Jana Pittman on Drama, Resilience and Finally Learning to Rest

These days, Jana Pittman's mornings start with roughly a hundred animals that need feeding before anyone gets to school. Sheep, peacocks, quail, Highland cows, a goose she swears looks like it's wearing a wedding dress. It's a long way from an Olympic start line, which is sort of the point. Between the hurdles and the farm, she's lived through two Olympics lost to injury, a nickname she didn't choose, three divorces, four miscarriages, two daughters she had alone with a donor while living in her garage to get through medical school, and a slow, hard-won rebuild into Dr Jana Pittman, now a registrar training to be an obstetrician and the mother of six kids. Phew! But none of that is what struck me most when I saw her speak.

I first saw Jana speak at a Rest Bedding event, where she's a supporter of Rest Australia, lending her voice and her medical background to its 3am Club community of hot sleepers. I went in expecting a polished guest appearance. What I got was someone remarkably knowledgeable, warm and open about her own life in the same breath she was talking perimenopause. I walked out knowing she had to be the first person I featured on this season of Beautiful Inside, the season we're doing in partnership with Rest.

We ended up recording the actual conversation at a mutual friend's place, sitting in her kitchen, over a cuppa. There was no warming up required. Within minutes Jana was onto the Olympics, her marriage, her patients and the farm, in whatever order it came to her.

Jana and Sigourney, recording in a friend's kitchen

On Drama Jana and the public turning

Jana says the nickname only really landed around 2004, after injury pulled her out of the Athens Olympics and a camera caught her breaking down. "If mum had named me something else," she laughs, "I used to joke if it was Helen, there's not many things you could do that aren't positive with the name Helen."

What's stayed with her isn't the label. It's the years underneath it. "Losing the Olympic Games when it's your entire life and world due to injury is not something anyone's going to actually do on purpose," she says. "So that was heartbreaking. And then losing my relationship to my coach, my husband, everything at the same time. That's also not a drama someone's going to create. It just hurts."

Every disappointment has to be flipped. The unflipped ones are just waiting to be flipped.

Jana, back on the track

On bulimia, food noise and a body that was never really hers

Jana was open in a way most elite athletes still aren't about the bulimia that developed alongside her winning years. "It was a coping mechanism," she says, not something psychological so much as a fast brain looking for a quick fix, on top of a sport that demanded she be lean and a body that was, by her own account, quietly starving. "You're fighting this inner urge of I really need to support my body, but you're not allowed to."

She talks now, as a doctor, about food noise the way she wishes someone had explained it to her at 19: the inner chatter that overrides what your body actually needs. It didn't properly quiet down, she says, until she started medical weight management a couple of years ago, guided by her own GP and done properly, something she's firm should never be attempted without one. It's not a throwaway mention. It's the same clear-eyed, slightly clinical honesty she brings to everything, including the thing she told me has made the single biggest difference to how she sleeps.

On love, loss and six kids on a farm

Three divorces. Four miscarriages. A marriage to her own coach that she now looks back on as "a lot more me loving him than him tolerating me." A mortgage she couldn't afford while studying medicine as a solo mother of two, which saw her, her girls and a nanny sharing one bedroom while they rented out the rest of the house to make ends meet. She tells it all without flinching, and without asking for sympathy.

What comes through instead is a woman who's worked out, the hard way, that disappointment is only ever a problem if you leave it unflipped. "You have a choice," she says. "If you go through something hard and disappointing, you can either park it and push it away, and it becomes your ball and chain. Or it can be the exact thing you need, the fuel for your next opportunity."

These days that fuel runs a farm outside Port Macquarie with six kids, two au pairs, a farmhand who used to work at Taronga Zoo, and what she estimates is close to a hundred animals across sheep, peacocks, quail, Highland cows, donkeys, pythons and bearded dragons.

"There's a lot of poo," she says. "Like, you have never seen how much poo in your life."

On becoming Dr Pittman

Medicine was always the plan, until sport got in the way for a decade and a half. Jana calls it a homecoming rather than an escape, a goal that let her finish something after the Olympics didn't let her finish what she'd set out to do. She's now in her final stretch of training to become an obstetrician and gynaecologist, including the bereavement work she says she's uniquely equipped for, having had four miscarriages herself. "I feel I'm very good in sitting with disappointment and sitting with hardship," she says. "Sometimes my appointments go a bit too long. But to me it's important."

Jana and Sigourney, mid-laugh

On sleep, Rest and the 3am sheep

This is the part of the conversation I actually wanted to have the most, because Jana's relationship with sleep has never been simple. Night shifts, six kids, a racing ADHD brain she's never had formally diagnosed, and, more recently, the early flickers of perimenopause. "Being able to get back to sleep very quickly and not waking up, I would often wake up hot in the past, or I'd often wake up cold," she says. That's the bit she says has really changed.

"I am heavily involved in Rest, the company," she says, by way of full disclosure, before adding that the reason she stayed involved is simple. "I tried it probably a year ago now, and it completely changed my sleep behaviour," she says of Rest's Evercool bedding. "And I love the pyjamas!" She even brought them with her to show me. She talks about the comforter the way you'd talk about a fabric you didn't expect to love this much: "I definitely like how light they are, but how soothing they are, and how cool they feel."

This is where the science is worth sitting with for a second, because it's not just a nice-feeling fabric. Rest spent five years building Evercool specifically for hot sleepers, engineering it to move heat away from the skin and keep moving it all night rather than trap it the way traditional cotton does. Independent lab testing by SGS found it up to four times cooler than cotton, and Rest is now trusted by more than 600,000 sleepers worldwide. For someone like Jana, doing night shifts, raising six kids and moving through early perimenopause all at once, that's not a marketing line. It's the difference between waking up at 3am drenched or dry.

Jana on sleep, perimenopause and the 3am wake-up

She's since converted her whole household. There's a Rest blanket in her caravan and she takes one to work at the hospital now too, where she's fairly sure other registrars have been sleeping under when she's not looking. "It's an investment," she says, "and we all spend money on bedding anyway. I think this is functional and looks nice. It also feels nice, which is a big thing." Her friends who say they'll get onto it once they hit perimenopause get short shrift.

Mate, you are missing out. Just sleep in it now.

Beauticate currently has a trial team running Rest's Evercool bedding through its own three-week test, so stay tuned for that. In the meantime you can shop the full range, comforters, sheet sets and the pyjamas Jana can't stop wearing, in the Beauticate shop.

Behind the mic: what you'll learn from this chat

What does Jana Pittman say about the nickname Drama Jana? She traces it to a single moment caught on camera after an Athens injury, and says the label stuck to a genuinely traumatic chapter of her life rather than anything she created.

Does Jana Pittman still struggle with body image? She speaks openly about bulimia during her athletics career and ongoing food noise, which she says only settled once she started medically supervised weight management.

What bedding does Jana Pittman actually use? Rest's Evercool comforter, sheets and pyjamas, which she credits with ending a year of waking up overheated through night shifts and early perimenopause.

How many kids and animals does Jana Pittman have? Six children and close to a hundred animals, including sheep, peacocks, quail, Highland cows and one Sebastopol goose that looks, in her words, like it's wearing a wedding dress.

Thank you for listening.

Follow Jana Pittman for more on her farm, her patients and her very chaotic mornings. Follow Beauticate and Sigourney Cantelo for more conversations like this one. And if you've made it this far, the kindest thing you can do is hit follow, leave a rating or share this episode with a friend who needs to hear it.

Shop the bedding: Rest's Evercool comforter, sheet sets and pyjamas are available now at the Beauticate shop, with Beauticate's own trial team putting them through a three-week test as we speak.