The Alaska Peninsula is one of the densest populations of bears in the world. I've spent a lot of time there, you know, thousands of days out there over the years, and many many nights as well. On one particular shoot we did for the BBC, we were sleeping out there for probably four months, over four months in total intent in the middle of bear country, thousand pound carnivores and did tons at your tent in the morning and there
could be two, three or four bears in view. There's a lot of precautions you can take, like practical considerations, and then you just got to remember the bears really aren't looking for trouble.
Chris Morgan travels to remote corners of the planet to film animals in the wild. He gave us a glimpse into what it's like to sleep during these expeditions and the hypervigilance that it takes to capture a one of a kind shot of an animal with its own unique sleep schedule.
I was camping alone on this one particular little beach, but I was having a lie in one day and at five point fifteen in the morning.
I hear this sleepingly Yeah, yeah, but I hear.
This outside the tent and it was a wolf. So I was my alarm clock was a wolf at five point fifteen in the morning. Usually I've been getting up about four point thirty. For some reason, I didn't and this.
Wolf woke me up on my arm.
It was mind blowing. But I packed up my tent that day I had to move sites, and as I turned back to look at the site to sort of bid farewell to this beautiful spot in the trees on this little beach, this cove, the wolf came out. It was amazing because I didn't expect to see one of these elusive creatures. But yeah, there he was, keeping me on the on the on the wolf sleep pattern. You know it time to get up.
You know, you might think that an ecologist and filmmaker with a passion for sharing nature's hidden splendors would be immune to the effects of long term, uncomfortable sleeping arrangements as a condition of his job. But as he'll tell us, that hasn't necessarily been Chris's experience.
It's funny because I am I'm a big fan of sleep, so it didn't necessarily make the most sense, you know, to go into this line of work.
So, how exactly and when do Wildlife Documentary and sleep while they're out on assignment, and how do they balance getting enough sleep with capturing the perfect footage at just the right moment. We'll go behind the scenes in this episode Sleep in the Wild.
Hi, I'm Anahad O'Connor and this is Chasing Sleep and iHeartRadio production in partnership with Mattress Firm. Nature documentaries are incredibly popular. They're an immersive, easily accessible kind of escapism and given the rate of habit tat loss, there's never been a more important time to spread awareness. Chris Morgan has hosted and narrated Emmy Award winning TV productions and
he's the co founder of Wildlife Media. It's a nonprofit that produced Bear Trek, a documentary that follows Chris's journey by motorcycle to some of the most incredible places on Earth, places like Alaska, Peru.
The Canadian North, and Borneo.
But for someone who values a good night's rest, Chris spends a lot of time sleeping on the ground under the stars. On a recent assignment, Chris joined renowned Korean photographer and naturalist Sue Young Park in the northeastern forest of Russia to capture images of the elusive and beautiful Siberian tiger. The Siberian tiger is one of the rarest animals on the planet. Just four hundred are estimated to live in the wild, all of them hidden within this
incredibly remote, frozen landscape. Park spent five years filming for months at a time in negative twenty two degree weather. Chris observed the stamina and sleep process required for this remarkable feat firsthand, as Park recreated his experience for the PBS documentary Siberian Tiger Quest.
We've lost about ninety seven percent of tigers around the world just in the last one hundred years.
Wow.
Wherever they are, they're special. And then these ones are particularly special because they're out there on their own in this little corner of Russia, in an area about the same size as Washington State.
The physical and emotional effects of around the clock work schedule and hostile environments can really take its toll, and hiding in plain sight from one of the planet's most lethal predators is no easy feet. As Chris learned from Park.
He had a four x six hole in the ground that was his hide, a tiny little space that you couldn't stand up and you could just about sit up straight in And in the first year that he was there, he spent seven months in that hole in the ground and it was his hide way to film and see capture on film for the first time Siberian tigers. No one had done it before. But then he goes on to say that he was doing this in the winter months, which is the best time to see the tigers. There.
At one point, I say, and how long was it till you saw your first tiger? And he said, oh, two or three months. I just learned so much from the guy. He must have had some on off switch where he could sleep at a moment's notice and be able to just wait out the hours until a cap showed up. And he has insane stories of more than one getting onto the roof of his hide. At one point one of them swiped past his camera on his hand, and he had some really up close intense experiences with him.
Well, you have to be tough as nails to camp out perfectly still in this little hide for five months at a time. So how did he sleep in there?
He didn't get much sleep, but he had plenty of warm sleeping bags and enough to get him through the winters, you know, but of course no fire, because he didn't want to give his cent away or the s of anything sort of human like. Right, he'd be able to stretch out there, you know, it's about six feet long this hole in the ground, so we could stretch out straight, you know, and take naps. He sort of talked me through the process of this and left me to it.
I built a platform in the woods where I could try and sort of recreate a little bit what he did and how he did it. I don't know how he pulled it off, you know, but the proof is in his footage.
I think at one point you said that your mustache felt like it was freezing, and when you were sleeping out there on that platform in the middle of the night, you had to wake up because it was so cold, and I think you said, put on warmer clothes. What is it like, you know, for you sleeping out there in the dead of night in Siberia? And do you have to do anything to be able to sleep out there?
I think the most important thing is making sure you've got enough layer so you can add them and lose them as you need to. But I ended up wearing everything I'd got because it was damn cold, you know, So just a really good down sleeping bag, a really good thermal mattress, you know, just at least a couple of inches thick that keeps you off the ground, or in this case, keeps you off this wooden platform that i'd built in the forest. I had a tent around me as well to keep off some of the cold.
But there's not much you can do much more than that, other than just making sure that you wear and really good thermals, you know, and it comes down to it, it is like really good wool thermals. There's nothing better than a sheep to keep you warm at night. You know, they've learned over thousands of years out of stay warm. I also use those chemical handwarmers a lot. I actually get really quite bad circulations, so that often wakes me up, you know, my fingers or toes are cold. So just
having those chemical handwarm as handy is really good. And you keep all your clothes on and you're ready for action to jump out of a tent or sleeping magot any moment if something happens, to film or watch or record.
Round the clock vigilance, disrupted sleep routines, and less than ideal conditions create a world of challenges for professionals like Chris. Doctor Jade Wu is a board certified sleep medicine specialist and a research at Duke University School of Medicine, and Chris's story reminds her of another population.
What this reminds me of is actually people with a military background, because when people are deployed, for example, they really do need to be up at a moment's notice. It can be any time of night or day. You know, there's not much preparation for it, not much advanced notice, if any at all. And the pattern that I see when they get home when they're living a civilian life
now is that they're more on high alert. So even when they intellectually know that all is safe and they're not on duty they don't have to do anything at night, their body is still wired to be more on high alert, more easily woken up. And I think this is probably similar for Chris because he's also used to having to just pop up into consciousness and be ready to function
right away. So yeah, I can see how it would be more difficult to sleep long stretches more difficult maybe to relax into deep sleep and maybe more easily woken by small noises or lights.
While Chris has a lot of experience filming at night in a state of hypervigilance, his heightened awareness of his surroundings and dedication to the wildlife that he's there to research has a big advantage when it comes to establishing a sleep pattern that won't compromise the shoot. One of the things I've noticed from a lot of your films and your shows is you do a lot of work at night. Are you naturally a night outl Is that sort of a prerequisite for the job?
I am a bit more of a night owl. I'm not an early morning guy, but I have found that I which sounds weird, doesn't it? For a while? Left guy, But I'm able to adjust quite well, and especially on longer trips into the wilderness where I kind of get a chance to just start to flow with the rhythms of nature, and the rhythms of nature or what the animals, the wild animals that we are there to see, research, film, record, whatever it would be there, of course, tuned into that
rhythm of nature really well. Because of there're thousands of years of uninterrupted history with that natural circadian rhythm right of sleep cycles, whereas we've lost touch with it, you know, with alarm clocks and TV till late at night, and you know, changing our clocks and all kinds of disruptions to that natural cycle. But these wild creatures do it well.
And I've noticed that I can kind of switch. If I'm given enough days, I can kind of switch into the same rhythm as the animals that we're they're looking for.
We'll be right back after a brief message from our partners at Mattress Firm, and now back to chasing sleep. If you think about your own bedtime routine, maybe brushing your teeth out a sink in a bathroom, adjusting the temperature in your bedroom, or putting on pajama, you're giving your brain cues that it's time to go to sleep. Doctor Wu says that ideally you'd create as much separation as possible between your waking life and sleeping life for
your best chance at a good night's rest. But what about someone like Chris who's been living with a heightened state of awareness of his surroundings and all kinds of disruptions to sleep for weeks or months at a time and can't give his brain those traditional signals.
When he is out on a project and you know, he can't have home mode and these relaxing sort of cues for the body. I would say, really using napping strategically is good.
Funny Doctor wo should mention that, as Chris did mention his non traditional method for napping.
Once you've been really focused on your target, it can get mentally, unphysically really exhausting. And if you're out there long enough, you're able to figure out when the animals are active and when they're not, and when they not you can take a nap. So I've got really good at taking literally sometimes a two minute nap. I can put my head down and incident situations out in the middle of nowhere and be asleep in sixty seconds. Take a two or three minute nap, you know, fifteen minutes
if you're really lucky. I've learned to do that, and I've learned different positions. I heard the military has this as well. You know, guys in the military are taught if they sleep on their backs with their knees bent and their calves up on a chair, apparently having that blood drain from your legs into your core is good for sleep. So I try to do that, put my feet up, take a nap, get a quick powerkip in whenever I can, especially if there's like between action and it really works.
Yeah, I think that's a really good strategy for when you can't get more than two minutes at a time. Hate two minutes is better than nothing, right, So absolutely I support that. As a parent, just coming out of the haze of newborn life, I can absolutely say two minutes will do something for you. It'll refresh you, It'll give you your body a little bit of a refresh. It's certainly not enough to only sleep in these little
chunks throughout the day. We do need to come back down to earth and really replenish our body with deeper, longer, more restorative sleep. But you know, when you're in action mode, you know, if that's what you can get, that's what you can get.
So are there any advantages to these conditions?
I mean, I have my memory foam mattress, my white noise machine, my fan cooling bamboo sheets to help me get my quality sleep. So why is it that someone lying on a frozen platform or in a hole in the ground could still sleep well.
I think, you know, even with a difficult sleep schedule. When he's out there, one major advantage that he has is that he is living by the sun and the moon, right, so he has a much stronger circadian system probably than you or I do, because we work indoors, we work in an office, and we have to be conscious to make sure we have enough light exposure during the day and not too much screens and you know, light at night to maintain this day night contrast, whereas he just
gets that in space. He's out in the sun all day. He's you know, at the very least getting natural broad spectrum sunlight all day long, and then at night he has maybe his campfire, maybe some devices, but probably not as much as the average person. So you know, in this way, no wonder he is able to function so well even with disruptive sleep is that, you know, his circadian rhythm is at least really really solid, and so whatever sleep he is getting is really good quality sleep.
You definitely sort of get into this process of going to sleep when it's dark and then waking up when it's light, and it's exactly what the animals are doing. You just sort of start adapting to that, and there's no reason to stay awake at night at camp in the wilderness after dark, nothing to see do what you know, you might as well just sleep and you're bloody exhausted anyway.
So it depends what time of year, though, you know in Alaska up north is it's perpetual daylight a lot of the time, and that whole different subject of like, wow, what do you do then?
For Chris or for anybody else that does a lot of traveling or sleeping and unfamiliar or not perfect environments, if you can have like one object that's kind of your like comfy, reliable, Lucky sleep hat or Lucky Sleep iomask or Lucky sleep blanket, then you have something familiar to qe. That sleepiness, that ritual of falling asleep, whether you're in the jungles or you know, in a hotel room or wherever.
You've got to have these routines while you're out there. You know, breakfasters at this time, lunches at this time unless something gets in the way of it, and then you're evening ritual as well. I just love, you know, when I'm in that mode and I'm up at five o'clock in the morning and watching the sun come up, and you know that the world, the natural world, is coming alive as well. And you know, whether it's wolves or bears or targets, you know they're doing the same thing.
You know they're in their day beds or in their dens and they're stretching and slowly waking up. And you're doing the same thing. And you fire up that stove and you hear the boiling water and you see the steam in the early morning, and you pour your cup of c I can hear it and smell it now, you know, just talking about it, and it's just you kick back and you're like, this is the start of
my day. It's like, I don't know, it's like the best possible coffee commercial you could imagine when you're out in nature doing it. I just love that part of the day.
Ah.
So, even when you're out there, you know, in the middle of you know Siberia or you know, the jungle or wherever it is, there's still structure and routine involved in your daily schedule.
It sounds like, yes, it does depend for the longer shoots. Definitely, if you're out there for weeks or months, you've got to have that routine, I think, but then always be ready for something to completely disrupt it and get in the way of it. And it's usually an animal. You know, you've got to be ready to jump up at the foot instant, you know, without a moment's notice, with gear and the wherewithal to get into the right spot if someone's spotted an animal, or if we know that something's
happening or you hear something. So it's kind of that blend of like having a routine but be ready to break it a moment's notice.
What would you recommend, generally speaking, are some good things to add for an adult to wind down routine and things that may be like that you can do on the road. So for someone like Chris who's out there in the wild.
If you're Chris, you're out there in the wilderness, you can do a body scan, which you can also do at home, which is where you just walk your attention through your body from head to toe or from toe to head, and you know, without judgment and without trying to change anything. So even if you have pain or discomfort or something like that, just very non judgmentally ask your body, how does it feel you know, like, hey, little toe on my left foot, how do you feel,
haven't talked to you all day? And you know, moving to the other toes and to your feet, your ankles and slowly and gradually up. And often my patients will say, you know, I did the body scan and by the time I didn't, you know, I'd never even made it up to my shoulders and I was asleep on the couch. So whatever you can do to signal that switch, I think would be really helpful to have in the bedtime routine.
Sleep never feels so good after a trip like that. It's funny. I love I love traveling, and I love being out in wild places, and I feel lucky and privileged to be there and experience them. It's my life,
you know. I love these places deeply, so I put my all into it when I'm there, and then when I get back, oh my yeah, it just feels so luxuriant to have a bed and to have curtains that you can close, and to need an alarm clock to wake up, and it's like I just kind of hit the sack and don't want to get out of it for a few days on some back, and it's really really nice feeling because you feel like, Okay, this is just a but.
That's all for this episode. Join me again next week when we learn about sleeping in the Final Frontier, how astronauts get the rest they need while working in conditions no human was made to be in.
So imagine being so excited to be in space for the first time, looking at the Earth floating you with in this weird environment, feeling a little weird, and four hours after launching into space for my first time, I had to go to sleep.
We want to hear from you.
Leave a rating a 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 and partnership with Mattress Firm. Our executive producer is Molly Sosha. Our EP of post is James Foster. Our supervising producer is Keia Swinton. Our producer is Sierra Kaiser. This episode was written and researched by Eric Leijia and Jazscapatia.
This show is hosted by me Annahar O'Connor,