Wellness Simplified: Evidence-Based Health Habits for Busy Professionals
Jul 20, 2026 · 58 min · 15 segments
Wondering how to sleep better without another list of ten sleep hygiene rules you'll forget by Thursday? This week's guest, behavioural scientist Dr Jemma King, says most of us are focused on the…
Jemma KingGuestKelly NicholsHostUm, but your background is actually in stress and performance, um, psychology, and you've worked with all kinds of people, Olympic forces, C-suite, then the armed forces, like, quite impressive.
But so what led you to focus on this deep dive into sleep for your, for your book?
So like I say in my book, when people read that I'm s- researching and writing about stress, people would be like, from my youth go, "What? Her?" She was like...
But I started studying cortisol and stress and, um, doing big studies with, you know, thousands of people, and I started to see something in the data that I could not ignore, and that was the fact that every single person who I came across who had a mental health disruption had a sleep disruption.
And then every single person who I saw that didn't sleep normally would eventually succumb to some form of mental health disruption.
And I thought there's a really strong correlation here that I can't ignore, and so I started looking more and more into sleep.
And you know, when you look working with athletes and special forces soldiers and people who don't have a lot of time re- or s- you know, people who don't have resources, like Australian athletes aren't very well-resourced.
Or if, you know, if you're away and on deployment and you don't have access to a lot of, um, resources, I was thinking w- what is the greatest, most ac- uh, of, you know, accessible, free, democratically available, effective performance-enhancing protocol, and it came down to sleep.
Like, if you really want to become faster, smarter, you know, better, quicker, stronger, more emotionally stable, just have better cognitive performance, sleep is 100% the place where you should start.
Like, it, you know, it's right there every night for free and, you know, I, I know there's a lot of people have sleep issues, but I really found that if you just got that right, the second and third order effect of that was that everything else fell into place or became much easier to wrangle or to change.
Um, but your background is actually in stress and performance, um, psychology, and you've worked with all kinds of people, Olympic forces, C-suite, then the armed forces, like, quite impressive.
But so what led you to focus on this deep dive into sleep for your, for your book?
So like I say in my book, when people read that I'm s- researching and writing about stress, people would be like, from my youth go, "What? Her?" She was like...
But I started studying cortisol and stress and, um, doing big studies with, you know, thousands of people, and I started to see something in the data that I could not ignore, and that was the fact that every single person who I came across who had a mental health disruption had a sleep disruption.
And then every single person who I saw that didn't sleep normally would eventually succumb to some form of mental health disruption.
And I thought there's a really strong correlation here that I can't ignore, and so I started looking more and more into sleep.
And you know, when you look working with athletes and special forces soldiers and people who don't have a lot of time re- or s- you know, people who don't have resources, like Australian athletes aren't very well-resourced.
Or if, you know, if you're away and on deployment and you don't have access to a lot of, um, resources, I was thinking w- what is the greatest, most ac- uh, of, you know, accessible, free, democratically available, effective performance-enhancing protocol, and it came down to sleep.
Like, if you really want to become faster, smarter, you know, better, quicker, stronger, more emotionally stable, just have better cognitive performance, sleep is 100% the place where you should start.
Like, it, you know, it's right there every night for free and, you know, I, I know there's a lot of people have sleep issues, but I really found that if you just got that right, the second and third order effect of that was that everything else fell into place or became much easier to wrangle or to change.
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