Grace at CQU | Teaching at Loxton Lutheran School | Speaking at Together Queensland Conference
So, you're in the business of sleep - something tells me it's a harder sell than it should be... why is sleep still so undervalued, even though we all know it matters?
Everyone knows sleep matters, but it’s often the first thing we give up. We stay up a bit later to finish something, or just have a bit of “me” time at the end of the day.
I think part of the problem is that you can get away with not sleeping well, at least for a little while. You can still go to work, look after your friends and family, tick things off your to-do list, use caffeine to keep going, and sort of convince yourself you’re fine.
But the way I think about it is that sleep is like the foundation of a house. If that base is strong, everything else has a better chance of holding up. If the foundation is wobbly, cracks start to appear everywhere. Your mood, energy, health, patience, concentration, ability to cope, and even feeling “hangry” (hungry and angry) all start to suffer.
The good news is that this has changed a lot since I first started working in this area.
Sleep is now talked about much more openly, and you see athletes, business leaders, and high performers treating it as a performance tool, not just something you do at the
end of the day when everything else is done.
You say we spend about a third of our lives asleep, which sounds wildly unproductive...what are our brains actually doing?
If we lived to the age of 90, about 32 years of that would be spent asleep, which sounds like a lot of time to be doing “nothing”. But sleep is actually one of the busiest times for the brain and body.
While we’re asleep, the brain is sorting through the day. It helps lock in memories, process emotions, and decide what to keep and what to let go of. It’s part of why a problem can feel overwhelming at night, but a little clearer in the morning, or why everything feels 10 times worse when you’re exhausted.
There’s a lot happening physically too. The body is repairing, regulating hormones, supporting immune function, and resetting the systems that help us function the next day. So sleep is less “doing nothing” and more “getting everything ready to work properly again tomorrow.”
Grace with Firefighters at The Civil Defence Academy and Home Team Science and Technology Agency (HTX) in Singapore | Sleeping on the job in the CQU Sleep Lab
How does one get into sleep and shiftwork research? Was this always the plan,
or did you stumble into it?
I definitely stumbled into it. When I was 17, I went to my first university lecture on sleep, not really knowing what to expect. It was taught by Dr Tony Fernando, and I just remember being completely fascinated. I turned to our friend Antonia afterwards and said, “That was so cool.”
From there, I kept choosing subjects and research projects that brought me back to sleep. I became really interested in not just understanding sleep, but explaining it in a way that actually makes sense to people.
That’s the part I still love. Sleep is deeply scientific, but it is also something every single person has a relationship with. So if we can make the science clearer, more practical, and more relatable, it can genuinely help people.
What’s one thing people get completely wrong about sleep?
I think one of the big things people get wrong is placing too much trust in sleep trackers.
I love that people are interested in their sleep, but I wouldn’t get too caught up in what your watch says about REM sleep or deep sleep. Wearables like Garmin, Fitbit, and Apple Watches are getting better, but they’re still not great at accurately measuring sleep stages.
So if your watch tells you that you had “terrible REM sleep”, I wouldn’t read too much into it. That information is interesting, but it’s not gospel.
You have a big focus on shiftwork in your research - why is this such an
important group to understand and support?
Shiftworkers keep so many essential parts of society running. Healthcare, emergency
services, transport, hospitality, policing, aged care, the list goes on.
But the reality is they are often working completely against their body clock. They’re trying to sleep, eat, exercise, and recover at times when their body is naturally wired to be doing the opposite. Like trying to sleep at 10am when the rest of the world is wide awake, someone is mowing their lawn, and your body is telling you it’s daytime.
That’s why I think this group matters so much. It’s not enough to just tell shiftworkers to
“get more sleep” or “eat better”. We need advice, workplaces, and systems that actually
fit the reality of shiftwork. Otherwise we’re just giving people advice that sounds good on
paper, but is almost impossible to follow in real life.
You’ve created some amazing resources through your Healthy Shiftwork project - can you tell us a little more about it?
There is a lot of misinformation out there when it comes to sleep and shiftwork, and what we were noticing in our work with shiftworkers is that people just didn’t know where to go
for advice they could trust.
Healthy Shiftwork came from that gap. We had a lot of good science around sleep, nutrition, physical activity, and shiftwork, but scientists are not always the best at turning that into something people actually want to read or can easily use in real life.
That’s when I gave you a call and said, “Em, do you reckon we could join forces and do
this properly? Your creative brain, my science brain.” The goal was to create resources that were evidence-based, but also engaging, practical, and accessible.
I’m really proud of what we’ve created together. We’ve had shiftworkers tell us they’ve finally found advice that actually fits their life, and workplaces using the resources to better support their teams, which is exactly what we hoped for.
You talk about the ultimate nap length and taking a “nappucino” - which sounds like a bit of me! What does that involve?
I love that this one always gets a reaction, because a nappucino sounds like something you’d order at brunch.
It’s basically having a coffee right before a short nap. It sounds wrong, but it works.
Caffeine takes about 20–30 minutes to kick in, so if you have a coffee and then go
straight to sleep for a short nap, you wake up just as the caffeine is starting to do its thing.
The key is to keep the nap short, around 15–20 minutes. That gives you a quick boost
without dropping into deeper sleep and waking up feeling like you’ve been hit by a truck.
In the Sleep Lab during a study at CQUniversity
I had the chance to check out your sleep labs at CQUniversity when I was in Adelaide last - for those of us who haven’t snooped around a sleep lab, what actually happens when you have a study on?
People often imagine a sleep lab as being really hospital-like, but ours is more like a
sleep hotel, just with a lot more wires and people watching you sleep on CCTV, kind of
like Big Brother!
We run experiments where we can control things like sleep, light, timing, naps, and
wake-ups. Sometimes we keep people awake overnight, and sometimes we wake them
in the middle of the night, a bit like what might happen if a firefighter gets called out, and
then we look at how they respond.
At the moment, we’re studying how different nap lengths during the night affect performance. So people come into the lab, stay awake through the night as if they were working a night shift, have different nap opportunities, and then complete tasks so we
can measure things like alertness, reaction time, decision-making, and safety.
What’s the most surprising thing your research has taught you so far?
One of the most surprising things is how often people feel like they are coping well,
when the data tells a different story. Someone might be running on too little sleep and say, “I’m fine, I’m alert, I’m performing well,” but when we actually test things like reaction time, attention, and decision-making, we can see they’re not doing as well as they think.
That gap really matters, because in real life we rely so much on how we feel to decide whether we’re okay to keep going. And that is why sleep is so important. It affects us before we always realise it does.
You’re juggling research, speaking, family life… what’s one productivity or self-
care habit that helps you get through the week?
I’m a big believer in not trusting your brain to remember everything. My brain is for
thinking, not storage, so I write everything down, and quite often I’ll just email myself so I
know the thought has gone somewhere. From a sleep perspective, I also keep a pen and paper next to my bed. On those nights where your mind is racing, just being able to unload some of that by writing it down can make a really big difference.
I’m also a big fan of time blocking. In my day, I try to have blocks of time for thinking or for exercise that are just for me, and I don’t put meetings in there. I also have two little analogies I tend to work by. The first is “eat the frog”, which basically means do the thing you don’t want to do first. Get it out of the way early and the rest of the day feels a lot lighter. The second is about landing planes. We’re all juggling a lot, so it’s like having multiple planes in the air at once. You can’t land them all at the same time, so it’s about figuring out what needs to land first and focusing on that.
What can we expect next from Associate Professor Grace Vincent?
I genuinely love being a researcher, and I feel very lucky that I get to do work I care so
much about. In many ways it really is my dream job. At the same time, I’ve recently started thinking that in a few years it could be exciting to apply my research skills in a completely new area and see where that takes me.
For now though, I’m really focused on turning the research we’re doing into things that actually help people in real life, whether that’s through Healthy Shiftwork, working with
organisations, or projects that make sleep advice more personalised and practical. So probably a mix of research, real-world impact, naps, and continuing to talk about sleep to anyone who will listen.
A proud little Kozzy - Grace's daughter Ella supporting the ABs | Grace with her family
And finally, the very important questions...
Favourite brunch spot in Adelaide?
I've got to go with The Banksia Tree!
What are you listening to at the moment?
At the moment I’m listening to Equity Mates which is an investing podcast, and How Other Dads Dad
by comedian Hamish Blake. It’s an oldie, and technically mostly for
dads, but I’m getting quite a bit out of it!
After 15 years away what do you miss most about New Zealand and... All Blacks or Wallabies?
After 15 years away, I miss friends and family the most. But also, very importantly, a proper mince and cheese pie. And All Blacks. Even my Australian kids are All Blacks supporters, that one was never up for debate.
Thank you Grace! (off I go to test out a Nappucino!)
www.gracevincent.com.au
@phdsleepy
@healthyshiftwork.
www.healthyshiftwork.com.au
