Didn’t Turn a Wheel Last Night

No fires, no alarms, nothing. Slept for six hours and still went home feeling like I'd spent the night at Jimmy Barnes' family karaoke night.

We always used to call that a good night. And I suppose on paper it was.

But sleeping at a fire station is a strange thing when you think about it.

You're allowed to sleep, but you're also expected to go from completely unconscious to dressed, on the truck and vaguely useful in about thirty seconds. And after a while you get really good at it.

The bells go and you're awake. Not slowly waking up, checking the time and wondering where you are. You're up. Boots on. Moving. Sometimes you're sitting in the truck before your brain has properly joined you.

Do that hundreds, eventually thousands of times, and you're basically training your brain to think about sleep a little differently.

Sleep doesn't mean switch off anymore. Sleep means be ready.

You can be dead asleep, but if the right noise happens, everything needs to come online pretty much immediately.

At the station, that's exactly what you want. It's part of the job. The bells drop at 2am and nobody wants to spend the next five minutes sitting on the edge of the bed trying to remember what year it is. You need to wake up and move.

The problem is your brain doesn't just forget all that training when you go home.

On your days off there are no bells, no radio and nobody expecting you to be dressed and heading out the door in thirty seconds. But you've still spent years getting very good at waking up when something around you changes.

So now it's one of the kids getting up. A car door shutting outside. Your wife rolling over. Your 17-year-old Border Collie with absolutely no control of his arse muscles letting out a knee-trembler at 2am. Eyes open. Nothing happening. Back to sleep.

And the weird part is you might not even remember doing it.

You can wake up briefly throughout the night, drift straight back off and have no real memory of it in the morning. As far as you're concerned, you went to bed at 10 and woke up at 6. Good eight hours.

Except sleep isn't necessarily as simple as the number sitting on the clock.

Brief awakenings during the night are normal. Most people have them and often don't remember them. But disrupted or fragmented sleep can leave you feeling very different from a genuinely restful night, even when the total number of hours looks pretty respectable.

For firefighters, there can be a few things working against you at once.

Shift work can interfere with normal sleep patterns. Stress can affect sleep. Getting older doesn't exactly improve the situation. Kids certainly don't. And years spent sleeping in an environment where an alarm can require you to go from unconscious to operational in seconds may also change the way you respond to noises and other cues during the night.

That doesn't mean every firefighter sleeps badly, or that years of station life permanently rewire everyone's brain in exactly the same way.

But it does make the idea of a "quiet night" a little more complicated than I used to think it was. That's the bit I never really thought about when I was in the job.

We spend years getting incredibly good at waking up. Going from asleep to ready in seconds. It's a pretty useful skill when the bells drop at 2am. Not quite as useful when it's a car door shutting outside. Your wife rolling over. Or your 17-year-old Border Collie with absolutely no control of his arse muscles letting out a knee-trembler at 2am.

There are obviously plenty of other things that can mess with sleep. Stress, shift work, kids, getting older and about a hundred other things all play their part.

But I spent a lot of years thinking if we didn't turn a wheel, we'd had a good night.

I'm not so sure they're the same thing.