In order to be able to cover news twenty four to seven. It means people have to work at all strange hours of the night. And even if you think about a program like Good Morning America, everyone who works on that show is waking up at two, three, four, maybe five in the morning if they're lucky.
Diane Mercedo is a journalist, author, and news anchor who co hosts ABC News Live. From the anchor chair of early morning news shows to field reporting for overnight news coverage, Diane has done it all. We rely on journalists like her to be there to deliver the stories and information that we need to know, and Diane is one of the most trusted voices in the industry. On an average day, she's reporting the news to roughly eight point one million viewers.
The ultimate reward is relaying this information that I think is really important, and I do you consider news of public service. And I'm a very sort of principled, idealistic person.
Even still in my career.
Things don't stop happening just because the sun goes down. Reporting the news is a twenty four to seven job.
I've had shifts where I went in at noon, i went in at three thirty in the morning. I went in at one thirty in the morning, camera ready. I've gone in at ten or eleven pm and come out of work at nine am, And then you try to sleep.
If the news never sleeps, what does that mean for the journalists to report it and how do they disconnect from the intensity and severity of current events to onewine for healthy sleep. I'm Anahad O'Connor and this is Chasing Sleep and iHeartRadio production in partnership with Mattress Firm. As a best selling author and a health call with the background in psychology, I've spent a lot of my time
studying and writing about sleep. Sleep is so essential to our overall health, but often it's something we overlook and it's the first thing we tend to neglect. And each episode we'll meet people living and working in extraordinary circumstances. I want to learn how they rest and recharge their
bodies and minds to perform at their very best. In this episode, we'll uncover what working through the night to bring you the news does to the brain and how to slow things down to be able to get some much needed rest.
Breaking news is the most challenging part of my job. Now, But it's the part that I love the most. It's when there's no prompter to rely on, there's no script to rely on, sometimes very little information to rely on, and you kind of just have to go with your gut.
It's you and the audience and nothing in between.
As you're actively getting in this new information, how do I best relay this to the audience in a way that everyone's gonna understand and be able to take in and to be able to capture.
What the important parts of this story really are.
There's something deeply exciting about the world of reporting and fitting in all the pieces of a story to give the public a full picture.
I think I've just always had this intense curiosity about wanting to know what was going on in the world and wanting to figure it out, like everything was a giant puzzle, and the more information I could get, the more I could figure out how it all comes together.
There's no shortage of difficult moments in journalism. Sometimes the bigger the story, the bigger the emotional toll it can have on the public and the journalists delivering the story. I wondered about some of those bigger moments in Diane's career and how she's learned to process the weight of the news she's reporting.
One big one for me was working on the Eric Garner case. I was in Staten Island talking to his friends, people who were there, who witnessed the police put him in a chokehold. They were all telling me, you know, they're saying he died at the hospital. As far as we could tell, he died in front of us. And being able to talk to people like that firsthand, see
additional videos that they took. Regardless of your opinion on the case, when you see how any serious news story actually touches the people who are directly involved, it affects you differently. And that's one of those stories that you know even now, I go home sometimes and I find myself at midnight watching the video again, listening to the audio again.
Can I do anything about it?
No. But in the instances like that, your brain doesn't always let you sleep because it's so consumed by something else. And then you hit a story that just consumes you to the point where you can't fall asleep as easily as you would like to.
Journalism requires those in the field to be able to manage high levels of emotional stress along with the intense pressure of being the first to break the news, no matter the hour. At a certain point, that all starts to take a toll. And when you're pushing through on high levels of adrenaline, how do you come down from the reporting high?
Little by little, I just saw my sleep deteriorate more and more and more and more. And I think I did what most people do, which is you just assume you can.
Power through it.
And one of the perks of having a job like this is that you love it and when you're doing it, your adrenaline is pumping and you kind of find a way to perform. Your body just goes into showtime mode and you dig deep and you do it. I think the problem comes around after. It's when you get home and now you're trying to un plug from showtime mode, and you're trying to tell your body work time is over and now it's time to relax and unwind and
go to sleep. I think, for myself and for a lot of journalists who are used to that kind of quick, fast paced, fast thinking life, it's when you try to step back from that that then you start to have a problem because you lay down in bed and you're trying to tell your body it's time to go to sleep, and your body's still in go mode.
We all know at this point that stress can really do a number on our bodies. But I wanted to talk to an expert to learn more about how stress and anxiety impact our sleep. So I decided to catch up with doctor Jade Wu. She's a Board certified sleep psychologist, researcher, and author of the book Hello Sleep, The Science and Art of Overcoming Insomnia Without Medications. And so, with the high stress environment of working in a newsroom like Dianda's,
could you walk us through how stress affects sleep. We know that not getting enough sleep can be stressful, but how does having high levels of stress effect your sleep?
Yeah, stress and sleep are not good friends. So when we experience a lot of stress, especially chronic stress, hour after hour, day after day kind of stress, the message that's sending to our bodies is there must be a predator on our tail, because otherwise, why are you so high octane all the time, Why are you going, going, going, Why is your heart rate up and your cortisol levels are up? You know, all of this is telling our
bodies there must be a predator. So if there is a predator, obviously the last thing you want to do is sleep. So it's really hard to turn on and off that switch to say, Okay, now I'm on, i am reporting breaking news, I am you know, chasing down leads, I am in front of the camera in front of millions of people, and then switch it off like Okay, I'm alone in my quiet room and I want to sleep now. It's really hard to just, you know, switch on and off like that and get into sleepy mode.
So, if we're going about our days and tackling the challenges that life throws at us, how can we tell when stress is reaching a point where it's actively impacting our sleep.
So one of the most common things I hear is tired but wired. So someone is exhausted, they're dragging, they can't concentrate, they don't feel well. They just want to crawl into bed like everything in their body is screaming for rest. But when they get into bed, they can't sleep. They have insodom. Yet they're staring at the ceiling, They're tossing and turning, their mind is racing, you know, and sometimes they even feel like panicky feelings in their body.
That racing mind needs some sort of release. You know, you can't just keep kicking the can down the road. Your thoughts, your mind really do need your attention. So if all day long you're saying, Okay, I'm busy, I'm distracted, and I don't have time to process my thoughts or emotions. If the first time in your day that you have a chance to us your thoughts your emotions is at bedtime, when you lay down and it's finally quite and dark, then of course your racing mind is going to come
out to play. It's like been waiting patiently all day, like a child talking at your sleep. Okay, now I've got your full attention. Let me tell you all of the things. This is the tired, bit wired phenomenon that a lot of high stress jobs will bring, because then your body and mind are really confused about what is day, what is night? You know what is on time, what is off time, so it has a hard time keeping
up that. You know biological rhythm to help you up regulate when you should be awake, down, regulate when you should be asleep. We really should set aside time during the day to process our thoughts, to review what we're feeling, what we're doing. Let your mind stretch its wings so that your mind isn't like jonesing to go at bedtime. So this tired but wired feeling is definitely a telltale.
Sign stress plus crazy hours. Diane was feeling the weight of her job and I was impacting her sleep, and the little sleep she was getting was starting to impact other aspects of her health as well.
When I first started experiencing issues, I didn't realize that they were tied to my sleep. But the first thing I noticed was I had horrible acid reflux almost as soon as I started working in early morning news. So I saw all these doctors about my acid reflux. They put me on all this different medication. I started making
all these dietary changes. Nothing helped, and in fact, I started pushing my dinner time earlier and earlier and earlier, because I kept reading that you have to have a big space between your last meal and the time that you go to sleep in order to prevent acid reflux. What I didn't know, and what no one ever talks about, is that for some people, it's really hard to go to bed when you're hungry, and lack of sleep can cause acid reflux.
The other symptom I noticed was dry eyes.
I started feeling just this, this is comfort in my eyes that I had never felt before, and I didn't know what was causing it. I started feeling foggy at times, mentally foggy, like I couldn't focus, and I felt exhausted, but not sleepy. I think the breaking point for me ended up being when I developed a tolerance to ambient So I called my doctor and her advice to me was, you know, you're only taking half of the lowest dose, so just take.
A full pill.
And I kind of decided right then and there that this is not going to be the way forward for me. So that was kind of my big Eureka moment of I need to find a better solution.
Doctor Wu has seen many struggle with sleep the same way Diane has, and she recognizes that when you get to this breaking point, it can be hard to see the path out of poor sleep.
To see patients who are really struggling and who really feel like they've tried everything then feeling kind of hopeless, to be able to turn that around for them, to give them optimism and to really help them to re connect with their sleep really kind of changes their whole life.
You know, there's a famous saying among really busy people, I'll sleep when I'm dead.
Yep, I heard that.
Yeah, I'm sure you get that a lot. What are some of your big highlights for why sleep is so important? Ted? Do you what do you say to people who say, you know, I can skimp on sleep and focus on other things.
Well, to me, sleep is not just the empty space in between your days, right. Sometimes we think of it as like, oh, it's just filler. It's just like quiet time, and if I can squeeze more into my day, how awesome would that be. But the problem is that if you don't sleep well, then you don't have that nourishment, you don't have that basic foundation for health and well being. I don't think of it as empty space. I think of it as water in between continents. You know, it's
the very thing that makes life possible. So we do need to fill our oceans and make sure that, you know, we have the rest that we need, we have the sleep that we need.
It's amazing how interconnected all of these pieces are within our brains. It's like a car engine. When everything is going well, you can just cruise on down the street. But if you have a bad radiator or one of your spark plugs is out of whack, well you might still get the car from point A to point B, but it will be a struggle and one that can become dangerous. So how do you solve a serious sleep problem like a journalist, Well, you report on it.
I sat down with my producers at World News Now, and given we were an overnight show, I knew our audience, many of them, presumably were struggling with a lot of the same issues. I knew a lot of my coworkers were two for that matter, and so I said, you know, I want to set out on this mission to fix my sleep. Do you guys want me to document it?
And I will find doctors and do whatever they ask me to do, and we can put together the story of the things that I try and what works and what doesn't, and then we'll bring it to our viewers and so they can learn from it.
We'll be right back after a brief message from our partners at Mattress Firm, and now back to chasing sleep.
In my quest to find a doctor to work with me to do this whole news story and document my adventure. I had learned that cognitive behavioral therapy is the gold standard treatment for insomnia. Once we finally got this test done,
I got the official insomnia diagnosis. So I started reading more and more about CBTI because I knew that that's what was going to be coming next for me, and in the effort to be a very prepared journalist, I wanted to get ahead of the game as much as I could and understand what it is that I was going to be covering and talking about.
And part of the reason we.
Experienced insomnia over and over and over again is because we spend so much time awake and frustrated in bed that your brain starts to learn that bed is not a calm, safe space where we go to be sleepy. Your brain starts to learn, oh, bed is a stressful place where we have to be alert. And so going to bed triggers this arousal that keeps you awake. It's why you feel like you're dozing off on the couch one second, and then all of a sudden you go to go to sleep and boom, you're wide awake and
your brain is going a mile a minute. That's something called conditioned arousal.
You don't need to be a news anchor to have experienced this feeling. Your muscles are sore, your body is begging for sleep, but you just lie on the bed and stare at the ceiling. More often than not, this is the manifestation of the effects of stress on your sleeping cycle. So now the question is how do we fix this? Is there anything we can do from our otherwise comfortable beds to get our minds into sleep mode.
Actually, most of what we can do about this is what we do outside of bed. So for example, leading up to bedtime, we really need to have a nice wind down routine, a buffer zone between the day and the night, or for people who are working nights between you know, they're on time versus off time. That might be the best way to describe it. So leading up to bedtime, we need to be switching from doing mode
to being mode. So doing mode is like getting our chores done, crossing off to do lists, getting the kids ready for bed, preparing for work, checking emails, you know, doing all of these things that are goal oriented and
very active. We want to be switching from that mode to being mode, which is more like getting in touch with our body, getting in touch with our emotions, kind of winding down from the day and putting a way to do lists, putting away sort of goal oriented activities and really switching more to a grounded, centered kind of mode. And to do that, you know, we can really design
our own wind down routines. Often people will have a nice you know, like bath or shower, skincare routine, get into Pj's, cuddle off with the dog, maybe read the book for a little bit, chat with your partner, but save you know, big conversations for tomorrow because we're winding down out. So having that buffer in between your really on go, go go kind of day versus your relaxing and sleepy night is very important.
The driving forces that push us to calm down and actually get some rest are so strong, and the unique stresses of journalism require unique solutions. I was curious, how do journalists like Diane take some of the more tragic or emotional parts of the job and release them in order to get the amount of rest that they need.
So I think I've just sort of naturally, through the course of doing this job for so long, learned that I need to create a separation to be able to function, But that doesn't mean that you know, there aren't some stories that do affect you in that way. And I think for me, it's been a lot of just about just acceptance.
Right.
It's okay if I'm not shedding tears about every story that I report on air, even if they are a tragedy, And it's also okay if every now and then there is one where I do shed tears on air about it.
And you know, if I was.
Crying over every story, that would probably be fine too. I just think a lot of it is just sort of accepting what your body needs to do to process those emotions, and just to make sure you are acknowledging them and processing them, which I think I do a technique.
That I have used.
That's not necessarily about separating the sympathy and empathy part of things, but more about organizing my thoughts and my worries and my feeling. Sort of processing all of that and realizing what I can and can't control. I think
has been a huge part of my sleep recovery. And this is a practice called constructive worry, and I often just refer to it as a worry list or a brain dump because it sounds so silly, but you just you take a notebook and you divide a page down the center, and on the left hand side of the page you just write down anything that's on your mind, the kind of thing that would keep you awake at night, or that might wake you up in the middle of
the night. And now your brain starts racing. Write any of that stuff on the page, and then on the right hand side you write down the very next step toward resolving that issue. The exercise itself also gets you
focused on solutions instead of problems. And when you're stuck in this sort of insomnia cycle where you get into a pattern of going to bed and suddenly your brain starts racing, we often at that time are more susceptible to catastrophic thinking, and so we often will ruminate on problems and it will feel like there's no way out
of this. And so by doing this exercise, you sort of retrain your brain into thinking, Okay, problem, solution, what are we going to do about that, instead of just problem, problem, Oh my god, problem. And part of the reason why we cauldastrophize, at least one of the leading theories on it is that the areas of our brain that focus on things like rational thinking turn off while we're sleeping.
They kind of sleep as well, and so if you're awake in the middle of the night, let's say at a time that you're normally sleeping, that part of your brain is still asleep. So now you're thinking about your problems, but without the part of your brain that controls the irrational thought. That's why it's so much easier to go into that spiral in the middle of the night. And often I found by writing things down, when I look at them the next day, it seemed absurd that I
was so worried about this thing. And I think just knowing that helps the next time you're in that position to realize, wow, I think it's the end of the world that this thing happened, But it's probably just because it's.
Two o'clock in the morning.
And I bet, just like last time, when you know it's nine am, I'm going to realize that this really isn't so bad. And sometimes just knowing that can help turn the temperature down on that anxiety that's keeping you awake.
Diane's journey to find better sleep took her down a path of a lot of research and reporting, and ultimately she wrote a book. It's called The Sleep Fix Practical, proven and Surprising Solutions for insomnia, snoring, shift work, and more. Her goal in writing the book was to help others learn from her struggles and discoveries so they could find fixes to their own sleep problems.
I think one of the hardest parts for me was I didn't know it was anxiety that was keeping me awake. I was reading all of these articles and all of these things about the temperature in the room and the perfect bedtime routine and swearing off screens and quitting caffeine, and I was trying all of these things. And I don't consider myself an anxious person in general, and so I had no idea that it was anxiety that was playing such a huge role in.
Why I wasn't sleeping.
If I had known that, I probably would have sought out therapy or some you know, other techniques to address that.
But that's not what I was looking for.
I was looking for sleep solutions, and generally sleep solutions don't address anxiety. And really, textbook insomnia just means your arousal levels are too high. It essentially my layman's translation for it is Insomnia is when you can't sleep because you can't relax, and there are a number of things
that can do that for you. It can happen if you're too excited about something, but of course it can also happen if you're really stressed and worried about something, and normally if it happens for a long time, it's the latter. So for me, the anxiety, you know, in addressing this sort of fast paced lifestyle and just the way that my brain works was something that I kind of stumbled into accidentally.
So for our listeners who may be curious about their own sleep, he adventure, do you have any advice for how people can assess and may get a better understanding of their own sleep.
I do recommend that if you're struggling with your sleep, consult with a sleep specialist, even just to get an assessment to figure out, you know, is it because of shift work or do you have another sleep disorder. There are so many things that we don't know that we don't know about sleep, So I really caution folks not to just go down that internet rabbit hole of reading loss and lots of articles and self diagnosing. There are
people who also work too hard on their sleep. I have lots of insomnia patients, for example, who say they have the perfect sleep hygiene routine from all these articles they've read, but now they're trying so hard to perfect their sleep routine that they are kind of psyching themselves up and almost creating insomnia anxiety in the evenings for themselves, and they end up with orthosomnia, which is the condition of having insomnia because you're working too hard to track
your sleep. Everyone's situation is different, and that's why I think seeking help from a sleep professional is so important. Meanwhile, I think listening to our bodies and trusting our bodies to tell us, like if you feel sleepy, that's your body trying to tell you something important, and if you feel awake, that's also a sign that maybe it's not time to force sleep, it's not the right timing, or
you just don't have enough sleep drive yet. So I think listening to your body is a good start, and consulting with a sleep specialist can kind of take you all the way. As a news anchor, of course, you have to be really on right for the cameras, and you have to be really sharp mentally, you have to ask challenging questions to whoever you're interviewing. All of those things require mental focus, being alert, It requires being to
switch gears in your mind very quickly. All of that improves when you have better sleep and better circadian functioning. So if we can stay on track with our rhythms and have that good quality sleep, then we can definitely function better as a news anchor or a whatever we do with our lives.
The drive and determination that allowed Diane to thrive in the high octane field of journalism is also what allowed her to fix her sleep when it was veering dangerously off track. And with the return of good sleep came all the health benefits too.
Once I just started to sleep better, all of these things, like a flywheel now turning in the right direction, started getting better.
My acid reflux went away.
My eating habits improved, because when you lack sleep, your hormones for feeling hungry and feeling satisfied get completely thrown out of wax. So suddenly I just started eating better without even trying, as opposed to before I was trying all these diets and all these different things to improve my eating habits. That just sort of fell into place. My dry eyes went away, my thought process felt clearer. I started making better decisions and feeling less tempted by
things like screen time at night. And you just start to realize how much it all ties together, and if you can just pull on one thread, sometimes that's enough to get everything then moving in the right direction. So much of this journey for me has been learning to surrender in many ways.
I can't be.
The doer, the fixer, the perfectionist here in many ways I have to learn to let go and now the ability to sit at this seat for ABC News Live and have people invite me now not only into their homes every day, but their offices every day, the gym every day, wherever it is that they are watching.
Do you really feel like you form a relationship with the viewers.
I don't take that lightly, and I feel really privileged to be able to do it.
That's all for this episode. Join me again next week, when we learn about how healthcare professionals prioritize and schedule sleep while they're saving lives. We'll hear from an er doctor in New York City about how he chases sleep through the stress of changing work schedules and life and death scenarios.
During residency, I had to do ICU rotations that did have twenty four to twenty seven hour shifts. Doesn't sound possible and I didn't think it was, but somehow you make it through it.
We want to hear from you. Leave a rating or review for our show on your podcast player of choice. You can find me on Twitter at Anahad O'Connor. Until next time, hoping you're living your best while sleeping your best. Chasing Sleep is a production of iHeartRadio in partnership with Mattress Firm. Our executive producer is Molly Sosha, our EP of post is Matt Stillo, our producer is Sierra Kaiser, and this show is hosted by Anahad O'Connor.