Today, our guest is world-renowned Sleep and Performance Expert Dr. Ian Dunican. Dr. Dunican has over two decades of international professional experience in health, safety, and business improvement within military, mining, rail, oil, gas, and elite athletes.

He is an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at University Western Australia and also holds a Ph.D. in Sleep and Performance where he conducted research at the Australian Institute of Sport with elite-level combat and contact sport athletes.

If this resume can’t get any more impressive, he is also a BJJ Black belt, and ultra-endurance athlete completing over 20 events including the infamous Leadville 100-mile race in Leadville, Colorado.  

This is a cracker first guest episode, Ian comprehensively breaks down everything you need to know about why we sleep, the stages of sleep, the physiology of sleep, why we need light exposure, light sensitivity, shift work, athletes, performance, and much more. In the second half of this, we dive more into the philosophy of performance as a whole and how sleep fits into that and talk about Ian’s own experience with his own training and how he adjusted his sleep to suit that massive athletic endeavor.