The Academy Insider Podcast - Your Guide to The Naval Academy Experience
The mission of Academy Insider is to guide, serve, and support Midshipmen, future Midshipmen, and their families. Through the perspective of a community of former graduates and Naval Academy insiders, this podcast will help you learn about life at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis. Through our shared experiences, Academy Insider guides families through the anxiety and frustration caused by lack of understanding, misinformation, and confusion. This platform is designed to better relationships between midshipmen and their loved ones. This podcast is not affiliated with the United States Naval Academy, the United States Navy or Department of Defense. The thoughts and opinions are exclusively those of your host and his guests.
The Academy Insider Podcast - Your Guide to The Naval Academy Experience
#084 The Importance of Sleep at the Naval Academy: Insights from Dr. John Cordle on Performance and Safety
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 and the USNA Property Network 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 boutique residential real estate company that specializes in serving the United States Naval Academy community PCSing to California & Texas.
We are here to be your guide through the USNA experience.
Connect with Grant on Linkedin
Academy Insider Website
Academy Insider Facebook Page
If you are interested in sponsoring the podcast, have an idea, question or topic you would like to see covered, reach out: podcast@academyinsider.com.
Welcome to season two of the Academy Insider podcast. Academy Insider is a 501c3 nonprofit organization that serves midshipmen, future midshipmen and their families. At its core, this podcast is designed to bring together a community of Naval Academy graduates and those affiliated with the United States Naval Academy in order to tell stories and provide a little bit of insight into what life at the Naval Academy is really like. I hope you enjoy it. Thank you so much for listening and reach out if you ever have any questions. Hey, everyone, and welcome back to the Academy Insider Podcast. In today's episode, we're touching on a really important subject, which is sleep and the importance of sleep when it comes to the life of the midshipman and continuing through as a junior officer in the fleet, and so I am joined today by Dr John Cordell. He was a Naval Academy graduate, a former nuclear surface warfare officer and had command of multiple different ships, and since his retirement, is actually transitioned in this back, still working for the Department of the Navy as a human factor engineer and an advocate on all things sleep and human performance, and so this is going to be a really cool episode, diving into one the importance of sleep to the factors and things that have happened in the Navy as a result of sleep deprivation, and so we're going to talk about why it's important for shipment especially to really prioritize and take their sleep extremely seriously, and so if you want this insight, you want some recommendations from Dr Cordell on all things sleep, then check out this episode. I think it's a really interesting insight into some of the factors of high-level Navy policy, but also the impact and what it means for a midshipman or what it means for a junior officer on how to really attack and take their sleep really seriously, and so I hope you enjoy the episode. If you have any questions, let me know, and if you are big on LinkedIn, again follow Dr Kortel. He's really fun. Follow on LinkedIn and talks about a lot of these topics, so make sure to check him out. Otherwise, if you have any questions, let me know. Enjoy the listen. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:The Academy Insider Podcast is sponsored by the Vermeer Group, a residential real estate company that serves the United States Naval Academy community and other select clientele in both California and Texas. If I can ever answer a real estate related question for you or connect you with a trusted Academy affiliated agent in the market which you're in, please reach out to me directly at grant, at the vermeergroupcom. You can also reach out to me on my LinkedIn page, grant Vermeer, and I'd be happy to respond to you there. Thank you so much, and now let's get back to the episode. Hey, john, thank you so much for taking the time today to join the Academy Insider audience. If you don't mind just giving a little bit of context and background to who you are basically, where you're from, how you ended up at the Naval Academy, a little bit about your naval career and currently what you're doing now.
Speaker 2:Okay, awesome. Well, hey, thanks a lot. So I grew up in a military family. My dad was a limited duty officer, came in the Navy of World War II enlisted. I went to officer candidate school and retired as lieutenant commander and JT cordial and he retired to Rome, georgia, which is where I went to high school. And at about the four-year point in high school I had decent grades. I was in a rock band.
Speaker 2:I was going to band practice one night my senior year and dad called me in to sit at the table and he said, son, have a seat. And I said what's up, dad, he goes here's how this is going to work. You have a high school degree coming up, you've got good grades. I'm not paying for college. You can live in the basement for 500 bucks a month if you want and be dinner with the family every night and be home by 10 pm on the weekends, or you can fill out this application to the Naval Academy. And so I was like what's the Naval Academy? Because I had no idea. I thought the Army-Navy game was some soldiers and sailors that played a football game, and so basically, he goes. Well, here's the deal. Here's one for Georgia Tech and one for US Naval Academy. Here's the deal. Here's one for Georgia Tech and one for US Naval Academy. You fill them out and you can leave for the night.
Speaker 2:And so I sat down in one session and opened up these packages and wrote everything down and sealed them up and got accepted to both and at that point my decision process was stay in Georgia or get out of Georgia, and I chose kind of a. It sounds kind of funny when I say it, but I typically, when presented with two options, I typically choose the most difficult one, just because it's there. And that's what I did. And so, really sight unseen, with no knowledge of what I was getting into, I showed up for I-Day on June 7, 1980, which is 40 years ago, so I just went to my 40th anniversary homecoming up there. But yeah, that's how. All I knew was the Navy. When my dad was growing up, he came home smelling like diesel fuel and gunpowder and he was in Vietnam for two and a half years. I didn't see him from like my sixth birthday to my ninth birthday, but I knew what it was like when he came home and we had Navy stuff all over the house and it was just kind of there. It was part of my life pretty much for my entire childhood and it just seemed like a natural fit.
Speaker 2:And so I went into the Naval Academy, ocean engineering. Actually I was a history major and my grandfather had heard the Glee Club sing and said you should join the Glee Club. So I did that and I was a history major for a little bit. And then I went home for Christmas and again my granddad, who was a teacher at University of Tennessee, he goes. You know, john, the academy is kind of an engineering school. You might want to get a degree in engineering.
Speaker 2:And so I shifted from history to the ocean engineering, which, like nobody does right, they usually go the other way. But it was cool. Ocean engineering is, if you're not familiar, is kind of bridges and docks and landings and beaches. And so they had a cool lab there where you could build ship models. We built like a model of a beach and then they would have a wave machine, simulate like 50 years of erosion and see where your design stood up. And so I did all that. And then again come surface selection time, I went to. All you know, I'm still the same, it's cartramid or protramid or whatever. And so you get a sampling of aircraft, submarines, surface ships in the Marine Corps. So the Marine Corps. I fell asleep in the woods which we'll get to in our topic today and was woken up by the sound of machine gun fire and I said, well, maybe that's not for me. And then I went flying in an A4 aircraft and threw up in the cockpit and I'm like okay that's not for me, yeah, and then I went underwater on the submarine.
Speaker 2:I'm like that's definitely not for me, and so surface warfare was pretty much it.
Speaker 2:But that was my dad's legacy too, so I was kind of that I was already, and then they offered me the nuclear power program and one of my best friends from the academy was a systems engineer number two in the class and they they campaigned pretty hard for john and he was like, if it's that good, why? Why do they have to sell it so hard, you know? And but I fell for it and so I went up, did my interview, came back from on the bus feeling like a complete moron, Like that was that's the dumbest I've ever felt was coming back from that nuclear power interview.
Speaker 1:And.
Speaker 2:I'm like God, please don't take me. And they did. And then I went to the, the power program, and the rest is history. So, yeah, that's my, that's my elevator speech for how I got that kind of came in the door, but we can certainly get into some more details about my experience there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, absolutely. And so, and so you went through that process of again becoming a slow nuke and made your way up and took multiple commands. Do you mind talking a little bit about your command experience out to sea? And how some of the experiences you took there are now translating to what you're doing now today.
Speaker 2:Great, great question. So I grew up in the surface Navy in the 80s and 90s and into the 2000s, in a time when kind of sleep was an afterthought Right. In fact, it was almost to the point where lack of sleep was almost a badge of courage. You know, it's like if you went fishing well, I caught a fish this big, oh yeah, I caught one this big. Well, I went 24 hours without sleep, oh yeah, I went 36 hours without sleep, and it never occurred to us that that may not be good for you. And so I grew up division officer, department head, xo, always tired In the nuclear pipeline. I still remember in nuclear power school or no, in prototype we were in this crazy rotating 12-hour shift seven days in a row and we were on the mid-shift. And actually we found that if we snuck up into the captain's office there was a nice leather couch and there was nobody up there at night. So that's the place we would go to catch a nap, to get back up on step for the next watch, and so sleep deprivation had been a part of my life pretty much.
Speaker 2:Growing up I read an article in Proceedings Magazine which I'm a big fan of at the Institute, called Ready Around the Clock by a gentleman named Lenny Capello who was a cruiser CO, and he had divided his ship into blue gold crews and said, okay, you're on for 12 hours, six hours of watch, six hours of work and you're off for 12,. And say, okay, you're on for 12 hours, six hours of watch, six hours of work and you're off for 12, workout, sleep, whatever. So I tried that on USS Oscar Austin.
Speaker 2:Ddg Destroyer was my first command tour and we failed miserably. We had a plan. It was mainly built around the watch day and not the work day, and we didn't change the standard routine, and so people who were up standing watch at night still had to get up and do stuff during the day, for training or, and basically the crew mutinied and said this is not working. You know, great idea, boss, but? And so we went back to kind of the old way of what we call fire the dimes five hours on, 10 hours off, but rotating so you're sleeping at a different time.
Speaker 2:When I got to the end of that deployment that was the operation Iraqi freedom. So we were there during the war launching Tomahawks and sort of focused on the mission, and it was a relatively short deployment, but I said, hey, if I get a chance to do this again, I'd like to do it right. I did Went to command again at USS San Jacinto in 2010 and met Dr Anita Shattuck, who ran the postgraduate school crew endurance team, and she set us up to do a sort of a watch rotation circadian watch it's called, so basically you sleep at the same time, stand watch at the same time. This particular one was a four-section three hours on nine hours off instead of five hours on 10 hours off and so we shifted to that after a few weeks into deployment and it was like you had just lifted off a blanket a wet blanket off of the crew. People were more awake, they were more alert, they were more focused, they started to work out more, they could plan their day and it was really in 20 years at that point 25, the most revolutionary thing I had seen on a ship in my entire career, 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 SNA surface literary award. Everybody's talking about it except the Navy. And so the surface Navy was kind of like eh, you know, we need more data. We don't want to tell the captain how to do things, you know, let's kind of sit back and let this develop. And so, from then until I retired in 2013, I kept trying to push it forward, but there was a lot of resistance. I continued that after I retired, sort of in my free time, writing articles like I shared with you, and talked about a couple of those, and one of them was called Fatigue is the Navy's Black Lung Disease, right? And so we were talking about how the health effects of sleep affect you. So, at the end of the day, the Navy was very resistant.
Speaker 2:Then 2017 happened and the McCain collision and the Fitzgerald collision. One of the root causes when they dug into it was, say, fatigue, in some cases, fatigue combined with new systems that weren't very well tested and trained, and which fatigue just made it worse, right? And so suddenly there was this instruction, which had been floating around in draft for years but not signed, got signed out in a matter of like three weeks. So if you ever worked on a staff, a three-star staff, getting a major instruction signed out in three weeks is it doesn't happen. But this, you know, fleet the fleet had picked up on this. A lot of folks were doing it, but they were kind of doing it piecemeal. Just the watch. Fitzgerald had a circadian watch, but they were not adjusting the daily routine to match the watch schedule.
Speaker 2:The ceo of john s mccain but you look back at the report, he actually was thinking about sleep when he delayed stationing the detail when they went into a high traffic area. In doing so, though, he took all the risk upon himself, and so, at the end of the day, it was my command tours that sort of shaped it, but it really felt for a while there, like Dr Shattuck and I were just a voice in the wilderness of hey, you know, if it's that simple and it doesn't cost anything, there's no way it can be effective, right, and I find that as an often and sort of a buzzkill kind of thing. When you bring a new idea to the table, if it's not expensive and won't take a long time to do, people dismiss it, even though we have proof that it works. So, yeah, that was kind of how my command tours. I just you know, I knew it from myself that when I don't sleep I'm not at my best, and I made a couple of bad decisions, which I could talk about, based on sleep deprivation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, absolutely. And so, if it wasn't clear already today, you know today's episode really is going to be all about sleep and the power of sleep and the importance of sleep, and especially as it relates to the achievement at the naval academy. And then officers out in the fleet and just general again our service members out in the fleet doing the lord's work, and so you know we're going to bring it back. Can you go back to your time as a midshipman, right, kind of kind of tailoring this back to being a midshipman at the naval academy? Do you ever have any, any sleepy, like sleepy days, falling asleep in class? Was that a thing? While you were going through it as well, pretty much all of them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know it's fine, so your timing is great. So I just spent the weekend up with my both of folks from 14th company. Uh, we're all in our 60s now and the big joke was the guy who was the last one to formation with rack burns on his face and always falling asleep in class and now has a phd in sleep science and you know it's like the face of navy sleep, you know.
Speaker 2:So what better qualification than sleeping a lot? But uh, well, you know, this grant I mean when you're at the naval academy, even when you can sleep, you don't necessarily, right, you're now. You all probably had like things like radios and tape players and stuff. We were there as plebs, you know, back in the last pleb summer, which was 1980, that's real right we weren't allowed to have radios or tape players. So I had this little tape, I had one cassette tape it was ACDC, back in black, and every night you would get taps, turn off the light, put the covers down, put your headphones on and listen to this one tape. And so we were tired all the time and then, like I said, when I went on to Nuke School and beyond, so yeah, it was not something that you just took it for granted that being a midshipman means being tired.
Speaker 1:Oh, my gosh, does that sound familiar? Oh, it sounds so familiar. If there's one consistent, as much as again, the academy may change or stay the same. I think exhausted midshipman is going to be one of the constants that that goes through time. I just like for me. I remember I had never known it was possible to fall asleep standing up until like I was, until I was a midshipman. I was like the amount of times my, my classroom progression went from like sitting at my desk for about five minutes and doing the head bob, like nodding off, then standing up in the back of the class and getting a reprieve for about 10 minutes where I'm like all right, I feel okay, and then it was like I'm like now I'm head bobbing, standing up in the back of the classroom, like I had never realized Find something to lean up against.
Speaker 1:That's exactly.
Speaker 2:But I want to come back to that because, just like in the surface Navy I've that doesn't have to be that way. Right, we can talk about some things that could be done at the academy if we chose to. That might mitigate some of that, and I know there have been some studies. Dr Shattuck did a study at the Military Academy and there have been some changes implemented to try to reduce that. And if you think about it I don't know anymore, but I think TAPS was at 10 o'clock at night and Reveille was at 6. So technically you've got eight hours to sleep, but, like I said, when you're 18, you probably don't. But part of that's education, which I think this podcast kind of gets at is I thought I knew a lot about sleep and still I started actually studying it and realized that it's a whole science in and of itself and that there's a lot you can learn about it, about your own sleep and about your sleep in general.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I do want to dive into some of the science of it, but you mentioned it earlier. Something you said early on in the episode that I think I really resonated with, which was like it was almost a badge of honor right To like not sleep much Right. And so I think there was a certain aspect because, especially while I was a midshipman as well, like that was one of those things that like people would joke about, but it was also like kind of like you're saying, almost a badge of honor, almost like a bragging right to be like oh, look at me, like, look how I can function, and I only I only got four hours of sleep Right. Like there was like a badge of honor and almost like resiliency or toughness of being like oh yeah, no, I slept for three hours and I can still. I can still function.
Speaker 2:You know what I mean and so that's my analogy to that was. You know, when my dad was growing up, people said the same thing about alcohol. Right, oh, I've had five drinks. I can drive, you know, and we're way past that, and I can show you data that says that if you drink five beers and I stay up for 36 hours, we will score about the same on an aptitude test or one of those drunk driving tests and things like that. So that's one of the things that I talk about when I go to ships and talk to the sailors is hey look, if you should have drunk for a watch, you'd be going to captain's mast.
Speaker 2:The degradation of performance that you experience from sleep deprivation is equivalent. About 24 hours of sleep puts you at about a 0.08. 24 hours without sleep puts you pretty close between 0.05 and 0.08 blood alcohol content, and they've repeated that in multiple studies with multiple groups, and so it's pretty compelling data. But yeah, it was like that and I get the sense. It's kind of like that now to some extent. But they are getting, I think, as part of the warrior toughness curriculum, they get a little exposure. But I certainly think that the academy could benefit from a little more targeted education on what sleep, what it really means to you and why it's important.
Speaker 1:No, absolutely. And what are some of those additional data points that we're talking about? About the effects of sleep a degradation, quite literally, from a data analytics perspective, of how it affects a human being when you are not sleeping enough or consistently Right?
Speaker 2:right. So there's really two facets to this. One is the quantity of sleep, which is typically for most humans seven to eight hours in a 24-hour period. Now there's some science that says that can be broken into two sleep periods. That kind of goes back to our caveman ancestors. And the other is the quality of sleep. So am I sleeping at the same time so that my body gets in that cycle, and then am I sleeping in a place that's cold, dark and quiet so that I get sufficient rest? Because I'm not going to go into sleep science in detail, but there are phases of sleep. There's REM sleep, there's four phases and if you don't spend some of your time in those phases where your body is really kind of shut down, you don't recover. So to your question there's really three answers to your question. There's the short-term effects.
Speaker 2:When I was at the academy you know, pulling all-nighter, you study for a test and you pass the test and then you just crash right. And so in the short term, in the first 24 hours to 36 hours of sleep deprivation, you become impaired, just like you were drinking. In many ways You're decision-making reaction time. So translate that to a watchstander on a ship If there's an incoming missile or there's a spark that's going to be a fire and my response time is delayed. Now I've impacted my ability to fight the ship, my ability to stand a watch, so there's immediate impact within one day on your ability to stand a good watch or respond to a casualty. So that's kind of the most important thing is your reaction time.
Speaker 2:When you get into a sleep-deprived state for months or weeks at a time, you accumulate what they call sleep debt, which basically means that your body sort of stabilizes out at a lower level of alertness, a lower level of profness, a lower level of proficiency. Your mood starts to get bad, so you're angry and you sort of develop kind of a laissez-faire. So your overall performance just goes to. You're just saying let's just get 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 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 it does have.
Speaker 2:It also has effects in anxiety and mental health, you know, for young folks especially, like the shipment, your body still developing right. So, mentally and physically, sleep is the time when your bones develop a little more resiliency, your muscles recover from that workout. So someone who works out and doesn't sleep is not going to see the same benefits as someone who works out and does sleep, because that's when your body rejuvenates. For your mind it also sort of cleans out the anxiety for the day, so there's a reset. That happens.
Speaker 2:But then physically, what they're discovering more and more and this gets into the long term is that there are toxins in your bloodstream, in your brain, that get flushed out at night, because the blood vessels open up. When they're more relaxed, the blood flushes things out, and so they've actually found ties between sleep deprivation and dementia and Alzheimer's. And so what may resonate more than the Chipman? There's also a decline in other other parts of your, the chemical parts of your body, including testosterone, which are negatively affected by sleep deprivation. So you know, if the alcohol doesn't get your attention, maybe that will. But there are, you know, multiple health reasons, and so I kind of tell people look, if you want to, if you want to make your life better with one thing get more sleep, and it'll have multiple positive effects.
Speaker 1:No, I just want to double down on that Again, just coming from my perspective as a midshipman, I think that's like the number one thing that I failed with is, I think there were times where I prioritized certain things, including, like an academic, you know, assignment or whatever. The case was. That probably could have been prevented by a certain level of proactive, proactivity in like throughout my day. But there are multiple times where, like I would choose to live the life of you know, sleeping four to five hours a night instead, and again like over the longterm, as I'm sure you're saying, like that had dramatic effects on me and only just continued to create this cycle 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, and it perpetually just got worse.
Speaker 2:No, definitely that sleep that builds up over time and you can't pay it back in one night. 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 you know, on the weekends, what do you do? You go out and party and do all kinds of crazy things and don't get sleep as well. So you start Monday morning already in a sleep deprived kind of condition, quite often.
Speaker 2:Now, that was one thing that struck me during this weekend is you know, here we are a bunch of 60 year olds trying to keep pace with the midshipmen, and you know they run right, they are just, they're just on all the time. And so we were sort of starting to sort of my friend sponsors some mids and so they would come over and we'd talk and it was. It was kind of interesting to reconnect there, but but some things haven't changed at all and one of those, I think, is sleep deprivation, deprivation.
Speaker 1:Sure, and speaking of you know, like what you're saying, it's the weekend, you're exhausted from the week at the Naval Academy, like going through school, all the military obligations, athletics, et cetera. And then again a lot of people choose and I think there is a certain level of like culture at the Academy and in the Navy of general of like this like work hard, play hard type thing, where you know people go out they have multiple drinks. Can you talk about the effect of alcohol on sleep, like you have any insight on that? And again, you know, as we're talking about building up sleep debt and potentially the weekend being your one time to kind of recoup and start to build out of that a little bit, how does alcohol play an effect into, like the quality of sleep that you're getting?
Speaker 2: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 is a sleeping pill, but the reality is it might help you fall asleep at some level, but then, after it wears off, then you wake back up and so it's actually a negative effect. The overall impact with alcohol on sleep is negative. Plus, at some point you have to get rid of it, and so getting up at the night to go to the bathroom multiple times, um, is a sleep interruption and so, no, it just compounds. Funny, when you get one of these 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 see a night with alcohol and a night without alcohol and you can watch on a graph how it affects your sleep.
Speaker 2:So there's really no good sleep effects from alcohol. They're all bad. Both the liquid amount and the content of it just degrades your sleep pretty dramatically 100%.
Speaker 1:I think that piece is really interesting. My wife is a big wear of the of the aura ring as well, right, and there'll be times where you know her, her Apple teller. Like, did you drink alcohol last night when we had like a glass of wine with dinner? Right, so like what? Literally the physiological responses from that, her heart rate variability and all these different aspects of sleep, like it was like it's like your sleep score. Right, it's funny to like again the gamification of this, to like quite literally get a score. Tell, yeah, like these things have real effects on your, on your sleep.
Speaker 2:That that's a great point, you know. Back to the rings. Real quick, two quick stories from shipboard. So we put rings through the postgraduate 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 came back, went back to the ship to sign for more people up and she came up and found me and thanked me. She said you know, this thing has changed my life. She says now I pay attention to my sleep pattern, what I do before I go to bed, I can see the negative impacts of things like alcohol. The other one was a captain and kind of like you mentioned. He was up in the Gulf in the Red Sea defending the ship against Houthi missiles and it was in combat until 4 am, went to bed, came back up at 6.30. And he picks up his phone and says did you have a stressful day yesterday? And he's like I sure did.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But then it said, well, here's how to recover from that. And so I think there's benefits to like I always say we know the oil pressure in our pump, we know the voltage on our buses, on the ship. Why would we not know the fatigue level of our crew?
Speaker 1:as a standard thing.
Speaker 2:And there are some efforts out there. I mentioned Dr Nita Shattuck. Dr Rachel Markwald at the Naval Health Research Center has done a lot with. Basically it's a computer program that can pull in the data from your ring or your wearable device and actually plot it out for the whole crew and then feed that into the watch bill. So you can look at the watch bill. It's still in the research phase but it's kind of cool. You can look at a watch bill and say, okay, grant had the mid-watch and he's supposed to drive the ship in this morning. That's not a good choice. Look at his sleep deprivation number. So that sleep score becomes, you know, like the voltage on an electrical bus, something you can read off of a machine and make a decision, you know. So that's pretty cool.
Speaker 1:Oh, absolutely. And again, I think this stuff is really interesting because I think, as you're mentioning, it's well documented at this day and age. You know the effect of sleep right and how much it can affect and detriment human performance in a lot of different factors, from the short term to long term, etc. You've written articles in 2013,. You know the one you mentioned again, fatigue, is the Navy's black lung disease again in 2020.
Speaker 1:And these are things that you're continuing to talk about today over the course of 11 year span, right. Why do you think it's so difficult for these things to change? And, in your opinion, are these things even feasible with the necessity of 24-7 watch standing right, right, like when you mentioned that the Navy job is 24-7 and there are a lot of factors outside of your control? So, again, just from an honest opinion, like are these things feasible? And how do we, as a fleet and an individual kind of maximize our sleep to best be prepared for whatever may come in a day to day life?
Speaker 2: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 the nation, the Navy, is generational, and by that he meant it takes about 10 years from the beginning to the end for a change to really take effect. And so I tell people we are seven years from 2017 into a 10-year change in the culture. That was sort of I had a good confirmation point standing around the campfire this weekend. The gentleman next to me is a Navy SWO surface warfare officer, second tour back at the academy doing a pretty great program where he gets a master's in leadership and then becomes a company officer, which I thought was pretty cool. But he was on two ships as a division officer and we got to talking a little bit and after a while he's like are you that sleep guy? And I said yes, and he said thank you and I said why, and he goes because I was on. All I know is the three on nine off the circadian wash rotation, but all I heard from my department heads and my ex-O and CO was how much better it is now than it was when they were out there with the five and dimes and other stuff, and so so there has been a cult, but it's going to take the guys like him where that's all they know, who are now starting to get towards. You know, they were department heads, now they're taking command. They'll have to get to major command, and so it's going to take, I think, 10 years Now.
Speaker 2:There's there's two things that are major impediments to this in my opinion, and and one of those is just manning right, so you build a model of a ship and in that model there's a manning calculation that says hey, look, you have, you know, eight hours of watch, eight hours of work and eight hours of sleep. And then we built this model and we run it and there's all kinds of computer power behind it and everything. And it gives us a number and it says you need 300 people to run a destroyer-ish. And then we take that number and even at the op-nav level, we fund it to 90%, and so instead of 300, we buy 270 billets, and then, because of recruiting challenges and retention challenges, we can only get out of that 270, 250. And then we take that ship and put it in port and people go on, leave and take school. I was on a destroyer the other day mustering 207 out of 300.
Speaker 2: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 work per person, goes up because the work, the numerator doesn't change, right? Yeah, and so if you do the math, if I'm manned to 85 percent of whatever I'm supposed to be and I'm supposed to work, so the navy standard work week work week is 81 hours long. So even the baseline is 67 hours of watch plus work, and then 14 hours of training, quarters, leadership stuff, admin, 81 hours at sea. If I'm manned to 85%, do the math, I'm now at 100-hour week. A 100-hour week is 14 hours a week, two hours a day that I'm not sleeping. Now my time available for sleep goes from eight hours to six. So now my time available for sleep goes from eight hours to six, and so the average sleep of a sailor out there is about five and a half hours a night, which is borderline, legally drunk, right. And so we know the root cause is the manning. And then, but we don't, you know, we sort of accept it and that's the drum that I try to beat all the time.
Speaker 2:The other piece that we're kind of missing is and the GAO backs this up is if you want something to get fixed in the Navy, some one person has to own it, somebody has to be in charge of it. A DOD instruction came out three years ago that said all the services shall appoint a single responsible person for fatigue management and crew endurance. None of the services, including the Navy, have done that, and so, because there is no one in charge of it, there is no coherent action plan for the entire Navy, there's no funding, there's no policy, and so my constant sort of drumbeat now is you know the type commanders have. All you know, at the shipboard level we've kind of figured out the best we can do with what we've got, but it would require a change to Navy policy to actually implement this fleet-wide and put resources behind it. And you know that's been went past us here in the summertime that I continue to raise my voice of hey, we are standing into danger, and that's kind of my mantra now is, you know it's kind of the frog in a pot syndrome you keep turning the water and the frog doesn't notice it. Well, you know, the Navy kind of hired me to be the guy watching the frog, sure, but the navy is the frog, and so it's tough to convince the frog. Hey, you're boiling, you know. We just don't know it because you're used to that temperature.
Speaker 2:But we're, you know, manning wise, we're kind of back to where we were in 2017. Op tempo wise, we're kind of where 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 have made tremendous improvements, don't get me wrong. Sure, but if you don't address the root cause, which is simply that there's more work to do than there are people to do it and people, as you know, you did it yourself you put yourself last. Right, I'm going to stay up to fix that pump. I'm going to stand that extra watch. 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 to take a nap, but yeah, so I think we've got some work to do there. We have a tendency, as you know, to kind of okay, we've done that.
Speaker 1:We're going to put that one in the case, sure, and you know those are like you're saying, those are high level solutions and there's a certain level of stuff going on again like we're talking about in boardrooms at an executive level kind of, within the Navy, the DOD, the Department of the Navy, et cetera. But I kind of want to focus again there's some things that are just out of our control as a midshipman or as a jail or all these factors. I want to tailor this last piece of this conversation really directed towards, again, midshipmen and junior officers, controlling what they can control, to kind of maximize what we have in our current situation.
Speaker 1:Right, and so you know. The first piece is just why do you think it's so important for midshipmen to prioritize their sleep, and how do you think and if there is any scientific data or anything, or just personal anecdote and opinion how those habits towards sleep they build at the academy will prepare them for life in the fleet?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Thank you for bringing me back off the high horse there into reality. As a midshipman I wasn't real concerned with whether the CNO was going to sign out any policy.
Speaker 2:Right, that wasn't keeping me up at night. So you know to the midshipman out there, this is why it matters to you, okay? First of all, you are at a phase in your life where your mind and your body you may not want to hear this, but they're still developing. That's why you run all the time. That's why you work out. I was not in good shape when I went to the Naval Academy. I was like an, a student. I was in the choir. I went up to the soccer. My high school required intramurals and I even wrote a paper about how that was ruining my life, that you made me play soccer. So I was not a physical specimen and the Navy kind of whipped me into shape there to some extent and probably extended my life by doing so. But if you sleep more, then two things will happen. Number one your physical performance will increase. You'll be able to run faster, jump higher, hit harder.
Speaker 2:You're seeing professional sports teams bring in a sleep coach nowadays. I bet you the Naval Academy. Maybe that's what changed in the Naval Academy football program. I better go back and see If they hire a sleep coach in there. I'll take full credit for the unbeaten year of the season. But you see teams when they go to away games. They fly a day early, they get a hotel, they give the team a regimen to follow. And I have data. There are studies after studies that have showed increases in alertness, increases in reaction time, increases in retention of knowledge. So if you're better slept, you will 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 probably better off. If you've been in that class for six months and you don't know it, you're not going to learn it tonight, right? Um, yes, you sleep on it. Your brain will find that information faster, right from deep yes, like that's, that's so big.
Speaker 1:I'm so sorry, like I just need need to like double down and highlight, because that was my thing is like I would say in in study, and I would choose to quote unquote study for that extra hour and a half from like midnight to one, 30, right, instead of just going to sleep, which honestly, in retrospect, probably was a net negative action on my behalf.
Speaker 2:It's tough to prove a negative, but I would submit that if you and your roommate had had similar grades and then one of you stayed up all night and one of you went to sleep, the one who went to sleep is probably going to do a little bit better, and there's studies that show that. So, physically, what's the mission of the AVOCAD? Morally, mentally and physically, sleep will help with two of those. Sleep will help with two of those right Mentally and physically, you will be a better performer academically on the sports field if you get better sleep.
Speaker 2:The second thing is your immune system. They found this during COVID that an extra hour of sleep increases your immunity to disease, virus and bacterial disease by 40%. So if you're not sick, then you're not down, then you're not missing practice, you're not missing school days. So there's immunity, your immune, immune system and your general overall health. And then, finally, you know it doesn't matter to the machinima that's 18 years old, but you know you are probably going to live to be 60 or 70. Now will impact your quality of life. You know in your 40s, 50s and 60s and you can't go back and fix it right. I go to bed every night with a CPAP machine and I take a dopamine pill for my restless leg syndrome, which I have medical evidence that is tied back to my watch standing in the Navy. Now the VA doesn't accept that, but the medical world does Another conversation Right, so I tell every active duty service, duty service.
Speaker 2:Get a sleep test on active duty, because if it's not documented, then so you know. And the last piece I want to hit on is okay, what are the things within your control? Right, I really can't control when taps is and when revelry is. I can't control what I have to do during the work day, but a couple things I can do. First of all, it's pretty quiet and cool are the three things that make me sleep better. And so I just heard up there this weekend that Bancroft Hall is now air-conditioned, which it wasn't right when I was there. And so up on 7-4, air conditioning meant open two windows and hope the breeze came through. But if you're sleeping in an 80-degree room you're not getting good sleep, and so they have done stuff. So cool, get it down to below 70. Dark put duct tape over the lights, turn off the lights, make it very, very dark and then quiet Turn off the radio, tv. Some people like to have white noise, stuff like that, but those are very controllable, right Curtains, stuff like that. If you're out of the Naval Academy and you're back at your house, go to Ikea, get some blackout curtains.
Speaker 2:We hand out sleep improvement kits to the ships. That's nothing more than a blindfold, earplugs and a card the last piece you can do in your daily routine, right? So when you wake up in the morning, if you need to have a stimulant, one cup of coffee is okay. Coffee in the evenings or the afternoon is not good. It takes a long time to wear out. So, consciously, work on your daily routine, exercise, get good nutrition and then, when you get ready to go to sleep, make that a transition process. So change into whatever you're going to wear to bed. Do some stretching exercises, do yoga, listen to music, take a walk, do something to draw a line between that workday and your body transitioning to sleep, and that takes about a half an hour. So you have to plan your day for that sleep transition and that wake up transition.
Speaker 2:There's a thing you know back to my command tour you get woken up as a captain all the time and there's a thing called sleep inertia, which is, if you wake up from a deep sleep, there's about a 20 minute period where your mind hasn't quite caught up to. You think it has, because you're talking and making decisions, but you're not really clicking on all cylinders, and so you know you don't want to deep sleep until 6 am and then boom, you're off and running for the day. You kind of have to do a little bit to spool up, but really spooling down is the secret, I think, and that's where I've learned a lot about you know put the phone away, turn off the TV set, turn off the distractions, do something to sort of focus your mind, let your body sort of transition into the sleep mode and then focus on a good sleeping environment. And then the last thing I find that 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.
Speaker 2:Oh, I have this brief tomorrow. I've got a test tomorrow. I don't have it here handy. I have a little whiteboard that I bought at Dollar Tree. I'll typically sit there about 8 o'clock, 9 o'clock at night and say, okay, what do I have to not forget? Tomorrow? It might be where's my car keys? Where's my thing? You have a routine. But then also I need to email this particular brief in. I have to attend this event, and so I'll jot that stuff down so that when I wake up in the morning, there it is, I don't have to have it in my head all night. So those are a few things that I recommend that you can control well within your own sphere.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100% I love it. It's a very nuke move. I'm a big whiteboard guy To this day. I'm a big whiteboard guy To this day. I'm a big whiteboard guy. I absolutely love it. I can hardly have a conversation without one, really.
Speaker 2:One last thing I wanted to hit on before we wrap up, grant, is there's a piece of this that you hit on early on. I can give you all the time in the world to sleep and I can give you a cold, dark, quiet environment. At some point it's on you right. There's a personal responsibility piece to this I think we miss out on sometimes and I've heard that as an excuse not to implement these policies. Well, if we give them time, they'll just play video games or do other stupid stuff and not sleep. And that may be true to some extent.
Speaker 2:I will tell you, I've been on ships eight, 10 times since I got this job. What do I see? I see sailors working, standing watch and sleeping. They are so tired, even though we have like the worst mattresses. It was kind of funny. One of my sailors spent the night in jail in Newport News after a traffic. He got a reckless driving ticket and they let him serve his sentence on Friday and Saturday nights for like a month so he could work right, but he missed a duty day. So he was heading to XOI for missing a duty day and they asked him well, where were you? He goes. Well, I was in jail, okay.
Speaker 2:So that led down another path, because he hadn't told us that.
Speaker 2:But, during the conversation. But he was a good kid, he just got caught. It was kind of funny because initially the command was kind of spooling up to hammer this guy and then, literally between XOI and Captain's Mass, the captain got a ticket for reckless driving in his neighborhood, for going 45 in a 25 zone, which is 20 miles above the limit, and suddenly it didn't seem so bad. But anyway, this kid said this young sailor. He said hey, ractor R, the mattresses in the jail were much better than the ones we have on the ship. Can I get one of those? And so you know, the problem is you're so tired on the ship that it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.
Speaker 2:But back to that point of personal responsibility is you know, I sort of when I give my little talk on the ship, I talk about the alcohol correlation and I ask them, I say, do you believe me? And they all say oh, yes, yes, yes. And then we do a little skit where I call up a watch stander to take the watch and the first one I say look, you drank kind of like you and I talked about. You drank six beers and I've stayed up for 36 hours, go take the watch. And so the first guy comes up and says off the deck, I'm ready to take the watch. I've had five beers in the last 12 hours. And of course the off the deck is like no, you know, get out of here. The second guy comes up and says, sir, I had no sleep in the last 36 hours and my average time to say no for the drunk watch standard is like one second. My average time to get to know for the tired watch standard is like 15 seconds, because they'll start a conversation Well, why were you up and did you really not sleep? And then they'll look to me for like, what do I do? And you know you do what you would do in real life. And so they say they believe you, but when it comes to actually implementing it, and so you wouldn't show up drunk for watch. So it's on you to not show up tired.
Speaker 2:And I think that's where I think this message would resonate with Mitch Schimman, because one of the things you kind of beat into your head during four years is that that you are responsible. You know, from the honor code to the whatever, you're responsible for your behavior. And so there's an opportunity there, I think you know. Back to my, if I was, you know, king for a day or had 30 minutes with the commandant, I would say you know you want to improve the quality of service for your midshipmen and improve their performance. Do two things implement a sleep education program half an hour, 45-minute session and buy aura rings or wearables. Give them a uniform allowance. Say, go buy yourself one right Whoop aura. I don't want to, you know, but you know, get something so you can monitor your own performance.
Speaker 2:And I think you would see a net increase in the performance of the brigade.
Speaker 1:No, I think that's a really cool factor Because, like you say, I think it's really easy a lot of times for us as humans, right, just to kind of disassociate things not going well and not performing and blame it on other things, right. It's like oh yeah, I got enough sleep, I feel fine, blah, blah, blah. Right, it was kind of the thing that you're talking about the culture of like oh I've had three beers, I feel fine.
Speaker 1:Right, like there's no problem. Right, and I think you know almost that idea of having quite literally a physiological metric and analyzer. Right, that's telling you straight up, based on data like this is how your body's been affected by you not sleeping. Right, it's hitting you in the face, right Like there's. There's no ignoring it at that point, right, I think that's really interesting because, like we're saying a lot of times, in today's day and age and I'm I still consider myself a young person, you know, there are a lot of things that make me feel older. Now, sure, it's like there are a lot of distractions, right, like you finally get to the point where you're ready to go to bed but now are out there that can distract you from what should be the prioritization of sleep.
Speaker 2:That's exactly right, yeah, and so I think that's really interesting. That phone has has lights. You know, the blue light from the phone actually suppresses your melatonin production. So there's a double whammy. Because I tell the young sailors 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 in that phone is going to get onto your skin and you're going to be thinking about that when you should be sleeping. Somebody, you know, hey, he didn't like that poster, I didn't get enough, I didn't get a thumbs up from that guy, you know. And so now you're fixated on that. You're not focused on it. So I like the way you said it is. Hey, those are all distractors, we call them. They just sort of suck the life out of your sleep plan. Before you know it, it's midnight or 1 am and now you can't get six hours or seven hours because you're still up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%, 100%.
Speaker 1:And I think, like you mentioned, there's a personal responsibility.
Speaker 1:But when you get out to the fleet right, this is why I talk about the Academy a lot about it being a great opportunity to build these habits before you get out there, because when you're at the academy, it's really just you you know what I mean.
Speaker 1:Like you're only your decisions affect you when you get out to the fleet and you haven't, you know, built the habits to establish and prioritize your sleep. Now you're showing up tired to in front of your division and kind of we're talking about establishing that culture that, like, sleep is not important, right, or all these different things. Or you're putting yourself in a spot where you're not ready to help your sailors and whatever life situations they have going on, right, there are a lot of a lot of factors and, when it comes down to it, like building those habits and getting in a way of like prioritizing sleep. So that way, you know, we're talking about a lot of this power of presence Well, you need to be present mentally too, like, you need to be able to be there and be attentive and be focused, be able to help the people who are there, who are your sailors.
Speaker 2:Yeah, now that's a great point. Back to the command tour. When I was going through the pipeline, 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 admiral passing through and they grabbed him for a speech.
Speaker 2:But he said your whole life you've heard ship, ship, mate, self. Right, that's the triangle. When you get to a leadership position, you have to flip that. And you could hear the harumphs in the room. He said because here's the deal If you let yourself go physically, mentally, you don't work out, you don't eat right, you don't sleep, you're going to find yourself on watch or in a decision point where you are the decision maker and to some extent, the life and death of your crew could depend on that decision you have to make right now, with no warning and no preparation. And so you go into that moment with whatever you got in the tank and if you fail, then you lose the ship and you lose the crew. And so you know you have to start with yourself and lay that foundation of good nutrition, exercise and sleep and you'll be a better midshipman, you'll be a better warfighter, you'll be a better midshipman, you'll be a better warfighter, you'll be a better watchstander and you'll live longer and have a healthier life, you know.
Speaker 2:So, and no pills or medications needed. Sure.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, 100%. I am going to take this quick plug. If you've been listening to this episode, you're a midshipman or you're even a parent of a midshipman and you're like, how do they get this help when it comes to sleep? One thing that I will say about the Academy that they've started to do really well is the Midshipman Development Center, and it literally started to get recognized even in the Princeton Review as like the number one college counseling services across the country, which is incredible. But they do more than just you know what we would consider like quote unquote therapy. They have people on staff for sports performance, they have people on staff for sports performance, they have people on staff for sleep, they have people on staff for nutrition right, Like, there's a lot of different aspects to really in in do this, and so you know we're going to, we're going to have an episode coming out with the, you know, the director of the midshipman development center to talk all about the resources that they provide.
Speaker 1:But, like, I would encourage everyone who is listening there to take advantage of those services that are being provided by the Academy. Again, it requires proactivity on your part to go and like take advantage of those things, but they exist, but they exist right. And so again, I just you know from. It is always funny like it's a bunch of the people who've already been there before talking about their experience back, but I wish I would have prioritized my sleep significantly better as a midshipman and even as a junior officer in the fleet. And so take advantage of those resources, Take advantage of those resources.
Speaker 2:That's great. I didn't know that was there. I'd love to connect with them and learn what they're doing, so that's awesome.
Speaker 1:Offline I got you you make, so that's awesome. Yeah, I got you.
Speaker 2: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 this across the force is there is a greater emphasis on you as an individual, where the Navy invests whether it's in training or in therapy or in whatever to make you a better person, and the idea that that will make you a better sailor, better officer, better warfighter. And so I have heard that come across in many ways. Admiral Cahill, who was our boss when we were looking at these rings for the sailors, he goes look, even if we don't get any data, we are telling the sailors I care about you, I care about you enough to give you something to make your life better.
Speaker 2:And that wasn't the way of the world 30 years ago and it was sort of my way or the highway. My life sucks, so yours should too, and now it's more. Hey, my life sucked. But why did it suck? And well, partly because of decisions that I made, but partly because of things that weren't in place like that. That Midshipman Development Center is fantastic. That's great to hear. So I'll tell you just to my last thought. You'll experience this yourself Driving across that bridge and seeing Annapolis, even 40 years later, you still get a little pit in your stomach of ah, here it comes, I got to go back. What a beautiful, fantastic place, I mean it's just overwhelming.
Speaker 2:To walk the ground, see how far they've come, chat with the midshipmen I mean anybody who you know. I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. A lot of my generation sort of is like oh, senators, these days they don't care, they don't want to work hard. You know, go talk to some midshipmen, go walk the academy grounds. I mean, if you don't walk away from there with a spirit of enthusiasm, I'm always getting choked up because it was just like it was overwhelming. It really was, and so thank you for what you're doing to kind of. You know, I could have a whole mountain of the stuff I wish I had known when I was 18. And of course nobody would look at it. But I wouldn't have when I was 18. But golly the advances that that place has made. I had to laugh at one sign. It said that no drone zone no a sign on the wall.
Speaker 2:It's like you know that'll, that'll fend off the drones flying at eight feet. You know um, but uh, um, but anyway. No, it was uh. It was just eye-watering to talk to those mids and and see their enthusiasm and to find a couple service warfare officers who were very positive about the SWO community, which wasn't always the case when I was there too. But thanks for what you're doing. This is a great service to the Academy and I know they appreciate it and I hope the MIDS will look at this. And I encourage anyone listening to connect with me on LinkedIn and I will fill your inbox with sleep-related stories and ideas. But it really is. If there's one thing you can do to make your life better, get an extra hour of sleep. That's kind of my takeaway for this Love it.
Speaker 1:Well, john, thank you so much for taking the time and talking to us about this topic. I assume you'll probably be back on on multiple occasions to talk about a variety of different topics, but going into January and the dark ages in general, there are going to be a lot of topics around a midshipman how you saw it in the fleet, and your current and ongoing initiatives to try and improve that in aggregate for everyone in the Navy, and so I appreciate it very much. Thanks for joining us today and just a big, a big thank you. Thank you All right To the Academy Insider audience. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out. Otherwise, I do recommend I follow Dr John Cordell here on LinkedIn big time. Go follow him there.
Speaker 1:Great information and a lot of, again, just great articles and information regarding sleep and other kind of initiatives to just make sure all sailors are being cared for, loved and valued across the fleet, and so I love every bit of this. Thank you so much and reach out with any questions. Have a good day, thanks. Thank you so much for listening to 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 to like and subscribe or leave a comment about the episode. We really appreciate to hear your feedback about everything and continue to make Academy Insider an amazing service that guides, serves and supports midshipmen, future midshipmen and their families. Thank you.
