Jemma King

Do you ever regret going to bed late at night or eating just before sleeping? Do you ever wonder how these small, unhelpful habits can have such a powerful effect?
Welcome to Flow Unleashed. I'm Dr. Cameron Norsworthy, scientist and high performance coach to multiple world champions. In this show, we unpack key insights on specific topics so that you are kept up to date with the latest science and practice of human performance.
In [00:01:00] our quest for small, marginal gains, we often overlook the basics of human performance. Yet these fundamentals like proper sleep, nutrition, and stress management are the bedrock of our ability to excel. Without them, our physiological systems can't function optimally. Leaving little room for psychological excellence to take center stage, take sleep, for example.
Sleep is a vital biological process, it essential for life. It's during sleep that the body engages in critical functions such as physical recovery, brain development, cardiac health, metabolic balance, and memory consolidation. Sleep even plays a vital role in enhancing mood and learning. Today's guest is Dr.
Gemma King. A leading expert in stress, sleep, and recovery with a [00:02:00] PhD in human behavior. As a fellow at the UQ School of Psychology, Dr. King conducts groundbreaking research on how psychophysiological factors influence cognitive and behavioral performance. Her work spans key areas like stress recovery protocols, sleep optimization, biometrics, and emotional intelligence.
Dr. King has served as a specialist, external advisor to McKinsey, Inco, and consulted for elite organizations, including the Australian Defense Force, the Center for Australian Army Lead Leadership, the Australian Institute of Sport, and the Australian Olympic Swim team. Among her many achievements, she developed a pre-deployment performance optimization program for Special Operations Command, which has demonstrated measurable improvements in behavioral and performance outcomes.
In this episode we'll explore how mastering the basics, [00:03:00] especially sleep and stress management, can unlock human potential and optimize performance across every domain of life. Let's dive in. Flow. Unleashed, unleashed. Welcome to the show, Gemma.
Jemma: Thank you for having me.
Cameron: My pleasure. Delighted to have you on the show.
Heard you speak at South and Southwest and you seem to have a, a great curiosity for human behavior and human performance, which I admire. How did that formulate for you?
Jemma: Um, it actually started when I was a kid. I had a, a kind of a mac carb fascination for animals actually, and I wanted to be a scientist and so I used to dissect worms, bugs.
Small animals. And then that went on to humans. And I have a very large extended family. And like in all families, you know, there was some percentage of them that suffered from mental health disruption. And so I was super fascinated [00:04:00] about why does this happen and where does it come from, and what can you do to help these people?
My family members, but also my mother, she, um, used to teach socially and emotionally challenged children. And she had a really interesting perspective on people and people who were struggling. She always used to say, look at it from their perspective, what's happened to them in their life, why they like this, rather than teaching me to be reactive.
And so I think that she really instilled a great fascination into the concept of human behavior and why humans like the way they are. And what can you do to be more, I suppose, compassionate understanding. And then, and what can you do to help people.
Cameron: Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's amazing when something so close to home touches us, how fascinated we can become with it.
Jemma: Yeah. I think everybody has, is touched by some type of mental health disruption. I think it's becoming even more prolific, um, endemic in [00:05:00] society. Uh, of course it's, it's more likely to be spoken about. But also I think there are a lot of factors in modern society that contribute to the, I suppose, inability of people to regulate their, their emotions, deal with sleep, and have good interpersonal dynamics.
Cameron: Mm. Yeah. It's become somewhat normalized. You know, I think the stress that we experience on a day-to-day basis and, and what's acceptable when I spend a lot of my time working with people to help 'em towards optimal experiences. And, but yet it seems like most of the population are actually very satisfied just to reach restoration.
Right. Or reach, reach something that isn't survival.
Jemma: Yeah. I think there's so much disinformation out there as well. I think a lot of people get overwhelmed and they think, I can't do all of this. Uh, and some of it doesn't work 'cause it's not based on good science. And so they, they feel quite disenfranchised or marginalized and they'll [00:06:00] say, well, I can't do it, so I'm doing none of it.
And um, and then people will just go, yeah, there's those wellness bros over there, but you know, I'm, I'm over here in reality. So I think there's becoming like, almost like a two-tiered society. Those that can afford to and have access to the education, have time, resources to help themselves and those that are just really struggling to get by or, or are just uneducated.
I think the more that I know and the more that I study, the more I realize we don't know. And life is really complex and there's so many contributing factors just who go that go into how. The quality of a human's life. And this is my deep fascination, and this is what I spend all my time really deeply, um, involved in reading and researching, is how do you make all of these factors known to the general population?
And then what are the things you can [00:07:00] do to change those factors or improve those factors or enhance your life in not in a, in, not in a less suppose neurotic way where you become obsessed and all you do is think about yourself and you know how you're feeling and what you're doing, what, what you're putting into your mouth or what you're doing to your body, but more of a like, okay, I've got this kind of formulaic approach to life and, and, and mental health and, and physical health.
Is that not at any one moment will you have all the levers or all the factors on green, but it's just understanding that sometimes. Your sleep's going to be disrupted. You're gonna be working really hard, or you're not gonna be eating, or you're gonna be drinking alcohol. So what other levers can I push up to compensate for those negative things that I'm doing?
So overall, if you average it out, you're, you're still in a positive place rather than, oh, I can't, you know, I'm not sleeping or will I like exercise or I'll just eat junk food 'cause I'm, you know, hungry and then I'll just probably throw in some alcohol because I can't sleep. Instead of [00:08:00] doing that, you kind of know how to pull those levers.
That's what I'm passionate about.
Cameron: Most people listening to this podcast will be having high aspirations for life. You know, busy doing things, trying to achieve things, and stress is a, uh, is is pretty much an inevitability of, of that, you know, and a lot of it good stress. But what have you learned? Let's just dive into sleep.
First of all, what have you learned about the importance of sleep in order to. Have the resilience to that stress.
Jemma: Yeah. Sleep. I've got a funny relationship to sleep. If you ask my mother as a child, I never slept. It needs to drive her completely insane. And I just, you know, I, throughout my life I just thought there was so many fascinating, interesting things to do other than sleep.
I found it really boring and a complete waste of time. And so it wasn't until fairly recently when I, you know, I'm a stress reacher researcher, primarily from the University of [00:09:00] Queensland School of Psychology. But, and so I looked at all, you know, the factors of stress, looked at cortisol and um, you know, all of the chemicals that are related to, to stress and all the consequences of stress.
And I kept seeing stuff in the data and I kept thinking, wow, this is really interesting. One of the greatest predictors of stress is sleep deprivation. And I started to realize that I think that probably a lot of mental health disruption is sleep. Deprivation, undiagnosed. There's not a system in your body that isn't affected negatively by lack of sleep.
It is one of the most essential foundational pillars of mental and physical health that I know of. It's the, it's the only easily accessible, free legal performance enhancing activity that you can do and you don't need anything. It is incredibly important. And so now I'm really strict about sleep. [00:10:00] I mean, there are times where I'm traveling and I get jet lagged or you know, and I do have a great social life, so there are times that I'll stay up, but generally I'm pretty strict about making sure that my sleep consistency is tight.
So I'm going to bed within a 20 minute window, waking up at the same time, no matter how late I go to sleep, I'll always wake up probably 5 36 and. Um, and I've just realized that there are so many factors that we are doing throughout the day before bed that are unwittingly damaging the quality duration of our sleep.
And so I've kind of then merged into sleep research. I'm doing lots on sleep research and, uh, I think that, you know, when people are not feeling particularly like they're coping or they feel like overwhelmed or they're having some kind of interpersonal issues or issues with their diets or ability to [00:11:00] exercise, the very first thing I ask is how to sleep.
And if you don't get that right, you're really kind of in a rowboat with a big hole trying to bail out water while water just coming in. Like you, you have to fix your sleep first. And I find that when people do that, they go, oh my God, I thought it was all these other things. But it's actually my sleep.
And there's a lot of reasons why from a, you know, biochemical perspective why sleep is so important. And so, uh, what I think is really important is the necessity to measure your sleep. I think that a lot of us may think that we are sleeping well, but when you look at people's data, they're probably not getting into deep, slow wave sleep or there's some disruption in some part of their sleep architecture.
Or on the other hand, they're people who catastrophize and say, I didn't sleep at all. I had terrible sleep. And then when [00:12:00] you look at their data, they actually did sleep quite well. It's just maybe they'll have been woken up in the wrong way. So they feel that their sleep wasn't, wasn't satisfying. So I think if you wanna change something, you wanna understand it.
It's really important to measure it. So a big proponent of the whoop device, I've been using that since. Um. 2017. In fact, my partner was the first whoop wearer in Australia. Um, not financially associated with him. I just use, use it for all my research. And the reason being, it's one of the most well validated, reliable, it's got really solid data.
And for my research, particularly well was researching with the special forces and with people in sport, having something on your wrist that doesn't, you know, flash in your face and it's, it, it doesn't have a, a, a face that's distracting. It's not a ring so you don't get degloved, um, when you're doing dangerous activities.
So I've just found it being incredibly helpful [00:13:00] for all of my research. Having, you know, third party validated, um, objective data is really important.
Cameron: Yeah. And let's dive into the. The science, if you may, you mentioned there's a few sort of biomarkers of, or from a, like a psychophysiological perspective or neuros psychophysiological perspective, why is that deep REM so important?
Jemma: Well, if you look at the sleep architecture, so you've got four stages really of sleep, from light going down to deep, slow wave sleep, and then you come back up and get the rem and then your sleep cycle's about 90 minutes. And you don't just go down to sleep and then stay down that you do this cycling.
From an evolutionary perspective, it was probably a safety thing that you would go down to sleep, then come up and make sure that you were safe and then you go back down and each part of your sleep cycle has very important, uh, functions. And so when you go [00:14:00] down into deep, slow wave sleep, that's the generally the, the most physiologically replenishing part of your sleep.
It's involved in the glymphatic cleaning of your, of your brain. It's where you flush out all the metabolic byproducts of thinking called adenosine. It is where all of your blood sugar regulating hormones get secreted your, a lot of your sex hormones. A um, it's adrenal repair. So it's really like a lot of physiological replenishment.
But then when you go back up to rem sleep, rapid eye movement, that is the more what we call the dfr or the part of your sleep where you are making sense of your emotional part of your day, your memories, your consolidating memories. It's also that part of your sleep has a great forgetting function. So there's a lot of stuff that happens throughout our day that we would not necessarily, you know, need to remember.
And so you can, you need to shave that off. So it's that part of the sleep is when you say you look at [00:15:00] something and you say, do I keep it? Delete it. And, and which box in your brain do you put it into? And we know that if you miss your REM sleep you can get very quite anxious. And that's why alcohol is so bad for anxiety and sleep is because it disrupts the REM part of your, your sleep architecture.
And so what we find is that the most deep slow wave sleep actually happens in the hours before midnight. So there's a lot of people, particularly the younger generation, they are staying up really late, you know, 12 1 2 in the morning. They might get a good solid eight hours sleep, sleep in and waking up feeling a little, you know, anxious a little out of sorts.
And it's because even though they're getting eight hours sleep, they're not actually getting that good replenishing brain cleaning part of the sleep. It's very hard for your body to then engage in that type of sleep post midnight. And I think the whole concept of night hours owl and early birds is actually [00:16:00] being debunked.
What we see is when humans are. Out camping, they don't have access to artificial lighting. They will typically go go into a sleep cycle where they sort of sleep when the sun goes down or shortly after the sun and sleep through. So, I mean, for the better part of, you know, 250,000 years, humans have lived without electric lights.
And so we've adapted to it, but our deep evolutionary circadian rhythms are really not designed to be up late at night and sleeping through the ja through the day.
Cameron: And how important is that brain waste? I know when I get bad sleep, I wake up in the morning and there's a bit of fog and it's almost like a very subtle hangover where I feel like I, I need to have a cold shower and shake myself up.
Reset. And I, I imagine I'm creating brain waste right throughout the day and the evening. And if I'm [00:17:00] not cleaning that out through that emphatic system, then that's gonna consolidate and stick. And eventually, if I use a plumbing analogy, clog up the pipes. And I know some is linking it heavy with Alzheimer's disease and so forth.
What, what are the sort of the consequences with when we don't take that clearing of our brain waste? Seriously?
Jemma: Yeah, you're dead, right? Sleep disruption's being correlated with dementia, Alzheimer's. So what happens is throughout our day, we're always thinking, using our brain, using energy. And inside the brain there is a little molecular, uh, explosion that happens.
So it's adenosine tri phosphate, which sort of blows up the phosphate bond comes off, and that's what actually creates the energy that your brain will use. And the byproduct of that explosion in your head is. Adenosine. So this is really mother nature's dimmer switch. So it's what builds up and it's pretty much, uh, [00:18:00] sending a, a signal to us that okay, you need to, you know, slow down, go to sleep because it cognitively slows you down.
Your motor skills slow down. And we all know that feeling, you know, of tiredness. It is a chemical, um, reaction in your brain that's making you feel tired. And so what happens is that we know that this, uh, adenosine can give you an, an impending sense of doom. Do you know when you're tired? Each, you're quite overwhelmed.
Everything feels a lot harder. It's had this cumulative effect like, oh my God, I can't cope. Now what happens is we know this is partially because of adenosine, because adenosine is also used as a heart medication for tachycardia. And when the doctors have to administer this, uh, drug, they have to hold the patient's hand and say, don't worry, you're not going to diets.
It's just the adenosine and. There's only one way to get rid of this denine. It is blocked by caffeine. So caffeine is an adenosine receptor antagonist. So [00:19:00] caffeine will sit on the receptors and we know that like it'll only work for up to three days. So if you're, if you are really sleep deprived and you're drinking coffee, you actually don't know how tired you are and, and how silly your responses are.
And so what happens is people will wake up in the morning and humans have got this like desire to be logical and make sense of the, of their world and the way they're thinking. And so if you wake up and you feel crap, you kind of wanna post rationalize and say, it must be my boss, my job, my wife, my dog, my where I live.
And you, you, you want to attach that terrible feeling to something when actually you may not have had deep, slow wave sleep because that is the only way that. Your brain gets sort of like brainwashed or GED out from that adenosine. And so I think that this is why it's so critical to, to understand your sleep, understand are you [00:20:00] getting into deep slow of sleep?
But because if you are not, you'll actually feel crazy, insane, stressed out. You'll, you'll think it's everything else in your life, but it actually is the fact or could be the fact that you haven't just cleaned your brain out. And so we know that during deep, slow wave sleep, you know, there's certain, uh, breath rate that happens.
And this is a pulsitile cerebral spinal fluid pressure from your breath is, is helps create this glymphatic cleaning process where it's kind of like it has this pulsation and, um, the more that you get sort tangles built up in your, um, brain, the, the harder it is to clean. And so I, I believe it becomes this kind of, yeah, as you use that plumbing analogy.
You know, more clogged up and even harder to, uh, clean out. And so, yeah, you just really have to protect that, that deep, slow wave sleep part of your brain. And I often find that's when napping can be so good, because if you can have a 90 [00:21:00] minute nap during the day, you can have a, a, a brain wash and wake up feeling quite replenished and refreshed.
But there, I mean, there are rules around napping. Uh, you really shouldn't be napping after one unless you're sick or, or you're a toddler because it will push out your sleep pressure later that night and you, you know, sort of pushes the, you know, kicks the, the can down the, down the road. So, yeah, I really, I really am a strong proponent if you wake up and get a, don't feel quite good, have a cold shower.
In fact, I'll, I'll tell you some more about my research. I've just finished with Wim Hof have, yeah, a cold shower. And if you can, you're feeling a bit sort of stale, have a nap. 20, um, don't go like, you can go down to 20 minutes. But don't go into 30, 40 minutes or you go the full 90 minutes because if you get woken up, um, you know, 30, 40 minutes into a nap, you get this thing called sleep inertia where you are actually down in that deep slow wave part of your sleep and then you wake [00:22:00] up feeling terrible.
I think we've all had that feeling where we've working, woken up feeling intensely groggy and just out of sorts. And it can last for up to three hours. So you've gotta be really careful with your naps. You can rule your day and I think we've all heard of that, you know, nap espresso where you take a shot of caffeine by the time the caffeine hits your bloodstream, it's 20 minutes.
It'll wake you up. I've, I've met, mucked it up and haven't got it right 'cause it's taking me so long to go to sleep. So yeah, be careful around napping.
Cameron: To double click on that, what's the architecture there? So the benefits from a 20 minute nap. Compared to the benefits of a 90 minute gap,
Jemma: you can even have 10 minute nap tip.
10 minute naps have been shown to be, um, very replenishing. So 10 to 20 minute nap. So you're not actually getting into the rem part of the sleep in the, but, but you are just getting into the alpha brainwaves and people find that it just gives you a reset, but it doesn't do the, do the full brain cleaning, the [00:23:00] 90 minutes where you go right down into deep, slow wave sleep and back up again.
That's where you'll, you'll have that glymphatic cleaning process.
Cameron: And you also, is there an EREM?
Jemma: Yeah. You have the rem part of the sleep as well. So then you are shaving off those unwanted memories or, and you're doing the, the filing of the, of the emotional reasoning as well.
Cameron: So what is that cycle then?
It sounds pretty predictable in terms of when you go to slow wave and REM.
Jemma: Mm-hmm. Some people are slightly differ, but it goes down to 20 minutes. You're done 30, 40 minutes. How much you rem or slow wave sleep really does depend on a huge amount of factors. And so 50% of your sleep architecture should be REM and slow wave sleep, and that will be predicated on what you've done that day.
So if you've had a, a much more physiologically demanding, uh, physical day, you might have slightly more slow wave sleep. But if you've had a much more cognitively demanding day, you might have slightly more REM sleep. So that's a sort of a [00:24:00] ratio. So 50% of your sleep architecture should be built up of either, um, REM or slopes.
And the rest of the sleep architecture would be light sleep, um, slightly weight going down. And so, yeah. And so each sleep cycle's 90 minutes. And you, and as I said before, if you are sleeping, you wanna get a good two chunks of those before midnight.
Cameron: Interesting and really helpful when I'm, it feels like when I'm coaching.
High achievers who are more at the pointy end of their professions, they seem to get worse sleep than everyone else. So, and there's this sort of, I'll sleep when I'm retired. I don't have time for sleep attitude.
Jemma: That's insane. Like, you know, like, yeah. I think that the athletes that I'm working with now, and I like the special forces of soldiers and anyone who's in the high stress, no foul environment where they have to perform over time.
They're all now starting to realize that sleep is as the greatest performance enhancing activity you [00:25:00] can engage in. And they protect it vehemently. And I think that when you look at, um, sporting teams, elite athletes, what is the greatest number one predictor of success when you look over, over the data, over time, over all sports?
Do you know what that that one factor is?
Cameron: Well, I wanna say sleep now.
Jemma: Injury prevention. So if you look at. The greatest sportsmen and women, the greatest teams who have, you know, done the best things makes sense for a, a for a long time. It is their ability to come back from injury fast, uh, or their ability to avoid injury.
Now, what is the one of the greatest predictors of injury? Highly correlated? Do, do you know this
Cameron: Well, I wanna say sleep again.
Jemma: Yeah. So, fifties sleep, sleep status. Yeah. So we've done a whole lot of study with collegiate athletes looking at, I can't remember the exact stats, [00:26:00] but those athletes that slept less had much more incidents of injury where those that slept nine hours had a lower incidence of injury, and so therefore they were available to play.
So that's a very, very simple algorithm. If you want to perform high, a high level over time. You have to avoid injury. And then to avoid injury, you have to sleep because it makes sense that if you are not replenishing your bone, blood muscle fibers regularly, uh, and to the best of your ability on a regular basis every night.
So the integrity of your muscles or the bones or, or your ligaments are suboptimal. And that is a preventable thing because if you are sleepy every night you are doing, you're engaging in repair and rejuvenation, you are building growth hormones or your growth hormone. 85% of it, I think is produced in slow wave sleep.
So it's a very, very simple formula to perform. [00:27:00] You must sleep. And there are a few people on this planet that have the deck two gene, which means they only have to sleep four. Max five hours a night. Now they're very, very lucky. It's a genetic roll of the dice, genetic lotto. And what we see, there's an overrepresentation of people who are CEOs, politicians, um, fighter pilots, and people in high octane environments, entrepreneurs that have got this gene because they are able to, you know, stay awake, read, perform what everyone else needs, sleep, and they have no physiological decrements from it.
So, yeah, it's, I think it's about one in a hundred thousand people. You can't test for it, but if you have, uh, family members who didn't sleep very much, you, they've probably got that gene, you've probably got it too. But most of us, we on average have to sleep at least [00:28:00] 7.5 hours. Athletes, of course, nine. But if you're a normal human, you'll sleeping nine to 10 hours over 10 hours.
There's something wrong with you. Um, and yeah, it, it is, it is correlated with a couple of, you know, neurological disorders, so it's probably not a good idea or depression. Some people will medicate with sleep to deal with depression, but most people, seven and a half hours. And, um, yeah, I mean it's, it's super important because when humans are asleep, they're vulnerable to predators.
So for humans to go and do something that makes them vulnerable for that long, every day, it's critical. It's incredibly important. And so I, I make sure I really, really protect it. And just recently, I was given a mattress cover called Eight Sleep. And have you heard of the eight sleep?
Cameron: I have, yeah. I haven't actually got one, but it's on my, um.
Uh, Christmas list. Oh, of course I saw, [00:29:00] yeah,
Jemma: south by Southwest. I was talking about of course, that like, I mean, they don't pay me or anything to, to say this at all, but oh my God, that thing is insanely good because it just regulates your temperature. Like our bodies are so susceptible to temper temperature fluctuations impacting our sleep.
The reason being, we need to drop our core body temperature by two degrees to get into deep, slow wave sleep. And so if you're in a hot room or you've been running really hard or doing some high intensity, uh, sport before bed, if you've got your cortisol up, it's really hard for you to get into that a appropriate body temperature and you just don't have the quality sleep.
But, so this device will actually look at your body temperature, look at your heart rate, look at the ambient temperature, and it will look at you, you know, loads you through ai and it will get you into the optimal, um, sleep temperature zone. And then if you deviate from that, it'll like bring your body temperature up or down.
Yeah. [00:30:00] It's incredible.
Cameron: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And just to give more context, I had a, a client the other day. I, for some reason, I seem to work quite a lot with surgeons and, and I see this sort of consistently, but this one client stood out where they came in with all this stress, right. All these presenting issues of this and that and that, da da da, and we went away and I just said, just give an extra hour and a half more on your sleep.
Mm-hmm. An extra hour. And let's just see what that does. And probably 80% of what was troubling them almost disappeared after a few weeks. Right. Of just getting consistently good sleep.
Jemma: Well, if you've become a surgeon, like you've literally had ruined your sleep for decades to get to that position. Mm-hmm.
Like it, that's one industry where it's, it's it's absolute cy and madness that they let. Our medical professions operate, engage with patients, drugs and [00:31:00] scalpels when they're sleep deprived. 'cause it's like being drunk. Yeah. I mean your motor skills, your cognitive reasoning, your activity, your Yeah. Speed of processing, all of that is incredibly affected by sleep.
And yeah, so I think that there's a lot of people in the medical fraternity that just never quite get back to normalcy. 'cause that, that's been decades since I know what it feels like. So yeah, I think it's a travesty. If I was to wave a, a magic wand, I'd be like, every single doctor, medical profession has to have seven hours sleep.
I remember when I was having a baby and I was getting an epidural, and of course, you know, I, I've read too much and about medical malpractice and I grabbed, I remember grabbing the doctor 'cause I could hear the nurses talking about a party that they'd had the night before. And I grabbed him, I looked, I had been.
Breathing gas. So, um, I looked, I was a bit off, but I looked at him. I said, did you go to that party last night? I said, tell me the last time you've been, I said, how, how long has it been since you've [00:32:00] had a proper sleep? And he's just looking at me and he, he, he, 'cause he had his epidural to stick into my spine.
And I'm like, I'm not letting you stick that thing into my spine unless I know what you were doing last night. And he's like, I didn't go to the party. I'm okay. So, yeah.
Cameron: Are you looking to improve your performance, stress less and flow more? Do you want to improve the human performance in your organization or team? If so, we are here to help our team of experts specialize in helping individuals and businesses integrate high performance practice and culture. So if you want to take your performance to the next level, or integrate the lessons and skills you hear on this pod into your leaders and teams, go to flow center.org today.
The official site of flow training and flow coaching.
You said something earlier that I felt was quite [00:33:00] important where you said you always sort of wake up at the same time regardless of when you've gone to bed. And I think the, when hearing this type of information, it's quite easy to think. I'll just make sure I get that eight hours. Or if I get a good week of good sleep, then I can kind of go back to normal for a few weeks and then I can binge sleep to recover type scenario.
You, you mentioned the importance of consistency over, over sort of one off. Can you elaborate a little bit on why consistency is so important and why you would get up at the same time every morning, even if you've gone to bed late?
Jemma: It's not by choice. I, I've just trained myself. I, it just happens. So if I've gone to bed at two, I still wake up at six and I'm like, no.
Like, I'll try to get back to sleep, but I can't. It's, it's just my body clock is just so well-trained. Now the reason, like I, I always thought, you know, just get more sleep. That's more important. Sleep when you can binge sleep on the weekends. But actually the dinosaur, [00:34:00] um, it's actually you can't catch up and you can't binge.
It you, it's like money in the back is spent, it already. The damage is done. But the reason that you need sleep consistency is that inside every single cell of your body, there's a, there's a a clock. And this clock needs to know what time of day it is. 'cause there's a whole lot of biochemical reactions that it needs to engage in to put you in the right position for what you need to do during that day.
And it's very much correlated with sun, sunlight. And just, so in the morning you need, your cells all need to like produce the gago hormones, adrenaline, cortisol. So your highest level is of cortisol, is produced 30 minutes post waking. And that's a good thing, right? Goes up and then slowly goes down throughout the day.
Like you need that 'cause you need that kind of cortisol boost to like get yourself going. But then what happens is in the morning when you get lightened to your retinas, which are pretty much just brain cells hanging out of your skull, and that will send a, a message to your circadian [00:35:00] rhythm that you need.
Then to get natural sleep pressure 16 hours after that first light exposure. And so what happens then is these cells will then start to downregulate all of the stress or the go hormones and will start to reduce the sleep hormones, malton. And so, uh, in order for your body to know what time to do that, it has to have had seen light at the same time.
And then it has to know that when you do produce these sleep hormones, you're not gonna get a second burst. And then you're gonna have to produce more stress hormones 'cause that's very metabolically expensive. So I like to use the analogies. Like say you are running a cafe and you've got 12, uh, waitresses and waiters.
And they say, you say to them, okay, I'm opening up on Saturday. And they go, okay, what time should we come to work? And you'll say, I don't know. I'll let you know when I open the doors. Like [00:36:00] your staff won't put up with that, right? They say, we need to get ready, we need to catch the bus, we need to get dressed, we need to get our kids looked after.
And then, but you are kind of expecting yourselves to do that. It's just like beyond ready to go work in a certain way when they, they haven't been given any warning or they're confused. And when cells get confused, you know what they'll invariably do produce stress hormones. And so often we'll be sitting on the couch and get that kind of second, you know, get that sort of sleepiness and you're like, sleep pressure.
Then you're like, oh, but it's only nine 30. Oh, I'll just watch one more episode on Netflix. And then all of a sudden when you go to bed, you've got your second wind. That's 'cause your brain's like, okay, if you're up at night, past that 16 hour sleep pressure time, when you should be naturally gonna sleep, you're not at asleep.
You've got lights in your eyes, you've got noise. And then your brain will automatically think, well, from a primitive perspective, there's only two reasons why humans. Would stay up late at night. [00:37:00] Do you know what those two things would be from an evolutionary perspective?
Cameron: A decent story. Taylor has just turned up, ran the fire.
Jemma: Well, no. It's either hunt or be hunted. So that's, so if you are pushing past that, sleep pressure thinks, okay, well there must be something really important on, so it'll produce cortisol and adrenaline and you get that second wind and it makes it harder and longer for you to get into deep, slow wave sleep.
You might miss that two hours before midnight window and you'd have disrupted sleep. So that's why I always say if you're sitting on the couch and then Netflix or whatever you're watching, clicks over to the next channel or the next episode, be disciplined because there's a biochemical response. Not only.
Uh, what are you looking at? You've got blue light in your eyes. Even if you've got blue light blockers, you're getting purple light, you're getting blue light, uh, um, green light, but also what are you looking at? If you're watching violence, if [00:38:00] you're watching something emotionally reactive, um, invigorating, you'll produce stress hormones as if it's happening.
So if you're watching, yeah, someone fighting on screen, your mirror neurons will be kicking off in the same way and you'll produce fight hormones. So I've got this really good hack, which I use for myself to, because if my grown up brain is sort of offline, I have to create systems so my body behaves. So I got one of those electric plugs that's got a timer on it, and I set it to nine 30 and I put it up in, I dunno, back there.
You can see I've got a, my modem is in a cupboard right near the front door, up high, and it's behind all these cords. And so I plugged my modem into this timer plug. And so I'll be sitting on the couch. I don't really watch a lot of tv, but just say, I, you know, I, I did, my modem will turn off at nine 30 and it's like, oh, I [00:39:00] really wanted to watch the rest of that show.
But, so by the time I get up and for me to go and turn on the modem, I've got to drag a ladder out of the pantry over there. And so that's 1, 2, 3 steps to get up there. And that's just, I'm like, by, by that time my adult brains kicked in and said, don't be naughty. Go to bed, stop it. But if you've got no sort of distance between impulse and response, it's so easy to just like click through and before you know it's 1:00 AM.
Mm. So you have to build in some processes into your life. So you go to bed. And so when I go to bed, I try and reduce overhead lights. So I don't have any overhead lights in my kitchen. I try to re reduce noise. Um, phone. Try not to doom. Scroll, be before bed. And in my light I've got a red colored light. So when I walk in, I turn that on instead of having like the, the shot lights in my eyeballs.
And so all of these things just really help me. So when I get into [00:40:00] bed, I fall into to sleep a lot quicker. And my quality of sleep, it's a lot better. Mm-hmm. But also like what you eat before you go to bed is, is super important. I think people really underestimate the impact of what you ingest, um, all throughout the day, but particularly in the three hours before bed has, has a significant impact on your quality and duration.
I mean, if you eating sugary snacks before bed, I think it was whoop data, they found that sugary snackers slept on average 26 minutes less than non sugary snackers. And so that's kind of like putting logs in the fire. It's just lot of in increase in your metabolic. Burn and increasing body temperature.
Uh, also it changes your gut biome. So we know that you've got two to two and a half kilograms of gut biome in your stomach. And these things love sugar and they have their own little circadian rhythm. So if you are feeding [00:41:00] your gut biome before bed with sugar or ice cream or something that they love, like highly available glucose and sucrose.
Fructose, they will, um, proliferate have babies really. And then they send out mycelium to go look for more sugar and they will actually. They create bioidentical hormones that mimic hunger hormones that get sent to your brain, and they can often wake you up. And so you wanna refeed the gut bone and, and in then if you are not feeding them, there's a herx hammer reaction.
So these gut bone have a die effect and they produce metabolic byproducts that will actually make you feel crap. So before bed, you should definitely not be snacking on sugar. You should be snacking on foods that contain high levels of tryptophan. Tryptophan is a precursor to serotonin, which is a precursor to melatonin, that sleep hormone.
And so these are things like cherry juice, but not sweetened nuts. Um, cottage cheese, [00:42:00] dairy, uh, you know, walnuts, all those sorts of things full of tryptophan. Turkey does, but you don't. But another thing, you don't want to be eating lots of meat before bed because your body will compete, like if it will preference.
Digesting meat over deep, slow wave sleep. 'cause your body does not want to sleep with a big chunk of fer fermenting flesh in your stomach. So it will try to digest that before it'll put you into deep, slow wave sleep and, 'cause it's a metabolically expensive thing to digest meat. What are we
Cameron: talking about there?
There we saying no steaks, are we saying no, you know, protein, um, just heavy
Jemma: protein. I like, I haven't looked at the data on what types of protein, but I imagine like, so a big roast dinner, big steak, big chicken breast. I'm not sure about the other bioavailable proteins, but I, when I looked at my data, if I have protein at lunch and I have vegetarian at night, [00:43:00] huge difference in my recovery.
Huge, huge difference. It is phenomenal. So, um, yeah, I, I think people don't realize that eating two to three hours before bed, it actually has a big impact. But also things like. Um, MSG monosodium glutamate, which is the flavor enhancer. It's literally in everything packaged. It's in Asian food, Mexican, all takeaway food has MSG.
Now glutamate is a, is a neurotransmitter, so it will make you have, I know, like have you ever had that thing where you've gone to a restaurant and you get home, you're like, I'm so exhausted. Then you get into bed and then you have crazy dreams and you're like, just the most vivid, most intense dreams. And then you wake up in the morning and you are feeling just fried, thirsty, and just out of whack.
That's probably MSG that's done it. So I, if I have ever had a big day, I'm like. I can't, I won't eat takeout and I won't eat anything from a package. I'm really careful about my [00:44:00] sources, like there's some soy sauce or barbecue sauce or have got high levels of MSG, but there is an antidote. So if you do have MSG, if you have vitamin C, it does, your liver will uptake that vitamin C over MSG.
But yeah, just trying to avoid that. I think people have got no idea of the impact. Some people are really affected by it and some people are not so affected by it, but it's just something to watch out. If you are having really disrupted sort of crazy dreams and um, you're feeling waking up feeling tired, that's one thing you can look at.
Cameron: Yeah. It reminds me of the cheesy dreams. Yeah. Fond news, big wine. Yeah. Ttes in the mountains. Yeah. I, I think when we start to understand the science behind it all, it's easier to invest in tomorrow. Often there's this like, ah, I don't wanna go to bed. And often the advice, the one advice I normally give is set an alarm.
In the evening, you know, to
Jemma: go to bed. Yeah.
Cameron: To go to bed, to kind of [00:45:00] switch, start to switch off and get into your routine to go to bed. What would be, if you would just nail it down to one or two or three bits of advice for someone who's listening to this and going, okay, right, I'm gonna take my sleep seriously.
I'm gonna invest in tomorrow. What should I do?
Jemma: Well, um, you know, start, it starts the minute you wake up. Get out. I remember we've all heard this. Get lightened into your eyeballs. Um, hydrate during the day. Try and do cardio during the day because you do need to feel physically exhausted instead of just like brain fried, which a lot of us do feel, um, be really strict about it.
So, as I said, don't eat your protein at lunch. Try to reduce alcohol. If you do have alcohol, try to walk in between bed. Go for a walk around the block or go walk up and down the steps. Or even just do squats while you're brushing your teeth. Try and get rid of metabolize a lot of that alcohol. I would, yeah, just take it really seriously.
Watch light exposure before bed and be really careful about what you're putting into your eyeballs. [00:46:00] Um, doom scrolling. Your brain has a really hard time differentiating between actually seeing something and, you know, experiencing it or imagining it. So if you are looking at your phone and you are looking at war in Gaza, the war in Ukraine, or you see your, you're on LinkedIn and you see everyone else got better jobs than you.
Um, your friends have got bigger houses, better holidays, it kind of activates you and you start to produce stress hormones and, and remember your thoughts. Uh, these ephemeral things that just go off into the ether. They produce chemicals. And these chemicals will interrupt your sleep. If you are really, really wound up, you know, do some gentle stretches, it reduces cortisol.
Don't do anything that's 50% above your maximum perceived output. So don't go boxing. High intensity running. Hit do gentle stuff before bed so you don't get your cortisol up. But also if you are really, really super wound up, have a 40 degree [00:47:00] centigrade hot bath in one to two hours before bed. What that does, it counterintuitively heats up your body so your core body temperature will, will cool quicker.
And as I said before, you need to drop your core body temperature by two degrees. So that's why we bath babies. They, you know, it's a really, it's been, there was a meta-analysis of over 5,000 studies and they said this is one of the best ways to create sleepiness and to improve your sleep quality. So, 40 degree hot bath.
Also, I would be really careful about taking melatonin or sleep tablets on a regular basis. We know that, and, or, or alcohol that they don't sedate. They, they don't give you the proper sleep cycles. They sedate you. And, um, and me, so that's sleeping tablets narco, but melatonin is, if you are giving your body synthetic hormones, your body will say, sweet, I'm getting them for free.
This is expensive for me to produce them. And so your body will actually reduce the amount of natural hormones that it produces. [00:48:00] And so you really should be looking at why do you need melatonin rather than just taking it every night. I think it's really good if you are traveling or if you've got short term sleep disruption, but I would not be doing it on a regular basis.
And I've even seen some parents are giving their, you know, melatonin gummies, which is Oh wow. Really, really dangerous. Um,
Cameron: yeah. So just on the traveling
Jemma: mm-hmm.
Cameron: I certainly travel a lot. What, what do you suggest in terms of clicking into that new time zone As quickly as possible?
Jemma: Yeah. It depends on how long you're going to be away.
Sometimes it's not worth. Trying to get on the time zone if you're only gonna be there a couple of days if you are. So, I mean, I've just done a sort of, I think, six trips over to overseas this year and I really got to sharpen my, uh, jet lag skills very well because I'd be landing and having to do workshops for three hours and or keynote.
And it was, yeah, it was pretty tough. So what I found was, if you can, [00:49:00] and you're gonna be there for some time, try and push your sleep back one hour every night before you go, and that's reducing the amount of light into your eyeballs, wearing dark glasses before bed and getting up in the morning and getting blue light exposure into eyeballs.
Um, so what you can do is you get your phone, you put a piece of sticky tape across the back there, and then you like get a, like a blue sharpie and then you color it in, and then when you wake up and your foot awful, you'd put the light on on your camera like that, and then you bang some light blue light into your eyeballs.
And that's just to wake you up. And also, if you wake up and you're feel absolutely like out of sorts and you've got a meeting to go to, I highly recommend a cold shower. So it is gotta be under 12 degrees and start 30 seconds. If you can get up to two minutes, try and get your face in because it's got the most amount of, um, [00:50:00] thermoreceptors the highest density on your face.
So that really does increase your adrenaline in dopamine. I've just done a big study with rum. Huff will tell you about that later. If you can try to have cardio, try to do some cardio in the morning. And then if you're going to the point where you are really exhausted, I would have a micro nap. So a 20 minute nap, and then get up and then try and stay up and, and try and go to sleep at the new, the new time zone and take melatonin if you can.
At that time, if you wake up. At, at the unusual time, like two in the morning. Um, lie there, do deep breathing, try to get no light exposure into your eyeballs at that time. Don't like, try not to get on your phone if you can't go to sleep. I would get a red light, a red travel light that you could sort of plug in a USB one.
And then I would make notes on a, on a diary with the red light facing away from your eyeballs. Um, and then try and get back to sleep again. If you [00:51:00] do get disrupted, try to have your protein when you first wake up and then just have light meals before bed of, or alcohol's terrible. I mean so hard to do that.
But if you really wanna feel terrible drink, it's not the thing to do to try and get yourself to sleep in a new ti time zone. But I still do it anyway.
Cameron: Yeah. I'm often laughing at people on the plane who are sort of necking back load of whiskey to try and knock themselves out. Yeah. And then, so then. Uh, standing up, walking the aisles four hours later.
Jemma: Yeah. Yeah. I don't think you do. If you're sitting in a meeting and you're feeling like really exhausted, just flick here underneath your chin there, you've got these nerves that come down here that will wake you up. Or if you're in a, um, you can dip your wrists into some ice water. If you're sitting in a meeting, it's another good thing you can do.
But yeah. Nap. Quick, quick micro naps.
Cameron: Do you want to help others unleash their performance? [00:52:00] Do you want an internationally recognized accreditation to stand out amongst the crowd? What do you want? The play I use every day when helping professionals to be their best and find their flow when it matters most. If this sounds interesting, join others who are training to become a high performance coach.
We are on a mission to train a fellowship of expert practitioners and coaches to work with us and help make the world a better place to find out more. Go to flow coaching federation.org and check out the Flow Coach accreditation today. Let's dive into gut biome. Like I saw something the other day that said we have 30 trillion human cells in our system and we have 39 trillion microbiome, and I was suddenly stricken.
It's like that statistic that we're [00:53:00] between 70 and 85% water and that perspective that we are 99.99999% energy with sort of electrostatic energy in between the atoms of protons and neutrons. That, so really we're, we're more energy than we are matter. And when we look at ourselves through a microbiome lens, how does that change how the way we might want to live our life?
Jemma: Well, interestingly, if you look at, um, genetic diversity, if you at count the different genes that we have in our bodies, we actually are more mi microbiome than we are human. There's more microbiome DNA in our body than there is human, not by volume, of course, but by by numbers. And so I think this is really the new frontier.
I think that we, it's like space travel. We have no idea just how impactful our gut biome is [00:54:00] on everything, our mood, our relationships, our cognitive performance, our sleep, our hunger, our weight, our athletic ability, our sexual attraction, longevity. Literally, I believe everything is predicated what our gut biome.
And I think in the future, this will be the new frontier of medicine. We all have individualized medicine because we know that how you metabolize certain drugs is very much predicated on your gut biome. So I think, and I think it's already started in China where particularly now with ai, you will go give your sample into the doctor and it will go, okay, you've got this profile on that basis that you'll have X amount of milligrams of this drug, or you'll be given gut biome as medicine.
I mean, they're already doing it, I think South Australia and they're the leaders where they, they give people crap souls. [00:55:00] And so people with bipolar disorder, autism are given. Um, capsules of microbiome and there's been terrible stories where like, of course they've cured or they've improved the, um, outcomes of these people in terms of autism and, um, schizophrenia and, um, bipolar, but also people of caught depression and, um, obesity.
So I think that we have no idea as how powerful our gut biome is on so many things. I think in the future people will be, be able to order, you know, I want, I wanna be like this or have this or be this way to, or be this good at long distance running and you'll be able to order these biomes. I think that's what's gonna happen.
Mm. I've just done a, a big study. We're still sitting on the data. We haven't finished. We looked, we did a whole lot of, gave, um, we devices to a whole lot of CEOs and then we tested their gut biome and we put continuous glucose monitors on there. [00:56:00] Those, um, those diabetes things. And then we gave them a whole lot of cognitive tests and mood psychological tests and team dynamic tests.
And so we're looking at the correlation between gut biome and continuous glucose monitoring and fluctuations in that and how they coped cognitively looked at their sleep stress and also how much psychological safety their subordinates felt with them. So yeah, watch this space. We haven't looked at the data yet.
Cameron: Yeah. Fascinating. And whilst we're waiting for that FedEx of microbiome to individualize our, uh, our gut, what's some of the practices that you have found that, uh, is really helpful?
Jemma: Yeah. I'm very, very aware of my gut biome and I've been fascinated for like 20 years. I remember. Thinking way back. Oh, I can't remember when I, yeah, 20 years ago I started reading it about it and then just started [00:57:00] to notice, um, correlations between my energy levels, my mood, my sleep, and what I ate.
And I haven't eaten wheat for 23 years 'cause I'm actually allergic to it. But I think that that kind of got me on, got me down the route of looking at diet and the impact, the psycho psychophysiological impact. If I have like a lot of alcohol, a lot of sugar, a lot of stodge, and I know that my gut buying will be proliferating with certain.
Types of gut biome that are probably not helpful, I can literally feel it. So I will eat raw garlic and cut it up into little chunks. I'll let it oxidize. So what it does, it makes it change to di al di sulfur. And I'll like drink that down and that will, has a very antimicrobial, pop potent mechanism to kill a lot of that gut biome.
And then I'll eat heaps of green stuff. So I'll eat a whole bowl of rocket or little bitters, bitter greens, anything green, any like lots [00:58:00] of onions, anything leafy green, uh, cabbages green, um, and red cabbage. And I can literally feel my mood change because we know that 85 to 90% of your serotonin is produced by your gut biome.
And so you need to be able to feed these things with prebiotics. So they're. S resistant starches and, um, leafy greens. I love to eat those things and I rarely, rarely take antibiotics, but I know if I take antibiotics that I'll, I'll feel down, I'll feel off. And I won't relate it to like, oh, what's happening in my life that I'll know that it actually is a biochemical thing.
'cause my gut biome is being killed off by antibiotics. And so I will have fermented foods. I have drink a heap of kefi, eat sauerkraut. I don't like kimchi 'cause I used to live in Korea, but my family love kimchi, so I'll be really careful about that. And just no sugar. I don't eat sugar anyway, but I'll have not even starchy or I won't have fruit.
I might have [00:59:00] berries and that's it. But I eat really, really, really well that, um, I drink alcohol, but that's the one thing I do is I don't eat junk food because I know food is medicine and I know I can feel my gut while I'm changing to what I eat. And I can feel the, the consequences for my mood, my motivation, energy levels, and sleep.
And
Cameron: how effective do you think the probiotics or prebiotics are?
Jemma: Prebiotics? Yes. So like, so prebiotics are the other things that the bugs like to eat. So they're cabbage, green, leafy things, resistant starch, nuts, things like that. Very good probiotics that you buy. Um, from my research, I is a multi-billion dollar fast.
It is not true. So I was working with Micro, which is a company out of like the, out of UQ and um, up here in Queensland. And the head microbiologist there told me that the [01:00:00] research is flawed. So I think Lactobacillus bacillus was, was the one gut biome. They said all humans, it's really good for us. So there was this massive marketing ploy that to give those little sh what are they called?
Yles and tablets. And, and for a start. What happened was they took samples of gut biome, put it into a Petri juice, and so got exposed to oxygen. And so any aerobic, um, by gut biome, sorry, anaerobic gut biome died and the aerobic biome was left. So when they looked under the microscope, they're like, oh, that's all the microbiome that must be in the human digestive tract.
'cause they're the only ones that were, were, were alive, where they're the only ones that survived being in oxygen where all the anaerobic bacteria died. And then they would just take it from like, just certain parts of the, you know, the colon as it came out. That microbiome is very different from the, the biome that's actually in your stomach or in, or a new mouth or a new digestive tract.
So it's like a, a forest. So if you walked into a forest, you wouldn't just pick up one bit of [01:01:00] dirt and say, this is what the whole forest looks like. It's very, very, um, heterogeneous people were giving people prebiotic, um, probiotic tablets, but then you look at the, the pH of the stomach. It is like pH of one, like this is like pool cleaner.
It will burn holes in your skin. So if you're just eating bugs that are just in normal capsules, they would be killed by your stomach acid. So unless you are got an enteric coat capitalized probiotic, it doesn't actually get through it. Guess it gets burnt up in this, in your stomach acid. So there's so much we don't know, and I think just throwing down very, very expensive probiotics, it could be a waste of money.
My recommendation is just eat 40 different plant-based materials a week. That sounds like a lot, but you can just have a a, a curry. So [01:02:00] like garlic, ginger, they're, they're also counted pepper nuts. Throw in. A heap of different vegetables and try to have 40 different plant-based foods a week. And that is trying to increase the diversity or heterogeneity of your gut biome.
So each gut biome eats a certain thing and if you're eating only white bread, sugar, meat, no vegetables or you're going to be doing is pretty much growing. Those gut biome that just live on those and they have been shown to be not that advantageous for your gut biome health, um, and all the other factors I spoke about.
So the more diverse your gut biome, the healthier you are. It's kind of like if you had a field just full of one variation of corn and along comes some kind of mold and it just knocks out the whole field of corn. But if you had different variations of vegetables or different. Types of corn, purple corn, [01:03:00] old ancient corn, and a virus comes through, or mold comes through.
At least some of those varieties would survive. And so that's what you've gotta think of your gut biome. In the same way, you wanna have robust heterogeneity. So if you get sick bacteria, a bug, there's other gut biomes that will, will flourish and, and prosper despite them that one B being attacked by that bug.
So it's like bug wars down there. Yeah. The ones that shoot, the ones that can, you know, climb, ones can swim, ones that that can throw, ones that can punch. You've gotta have a huge range of them down there.
Cameron: And some of your research focuses on emotional intelligence.
Jemma: Mm-hmm.
Cameron: Is that in relation to the things we've talked about?
Jemma: Yeah. So I was really interested in how emotions are, you know, made. Understood, displayed. And [01:04:00] so I, I thought that if I looked at people who were successful or people who were not successful in life, the one thing was I found correlated was their ability to manage their emotions or not manage their emotions.
When you think about truly successful people, they know when to upregulate, when to downregulate, they understand why they're feeling that way, and they, they use emotional data to make good decisions. They've got a really good autonomy and agency over their emotional world. And I, and I saw like, so particularly people in my family who did have, um, mental health disruption, the biggest thing was they, they had had the inability to regulate their emotions at the, the, the wrong time.
And, and it was cruel. I felt, I felt like, God, if only we could teach this to people who are not naturally good at it. Um, it will really help in so many ways, you know, their own self-esteem, the way they, they perceive themselves, their relationships and longevity. Because if you don't manage your emotions, you produce [01:05:00] stress hormones and their stress hormones are incredibly detrimental to your immune system, your digestive system, your ability to rep replenish cortisol just ruins unchecked.
Cortisol just ruins growth and longevity. And so I was at uni and so I was looking at how do we even manage emotions and stress in particular because I know a lot of people will lie about their stress status. And so that's when I got into testing cortisol and immune function and I thought, okay, let's do a big experiment and we'll look at, if we teach emotional intelligence or are highly emotionally intelligent people better at managing their cortisol, then we know that that's something that we can teach.
It's kind of. Pretty low, like, you know, pretty cheap. Um, you don't need anything. You just need to be able to teach people. And so then I was awarded a research funding by the military. 'cause I really [01:06:00] liked my approach at using an objective measure of stress and then having a way to teach people how to regulate their emotions.
So I went down to Tu Commando, this was back in 2015, 16. And so I spent a lot of time researching that population, looking at what emotional intelligence would look like in a military context, particularly a high combat context. And so I developed a program looking at it was emotional perception. How do you perceive emotions not only in yourself, how do you know when you're starting to feel a change in emotions, but also how do you perceive emotions in others?
So that was a lot of lie detection, micro expression detection. So this is all the stuff that I was teaching as well. Looking at just slight body language shifts, emotional perception in groups of people, and we call it emotional aperture. So if you walk into a crowd, walk into a village, walk into a room, how do you know what the emotional valence of that group of people were?
Then the next one is emotional understanding. [01:07:00] So knowing like, ah, if that emotion plus that emotion blends, then you're gonna get this emotion transmuted. Um, knowing why people felt the way they did, knowing complex emotions. So that can be seemingly opposite emotions that can sit in the same person at the same time.
So for instance, the concepts. So if I said to you, think about that day you went to the beach with your grandmother and she bought you ice cream and you were so happy, but she's dead, right? You can have happy and sad at the same time, and that transmits to melancholy. So once you have this deep granularity about the different sort of.
Levels of emotions, you are much better at understanding and managing them. So then the next part of emotional intelligence is emotional use and using emotional intelligence to make decisions. So, okay, I know that person is melancholic. If I then tell them to do this or add this thing on their plate, they're [01:08:00] probably gonna be upset or now's not the time.
So then using the emotional status of those around you and also yourself to make decisions. And then the last, and I think the most important component of emotional intelligence is where I spoke, I spent most of my time was emotional regulation. So regulating yourself if you need to up or down, regulate, and then also emotional regulation of those around you.
So how do you know that that's, that person needs to be up or down regulated. Um, but also understanding it, the concept of chemo signaling and emotional contagion, that your emotions are very sticky or very like a virus, you can infect those around you. So, uh, understanding that and so I spent a lot of time, yeah, training this, testing it, retraining in different contexts.
And yeah, it was our research. I've just actually submitted my research to Nature Scientific reports and it's under review, so fingers crossed it gets published. [01:09:00] And so then we used that framework that, that training framework and that all the knowledge we gained from the special forces. We then went and taught that to the Olympic swim team and at the Australian Institute of Sport.
And then from there, a lot of management consultants and a lot of people in industry and executives and people in the legal fraternity, banking, mining, um. Ev, you know, everyone started to get really interested and said, well, if it works for them, it can definitely work for me in the boardroom or work for me with my team.
And so that's pretty much what I've been doing since, since then.
Cameron: Yeah. Emotional intelligence and leadership is fast becoming a, a necessity rather than a curiosity.
Jemma: Yeah, I just, um, I just did a keynote for a big law firm and these law firms, the leaders in ai and so they are really just trying to embed emotional inte intelligence, sorry, um, artificial intelligence into their work [01:10:00] processes.
And I spoke about that. You know, this is gonna be a new world order where the cost of iq, the cost of intelligence is going to reach zero marginal costs. You can have an agent next to you. That has an IQ equivalency of over 400 to a thousand, right? So what do you do when the cost of IQ is, is nothing?
Well, how do we be, how do we stay relevant and what do we teach our subordinates and those around us? And I make the case emotional intelligence is what we need to foster. It's what we need to be good at. Because at this point, AI is not as good as us. It's getting there, but it's not as good as us. So in order for us to be able to maintain trust, rapport, build important, cohesive relationships with our clients, with our stakeholders, with our employees, we have to get good at emotional intelligence.
So if we're gonna teach anything, [01:11:00] because AI will be so smart, it can, it can do all the calculations, it can do all the maths, it can do all the um, the cognitively stuff, face
Cameron: recognition, and.
Jemma: Yeah, but we need to be able to have the emotional touch that human touch. So yeah, it's more important now than ever.
Cameron: Hmm. So just to go through that framework again, what's the headline processes?
Jemma: So first of all, you need to one, be emotionally aware of your own status. So self perception. Mm-hmm. That is your heart rate going up? Is your face flushing? Are you getting shake? Knowing that there is an emotional movement with inside your body.
Second is recognizing emotional or emotional perception in others, those around you. Second is emotional understanding. Understand why you or that all the other people or that group are thinking, feeling these things. Understand the [01:12:00] emotions. Combine, transmute, they can be. Seemingly opposite, but, but that can still exist in the one person.
Then you've got facilitation or emotional use of those, of that emotional data and using the rules of emotion, emotional intelligence, and then emotionally regulating or emotionally managing yourself and those around you.
Cameron: Mm. Nice. So it's like a four part. Yeah. Yeah. That's really helpful, especially in a leadership situation.
From a scientific lens, how do you explain the contagion of emotion?
Jemma: Yeah, it's, uh, I, I find this utterly fascinating. So, from a evolutionary perspective, we have receptors in our perinasal sinuses in our skin that helps us pick up the emotional status of those around us in our clan. So it was, it was a survival mechanism.
So in clan environments, if [01:13:00] someone was in trouble, invariably that trouble would be coming our way. So it behooved us to know what is the emotional status of people in our near vicinity, in particular, our leader. So emotional contagion is much more contagious from above down. That's because if you're acute or if you are a leader, a follower or, or a subordinate, you need to know what their emotional state is because they're probably the most influential into what happens to you.
Next. What happens is when people produce cortisol, we pick it up very, very quickly. It all, it's all processed subconsciously. So, uh, and like all sorts of things, happy, sad, have nefarious intent, sexual intent, all of those things that we, we can smell it, we can smell madness, we can smell. If people are not okay, we, we know it when we, and we feel it, you know, when you've walked into a room and you like, kind of can cut the air with a knife, you're like, oh, something's been going on in this room.
I understand that that is not just a wewe feeling, it's [01:14:00] actual science. We're picking up, you know, tiny, tiny amounts of, of chemicals
Cameron: and, and energetic signaling from the heart as well, I think picks up.
Jemma: Yeah, I think that information before the
Cameron: brain,
Jemma: we don't really have very highly calibrated detection mechanisms at this time.
I do believe in a hundred years we will go, oh my God, this, how did we not know this? Just like you think about, you know, 500 years ago if people got sick you'd, they'd say, you've got melancholy or you've got humors or spirits have have made you sick. And then they invented the microscope and they went, oh, here's some, some bacteria that makes you sick.
You know, when they first looked down at microscope, everyone said, you're insane that there's little men that get into your body and make you sick. Now we know this is the germ theory. So I think in, in 200 years, we will all know the vibration theory or the electromagnetic field theory because we don't have the mechanisms to detect [01:15:00] it.
I think in the future we will. So when you walk in and you get that vibe of someone, we will know why. Right now we, we. They, you know, like general science doesn't have that available to people. And so I think you've gotta be very, very careful as a leader what you bring into an a situation. If you wanna be trusted, if you wanna have effect, build rapport, wanna be listened to, wanna be followed, you have to make sure that your own emotional status is in a position that is a place where people wanna know you want to follow you.
They trust and respect you because you've got your shoe together, right? You, you're managing your, your emotions, you're regulating, you're understanding yourself. You, you perceive where you're at. There's a lot of leaders that I speak to if they feel like they've, they're in the red when they woke up, they feel a little bit off.
They just don't make big decisions that day. 'cause they know that their cognitive performance is suboptimal and so they will leave it for another day, particularly if they haven't slept well. And so [01:16:00] I think as a leader, understanding thyself is critical for effective performance. Creating psychological safety and trust and efficiencies.
Hmm.
Cameron: Yeah. So often the, the old perception of leadership is leading by the front, you know, this way marching forwards. But when leadership becomes the, the glue between the people and the culture, that allows motivation and people to become fascinated and have deep engagement and continue that deep engagement.
Then emotional intelligence is, is everything. Everything.
Jemma: I think also, yeah, for you have to have humility. So a leader these days now. Um, have a te obvi, you know, invariably have a team full of digital natives, like kids that have just been grown up on a solid diet of tech. So we cannot compete with those in terms of ability to utilize technology.
We just don't, we just haven't been brought up on it. And so a, a leader must have the humility to step down at certain times and let subordinates of younger people step up and take the [01:17:00] lead and say, okay, you know more about this, you're much more proficient at me than this. So you need to be able to have the humility or the intelligence, emotional intelligence to give people leadership moments, even though you could be threatened by, by that.
But you have to do it because you, as a leader, you cannot possibly know everything. Every life is so complicated. There are so many things that a leader has to know, technical things that a leader has to know. We cannot know it in depth. So we have to rely on subordinates. We have to rely on those younger generation who are better at it.
And so. If you don't have humility, if you are stressed, tied, strung out, your ability to trust others or even identify those who you can trust, who have the skillset to do what you need to do is thwarted. So this is why a leader needs to be well slept, well, moved socially engaged, intellectually curious, intellectually [01:18:00] humble and eat well.
Otherwise, you just, there'll be, there'll be deficits and it'll have consequences.
Cameron: Yeah. Well summarized.
Well, thank you gem. And coming to the end of our pod, I always ask a couple of questions. A book or a film that had a huge impact on yourself.
Jemma: Oh my God, I, I hate this question 'cause I am not a one book, one, one film person. I. I, I only read nonfiction as well, so I never read fiction, which is terrible. I really should start to read some nonfiction and escape my brain for a moment.
But I, I, I have to say that one of the most impactful books was The Upside of Stress by Kelly McGonal. It's about how you can use your stress as a resource, um, to perform better. So I thought that was a really, really good book, and I, I used it a lot with athletes and, and high [01:19:00] performers.
Cameron: Time to flip the mic.
And the second question is a question you have from me to flip the mic and get, get payback.
Jemma: Yeah. So if you could interview one person, dead or alive, who would that be and why? And what would you ask them?
Cameron: Oh, my goodness.
I, I have a fascination with Flo. And Chick Mihai. Yes. I never got to meet. And I have a few questions around his thoughts on complexity and the more metaphysical understanding of flow and consciousness and, and those sorts of things. So I'd, I'd love to have a good dinner on, on that topic I think would be really interesting.
Jemma: Yeah. Ask him how to pronounce his name, by the way. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think my text people
Cameron: away.
Jemma: Yeah. I think [01:20:00] flow is like, is the absence of the things that stop us from going into flow. I think flow is a, is a natural human state and I think the dirt, the gr the stress, the, the weight of our world actually stop us from getting into it.
So we'd always teach you don't reach for flow. You remove those things that are stopping you getting there. It's a natural, natural process. It's a human state that we Sure try to. Get into as many times as much as possible. I think,
Cameron: yeah. I mean it's, it's a signpost instead of restoration and surviving.
You know, why not push the bar up and go to our optimal state of functioning and Mm. And, uh, experience. Awe. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, I think optimal experience is highly misunderstood. It's often put in that bucket of it's only for elite professionals or one-off experience, but actually subjective experience fluctuates constantly throughout the day.
And mostly, most of the time we're reacting to the external world and our internal world is [01:21:00] sort of enslaved to that. But when we gar on back control of that internal world and realize that optimal experience is something we can curate, it can become a daily experience and doesn't have to be this sort of.
Mind blowing, life changing experience, but rather a, a very deep and rich quality of experience. That's very much within our control flows are sort of the scientific term that's been positioned there. But if you take the whole field of positive psychology as opposed to restoring deficits, but moving towards where we want to be in an optimal manner, then the the brain is, and bodies we've just discussed, the psychophysiology is a very powerful mechanism and if we give it the right signpost, then it will do its best to, to create what the intentions are.
So, yeah, well said. Extremely important if we wanna live, live an amazing life. Correct. Yeah. Well, thank you very much for your time, Gemma. Awesome to connect and, and chat with you.
Jemma: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.
Cameron: Flow. [01:22:00] Unleashed. Unleashed. My chat with Gemma was a powerful reminder of the importance of getting the basics right when it comes to human performance.
If you're pushing your limits, take a moment to check in. Are your sleep, nutrition and emotional training supporting your performance at the elite level? Small adjustments can make a big difference, but even if you're not a pro, experimenting with better sleep and nutrition can help you feel better, lead better, and be better Perhaps.
The biggest takeaway for me is that consistency is key. There's no wonder why we thrive on routine. Set yourself up for success by making healthy choices. And remove the inconvenience of bad habits like Gemma. Make unhelpful [01:23:00] acts difficult to achieve. Put your modem on a timer. Store your phone in a lockbox at night.
Or keep sugary snacks out of reach or in a box that's in another box. Be your own coach. Prioritize your sleep, fuel your body properly, and give yourself and your gut the best chance to thrive. If you want to find out more about German King, please see the show notes.
Thank you for listening to Flow Unleashed. If you enjoyed listening, please subscribe to get notified when our next episode drops. The more people that subscribe, the better I can make the show for you. Equally, please leave a review. Your review will go a long way to helping others find this pot. Until the next time, thank you for listening to Flow [01:24:00] Unleashed.