justget through the day right.
So you're not driven to do well, you're not driven to stand a
good watch.
You're trying to, like you know, stand up against a little
(19:44):
radar and kind of find a nudge.
You can fall asleep, sleep,kind of sleep standing up, and
get away with it right.
And so over the long term itdoes have.
It also has effects in anxietyand mental health, you know, for
young folks especially, likethe shipment, your body still
developing right.
So, mentally and physically,sleep is the time when your
bones develop a little moreresiliency, your muscles recover
(20:07):
from that workout.
So someone who works out anddoesn't sleep is not going to
see the same benefits as someonewho works out and does sleep,
because that's when your bodyrejuvenates.
For your mind it also sort ofcleans out the anxiety for the
day, so there's a reset.
That happens.
But then physically, whatthey're discovering more and
more and this gets into the longterm is that there are toxins
in your bloodstream, in yourbrain, that get flushed out at
(20:31):
night, because the blood vesselsopen up.
When they're more relaxed, theblood flushes things out, and so
they've actually found tiesbetween sleep deprivation and
dementia and Alzheimer's.
And so what may resonate morethan the Chipman?
There's also a decline in otherother parts of your, the
chemical parts of your body,including testosterone, which
(20:52):
are negatively affected by sleepdeprivation.
So you know, if the alcoholdoesn't get your attention,
maybe that will.
But there are, you know,multiple health reasons, and so
I kind of tell people look, ifyou want to, if you want to make
your life better with one thingget more sleep, and it'll have
multiple positive effects.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
No, I just want to double down on that Again, just
coming from my perspective as amidshipman, I think that's like
the number one thing that Ifailed with is, I think there
were times where I prioritizedcertain things, including, like
an academic, you know,assignment or whatever.
The case was.
That probably could have beenprevented by a certain level of
proactive, proactivity in likethroughout my day.
(21:31):
But there are multiple timeswhere, like I would choose to
live the life of you know,sleeping four to five hours a
night instead, and again likeover the longterm, as I'm sure
you're saying, like that haddramatic effects on me and only
just continued to create thiscycle where I wasn't as
attentive, I wasn't as focused,I wasn't able to complete
assignments as quickly as I was,just because I was so tired,
(21:53):
and it perpetually just gotworse.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
No, definitely that sleep that builds up over time
and you can't pay it back in onenight.
You know, I've tried.
You can't just sleep all day,saturday, and recover from a
week of sleep deprivation.
And then, of course, as youknow, on the weekends, what do
you do?
You go out and party and do allkinds of crazy things and don't
get sleep as well.
So you start Monday morningalready in a sleep deprived kind
of condition, quite often.
(22:17):
Now, that was one thing thatstruck me during this weekend is
you know, here we are a bunchof 60 year olds trying to keep
pace with the midshipmen, andyou know they run right, they
are just, they're just on allthe time.
And so we were sort of startingto sort of my friend sponsors
some mids and so they would comeover and we'd talk and it was.
It was kind of interesting toreconnect there, but but some
(22:38):
things haven't changed at alland one of those, I think, is
sleep deprivation, deprivation.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
Sure, and speaking of you know, like what you're
saying, it's the weekend, you'reexhausted from the week at the
Naval Academy, like goingthrough school, all the military
obligations, athletics, etcetera.
And then again a lot of peoplechoose and I think there is a
certain level of like culture atthe Academy and in the Navy of
general of like this like workhard, play hard type thing,
(23:02):
where you know people go outthey have multiple drinks.
Can you talk about the effectof alcohol on sleep, like you
have any insight on that?
And again, you know, as we'retalking about building up sleep
debt and potentially the weekendbeing your one time to kind of
recoup and start to build out ofthat a little bit, how does
alcohol play an effect into,like the quality of sleep that
you're getting?
Speaker 2 (23:22):
Great question, and you know there's kind of a myth
out there.
In fact we use a joke.
You know the beer in my hand isa sleeping pill, but the
reality is it might help youfall asleep at some level, but
then, after it wears off, thenyou wake back up and so it's
actually a negative effect.
The overall impact with alcoholon sleep is negative.
Plus, at some point you have toget rid of it, and so getting
(23:43):
up at the night to go to thebathroom multiple times, um, is
a sleep interruption and so, no,it just compounds.
Funny, when you get one ofthese I don't have mine on right
now, but the aura ring or the,or a wearable like a whoop or
something like that- you can seea night with alcohol and a
night without alcohol and youcan watch on a graph how it
affects your sleep.
So there's really no good sleepeffects from alcohol.
(24:06):
They're all bad.
Both the liquid amount and thecontent of it just degrades your
sleep pretty dramatically 100%.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
I think that piece is really interesting.
My wife is a big wear of the ofthe aura ring as well, right,
and there'll be times where youknow her, her Apple teller.
Like, did you drink alcohollast night when we had like a
glass of wine with dinner?
Right, so like what?
Literally the physiologicalresponses from that, her heart
rate variability and all thesedifferent aspects of sleep, like
it was like it's like yoursleep score.
(24:37):
Right, it's funny to like againthe gamification of this, to
like quite literally get a score.
Tell, yeah, like these thingshave real effects on your, on
your sleep.
Speaker 2 (24:46):
That that's a great point, you know.
Back to the rings.
Real quick, two quick storiesfrom shipboard.
So we put rings through thepostgraduate school on the
fingers of about 100 sailors,each on four ships and a carrier
, and two, two stories from that.
One of the junior sailors cameback, went back to the ship to
sign for more people up and shecame up and found me and thanked
me.
She said you know, this thinghas changed my life.
(25:07):
She says now I pay attention tomy sleep pattern, what I do
before I go to bed, I can seethe negative impacts of things
like alcohol.
The other one was a captain andkind of like you mentioned.
He was up in the Gulf in theRed Sea defending the ship
against Houthi missiles and itwas in combat until 4 am, went
to bed, came back up at 6.30.
(25:28):
And he picks up his phone andsays did you have a stressful
day yesterday?
And he's like I sure did.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
But then it said, well, here's how to recover from
that.
And so I think there's benefitsto like I always say we know
the oil pressure in our pump, weknow the voltage on our buses,
on the ship.
Why would we not know thefatigue level of our crew?
Speaker 1 (25:50):
as a standard thing.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
And there are some efforts out there.
I mentioned Dr Nita Shattuck.
Dr Rachel Markwald at the NavalHealth Research Center has done
a lot with.
Basically it's a computerprogram that can pull in the
data from your ring or yourwearable device and actually
plot it out for the whole crewand then feed that into the
watch bill.
So you can look at the watchbill.
It's still in the researchphase but it's kind of cool.
You can look at a watch billand say, okay, grant had the
(26:13):
mid-watch and he's supposed todrive the ship in this morning.
That's not a good choice.
Look at his sleep deprivationnumber.
So that sleep score becomes,you know, like the voltage on an
electrical bus, something youcan read off of a machine and
make a decision, you know.
So that's pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
Oh, absolutely.
And again, I think this stuffis really interesting because I
think, as you're mentioning,it's well documented at this day
and age.
You know the effect of sleepright and how much it can affect
and detriment human performancein a lot of different factors,
from the short term to long term, etc.
You've written articles in2013,.
You know the one you mentionedagain, fatigue, is the Navy's
(26:52):
black lung disease again in 2020.
And these are things that you'recontinuing to talk about today
over the course of 11 year span,right.
Why do you think it's sodifficult for these things to
change?
And, in your opinion, are thesethings even feasible with the
necessity of 24-7 watch standingright, right, like when you
mentioned that the Navy job is24-7 and there are a lot of
(27:14):
factors outside of your control?
So, again, just from an honestopinion, like are these things
feasible?
And how do we, as a fleet andan individual kind of maximize
our sleep to best be preparedfor whatever may come in a day
to day life?
Speaker 2 (27:29):
That's a very fair question and you know.
So to the question of change,one of my good friends had a had
a great quote.
He said that the change in thenation, the Navy, is
generational, and by that hemeant it takes about 10 years
from the beginning to the endfor a change to really take
effect.
And so I tell people we areseven years from 2017 into a
(27:49):
10-year change in the culture.
That was sort of I had a goodconfirmation point standing
around the campfire this weekend.
The gentleman next to me is aNavy SWO surface warfare officer
, second tour back at theacademy doing a pretty great
program where he gets a master'sin leadership and then becomes
a company officer, which Ithought was pretty cool.
But he was on two ships as adivision officer and we got to
(28:12):
talking a little bit and after awhile he's like are you that
sleep guy?
And I said yes, and he saidthank you and I said why, and he
goes because I was on.
All I know is the three on nineoff the circadian wash rotation
, but all I heard from mydepartment heads and my ex-O and
CO was how much better it isnow than it was when they were
(28:32):
out there with the five anddimes and other stuff, and so so
there has been a cult, but it'sgoing to take the guys like him
where that's all they know, whoare now starting to get towards
.
You know, they were departmentheads, now they're taking
command.
They'll have to get to majorcommand, and so it's going to
take, I think, 10 years Now.
There's there's two things thatare major impediments to this in
(28:55):
my opinion, and and one ofthose is just manning right, so
you build a model of a ship andin that model there's a manning
calculation that says hey, look,you have, you know, eight hours
of watch, eight hours of workand eight hours of sleep.
And then we built this modeland we run it and there's all
kinds of computer power behindit and everything.
(29:15):
And it gives us a number and itsays you need 300 people to run
a destroyer-ish.
And then we take that numberand even at the op-nav level, we
fund it to 90%, and so insteadof 300, we buy 270 billets, and
then, because of recruitingchallenges and retention
challenges, we can only get outof that 270, 250.
(29:37):
And then we take that ship andput it in port and people go on,
leave and take school.
I was on a destroyer the otherday mustering 207 out of 300.
Well, if I have X amount of work, it's pretty simple, math,
right.
And Y amount of people,whatever I decrease the
denominator by the hours of workper person, goes up because the
work, the numerator doesn'tchange, right?
(29:59):
Yeah, and so if you do the math, if I'm manned to 85 percent of
whatever I'm supposed to be andI'm supposed to work, so the
navy standard work week workweek is 81 hours long.
So even the baseline is 67hours of watch plus work, and
then 14 hours of training,quarters, leadership stuff,
admin, 81 hours at sea.
(30:22):
If I'm manned to 85%, do themath, I'm now at 100-hour week.
A 100-hour week is 14 hours aweek, two hours a day that I'm
not sleeping.
Now my time available for sleepgoes from eight hours to six.
So now my time available forsleep goes from eight hours to
six, and so the average sleep ofa sailor out there is about
(30:43):
five and a half hours a night,which is borderline, legally
drunk, right.
And so we know the root causeis the manning.
And then, but we don't, youknow, we sort of accept it and
that's the drum that I try tobeat all the time.
The other piece that we're kindof missing is and the GAO backs
(31:03):
this up is if you want somethingto get fixed in the Navy, some
one person has to own it,somebody has to be in charge of
it.
A DOD instruction came outthree years ago that said all
the services shall appoint asingle responsible person for
fatigue management and crewendurance.
None of the services, includingthe Navy, have done that, and
(31:23):
so, because there is no one incharge of it, there is no
coherent action plan for theentire Navy, there's no funding,
there's no policy, and so myconstant sort of drumbeat now is
(32:07):
you know the type commandershave.
All you know, at the shipboardlevel we've kind of figured out
the best we can do with whatwe've got, but it would require
a change to Navy policy toactually implement this
fleet-wide and put resourcesbehind it.
And you know that's been wentpast us here in the summertime
that I continue to raise myvoice of hey, we are standing
into danger, and that's kind ofmy mantra now is, you know it's
(32:29):
kind of the frog in a potsyndrome you keep turning the
water and the frog doesn'tnotice it.
Well, you know, the Navy kindof hired me to be the guy
watching the frog, sure, but thenavy is the frog, and so it's
tough to convince the frog.
Hey, you're boiling, you know.
We just don't know it becauseyou're used to that temperature.
But we're, you know, manningwise, we're kind of back to
(32:51):
where we were in 2017.
Op tempo wise, we're kind ofwhere we were, and so, you know,
the red flags are kind of there, um, sure, but not to be all
doom and gloom, because we havemade tremendous improvements,
don't get me wrong.
Sure, but if you don't addressthe root cause, which is simply
that there's more work to dothan there are people to do it
and people, as you know, you didit yourself you put yourself
(33:12):
last.
Right, I'm going to stay up tofix that pump.
I'm going to stand that extrawatch.
It's got to get done.
The missiles aren't going to.
I can't say, oh wait, you know,mr Houthis, can you take a?
Take a pause.
I got to catch a nap, we got totake a nap, but yeah, so I
think we've got some work to dothere.
We have a tendency, as you know, to kind of okay, we've done
that.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
We're going to put that one in the case, sure, and
you know those are like you'resaying, those are high level
solutions and there's a certainlevel of stuff going on again
like we're talking about inboardrooms at an executive level
kind of, within the Navy, theDOD, the Department of the Navy,
et cetera.
But I kind of want to focusagain there's some things that
(33:54):
are just out of our control as amidshipman or as a jail or all
these factors.
I want to tailor this lastpiece of this conversation
really directed towards, again,midshipmen and junior officers,
controlling what they cancontrol, to kind of maximize
what we have in our currentsituation.
Right, and so you know.
The first piece is just why doyou think it's so important for
(34:14):
midshipmen to prioritize theirsleep, and how do you think and
if there is any scientific dataor anything, or just personal
anecdote and opinion how thosehabits towards sleep they build
at the academy will prepare themfor life in the fleet?
Speaker 2 (34:29):
Absolutely.
Thank you for bringing me backoff the high horse there into
reality.
As a midshipman I wasn't realconcerned with whether the CNO
was going to sign out any policy.
Right, that wasn't keeping me upat night.
So you know to the midshipmanout there, this is why it
matters to you, okay?
First of all, you are at aphase in your life where your
mind and your body you may notwant to hear this, but they're
(34:50):
still developing.
That's why you run all the time.
That's why you work out.
I was not in good shape when Iwent to the Naval Academy.
I was like an, a student.
I was in the choir.
I went up to the soccer.
My high school requiredintramurals and I even wrote a
paper about how that was ruiningmy life, that you made me play
soccer.
So I was not a physicalspecimen and the Navy kind of
(35:11):
whipped me into shape there tosome extent and probably
extended my life by doing so.
But if you sleep more, then twothings will happen.
Number one your physicalperformance will increase.
You'll be able to run faster,jump higher, hit harder.
You're seeing professionalsports teams bring in a sleep
coach nowadays.
I bet you the Naval Academy.
Maybe that's what changed inthe Naval Academy football
(35:31):
program.
I better go back and see Ifthey hire a sleep coach in there
.
I'll take full credit for theunbeaten year of the season.
But you see teams when they goto away games.
They fly a day early, they geta hotel, they give the team a
regimen to follow.
And I have data.
There are studies after studiesthat have showed increases in
alertness, increases in reactiontime, increases in retention of
(35:54):
knowledge.
So if you're better slept, youwill learn better and faster.
And you want to study as hard,right.
So so an extra hour of sleep,especially those all-nighters I
talked about, you're probablybetter off.
If you've been in that classfor six months and you don't
know it, you're not going tolearn it tonight, right?
Um, yes, you sleep on it.
Your brain will find thatinformation faster, right from
(36:14):
deep yes, like that's, that's sobig.
Speaker 1 (36:16):
I'm so sorry, like I just need need to like double
down and highlight, because thatwas my thing is like I would
say in in study, and I wouldchoose to quote unquote study
for that extra hour and a halffrom like midnight to one, 30,
right, instead of just going tosleep, which honestly, in
retrospect, probably was a netnegative action on my behalf.
Speaker 2 (36:37):
It's tough to prove a negative, but I would submit
that if you and your roommatehad had similar grades and then
one of you stayed up all nightand one of you went to sleep,
the one who went to sleep isprobably going to do a little
bit better, and there's studiesthat show that.
So, physically, what's themission of the AVOCAD?
Morally, mentally andphysically, sleep will help with
two of those.
Sleep will help with two ofthose right Mentally and
(36:58):
physically, you will be a betterperformer academically on the
sports field if you get bettersleep.
The second thing is your immunesystem.
They found this during COVIDthat an extra hour of sleep
increases your immunity todisease, virus and bacterial
disease by 40%.
So if you're not sick, thenyou're not down, then you're not
missing practice, you're notmissing school days.
(37:18):
So there's immunity, yourimmune, immune system and your
general overall health.
And then, finally, you know itdoesn't matter to the machinima
that's 18 years old, but youknow you are probably going to
live to be 60 or 70.
Now will impact your quality oflife.
(37:42):
You know in your 40s, 50s and60s and you can't go back and
fix it right.
I go to bed every night with aCPAP machine and I take a
dopamine pill for my restlessleg syndrome, which I have
medical evidence that is tiedback to my watch standing in the
Navy.
Now the VA doesn't accept that,but the medical world does
Another conversation Right, so Itell every active duty service,
duty service.
Get a sleep test on active duty,because if it's not documented,
then so you know.
(38:03):
And the last piece I want tohit on is okay, what are the
things within your control?
Right, I really can't controlwhen taps is and when revelry is
.
I can't control what I have todo during the work day, but a
couple things I can do.
First of all, it's pretty quietand cool are the three things
that make me sleep better.
And so I just heard up therethis weekend that Bancroft Hall
(38:26):
is now air-conditioned, which itwasn't right when I was there.
And so up on 7-4, airconditioning meant open two
windows and hope the breeze camethrough.
But if you're sleeping in an80-degree room you're not
getting good sleep, and so theyhave done stuff.
So cool, get it down to below70.
Dark put duct tape over thelights, turn off the lights,
make it very, very dark and thenquiet Turn off the radio, tv.
(38:49):
Some people like to have whitenoise, stuff like that, but
those are very controllable,right Curtains, stuff like that.
If you're out of the NavalAcademy and you're back at your
house, go to Ikea, get someblackout curtains.
We hand out sleep improvementkits to the ships.
That's nothing more than ablindfold, earplugs and a card
(39:10):
the last piece you can do inyour daily routine, right?
So when you wake up in themorning, if you need to have a
stimulant, one cup of coffee isokay.
Coffee in the evenings or theafternoon is not good.
It takes a long time to wearout.
So, consciously, work on yourdaily routine, exercise, get
good nutrition and then, whenyou get ready to go to sleep,
make that a transition process.
So change into whatever you'regoing to wear to bed.
(39:33):
Do some stretching exercises,do yoga, listen to music, take a
walk, do something to draw aline between that workday and
your body transitioning to sleep, and that takes about a half an
hour.
So you have to plan your dayfor that sleep transition and
that wake up transition.
There's a thing you know back tomy command tour you get woken
up as a captain all the time andthere's a thing called sleep
(39:54):
inertia, which is, if you wakeup from a deep sleep, there's
about a 20 minute period whereyour mind hasn't quite caught up
to.
You think it has, becauseyou're talking and making
decisions, but you're not reallyclicking on all cylinders, and
so you know you don't want todeep sleep until 6 am and then
boom, you're off and running forthe day.
You kind of have to do a littlebit to spool up, but really
(40:16):
spooling down is the secret, Ithink, and that's where I've
learned a lot about you know putthe phone away, turn off the TV
set, turn off the distractions,do something to sort of focus
your mind, let your body sort oftransition into the sleep mode
and then focus on a goodsleeping environment.
And then the last thing I findthat you know, the more senior
you are, the more likely you're,the stuff in your head is going
to be what keeps you awake.
(40:37):
Oh, I have this brief tomorrow.
I've got a test tomorrow.
I don't have it here handy.
I have a little whiteboard thatI bought at Dollar Tree.
I'll typically sit there about8 o'clock, 9 o'clock at night
and say, okay, what do I have tonot forget?
Tomorrow?
It might be where's my car keys?
Where's my thing?
You have a routine.
But then also I need to emailthis particular brief in.
(40:57):
I have to attend this event,and so I'll jot that stuff down
so that when I wake up in themorning, there it is, I don't
have to have it in my head allnight.
So those are a few things thatI recommend that you can control
well within your own sphere.
Speaker 1 (41:12):
Yeah, 100% I love it.
It's a very nuke move.
I'm a big whiteboard guy Tothis day.
I'm a big whiteboard guy Tothis day.
I'm a big whiteboard guy.
I absolutely love it.
I can hardly have aconversation without one, really
.
Speaker 2 (41:30):
One last thing I wanted to hit on before we wrap
up, grant, is there's a piece ofthis that you hit on early on.
I can give you all the time inthe world to sleep and I can
give you a cold, dark, quietenvironment.
At some point it's on you right.
There's a personalresponsibility piece to this I
think we miss out on sometimesand I've heard that as an excuse
not to implement these policies.
(41:50):
Well, if we give them time,they'll just play video games or
do other stupid stuff and notsleep.
And that may be true to someextent.
I will tell you, I've been onships eight, 10 times since I
got this job.
What do I see?
I see sailors working, standingwatch and sleeping.
They are so tired, even thoughwe have like the worst
mattresses.
It was kind of funny.
(42:11):
One of my sailors spent thenight in jail in Newport News
after a traffic.
He got a reckless drivingticket and they let him serve
his sentence on Friday andSaturday nights for like a month
so he could work right, but hemissed a duty day.
So he was heading to XOI formissing a duty day and they
asked him well, where were you?
He goes.
Well, I was in jail, okay.
So that led down another path,because he hadn't told us that.
(42:33):
But, during the conversation.
But he was a good kid, he justgot caught.
It was kind of funny becauseinitially the command was kind
of spooling up to hammer thisguy and then, literally between
XOI and Captain's Mass, thecaptain got a ticket for
reckless driving in hisneighborhood, for going 45 in a
25 zone, which is 20 miles abovethe limit, and suddenly it
didn't seem so bad.
But anyway, this kid said thisyoung sailor.
(42:53):
He said hey, ractor R, themattresses in the jail were much
better than the ones we have onthe ship.
Can I get one of those?
And so you know, the problem isyou're so tired on the ship
that it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
But back to that point ofpersonal responsibility is you
know, I sort of when I give mylittle talk on the ship, I talk
about the alcohol correlationand I ask them, I say, do you
(43:17):
believe me?
And they all say oh, yes, yes,yes.
And then we do a little skitwhere I call up a watch stander
to take the watch and the firstone I say look, you drank kind
of like you and I talked about.
You drank six beers and I'vestayed up for 36 hours, go take
the watch.
And so the first guy comes upand says off the deck, I'm ready
to take the watch.
I've had five beers in the last12 hours.
And of course the off the deckis like no, you know, get out of
(43:38):
here.
The second guy comes up andsays, sir, I had no sleep in the
last 36 hours and my averagetime to say no for the drunk
watch standard is like onesecond.
My average time to get to knowfor the tired watch standard is
like 15 seconds, because they'llstart a conversation Well, why
were you up and did you reallynot sleep?
And then they'll look to me forlike, what do I do?
And you know you do what youwould do in real life.
(44:00):
And so they say they believeyou, but when it comes to
actually implementing it, and soyou wouldn't show up drunk for
watch.
So it's on you to not show uptired.
And I think that's where I thinkthis message would resonate
with Mitch Schimman, because oneof the things you kind of beat
into your head during four yearsis that that you are
(44:20):
responsible.
You know, from the honor codeto the whatever, you're
responsible for your behavior.
And so there's an opportunitythere, I think you know.
Back to my, if I was, you know,king for a day or had 30
minutes with the commandant, Iwould say you know you want to
improve the quality of servicefor your midshipmen and improve
their performance.
Do two things implement a sleepeducation program half an hour,
(44:42):
45-minute session and buy aurarings or wearables.
Give them a uniform allowance.
Say, go buy yourself one rightWhoop aura.
I don't want to, you know, butyou know, get something so you
can monitor your own performance.
And I think you would see a netincrease in the performance of
the brigade.
Speaker 1 (45:01):
No, I think that's a really cool factor Because, like
you say, I think it's reallyeasy a lot of times for us as
humans, right, just to kind ofdisassociate things not going
well and not performing andblame it on other things, right.
It's like oh yeah, I got enoughsleep, I feel fine, blah, blah,
blah.
Right, it was kind of the thingthat you're talking about the
(45:22):
culture of like oh I've hadthree beers, I feel fine.
Right, like there's no problem.
Right, and I think you knowalmost that idea of having quite
literally a physiologicalmetric and analyzer.
Right, that's telling youstraight up, based on data like
this is how your body's beenaffected by you not sleeping.
Right, it's hitting you in theface, right Like there's.
There's no ignoring it at thatpoint, right, I think that's
really interesting because, likewe're saying a lot of times, in
(45:45):
today's day and age and I'm Istill consider myself a young
person, you know, there are alot of things that make me feel
older.
Now, sure, it's like there area lot of distractions, right,
like you finally get to thepoint where you're ready to go
to bed but now are out therethat can distract you from what
(46:05):
should be the prioritization ofsleep.
Speaker 2 (46:08):
That's exactly right, yeah, and so I think that's
really interesting.
That phone has has lights.
You know, the blue light fromthe phone actually suppresses
your melatonin production.
So there's a double whammy.
Because I tell the youngsailors I said first of all the
light is bad, or the tv, or the,or the thing or the phone.
The other thing is something inthat phone is going to get onto
your skin and you're going tobe thinking about that when you
(46:29):
should be sleeping.
Somebody, you know, hey, hedidn't like that poster, I
didn't get enough, I didn't geta thumbs up from that guy, you
know.
And so now you're fixated onthat.
You're not focused on it.
So I like the way you said itis.
Hey, those are all distractors,we call them.
They just sort of suck the lifeout of your sleep plan.
Before you know it, it'smidnight or 1 am and now you
can't get six hours or sevenhours because you're still up.
Speaker 1 (46:52):
Yeah, 100%, 100%.
And I think, like you mentioned,there's a personal
responsibility.
But when you get out to thefleet right, this is why I talk
about the Academy a lot about itbeing a great opportunity to
build these habits before youget out there, because when
you're at the academy, it'sreally just you you know what I
mean.
Like you're only your decisionsaffect you when you get out to
the fleet and you haven't, youknow, built the habits to
establish and prioritize yoursleep.
(47:13):
Now you're showing up tired toin front of your division and
kind of we're talking aboutestablishing that culture that,
like, sleep is not important,right, or all these different
things.
Or you're putting yourself in aspot where you're not ready to
help your sailors and whateverlife situations they have going
on, right, there are a lot of alot of factors and, when it
comes down to it, like buildingthose habits and getting in a
(47:36):
way of like prioritizing sleep.
So that way, you know, we'retalking about a lot of this
power of presence Well, you needto be present mentally too,
like, you need to be able to bethere and be attentive and be
focused, be able to help thepeople who are there, who are
your sailors.
Speaker 2 (47:50):
Yeah, now that's a great point.
Back to the command tour.
When I was going through thepipeline, an admiral came up to
talk to us at our graduation.
I wish I could find him now.
I can't remember.
He was the random admiralpassing through and they grabbed
him for a speech.
But he said your whole lifeyou've heard ship, ship, mate,
self.
Right, that's the triangle.
When you get to a leadershipposition, you have to flip that.
(48:10):
And you could hear the harumphsin the room.
He said because here's the dealIf you let yourself go
physically, mentally, you don'twork out, you don't eat right,
you don't sleep, you're going tofind yourself on watch or in a
decision point where you are thedecision maker and to some
extent, the life and death ofyour crew could depend on that
decision you have to make rightnow, with no warning and no
preparation.
And so you go into that momentwith whatever you got in the
(48:32):
tank and if you fail, then youlose the ship and you lose the
crew.
And so you know you have tostart with yourself and lay that
foundation of good nutrition,exercise and sleep and you'll be
a better midshipman, you'll bea better warfighter, you'll be a
better midshipman, you'll be abetter warfighter, you'll be a
better watchstander and you'lllive longer and have a healthier
life, you know.
So, and no pills or medicationsneeded.
(48:54):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (48:54):
So, yeah, 100%.
I am going to take this quickplug.
If you've been listening tothis episode, you're a
midshipman or you're even aparent of a midshipman and
you're like, how do they getthis help when it comes to sleep
?
One thing that I will say aboutthe Academy that they've
started to do really well is theMidshipman Development Center,
and it literally started to getrecognized even in the Princeton
Review as like the number onecollege counseling services
(49:18):
across the country, which isincredible.
But they do more than just youknow what we would consider like
quote unquote therapy.
They have people on staff forsports performance, they have
people on staff for sportsperformance, they have people on
staff for sleep, they havepeople on staff for nutrition
right, Like, there's a lot ofdifferent aspects to really in
in do this, and so you knowwe're going to, we're going to
have an episode coming out withthe, you know, the director of
(49:39):
the midshipman developmentcenter to talk all about the
resources that they provide.
But, like, I would encourageeveryone who is listening there
to take advantage of thoseservices that are being provided
by the Academy.
Again, it requires proactivityon your part to go and like take
advantage of those things, butthey exist, but they exist right
(49:59):
.
And so again, I just you knowfrom.
It is always funny like it's abunch of the people who've
already been there beforetalking about their experience
back, but I wish I would haveprioritized my sleep
significantly better as amidshipman and even as a junior
officer in the fleet.
And so take advantage of thoseresources, Take advantage of
those resources.
Speaker 2 (50:18):
That's great.
I didn't know that was there.
I'd love to connect with themand learn what they're doing, so
that's awesome.
Speaker 1 (50:24):
Offline I got you you make, so that's awesome.
Yeah, I got you.
Speaker 2 (50:26):
That's that's you make a good point.
I think that's that's.
You talked about change, right,and I think one of the things
that has changed and I see thisacross the force is there is a
greater emphasis on you as anindividual, where the Navy
invests whether it's in trainingor in therapy or in whatever to
make you a better person, andthe idea that that will make you
a better sailor, better officer, better warfighter.
(50:47):
And so I have heard that comeacross in many ways.
Admiral Cahill, who was ourboss when we were looking at
these rings for the sailors, hegoes look, even if we don't get
any data, we are telling thesailors I care about you, I care
about you enough to give yousomething to make your life
better.
And that wasn't the way of theworld 30 years ago and it was
(51:10):
sort of my way or the highway.
My life sucks, so yours shouldtoo, and now it's more.
Hey, my life sucked.
But why did it suck?
And well, partly because ofdecisions that I made, but
partly because of things thatweren't in place like that.
That Midshipman DevelopmentCenter is fantastic.
That's great to hear.
So I'll tell you just to mylast thought.
(51:32):
You'll experience this yourselfDriving across that bridge and
seeing Annapolis, even 40 yearslater, you still get a little
pit in your stomach of ah, hereit comes, I got to go back.
What a beautiful, fantasticplace, I mean it's just
overwhelming.
To walk the ground, see how farthey've come, chat with the
midshipmen I mean anybody whoyou know.
(51:53):
I'm pretty active on LinkedIn.
A lot of my generation sort ofis like oh, senators, these days
they don't care, they don'twant to work hard.
You know, go talk to somemidshipmen, go walk the academy
grounds.
I mean, if you don't walk awayfrom there with a spirit of
enthusiasm, I'm always gettingchoked up because it was just
like it was overwhelming.
It really was, and so thank youfor what you're doing to kind
(52:15):
of.
You know, I could have a wholemountain of the stuff I wish I
had known when I was 18.
And of course nobody would lookat it.
But I wouldn't have when I was18.
But golly the advances thatthat place has made.
I had to laugh at one sign.
It said that no drone zone no asign on the wall.
It's like you know that'll,that'll fend off the drones
flying at eight feet.
(52:35):
You know um, but uh, um, butanyway.
No, it was uh.
It was just eye-watering totalk to those mids and and see
their enthusiasm and to find acouple service warfare officers
who were very positive about theSWO community, which wasn't
always the case when I was theretoo.
But thanks for what you'redoing.
This is a great service to theAcademy and I know they
(52:56):
appreciate it and I hope theMIDS will look at this.
And I encourage anyonelistening to connect with me on
LinkedIn and I will fill yourinbox with sleep-related stories
and ideas.
But it really is.
If there's one thing you can doto make your life better, get
an extra hour of sleep.
That's kind of my takeaway forthis Love it.
Speaker 1 (53:17):
Well, john, thank you so much for taking the time and
talking to us about this topic.
I assume you'll probably beback on on multiple occasions to
talk about a variety ofdifferent topics, but going into
(53:43):
January and the dark ages ingeneral, there are going to be a
lot of topics around amidshipman how you saw it in the
fleet, and your current andongoing initiatives to try and
improve that in aggregate foreveryone in the Navy, and so I
appreciate it very much.
Thanks for joining us today andjust a big, a big thank you.
Thank you All right To theAcademy Insider audience.
(54:05):
If you have any questions, feelfree to reach out.
Otherwise, I do recommend Ifollow Dr John Cordell here on
LinkedIn big time.
Go follow him there.
Great information and a lot of,again, just great articles and
information regarding sleep andother kind of initiatives to
just make sure all sailors arebeing cared for, loved and
(54:26):
valued across the fleet, and soI love every bit of this.
Thank you so much and reach outwith any questions.
Have a good day, thanks.
Thank you so much for listeningto this episode of the Academy
Insider Podcast.
I really hope you liked it,enjoyed it and learned something
during this time.
If you did, please feel free tolike and subscribe or leave a
(54:46):
comment about the episode.
We really appreciate to hearyour feedback about everything
and continue to make AcademyInsider an amazing service that
guides, serves and supportsmidshipmen, future midshipmen
and their families.
Thank you.
Welcome to season two of the Academy Insider podcast.
Academy Insider is a 501c3nonprofit organization that
serves midshipmen, futuremidshipmen and their families.
At its core, this podcast isdesigned to bring together a
community of Naval Academygraduates and those affiliated
with the United States NavalAcademy in order to tell stories
and provide a little bit ofinsight into what life at the
(00:22):
Naval Academy is really like.
I hope you enjoy it.
Thank you so much for listeningand reach out if you ever have
any questions.
Hey, everyone, and welcome backto the Academy Insider Podcast.
In today's episode, we'retouching on a really important
subject, which is sleep and theimportance of sleep when it
comes to the life of themidshipman and continuing
through as a junior officer inthe fleet, and so I am joined
(00:43):
today by Dr John Cordell.
He was a Naval Academy graduate, a former nuclear surface
warfare officer and had commandof multiple different ships, and
since his retirement, isactually transitioned in this
back, still working for theDepartment of the Navy as a
human factor engineer and anadvocate on all things sleep and
human performance, and so thisis going to be a really cool
episode, diving into one theimportance of sleep to the
(01:06):
factors and things that havehappened in the Navy as a result
of sleep deprivation, and sowe're going to talk about why
it's important for shipmentespecially to really prioritize
and take their sleep extremelyseriously, and so if you want
this insight, you want somerecommendations from Dr Cordell
on all things sleep, then checkout this episode.
I think it's a reallyinteresting insight into some of
(01:28):
the factors of high-level Navypolicy, but also the impact and
what it means for a midshipmanor what it means for a junior
officer on how to really attackand take their sleep really
seriously, and so I hope youenjoy the episode.
If you have any questions, letme know, and if you are big on
LinkedIn, again follow Dr Kortel.
He's really fun.
Follow on LinkedIn and talksabout a lot of these topics, so
(01:48):
make sure to check him out.
Otherwise, if you have anyquestions, let me know.
Enjoy the listen.
Thank you so much.
The Academy Insider Podcast issponsored by the Vermeer Group,
a residential real estatecompany that serves the United
States Naval Academy communityand other select clientele in
(02:09):
both California and Texas.
If I can ever answer a realestate related question for you
or connect you with a trustedAcademy affiliated agent in the
market which you're in, pleasereach out to me directly at
grant, at the vermeergroupcom.
You can also reach out to me onmy LinkedIn page, grant Vermeer
, and I'd be happy to respond toyou there.
(02:29):
Thank you so much, and nowlet's get back to the episode.
Hey, john, thank you so muchfor taking the time today to
join the Academy Insideraudience.
If you don't mind just giving alittle bit of context and
background to who you arebasically, where you're from,
how you ended up at the NavalAcademy, a little bit about your
naval career and currently whatyou're doing now.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Okay, awesome.
Well, hey, thanks a lot.
So I grew up in a militaryfamily.
My dad was a limited dutyofficer, came in the Navy of
World War II enlisted.
I went to officer candidateschool and retired as lieutenant
commander and JT cordial and heretired to Rome, georgia, which
is where I went to high school.
And at about the four-yearpoint in high school I had
decent grades.
I was in a rock band.
I was going to band practice onenight my senior year and dad
called me in to sit at the tableand he said, son, have a seat.
(03:12):
And I said what's up, dad, hegoes here's how this is going to
work.
You have a high school degreecoming up, you've got good
grades.
I'm not paying for college.
You can live in the basementfor 500 bucks a month if you
want and be dinner with thefamily every night and be home
by 10 pm on the weekends, or youcan fill out this application
to the Naval Academy.
And so I was like what's theNaval Academy?
(03:33):
Because I had no idea.
I thought the Army-Navy gamewas some soldiers and sailors
that played a football game, andso basically, he goes.
Well, here's the deal.
Here's one for Georgia Tech andone for US Naval Academy.
Here's the deal.
Here's one for Georgia Tech andone for US Naval Academy.
You fill them out and you canleave for the night.
And so I sat down in one sessionand opened up these packages
and wrote everything down andsealed them up and got accepted
to both and at that point mydecision process was stay in
(03:57):
Georgia or get out of Georgia,and I chose kind of a.
It sounds kind of funny when Isay it, but I typically, when
presented with two options, Itypically choose the most
difficult one, just because it'sthere.
And that's what I did.
And so, really sight unseen,with no knowledge of what I was
getting into, I showed up forI-Day on June 7, 1980, which is
(04:18):
40 years ago, so I just went tomy 40th anniversary homecoming
up there.
But yeah, that's how.
All I knew was the Navy.
When my dad was growing up, hecame home smelling like diesel
fuel and gunpowder and he was inVietnam for two and a half
years.
I didn't see him from like mysixth birthday to my ninth
birthday, but I knew what it waslike when he came home and we
had Navy stuff all over thehouse and it was just kind of
(04:40):
there.
It was part of my life prettymuch for my entire childhood and
it just seemed like a naturalfit.
And so I went into the NavalAcademy, ocean engineering.
Actually I was a history majorand my grandfather had heard the
Glee Club sing and said youshould join the Glee Club.
So I did that and I was ahistory major for a little bit.
And then I went home forChristmas and again my granddad,
(05:01):
who was a teacher at Universityof Tennessee, he goes.
You know, john, the academy iskind of an engineering school.
You might want to get a degreein engineering.
And so I shifted from history tothe ocean engineering, which,
like nobody does right, theyusually go the other way.
But it was cool.
Ocean engineering is, if you'renot familiar, is kind of
bridges and docks and landingsand beaches.
And so they had a cool labthere where you could build ship
(05:27):
models.
We built like a model of abeach and then they would have a
wave machine, simulate like 50years of erosion and see where
your design stood up.
And so I did all that.
And then again come surfaceselection time, I went to.
All you know, I'm still thesame, it's cartramid or
protramid or whatever.
And so you get a sampling ofaircraft, submarines, surface
ships in the Marine Corps.
So the Marine Corps.
(05:48):
I fell asleep in the woodswhich we'll get to in our topic
today and was woken up by thesound of machine gun fire and I
said, well, maybe that's not forme.
And then I went flying in an A4aircraft and threw up in the
cockpit and I'm like okay that'snot for me, yeah, and then I
went underwater on the submarine.
I'm like that's definitely notfor me, and so surface warfare
was pretty much it.
(06:08):
But that was my dad's legacy too, so I was kind of that I was
already, and then they offeredme the nuclear power program and
one of my best friends from theacademy was a systems engineer
number two in the class and theythey campaigned pretty hard for
john and he was like, if it'sthat good, why?
Why do they have to sell it sohard, you know?
And but I fell for it and so Iwent up, did my interview, came
(06:28):
back from on the bus feelinglike a complete moron, Like that
was that's the dumbest I'veever felt was coming back from
that nuclear power interview.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
And.
Speaker 2 (06:36):
I'm like God, please don't take me.
And they did.
And then I went to the, thepower program, and the rest is
history.
So, yeah, that's my, that's myelevator speech for how I got
that kind of came in the door,but we can certainly get into
some more details about myexperience there.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
Yeah, no, absolutely.
And so, and so you went throughthat process of again becoming
a slow nuke and made your way upand took multiple commands.
Do you mind talking a littlebit about your command
experience out to sea?
And how some of the experiencesyou took there are now
translating to what you're doingnow today.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Great, great question .
So I grew up in the surfaceNavy in the 80s and 90s and into
the 2000s, in a time when kindof sleep was an afterthought
Right.
In fact, it was almost to thepoint where lack of sleep was
almost a badge of courage.
You know, it's like if you wentfishing well, I caught a fish
this big, oh yeah, I caught onethis big.
Well, I went 24 hours withoutsleep, oh yeah, I went 36 hours
(07:31):
without sleep, and it neveroccurred to us that that may not
be good for you.
And so I grew up divisionofficer, department head, xo,
always tired In the nuclearpipeline.
I still remember in nuclearpower school or no, in prototype
we were in this crazy rotating12-hour shift seven days in a
row and we were on the mid-shift.
(07:52):
And actually we found that ifwe snuck up into the captain's
office there was a nice leathercouch and there was nobody up
there at night.
So that's the place we would goto catch a nap, to get back up
on step for the next watch, andso sleep deprivation had been a
part of my life pretty much.
Growing up I read an article inProceedings Magazine which I'm a
big fan of at the Institute,called Ready Around the Clock by
(08:14):
a gentleman named Lenny Capellowho was a cruiser CO, and he
had divided his ship into bluegold crews and said, okay,
you're on for 12 hours, sixhours of watch, six hours of
work and you're off for 12,.
And say, okay, you're on for 12hours, six hours of watch, six
hours of work and you're off for12, workout, sleep, whatever.
So I tried that on USS OscarAustin.
Ddg Destroyer was my firstcommand tour and we failed
miserably.
We had a plan.
(08:35):
It was mainly built around thewatch day and not the work day,
and we didn't change thestandard routine, and so people
who were up standing watch atnight still had to get up and do
stuff during the day, fortraining or, and basically the
crew mutinied and said this isnot working.
You know, great idea, boss, but?
And so we went back to kind ofthe old way of what we call fire
the dimes five hours on, 10hours off, but rotating so
(08:55):
you're sleeping at a differenttime.
When I got to the end of thatdeployment that was the
operation Iraqi freedom.
So we were there during the warlaunching Tomahawks and sort of
focused on the mission, and itwas a relatively short
deployment, but I said, hey, ifI get a chance to do this again,
I'd like to do it right.
I did Went to command again atUSS San Jacinto in 2010 and met
(09:17):
Dr Anita Shattuck, who ran thepostgraduate school crew
endurance team, and she set usup to do a sort of a watch
rotation circadian watch it'scalled, so basically you sleep
at the same time, stand watch atthe same time.
This particular one was afour-section three hours on nine
hours off instead of five hourson 10 hours off and so we
(09:40):
shifted to that after a fewweeks into deployment and it was
like you had just lifted off ablanket a wet blanket off of the
crew.
People were more awake, theywere more alert, they were more
focused, they started to workout more, they could plan their
day and it was really in 20years at that point 25, the most
revolutionary thing I had seenon a ship in my entire career,
(10:01):
and so I came back from that,wrote a message about it for the
safety command.
We won a safety award.
Dr Shattuck and I won the SNAsurface literary award.
Everybody's talking about itexcept the Navy.
And so the surface Navy waskind of like eh, you know, we
need more data.
We don't want to tell thecaptain how to do things, you
(10:21):
know, let's kind of sit back andlet this develop.
And so, from then until Iretired in 2013, I kept trying
to push it forward, but therewas a lot of resistance.
I continued that after Iretired, sort of in my free time
, writing articles like I sharedwith you, and talked about a
couple of those, and one of themwas called Fatigue is the
Navy's Black Lung Disease, right?
And so we were talking abouthow the health effects of sleep
(10:44):
affect you.
So, at the end of the day, theNavy was very resistant.
Then 2017 happened and theMcCain collision and the
Fitzgerald collision.
One of the root causes whenthey dug into it was, say,
fatigue, in some cases, fatiguecombined with new systems that
weren't very well tested andtrained, and which fatigue just
(11:05):
made it worse, right?
And so suddenly there was thisinstruction, which had been
floating around in draft foryears but not signed, got signed
out in a matter of like threeweeks.
So if you ever worked on astaff, a three-star staff,
getting a major instructionsigned out in three weeks is it
doesn't happen.
But this, you know, fleet thefleet had picked up on this.
(11:25):
A lot of folks were doing it,but they were kind of doing it
piecemeal.
Just the watch.
Fitzgerald had a circadianwatch, but they were not
adjusting the daily routine tomatch the watch schedule.
The ceo of john s mccain but youlook back at the report, he
actually was thinking aboutsleep when he delayed stationing
the detail when they went intoa high traffic area.
In doing so, though, he tookall the risk upon himself, and
(11:48):
so, at the end of the day, itwas my command tours that sort
of shaped it, but it really feltfor a while there, like Dr
Shattuck and I were just a voicein the wilderness of hey, you
know, if it's that simple and itdoesn't cost anything, there's
no way it can be effective,right, and I find that as an
often and sort of a buzzkillkind of thing.
(12:09):
When you bring a new idea tothe table, if it's not expensive
and won't take a long time todo, people dismiss it, even
though we have proof that itworks.
So, yeah, that was kind of howmy command tours.
I just you know, I knew it frommyself that when I don't sleep
I'm not at my best, and I made acouple of bad decisions, which
I could talk about, based onsleep deprivation.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
Yeah, no, absolutely.
And so, if it wasn't clearalready today, you know today's
episode really is going to beall about sleep and the power of
sleep and the importance ofsleep, and especially as it
relates to the achievement atthe naval academy.
And then officers out in thefleet and just general again our
service members out in thefleet doing the lord's work, and
so you know we're going tobring it back.
Can you go back to your time asa midshipman, right, kind of
(12:54):
kind of tailoring this back tobeing a midshipman at the naval
academy?
Do you ever have any, anysleepy, like sleepy days,
falling asleep in class?
Was that a thing?
While you were going through itas well, pretty much all of
them.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
Yeah, you know it's fine, so your timing is great.
So I just spent the weekend upwith my both of folks from 14th
company.
Uh, we're all in our 60s nowand the big joke was the guy who
was the last one to formationwith rack burns on his face and
always falling asleep in classand now has a phd in sleep
science and you know it's likethe face of navy sleep, you know
.
So what better qualificationthan sleeping a lot?
(13:27):
But uh, well, you know, thisgrant I mean when you're at the
naval academy, even when you cansleep, you don't necessarily,
right, you're now.
You all probably had likethings like radios and tape
players and stuff.
We were there as plebs, youknow, back in the last pleb
summer, which was 1980, that'sreal right we weren't allowed to
have radios or tape players.
So I had this little tape, Ihad one cassette tape it was
(13:48):
ACDC, back in black, and everynight you would get taps, turn
off the light, put the coversdown, put your headphones on and
listen to this one tape.
And so we were tired all thetime and then, like I said, when
I went on to Nuke School andbeyond, so yeah, it was not
something that you just took itfor granted that being a
midshipman means being tired.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
Oh, my gosh, does that sound familiar?
Oh, it sounds so familiar.
If there's one consistent, asmuch as again, the academy may
change or stay the same.
I think exhausted midshipman isgoing to be one of the
constants that that goes throughtime.
I just like for me.
I remember I had never known itwas possible to fall asleep
standing up until like I was,until I was a midshipman.
(14:34):
I was like the amount of timesmy, my classroom progression
went from like sitting at mydesk for about five minutes and
doing the head bob, like noddingoff, then standing up in the
back of the class and getting areprieve for about 10 minutes
where I'm like all right, I feelokay, and then it was like I'm
like now I'm head bobbing,standing up in the back of the
classroom, like I had neverrealized Find something to lean
up against.
That's exactly.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
But I want to come back to that because, just like
in the surface Navy I've thatdoesn't have to be that way.
Right, we can talk about somethings that could be done at the
academy if we chose to.
That might mitigate some ofthat, and I know there have been
some studies.
Dr Shattuck did a study at theMilitary Academy and there have
been some changes implemented totry to reduce that.
(15:16):
And if you think about it Idon't know anymore, but I think
TAPS was at 10 o'clock at nightand Reveille was at 6.
So technically you've got eighthours to sleep, but, like I
said, when you're 18, youprobably don't.
But part of that's education,which I think this podcast kind
of gets at is I thought I knew alot about sleep and still I
started actually studying it andrealized that it's a whole
(15:37):
science in and of itself andthat there's a lot you can learn
about it, about your own sleepand about your sleep in general.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
Yeah, and I do want to dive into some of the science
of it, but you mentioned itearlier.
Something you said early on inthe episode that I think I
really resonated with, which waslike it was almost a badge of
honor right To like not sleepmuch Right.
And so I think there was acertain aspect because,
especially while I was amidshipman as well, like that
was one of those things thatlike people would joke about,
but it was also like kind oflike you're saying, almost a
(16:03):
badge of honor, almost like abragging right to be like oh,
look at me, like, look how I canfunction, and I only I only got
four hours of sleep Right.
Like there was like a badge ofhonor and almost like resiliency
or toughness of being like ohyeah, no, I slept for three
hours and I can still.
I can still function.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
You know what I mean and so that's my analogy to that
was.
You know, when my dad wasgrowing up, people said the same
thing about alcohol.
Right, oh, I've had five drinks.
I can drive, you know, andwe're way past that, and I can
show you data that says that ifyou drink five beers and I stay
up for 36 hours, we will scoreabout the same on an aptitude
(16:39):
test or one of those drunkdriving tests and things like
that.
So that's one of the thingsthat I talk about when I go to
ships and talk to the sailors ishey look, if you should have
drunk for a watch, you'd begoing to captain's mast.
The degradation of performancethat you experience from sleep
deprivation is equivalent.
About 24 hours of sleep putsyou at about a 0.08.
24 hours without sleep puts youpretty close between 0.05 and
(17:02):
0.08 blood alcohol content, andthey've repeated that in
multiple studies with multiplegroups, and so it's pretty
compelling data.
But yeah, it was like that andI get the sense.
It's kind of like that now tosome extent.
But they are getting, I think,as part of the warrior toughness
curriculum, they get a littleexposure.
But I certainly think that theacademy could benefit from a
(17:23):
little more targeted educationon what sleep, what it really
means to you and why it'simportant.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
No, absolutely.
And what are some of thoseadditional data points that
we're talking about?
About the effects of sleep adegradation, quite literally,
from a data analyticsperspective, of how it affects a
human being when you are notsleeping enough or consistently
(17:50):
Right?
Speaker 2 (17:51):
right.
So there's really two facets tothis.
One is the quantity of sleep,which is typically for most
humans seven to eight hours in a24-hour period.
Now there's some science thatsays that can be broken into two
sleep periods.
That kind of goes back to ourcaveman ancestors.
And the other is the quality ofsleep.
So am I sleeping at the sametime so that my body gets in
that cycle, and then am Isleeping in a place that's cold,
(18:13):
dark and quiet so that I getsufficient rest?
Because I'm not going to gointo sleep science in detail,
but there are phases of sleep.
There's REM sleep, there's fourphases and if you don't spend
some of your time in thosephases where your body is really
kind of shut down, you don'trecover.
So to your question there'sreally three answers to your
question.
There's the short-term effects.
(18:39):
When I was at the academy youknow, pulling all-nighter, you
study for a test and you passthe test and then you just crash
right.
And so in the short term, inthe first 24 hours to 36 hours
of sleep deprivation, you becomeimpaired, just like you were
drinking.
In many ways You'redecision-making reaction time.
So translate that to awatchstander on a ship If
there's an incoming missile orthere's a spark that's going to
be a fire and my response timeis delayed.
Now I've impacted my ability tofight the ship, my ability to
(19:01):
stand a watch, so there'simmediate impact within one day
on your ability to stand a goodwatch or respond to a casualty.
So that's kind of the mostimportant thing is your reaction
time.
When you get into asleep-deprived state for months
or weeks at a time, youaccumulate what they call sleep
debt, which basically means thatyour body sort of stabilizes
(19:22):
out at a lower level ofalertness, a lower level of
profness, a lower level ofproficiency.
Your mood starts to get bad, soyou're angry and you sort of
develop kind of a laissez-faire.
So your overall performancejust goes to.
You're just saying let's justget through the day right.
So you're not driven to do well, you're not driven to stand a
good watch.
You're trying to, like you know, stand up against a little
(19:44):
radar and kind of find a nudge.
You can fall asleep, sleep,kind of sleep standing up, and
get away with it right.
And so over the long term itdoes have.
It also has effects in anxietyand mental health, you know, for
young folks especially, likethe shipment, your body still
developing right.
So, mentally and physically,sleep is the time when your
bones develop a little moreresiliency, your muscles recover
(20:07):
from that workout.
So someone who works out anddoesn't sleep is not going to
see the same benefits as someonewho works out and does sleep,
because that's when your bodyrejuvenates.
For your mind it also sort ofcleans out the anxiety for the
day, so there's a reset.
That happens.
But then physically, whatthey're discovering more and
more and this gets into the longterm is that there are toxins
in your bloodstream, in yourbrain, that get flushed out at
(20:31):
night, because the blood vesselsopen up.
When they're more relaxed, theblood flushes things out, and so
they've actually found tiesbetween sleep deprivation and
dementia and Alzheimer's.
And so what may resonate morethan the Chipman?
There's also a decline in otherother parts of your, the
chemical parts of your body,including testosterone, which
(20:52):
are negatively affected by sleepdeprivation.
So you know, if the alcoholdoesn't get your attention,
maybe that will.
But there are, you know,multiple health reasons, and so
I kind of tell people look, ifyou want to, if you want to make
your life better with one thingget more sleep, and it'll have
multiple positive effects.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
No, I just want to double down on that Again, just
coming from my perspective as amidshipman, I think that's like
the number one thing that Ifailed with is, I think there
were times where I prioritizedcertain things, including, like
an academic, you know,assignment or whatever.
The case was.
That probably could have beenprevented by a certain level of
proactive, proactivity in likethroughout my day.
(21:31):
But there are multiple timeswhere, like I would choose to
live the life of you know,sleeping four to five hours a
night instead, and again likeover the longterm, as I'm sure
you're saying, like that haddramatic effects on me and only
just continued to create thiscycle where I wasn't as
attentive, I wasn't as focused,I wasn't able to complete
assignments as quickly as I was,just because I was so tired,
(21:53):
and it perpetually just gotworse.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
No, definitely that sleep that builds up over time
and you can't pay it back in onenight.
You know, I've tried.
You can't just sleep all day,saturday, and recover from a
week of sleep deprivation.
And then, of course, as youknow, on the weekends, what do
you do?
You go out and party and do allkinds of crazy things and don't
get sleep as well.
So you start Monday morningalready in a sleep deprived kind
of condition, quite often.
(22:17):
Now, that was one thing thatstruck me during this weekend is
you know, here we are a bunchof 60 year olds trying to keep
pace with the midshipmen, andyou know they run right, they
are just, they're just on allthe time.
And so we were sort of startingto sort of my friend sponsors
some mids and so they would comeover and we'd talk and it was.
It was kind of interesting toreconnect there, but but some
(22:38):
things haven't changed at alland one of those, I think, is
sleep deprivation, deprivation.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
Sure, and speaking of you know, like what you're
saying, it's the weekend, you'reexhausted from the week at the
Naval Academy, like goingthrough school, all the military
obligations, athletics, etcetera.
And then again a lot of peoplechoose and I think there is a
certain level of like culture atthe Academy and in the Navy of
general of like this like workhard, play hard type thing,
(23:02):
where you know people go outthey have multiple drinks.
Can you talk about the effectof alcohol on sleep, like you
have any insight on that?
And again, you know, as we'retalking about building up sleep
debt and potentially the weekendbeing your one time to kind of
recoup and start to build out ofthat a little bit, how does
alcohol play an effect into,like the quality of sleep that
you're getting?
Speaker 2 (23:22):
Great question, and you know there's kind of a myth
out there.
In fact we use a joke.
You know the beer in my hand isa sleeping pill, but the
reality is it might help youfall asleep at some level, but
then, after it wears off, thenyou wake back up and so it's
actually a negative effect.
The overall impact with alcoholon sleep is negative.
Plus, at some point you have toget rid of it, and so getting
(23:43):
up at the night to go to thebathroom multiple times, um, is
a sleep interruption and so, no,it just compounds.
Funny, when you get one ofthese I don't have mine on right
now, but the aura ring or the,or a wearable like a whoop or
something like that- you can seea night with alcohol and a
night without alcohol and youcan watch on a graph how it
affects your sleep.
So there's really no good sleepeffects from alcohol.
(24:06):
They're all bad.
Both the liquid amount and thecontent of it just degrades your
sleep pretty dramatically 100%.
Speaker 1 (24:16):
I think that piece is really interesting.
My wife is a big wear of the ofthe aura ring as well, right,
and there'll be times where youknow her, her Apple teller.
Like, did you drink alcohollast night when we had like a
glass of wine with dinner?
Right, so like what?
Literally the physiologicalresponses from that, her heart
rate variability and all thesedifferent aspects of sleep, like
it was like it's like yoursleep score.
(24:37):
Right, it's funny to like againthe gamification of this, to
like quite literally get a score.
Tell, yeah, like these thingshave real effects on your, on
your sleep.
Speaker 2 (24:46):
That that's a great point, you know.
Back to the rings.
Real quick, two quick storiesfrom shipboard.
So we put rings through thepostgraduate school on the
fingers of about 100 sailors,each on four ships and a carrier
, and two, two stories from that.
One of the junior sailors cameback, went back to the ship to
sign for more people up and shecame up and found me and thanked
me.
She said you know, this thinghas changed my life.
(25:07):
She says now I pay attention tomy sleep pattern, what I do
before I go to bed, I can seethe negative impacts of things
like alcohol.
The other one was a captain andkind of like you mentioned.
He was up in the Gulf in theRed Sea defending the ship
against Houthi missiles and itwas in combat until 4 am, went
to bed, came back up at 6.30.
(25:28):
And he picks up his phone andsays did you have a stressful
day yesterday?
And he's like I sure did.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
But then it said, well, here's how to recover from
that.
And so I think there's benefitsto like I always say we know
the oil pressure in our pump, weknow the voltage on our buses,
on the ship.
Why would we not know thefatigue level of our crew?
Speaker 1 (25:50):
as a standard thing.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
And there are some efforts out there.
I mentioned Dr Nita Shattuck.
Dr Rachel Markwald at the NavalHealth Research Center has done
a lot with.
Basically it's a computerprogram that can pull in the
data from your ring or yourwearable device and actually
plot it out for the whole crewand then feed that into the
watch bill.
So you can look at the watchbill.
It's still in the researchphase but it's kind of cool.
You can look at a watch billand say, okay, grant had the
(26:13):
mid-watch and he's supposed todrive the ship in this morning.
That's not a good choice.
Look at his sleep deprivationnumber.
So that sleep score becomes,you know, like the voltage on an
electrical bus, something youcan read off of a machine and
make a decision, you know.
So that's pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
Oh, absolutely.
And again, I think this stuffis really interesting because I
think, as you're mentioning,it's well documented at this day
and age.
You know the effect of sleepright and how much it can affect
and detriment human performancein a lot of different factors,
from the short term to long term, etc.
You've written articles in2013,.
You know the one you mentionedagain, fatigue, is the Navy's
(26:52):
black lung disease again in 2020.
And these are things that you'recontinuing to talk about today
over the course of 11 year span,right.
Why do you think it's sodifficult for these things to
change?
And, in your opinion, are thesethings even feasible with the
necessity of 24-7 watch standingright, right, like when you
mentioned that the Navy job is24-7 and there are a lot of
(27:14):
factors outside of your control?
So, again, just from an honestopinion, like are these things
feasible?
And how do we, as a fleet andan individual kind of maximize
our sleep to best be preparedfor whatever may come in a day
to day life?
Speaker 2 (27:29):
That's a very fair question and you know.
So to the question of change,one of my good friends had a had
a great quote.
He said that the change in thenation, the Navy, is
generational, and by that hemeant it takes about 10 years
from the beginning to the endfor a change to really take
effect.
And so I tell people we areseven years from 2017 into a
(27:49):
10-year change in the culture.
That was sort of I had a goodconfirmation point standing
around the campfire this weekend.
The gentleman next to me is aNavy SWO surface warfare officer
, second tour back at theacademy doing a pretty great
program where he gets a master'sin leadership and then becomes
a company officer, which Ithought was pretty cool.
But he was on two ships as adivision officer and we got to
(28:12):
talking a little bit and after awhile he's like are you that
sleep guy?
And I said yes, and he saidthank you and I said why, and he
goes because I was on.
All I know is the three on nineoff the circadian wash rotation
, but all I heard from mydepartment heads and my ex-O and
CO was how much better it isnow than it was when they were
(28:32):
out there with the five anddimes and other stuff, and so so
there has been a cult, but it'sgoing to take the guys like him
where that's all they know, whoare now starting to get towards
.
You know, they were departmentheads, now they're taking
command.
They'll have to get to majorcommand, and so it's going to
take, I think, 10 years Now.
There's there's two things thatare major impediments to this in
(28:55):
my opinion, and and one ofthose is just manning right, so
you build a model of a ship andin that model there's a manning
calculation that says hey, look,you have, you know, eight hours
of watch, eight hours of workand eight hours of sleep.
And then we built this modeland we run it and there's all
kinds of computer power behindit and everything.
(29:15):
And it gives us a number and itsays you need 300 people to run
a destroyer-ish.
And then we take that numberand even at the op-nav level, we
fund it to 90%, and so insteadof 300, we buy 270 billets, and
then, because of recruitingchallenges and retention
challenges, we can only get outof that 270, 250.
(29:37):
And then we take that ship andput it in port and people go on,
leave and take school.
I was on a destroyer the otherday mustering 207 out of 300.
Well, if I have X amount of work, it's pretty simple, math,
right.
And Y amount of people,whatever I decrease the
denominator by the hours of workper person, goes up because the
work, the numerator doesn'tchange, right?
(29:59):
Yeah, and so if you do the math, if I'm manned to 85 percent of
whatever I'm supposed to be andI'm supposed to work, so the
navy standard work week workweek is 81 hours long.
So even the baseline is 67hours of watch plus work, and
then 14 hours of training,quarters, leadership stuff,
admin, 81 hours at sea.
(30:22):
If I'm manned to 85%, do themath, I'm now at 100-hour week.
A 100-hour week is 14 hours aweek, two hours a day that I'm
not sleeping.
Now my time available for sleepgoes from eight hours to six.
So now my time available forsleep goes from eight hours to
six, and so the average sleep ofa sailor out there is about
(30:43):
five and a half hours a night,which is borderline, legally
drunk, right.
And so we know the root causeis the manning.
And then, but we don't, youknow, we sort of accept it and
that's the drum that I try tobeat all the time.
The other piece that we're kindof missing is and the GAO backs
(31:03):
this up is if you want somethingto get fixed in the Navy, some
one person has to own it,somebody has to be in charge of
it.
A DOD instruction came outthree years ago that said all
the services shall appoint asingle responsible person for
fatigue management and crewendurance.
None of the services, includingthe Navy, have done that, and
(31:23):
so, because there is no one incharge of it, there is no
coherent action plan for theentire Navy, there's no funding,
there's no policy, and so myconstant sort of drumbeat now is
(32:07):
you know the type commandershave.
All you know, at the shipboardlevel we've kind of figured out
the best we can do with whatwe've got, but it would require
a change to Navy policy toactually implement this
fleet-wide and put resourcesbehind it.
And you know that's been wentpast us here in the summertime
that I continue to raise myvoice of hey, we are standing
into danger, and that's kind ofmy mantra now is, you know it's
(32:29):
kind of the frog in a potsyndrome you keep turning the
water and the frog doesn'tnotice it.
Well, you know, the Navy kindof hired me to be the guy
watching the frog, sure, but thenavy is the frog, and so it's
tough to convince the frog.
Hey, you're boiling, you know.
We just don't know it becauseyou're used to that temperature.
But we're, you know, manningwise, we're kind of back to
(32:51):
where we were in 2017.
Op tempo wise, we're kind ofwhere we were, and so, you know,
the red flags are kind of there, um, sure, but not to be all
doom and gloom, because we havemade tremendous improvements,
don't get me wrong.
Sure, but if you don't addressthe root cause, which is simply
that there's more work to dothan there are people to do it
and people, as you know, you didit yourself you put yourself
(33:12):
last.
Right, I'm going to stay up tofix that pump.
I'm going to stand that extrawatch.
It's got to get done.
The missiles aren't going to.
I can't say, oh wait, you know,mr Houthis, can you take a?
Take a pause.
I got to catch a nap, we got totake a nap, but yeah, so I
think we've got some work to dothere.
We have a tendency, as you know, to kind of okay, we've done
that.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
We're going to put that one in the case, sure, and
you know those are like you'resaying, those are high level
solutions and there's a certainlevel of stuff going on again
like we're talking about inboardrooms at an executive level
kind of, within the Navy, theDOD, the Department of the Navy,
et cetera.
But I kind of want to focusagain there's some things that
(33:54):
are just out of our control as amidshipman or as a jail or all
these factors.
I want to tailor this lastpiece of this conversation
really directed towards, again,midshipmen and junior officers,
controlling what they cancontrol, to kind of maximize
what we have in our currentsituation.
Right, and so you know.
The first piece is just why doyou think it's so important for
(34:14):
midshipmen to prioritize theirsleep, and how do you think and
if there is any scientific dataor anything, or just personal
anecdote and opinion how thosehabits towards sleep they build
at the academy will prepare themfor life in the fleet?
Speaker 2 (34:29):
Absolutely.
Thank you for bringing me backoff the high horse there into
reality.
As a midshipman I wasn't realconcerned with whether the CNO
was going to sign out any policy.
Right, that wasn't keeping me upat night.
So you know to the midshipmanout there, this is why it
matters to you, okay?
First of all, you are at aphase in your life where your
mind and your body you may notwant to hear this, but they're
(34:50):
still developing.
That's why you run all the time.
That's why you work out.
I was not in good shape when Iwent to the Naval Academy.
I was like an, a student.
I was in the choir.
I went up to the soccer.
My high school requiredintramurals and I even wrote a
paper about how that was ruiningmy life, that you made me play
soccer.
So I was not a physicalspecimen and the Navy kind of
(35:11):
whipped me into shape there tosome extent and probably
extended my life by doing so.
But if you sleep more, then twothings will happen.
Number one your physicalperformance will increase.
You'll be able to run faster,jump higher, hit harder.
You're seeing professionalsports teams bring in a sleep
coach nowadays.
I bet you the Naval Academy.
Maybe that's what changed inthe Naval Academy football
(35:31):
program.
I better go back and see Ifthey hire a sleep coach in there
.
I'll take full credit for theunbeaten year of the season.
But you see teams when they goto away games.
They fly a day early, they geta hotel, they give the team a
regimen to follow.
And I have data.
There are studies after studiesthat have showed increases in
alertness, increases in reactiontime, increases in retention of
(35:54):
knowledge.
So if you're better slept, youwill learn better and faster.
And you want to study as hard,right.
So so an extra hour of sleep,especially those all-nighters I
talked about, you're probablybetter off.
If you've been in that classfor six months and you don't
know it, you're not going tolearn it tonight, right?
Um, yes, you sleep on it.
Your brain will find thatinformation faster, right from
(36:14):
deep yes, like that's, that's sobig.
Speaker 1 (36:16):
I'm so sorry, like I just need need to like double
down and highlight, because thatwas my thing is like I would
say in in study, and I wouldchoose to quote unquote study
for that extra hour and a halffrom like midnight to one, 30,
right, instead of just going tosleep, which honestly, in
retrospect, probably was a netnegative action on my behalf.
Speaker 2 (36:37):
It's tough to prove a negative, but I would submit
that if you and your roommatehad had similar grades and then
one of you stayed up all nightand one of you went to sleep,
the one who went to sleep isprobably going to do a little
bit better, and there's studiesthat show that.
So, physically, what's themission of the AVOCAD?
Morally, mentally andphysically, sleep will help with
two of those.
Sleep will help with two ofthose right Mentally and
(36:58):
physically, you will be a betterperformer academically on the
sports field if you get bettersleep.
The second thing is your immunesystem.
They found this during COVIDthat an extra hour of sleep
increases your immunity todisease, virus and bacterial
disease by 40%.
So if you're not sick, thenyou're not down, then you're not
missing practice, you're notmissing school days.
(37:18):
So there's immunity, yourimmune, immune system and your
general overall health.
And then, finally, you know itdoesn't matter to the machinima
that's 18 years old, but youknow you are probably going to
live to be 60 or 70.
Now will impact your quality oflife.
(37:42):
You know in your 40s, 50s and60s and you can't go back and
fix it right.
I go to bed every night with aCPAP machine and I take a
dopamine pill for my restlessleg syndrome, which I have
medical evidence that is tiedback to my watch standing in the
Navy.
Now the VA doesn't accept that,but the medical world does
Another conversation Right, so Itell every active duty service,
duty service.
Get a sleep test on active duty,because if it's not documented,
then so you know.
(38:03):
And the last piece I want tohit on is okay, what are the
things within your control?
Right, I really can't controlwhen taps is and when revelry is
.
I can't control what I have todo during the work day, but a
couple things I can do.
First of all, it's pretty quietand cool are the three things
that make me sleep better.
And so I just heard up therethis weekend that Bancroft Hall
(38:26):
is now air-conditioned, which itwasn't right when I was there.
And so up on 7-4, airconditioning meant open two
windows and hope the breeze camethrough.
But if you're sleeping in an80-degree room you're not
getting good sleep, and so theyhave done stuff.
So cool, get it down to below70.
Dark put duct tape over thelights, turn off the lights,
make it very, very dark and thenquiet Turn off the radio, tv.
(38:49):
Some people like to have whitenoise, stuff like that, but
those are very controllable,right Curtains, stuff like that.
If you're out of the NavalAcademy and you're back at your
house, go to Ikea, get someblackout curtains.
We hand out sleep improvementkits to the ships.
That's nothing more than ablindfold, earplugs and a card
(39:10):
the last piece you can do inyour daily routine, right?
So when you wake up in themorning, if you need to have a
stimulant, one cup of coffee isokay.
Coffee in the evenings or theafternoon is not good.
It takes a long time to wearout.
So, consciously, work on yourdaily routine, exercise, get
good nutrition and then, whenyou get ready to go to sleep,
make that a transition process.
So change into whatever you'regoing to wear to bed.
(39:33):
Do some stretching exercises,do yoga, listen to music, take a
walk, do something to draw aline between that workday and
your body transitioning to sleep, and that takes about a half an
hour.
So you have to plan your dayfor that sleep transition and
that wake up transition.
There's a thing you know back tomy command tour you get woken
up as a captain all the time andthere's a thing called sleep
(39:54):
inertia, which is, if you wakeup from a deep sleep, there's
about a 20 minute period whereyour mind hasn't quite caught up
to.
You think it has, becauseyou're talking and making
decisions, but you're not reallyclicking on all cylinders, and
so you know you don't want todeep sleep until 6 am and then
boom, you're off and running forthe day.
You kind of have to do a littlebit to spool up, but really
(40:16):
spooling down is the secret, Ithink, and that's where I've
learned a lot about you know putthe phone away, turn off the TV
set, turn off the distractions,do something to sort of focus
your mind, let your body sort oftransition into the sleep mode
and then focus on a goodsleeping environment.
And then the last thing I findthat you know, the more senior
you are, the more likely you're,the stuff in your head is going
to be what keeps you awake.
(40:37):
Oh, I have this brief tomorrow.
I've got a test tomorrow.
I don't have it here handy.
I have a little whiteboard thatI bought at Dollar Tree.
I'll typically sit there about8 o'clock, 9 o'clock at night
and say, okay, what do I have tonot forget?
Tomorrow?
It might be where's my car keys?
Where's my thing?
You have a routine.
But then also I need to emailthis particular brief in.
(40:57):
I have to attend this event,and so I'll jot that stuff down
so that when I wake up in themorning, there it is, I don't
have to have it in my head allnight.
So those are a few things thatI recommend that you can control
well within your own sphere.
Speaker 1 (41:12):
Yeah, 100% I love it.
It's a very nuke move.
I'm a big whiteboard guy Tothis day.
I'm a big whiteboard guy Tothis day.
I'm a big whiteboard guy.
I absolutely love it.
I can hardly have aconversation without one, really
.
Speaker 2 (41:30):
One last thing I wanted to hit on before we wrap
up, grant, is there's a piece ofthis that you hit on early on.
I can give you all the time inthe world to sleep and I can
give you a cold, dark, quietenvironment.
At some point it's on you right.
There's a personalresponsibility piece to this I
think we miss out on sometimesand I've heard that as an excuse
not to implement these policies.
(41:50):
Well, if we give them time,they'll just play video games or
do other stupid stuff and notsleep.
And that may be true to someextent.
I will tell you, I've been onships eight, 10 times since I
got this job.
What do I see?
I see sailors working, standingwatch and sleeping.
They are so tired, even thoughwe have like the worst
mattresses.
It was kind of funny.
(42:11):
One of my sailors spent thenight in jail in Newport News
after a traffic.
He got a reckless drivingticket and they let him serve
his sentence on Friday andSaturday nights for like a month
so he could work right, but hemissed a duty day.
So he was heading to XOI formissing a duty day and they
asked him well, where were you?
He goes.
Well, I was in jail, okay.
So that led down another path,because he hadn't told us that.
(42:33):
But, during the conversation.
But he was a good kid, he justgot caught.
It was kind of funny becauseinitially the command was kind
of spooling up to hammer thisguy and then, literally between
XOI and Captain's Mass, thecaptain got a ticket for
reckless driving in hisneighborhood, for going 45 in a
25 zone, which is 20 miles abovethe limit, and suddenly it
didn't seem so bad.
But anyway, this kid said thisyoung sailor.
(42:53):
He said hey, ractor R, themattresses in the jail were much
better than the ones we have onthe ship.
Can I get one of those?
And so you know, the problem isyou're so tired on the ship
that it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
But back to that point ofpersonal responsibility is you
know, I sort of when I give mylittle talk on the ship, I talk
about the alcohol correlationand I ask them, I say, do you
(43:17):
believe me?
And they all say oh, yes, yes,yes.
And then we do a little skitwhere I call up a watch stander
to take the watch and the firstone I say look, you drank kind
of like you and I talked about.
You drank six beers and I'vestayed up for 36 hours, go take
the watch.
And so the first guy comes upand says off the deck, I'm ready
to take the watch.
I've had five beers in the last12 hours.
And of course the off the deckis like no, you know, get out of
(43:38):
here.
The second guy comes up andsays, sir, I had no sleep in the
last 36 hours and my averagetime to say no for the drunk
watch standard is like onesecond.
My average time to get to knowfor the tired watch standard is
like 15 seconds, because they'llstart a conversation Well, why
were you up and did you reallynot sleep?
And then they'll look to me forlike, what do I do?
And you know you do what youwould do in real life.
(44:00):
And so they say they believeyou, but when it comes to
actually implementing it, and soyou wouldn't show up drunk for
watch.
So it's on you to not show uptired.
And I think that's where I thinkthis message would resonate
with Mitch Schimman, because oneof the things you kind of beat
into your head during four yearsis that that you are
(44:20):
responsible.
You know, from the honor codeto the whatever, you're
responsible for your behavior.
And so there's an opportunitythere, I think you know.
Back to my, if I was, you know,king for a day or had 30
minutes with the commandant, Iwould say you know you want to
improve the quality of servicefor your midshipmen and improve
their performance.
Do two things implement a sleepeducation program half an hour,
(44:42):
45-minute session and buy aurarings or wearables.
Give them a uniform allowance.
Say, go buy yourself one rightWhoop aura.
I don't want to, you know, butyou know, get something so you
can monitor your own performance.
And I think you would see a netincrease in the performance of
the brigade.
Speaker 1 (45:01):
No, I think that's a really cool factor Because, like
you say, I think it's reallyeasy a lot of times for us as
humans, right, just to kind ofdisassociate things not going
well and not performing andblame it on other things, right.
It's like oh yeah, I got enoughsleep, I feel fine, blah, blah,
blah.
Right, it was kind of the thingthat you're talking about the
(45:22):
culture of like oh I've hadthree beers, I feel fine.
Right, like there's no problem.
Right, and I think you knowalmost that idea of having quite
literally a physiologicalmetric and analyzer.
Right, that's telling youstraight up, based on data like
this is how your body's beenaffected by you not sleeping.
Right, it's hitting you in theface, right Like there's.
There's no ignoring it at thatpoint, right, I think that's
really interesting because, likewe're saying a lot of times, in
(45:45):
today's day and age and I'm Istill consider myself a young
person, you know, there are alot of things that make me feel
older.
Now, sure, it's like there area lot of distractions, right,
like you finally get to thepoint where you're ready to go
to bed but now are out therethat can distract you from what
(46:05):
should be the prioritization ofsleep.
Speaker 2 (46:08):
That's exactly right, yeah, and so I think that's
really interesting.
That phone has has lights.
You know, the blue light fromthe phone actually suppresses
your melatonin production.
So there's a double whammy.
Because I tell the youngsailors I said first of all the
light is bad, or the tv, or the,or the thing or the phone.
The other thing is something inthat phone is going to get onto
your skin and you're going tobe thinking about that when you
(46:29):
should be sleeping.
Somebody, you know, hey, hedidn't like that poster, I
didn't get enough, I didn't geta thumbs up from that guy, you
know.
And so now you're fixated onthat.
You're not focused on it.
So I like the way you said itis.
Hey, those are all distractors,we call them.
They just sort of suck the lifeout of your sleep plan.
Before you know it, it'smidnight or 1 am and now you
can't get six hours or sevenhours because you're still up.
Speaker 1 (46:52):
Yeah, 100%, 100%.
And I think, like you mentioned,there's a personal
responsibility.
But when you get out to thefleet right, this is why I talk
about the Academy a lot about itbeing a great opportunity to
build these habits before youget out there, because when
you're at the academy, it'sreally just you you know what I
mean.
Like you're only your decisionsaffect you when you get out to
the fleet and you haven't, youknow, built the habits to
establish and prioritize yoursleep.
(47:13):
Now you're showing up tired toin front of your division and
kind of we're talking aboutestablishing that culture that,
like, sleep is not important,right, or all these different
things.
Or you're putting yourself in aspot where you're not ready to
help your sailors and whateverlife situations they have going
on, right, there are a lot of alot of factors and, when it
comes down to it, like buildingthose habits and getting in a
(47:36):
way of like prioritizing sleep.
So that way, you know, we'retalking about a lot of this
power of presence Well, you needto be present mentally too,
like, you need to be able to bethere and be attentive and be
focused, be able to help thepeople who are there, who are
your sailors.
Speaker 2 (47:50):
Yeah, now that's a great point.
Back to the command tour.
When I was going through thepipeline, an admiral came up to
talk to us at our graduation.
I wish I could find him now.
I can't remember.
He was the random admiralpassing through and they grabbed
him for a speech.
But he said your whole lifeyou've heard ship, ship, mate,
self.
Right, that's the triangle.
When you get to a leadershipposition, you have to flip that.
(48:10):
And you could hear the harumphsin the room.
He said because here's the dealIf you let yourself go
physically, mentally, you don'twork out, you don't eat right,
you don't sleep, you're going tofind yourself on watch or in a
decision point where you are thedecision maker and to some
extent, the life and death ofyour crew could depend on that
decision you have to make rightnow, with no warning and no
preparation.
And so you go into that momentwith whatever you got in the
(48:32):
tank and if you fail, then youlose the ship and you lose the
crew.
And so you know you have tostart with yourself and lay that
foundation of good nutrition,exercise and sleep and you'll be
a better midshipman, you'll bea better warfighter, you'll be a
better midshipman, you'll be abetter warfighter, you'll be a
better watchstander and you'lllive longer and have a healthier
life, you know.
So, and no pills or medicationsneeded.
(48:54):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (48:54):
So, yeah, 100%.
I am going to take this quickplug.
If you've been listening tothis episode, you're a
midshipman or you're even aparent of a midshipman and
you're like, how do they getthis help when it comes to sleep
?
One thing that I will say aboutthe Academy that they've
started to do really well is theMidshipman Development Center,
and it literally started to getrecognized even in the Princeton
Review as like the number onecollege counseling services
(49:18):
across the country, which isincredible.
But they do more than just youknow what we would consider like
quote unquote therapy.
They have people on staff forsports performance, they have
people on staff for sportsperformance, they have people on
staff for sleep, they havepeople on staff for nutrition
right, Like, there's a lot ofdifferent aspects to really in
in do this, and so you knowwe're going to, we're going to
have an episode coming out withthe, you know, the director of
(49:39):
the midshipman developmentcenter to talk all about the
resources that they provide.
But, like, I would encourageeveryone who is listening there
to take advantage of thoseservices that are being provided
by the Academy.
Again, it requires proactivityon your part to go and like take
advantage of those things, butthey exist, but they exist right
(49:59):
.
And so again, I just you knowfrom.
It is always funny like it's abunch of the people who've
already been there beforetalking about their experience
back, but I wish I would haveprioritized my sleep
significantly better as amidshipman and even as a junior
officer in the fleet.
And so take advantage of thoseresources, Take advantage of
those resources.
Speaker 2 (50:18):
That's great.
I didn't know that was there.
I'd love to connect with themand learn what they're doing, so
that's awesome.
Speaker 1 (50:24):
Offline I got you you make, so that's awesome.
Yeah, I got you.
Speaker 2 (50:26):
That's that's you make a good point.
I think that's that's.
You talked about change, right,and I think one of the things
that has changed and I see thisacross the force is there is a
greater emphasis on you as anindividual, where the Navy
invests whether it's in trainingor in therapy or in whatever to
make you a better person, andthe idea that that will make you
a better sailor, better officer, better warfighter.
(50:47):
And so I have heard that comeacross in many ways.
Admiral Cahill, who was ourboss when we were looking at
these rings for the sailors, hegoes look, even if we don't get
any data, we are telling thesailors I care about you, I care
about you enough to give yousomething to make your life
better.
And that wasn't the way of theworld 30 years ago and it was
(51:10):
sort of my way or the highway.
My life sucks, so yours shouldtoo, and now it's more.
Hey, my life sucked.
But why did it suck?
And well, partly because ofdecisions that I made, but
partly because of things thatweren't in place like that.
That Midshipman DevelopmentCenter is fantastic.
That's great to hear.
So I'll tell you just to mylast thought.
(51:32):
You'll experience this yourselfDriving across that bridge and
seeing Annapolis, even 40 yearslater, you still get a little
pit in your stomach of ah, hereit comes, I got to go back.
What a beautiful, fantasticplace, I mean it's just
overwhelming.
To walk the ground, see how farthey've come, chat with the
midshipmen I mean anybody whoyou know.
(51:53):
I'm pretty active on LinkedIn.
A lot of my generation sort ofis like oh, senators, these days
they don't care, they don'twant to work hard.
You know, go talk to somemidshipmen, go walk the academy
grounds.
I mean, if you don't walk awayfrom there with a spirit of
enthusiasm, I'm always gettingchoked up because it was just
like it was overwhelming.
It really was, and so thank youfor what you're doing to kind
(52:15):
of.
You know, I could have a wholemountain of the stuff I wish I
had known when I was 18.
And of course nobody would lookat it.
But I wouldn't have when I was18.
But golly the advances thatthat place has made.
I had to laugh at one sign.
It said that no drone zone no asign on the wall.
It's like you know that'll,that'll fend off the drones
flying at eight feet.
(52:35):
You know um, but uh, um, butanyway.
No, it was uh.
It was just eye-watering totalk to those mids and and see
their enthusiasm and to find acouple service warfare officers
who were very positive about theSWO community, which wasn't
always the case when I was theretoo.
But thanks for what you'redoing.
This is a great service to theAcademy and I know they
(52:56):
appreciate it and I hope theMIDS will look at this.
And I encourage anyonelistening to connect with me on
LinkedIn and I will fill yourinbox with sleep-related stories
and ideas.
But it really is.
If there's one thing you can doto make your life better, get
an extra hour of sleep.
That's kind of my takeaway forthis Love it.
Speaker 1 (53:17):
Well, john, thank you so much for taking the time and
talking to us about this topic.
I assume you'll probably beback on on multiple occasions to
talk about a variety ofdifferent topics, but going into
(53:43):
January and the dark ages ingeneral, there are going to be a
lot of topics around amidshipman how you saw it in the
fleet, and your current andongoing initiatives to try and
improve that in aggregate foreveryone in the Navy, and so I
appreciate it very much.
Thanks for joining us today andjust a big, a big thank you.
Thank you All right To theAcademy Insider audience.
(54:05):
If you have any questions, feelfree to reach out.
Otherwise, I do recommend Ifollow Dr John Cordell here on
LinkedIn big time.
Go follow him there.
Great information and a lot of,again, just great articles and
information regarding sleep andother kind of initiatives to
just make sure all sailors arebeing cared for, loved and
(54:26):
valued across the fleet, and soI love every bit of this.
Thank you so much and reach outwith any questions.
Have a good day, thanks.
Thank you so much for listeningto this episode of the Academy
Insider Podcast.
I really hope you liked it,enjoyed it and learned something
during this time.
If you did, please feel free tolike and subscribe or leave a
(54:46):
comment about the episode.
We really appreciate to hearyour feedback about everything
and continue to make AcademyInsider an amazing service that
guides, serves and supportsmidshipmen, future midshipmen
and their families.
Thank you.
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