00:00:00
what the research says is that people who are having sex within a few hours when they sleep have better markers of
00:00:05
sleep and recovery so does masturbation not have the same implications well what was so interesting about this research
00:00:12
is that Kristen Holmes is the vice president of performance science at wo who has access to health data from
00:00:17
hundreds of thousands of people and her groundbreaking research will tell you the secrets of achieving perfect health
00:00:23
and performance the key to your health is your tradan Rhythm which are physical mental and behavioral changes that
00:00:30
happen in a 24-hour cycle one of the most known circadian rhythms is being asleep during the night and it has
00:00:37
massive Health consequences for example we know their shift workers on average are going to die 15 years sooner but if
00:00:44
you're awake for 2 hours between 10: p.m. and 4:00 a.m. 2 days per week for 25 days of the year you qualify as a
00:00:52
shift worker you are putting yourself at increased risk for cancer cardiovascular disease mental health issues you can
00:00:58
have trouble having children I mean that's terrifying we know that we haven't adapted to Blue Light the light
00:01:04
we get from screens yes if you're viewing light between the hours of 10 p.m. and 4:00 a.m. it actually has a pro
00:01:10
depressive effect it this goes on and on and a lot of people are like I have to go to bed at 1:00 a.m. because I'm a night owl total BS you're making a
00:01:17
choice and if you want to perform consistently increase your tolerance for stress and take control of your life you
00:01:23
need to we want to eat and most importantly we need
00:01:28
to quick one this is really really fascinating to me on the back end of our YouTube channel it says that
00:01:35
69.9% of you that watch this channel frequently over the lifetime of this channel haven't yet hit the Subscribe
00:01:41
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00:01:47
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00:02:01
sure that everything we do here gets better and better and better and better that is a promise I'm willing to make you do we have a
00:02:06
[Music]
00:02:12
deal Kristen why do you do the work that you
00:02:17
do I am uh irrationally passionate about human flourishing and the Frameworks
00:02:26
policies basically determinants of of human flourishing and um yeah I've kind
00:02:31
of dedicated my life to understanding um how the physiology
00:02:36
and and psychology work together to help people take control of their health um
00:02:42
so they can understand how to apply their energy and and attention in a way that's truly rewarding what is your job
00:02:49
title I'm the vice president of performance science principal scientist at uh whoop which is a technology a
00:02:55
physiological monitoring technology company and what does that mean so I'm trying to make sure uh whoop is a
00:03:02
thought leader in human performance so trying to see around the bend to understand you know what's going to be
00:03:07
important for tomorrow in terms of understanding uh how we can take control
00:03:13
of the directory of our health you know what are the markers that are important that we need to be tracking um what are the behaviors that we need to be
00:03:18
engaging in in order to move those metrics around in a way that is Health promoting I look at a lot of the high
00:03:25
stakes high stress environments so professional athletes um Frontline Healthcare CL Ians um and uh you know
00:03:33
military operators so kind of understanding some of these extreme professions and and crafts and and what
00:03:40
the physiology and the psychology looks like we can then kind of abstract and and and I think in some ways generalize
00:03:49
what that means for the regular population um who are experiencing less extreme demands on on their time and
00:03:55
their energy and and their cognitive bandwidth and you conduct um your own studies yes yeah so I'm a principal
00:04:03
investigator on um on many studies um which means that I'm kind of leading those experiments from kind of A to Z
00:04:09
and I have a team that is you know kind of supporting that research um and from
00:04:15
various aspects of of expertise um but yeah I mean one of the studies that we published in in May was looking at uh a
00:04:21
thousand paratroopers in Army Alaska so super extreme you know environment you know harsh but the the Army came to us
00:04:29
they were you know if if you you know Alaska in general has a very high suicide rate um this base in elor Alaska
00:04:37
has a lot of mental health issues a lot of suicide and um they're trying to understand you know what is actually
00:04:43
going on here and we were able to run a study where we showed that there's
00:04:48
actually one Behavior one behavior that was surfaced that was the most predictive of positive
00:04:56
psychological functioning in these um in these soldiers and that one Behavior was sleep wake
00:05:02
timing so the more consistent and more stable the sleep wake the Sleep onset
00:05:08
and offset of these soldiers um the higher levels of positive psychological
00:05:14
functioning so work place resilience um uh less homesickness more feelings of
00:05:20
control more positive social networks it bubbles up in every single piece of of
00:05:26
research that we do at whoop sleep wake timing I think is the mother of all
00:05:31
performance optimization behaviors sleep wake timing so is this the same thing as
00:05:37
your Cadian Rhythm or yeah so this is one of the most I think when we think about circadian rhythms which is just
00:05:42
physical mental and behavioral changes that happen in a 24-hour cycle um and
00:05:48
your biological clock is kind of orchestrating these rhythms right and
00:05:54
okay so I'm going to have to pause and take this right back to Monkey level stuff yeah what is a Arcadian Rhythm as
00:06:00
if you're expending it to a 10-year-old yeah so it's basically physical mental
00:06:05
and behavioral changes that happen over a 24-hour cycle
00:06:12
okay so here's my read on it and correct me if I'm wrong there's a clock in my head yes the
00:06:22
the the supermatic nucleus yeah is a is the Master Clock okay which is somewhere
00:06:28
in my body it's in the it's in the hypothalamus so it's in my brain and this clock regulates every cell in my
00:06:34
body cell tissue organ okay and it
00:06:40
releases it controls the release of a chemical which makes those cells organs
00:06:45
every part of my body do stuff yeah so it is your hypothalamus so the superism
00:06:51
nucleus it responds to light and it responds to Darkness okay okay so that's
00:06:57
like the most pronounced entrainment cue for this master clock and it then tells
00:07:04
it sends signals to every cell tissue in your body as to what it needs to be doing in the presence of light in the
00:07:10
presence of darkness and when we are viewing light at a phase of the natural
00:07:17
light dark cycle that is if I am awake when I should be sleeping or I am
00:07:23
sleeping when I should be awake when my body anticipates that it causes huge amounts of stress in the system if we do
00:07:31
this once or twice not a big deal but if we're doing this chronically okay it has massive Health
00:07:41
consequences you know cancer um metabolic disease um you know
00:07:46
cardiovascular disease 100% of mental health issues there will be some level
00:07:53
of circadian disruption okay so when this inform this light information comes
00:07:58
in and tells these clocks to what to do if I am going outside of my natural
00:08:05
biological preferences that is circadian disruption and if and if you think about
00:08:13
how many folks are walking around circadian disruption it is mind-blowing
00:08:18
I mean basically the the kind of the definition that's been thrown out there is if you are awake from the hours of 10
00:08:27
p.m. to 4 a.m. if you're awake for 2 hours between 10: p.m. and 4:00 a.m. for
00:08:35
2 days per week for 25 days of the year
00:08:40
you qualify as a kind of card carrying shift worker and you likely have
00:08:48
significant circadian disruption which means that I have you are at risk for
00:08:53
some of the and it you know it's not going to happen tomorrow but if you continue on that pattern that I just described red you are putting yourself
00:09:01
at increased risk for cancer and cardiovascular disease
00:09:06
metabolis dysfunction um you know you can have trouble having children it impacts fertility mental health
00:09:14
psychiatric disorders there isn't disease or disorder that circadian disruption doesn't
00:09:19
touch so a way of thinking about this um so that I and everyone else can understand is there's this master clock
00:09:25
in our um hypothalamus look at me um hypothalamus and this Master Clock
00:09:31
regulates all of the other clocks throughout our entire body and there's millions of them right basically yes and
00:09:36
the thing that's the Master Clock is using as a signal the clock in our brain is light and darkness that's its most
00:09:44
reliable yes that's the signal it cares about it listens to the most but there's other signals as well and if that Master
00:09:51
Clock if so if I'm if I'm up at 4:00 a.m. and I'm looking at a a light at 4:00 a.m. that Master Clock is going to
00:09:58
start firing off chemicals to all the other clocks um and then all the clocks are going to be out of sync because then
00:10:03
when I wake up it's light and then you know you're confusing I'm confusing my body and it's firing off in all kinds of
00:10:08
different ways so I need to form an alignment which means basically sleeping at the right time exposing myself to
00:10:15
Darkness at the right time etc etc your body loves regularity and and that's and the problem is modity is not set up for
00:10:22
that you know we have access you know I think all the Circadian research um unfortunately was done after the Advent
00:10:29
of electri electricity so so we're kind of fighting you know this access to
00:10:36
constant light um and you know we're starting to see the the I think dilar
00:10:43
effects or the the negative consequences of exposure to light really after the
00:10:49
sun goes down we haven't adapted to blue light after dark right after the sun
00:10:55
goes down we have not adapted to blue light blue light being the light we get from screens yes there was a study that
00:11:01
looked at the timing of light and its impact on um mood and and brain circuit
00:11:07
circuits and they saw that if you're viewing light between the hours of again this is kind of this magic window of
00:11:13
time 10 p.m. and 4: a.m. it actually has a pro depressive effect so it impacts your dopamine
00:11:20
system reward motivation right so when we wonder you know oh why are why what
00:11:26
is this Mental Health crisis I mean we have to look at light first and I and I
00:11:32
just don't know and and I think what's hard about the discussion and hard about this behavior is
00:11:37
that you know it it's really hard for people to not engage with their phones
00:11:45
you know before bed um that has its own addictive properties right but we just have to understand that these our our
00:11:51
relationship to light will directly influence the trajectory of our health
00:11:57
there's just no question about that to understand this from a more sort of prehistoric ancestoral lens if we go
00:12:05
back I don't know tens of thousands of years to how maybe some of our ancestors used to live they would have food at
00:12:13
certain times and they would have light exposure at certain times they didn't have artificial light right they had invented that yet the modern world is
00:12:19
very much the antithesis of that it is we have food whenever we want it we can order I can order a cookie at 3:00 a.m.
00:12:25
if I want to eat cookie at 3 a.m. and I can watch YouTube video the D CEO for
00:12:30
example like And subscribe at any hour of the day um so is this kind of like a
00:12:36
misalignment issue with our the way our body was designed by nature and the world we now live in yeah we have not
00:12:42
evolved to to to digest food in the middle of the night or or to view light
00:12:48
in the middle of the night um or to be super active in the middle of the night which just happen and it does it creates
00:12:54
this it creates this misalignment and you know I think what's interesting if we are to kind of look at individuals
00:13:01
you know or societies currently that don't have electricity it's it's really interesting
00:13:07
to to I think see some of their behaviors some of their sleep wake behaviors and this is fascinating there
00:13:14
is a study done looking at um kind of a hunter gatherer type of society who don't have access to any electricity and
00:13:21
when you observe their sleep wake times they all fall asleep within 15 to 30 minutes of each other and they all wake
00:13:26
up between 15 and 30 minutes of each other so this whole notion of chronotypes is like kind of like total
00:13:32
BS It's like because I think that's you know I think that's the reason a lot of people are like oh I I I have to go to
00:13:39
bed at 1: a.m. because I'm a night owl no you're you're making a choice generally speaking now this is in
00:13:45
healthy populations not people who have circadian you know disorders and and things like that um generally speaking
00:13:51
like if you were to throw everyone in this building on a mountain in Colorado and this experiment has actually been
00:13:56
done with no electricity we will literally all fall asleep within 30 minutes of each other after 48 Hours
00:14:02
like that is how powerful these light dark signals are to our body and I I
00:14:09
think that just those two examples are really compelling in that you know we're we have evolved to kind of wake up and
00:14:16
fall asleep in relation to This Light Dark cycle so what are this stuff we say to ourselves because I say that to
00:14:21
myself all the time I told I've told myself I'm a nightow yeah and I've given myself the whole chronotype Spiel yeah
00:14:28
that's be yeah in my opinion the way I interpret the literature it it seems that you know the
00:14:35
the variability that I think is talked about or how we think about it in as a as a society in terms of there's
00:14:41
chronotypes that are you know very you know you're you fall asleep you want to you you're genetically predisposed to
00:14:48
fall asleep at 1:00 am and I'm genetically predisposed to to fall asleep at 9:00 P p.m. yeah I I don't
00:14:53
think it's that kind of variability I think the variability maybe is an hour at the most maybe an hour and a half obviously it's age related as well um
00:15:00
but for the most part I don't I don't think this variability is is as pronounced as as as what um what we say
00:15:06
it is sleep yeah so conventional wisdom says it's all about how many hours you
00:15:12
spend sleeping we already this has already been shown to be not true sleep
00:15:20
duration is is important right we can put a pin in that um but sleep regularity predicts all cause mortality
00:15:28
and this is just recently published actually um not by my team but um
00:15:33
looking at it was actually UK uh uh biobank 60,000 people 10 million sleeps
00:15:41
objective measure of sleep and they found that sleep regularity predicted uh
00:15:47
mortality and independent of sleep duration so it it's not to say that sleep duration doesn't matter but that
00:15:54
is absolutely incomplete advice how much time you spend in bed does doesn't necessarily predict how long you live it
00:16:01
is the degree to which you stabilize when you go to bed and when you wake up that predicts mortality what did they find what what was the conclusion of
00:16:08
that was there a sort of a percentage variance in those that have irregular and regular sleep yeah so the Sleep
00:16:13
onset offset times I'm I'm not sure but actually this is research that my team is doing and that we have not published
00:16:20
yet so this is preliminary data but we are we're actually able to determine down to the
00:16:27
minute what is a tolerable level of variability so for the most elite
00:16:33
athletes on the planet the 0.001% 18 to 23 year olds we know that
00:16:41
um 70 minutes of onset offset variability at 70 minutes we will see a
00:16:49
sharp decline in markers of recovery heartly variability resting heart rate
00:16:55
which is a indicator of how you will adapt to load the next day to stress the
00:17:01
next day to stress the next day so life load so sleep awake time is really important and we're we're we're doing
00:17:07
research across across every age bucket and and but you can imagine that if these are the most robust humans on the
00:17:14
planet and they have 70 minutes of of variability that is tolerable within
00:17:21
that population some are a little bit sooner um in terms of the or uh can deal
00:17:27
with less variability others can deal with slightly more variability but the mean is 70 70 minutes so you can imagine
00:17:34
for individuals who are more vulnerable who have less are less robust physically
00:17:39
mentally emotionally their tolerable level is going to be much
00:17:44
narrower what's going on inside of the body when we increase the variability or
00:17:50
that we don't have a regular sleep and a regular wake up time what's actually going on from like a chemical
00:17:56
physiological perspective yeah so one of the things that's suppressed is melatonin
00:18:03
and circulating reductions in circulating melatonin have been shown to
00:18:08
be linked to every disorder and disease in the
00:18:13
body every disorder and disease in the body when we have suppressed or reduced
00:18:19
circulating melatonin that is going to impact us on every level and make us
00:18:25
more vulnerable to disease and and disorders so that is probably one of the most important thing when we have super
00:18:32
unstable sleep awake time we are going to uh have cell suppressed melatonin production um which leads to
00:18:39
inflammation in the body it's melatonin I think is is one of the big players in the story growth hormones yes yes and uh
00:18:48
typically you know if you're not going to sleep uh if you're going to sleep late you will not release a human growth
00:18:55
hormone um as uh you'll get less of a Bolis of of release and why does that
00:19:00
matter that's when all the physical restoration happens so all the Regeneration physically so for bypassing
00:19:06
that we're basically all the work that we did in the gym or you know everything that we did during the day um we're just
00:19:12
not going to recover um from that in in the same way that we would if we were getting that sleep is growth hormone
00:19:17
essentially the thing that causes our sort of muscles to grow and repair essentially so I sometimes think this
00:19:22
because I think if I'm sometimes in my life because I'm quite busy I have to make the decision whether to go to the
00:19:28
gym or get a great night's sleep yeah and the more I've learned about growth hormone in the body and whoop and all
00:19:34
those things I've started to make the decision towards sleep versus going to the gym because my brain now goes well
00:19:40
you're not going to get the recovery and sort of restoration anyway benefits yeah the benefits of going to the gym if
00:19:46
you're poorly slept that night yep I think if it's um if you're consistently
00:19:51
getting you know decent sleep and consistently getting you know going to bed and wake up some more times um you
00:19:58
know I would say it's okay to prioritize exercise sometimes um but sleep is is
00:20:04
very important um and is probably the thing that needs to be prioritized
00:20:09
first how consistent are you with your sleep I'm very consistent I heard that
00:20:14
in 2017 you started trying to sleep within sort of 25 to 30 minutes um every single day y the same
00:20:22
sleeping window that's right yeah and yeah it was a it was a paper that came out uh by Andrew Phillips actually in in
00:20:28
the summer of 2017 and it basically was a four-year study um that was conducted
00:20:34
at Harvard University looking at students and they were basically students sleep and they're trying to see
00:20:39
okay you know what aspect of of sleep is is predictive of things like GPA and um
00:20:44
other uh you know measures of of kind of uh flourishing and uh what they found is
00:20:51
that basically sleep weight time predicted GPA what's GPA for people oh sorry grade
00:20:57
point average yes so it's the difference you know they more regular you know it's the difference between getting an A and A B um by just stabilizing sleep awake
00:21:03
time and so at that time I was working with you know tons of Collegiate
00:21:09
athletes so nc2a athletes professional athletes so eppl um you know NBA NFL
00:21:16
MLB you name it like the biggest high performers like in the world and and I
00:21:23
started tracking this you know just manually at the time at whoop we didn't actually track this uh this wasn't
00:21:29
automated I had to like you know kind of do this in Excel and then sure enough you know sleep wake time started
00:21:35
predicting all these performance metrics that people care about and um we started rolling in some subjective measures um
00:21:42
we had internal load we had external load of course so all the objective measures but I started rolling in some subjective measures and sure enough
00:21:49
sleep awake time just continued to to to ladder up to all these performance variables that people care about so I
00:21:55
started of course you know because I have access to all these these data I start I'm like I need to I need to
00:22:01
like start stabilizing my sleep wake time and sure enough summer 2017 I just like that's basically like my
00:22:07
non-negotiable and yeah I mean I I haven't I haven't been sick since
00:22:13
2017 I had a little tiny head cold that lasted 48 hours but since then I
00:22:19
literally have not had a sniffle a stomach ache I didn't get covid like I
00:22:26
literally have not been sick and you know there I do a lot of other things well but that has been the single
00:22:33
biggest change just sleeping and waking up at the same time that's it what is your routine there how do you ensure
00:22:39
that happens because yeah so the the key to that is stabilizing when I wake up so
00:22:44
even when I travel and I do travel and I I travel internationally I travel to the West Coast um I try to maintain my home
00:22:50
time zone as much as I can as long as I can fulfill my business commitments and and social you know there might be a
00:22:55
social element as well but for the most part um I stabilize when I wake up so I
00:23:01
keep that consistent even if I can't go to bed at the same time I ensure that I
00:23:07
wake up at the same time and that basically sets my circadian rhythm so I will then feel sleepy at the right time
00:23:14
and I can kind of keep that virtuous cycle going if I um have short sleep I
00:23:20
just basically try to build in a nap prior to 1:30 for 30 minutes to an hour
00:23:26
so I don't accumulate sleep debt is another thing that we can talk about sleep DT is wild in some of its
00:23:31
correlations like psychological safety and executive function and um but but
00:23:36
yeah so I kind of that's how I manage short sleep um but I I always try to wake up at the same time so I'm getting that Bolis of light at the same time
00:23:43
every single day and what time do you wake up and go to sleep so I go to bed um around I kind of get into bed usually
00:23:51
around 9915 9:30 I read for a half an hour 45
00:23:57
minutes a book um printed page dim light um and
00:24:02
then I fall asleep usually around 10 and then I wake up um like at 6 uh 14 no I'm
00:24:08
just kidding like around six around 6 you know whenever I talk about these subjects the rebuttal I get is one you
00:24:15
might be able to predict it's from a group of people that I can't yet relate to yeah do you know who I'm talking
00:24:22
about um parents oh yeah yeah well I've had I have two kids so I totally
00:24:28
understand the whole parenting thing so yeah I mean there's no question there are going to be times in your life where you're literally a shift worker because
00:24:34
you're caring for a sick parent or a sick child or you just literally have
00:24:39
kids and they're young um you're a shift worker I mean there there are things um you're making decisions to go out and
00:24:47
and and socialize in in times that maybe maybe aren't optimal for kind of human functioning but yes there's there's no
00:24:53
question that there are periods in your life where it's going to be harder um that said there are some things that you
00:24:59
can do to mitigate some of the negative effects of both Direction and timing and
00:25:06
one of those those things is um is dialing in your feeding window which is another kind of circadian Behavior so
00:25:12
the timing of when you eat is is pretty important um and can at least check some
00:25:18
of the boxes in terms of its impact on uh metabolic functioning and and her health and things like that so let's
00:25:24
talk about that then meal timing mhm what is the what do I need to know about
00:25:30
when I should be eating what I should be eating um and the implications that has on yeah my circadian rhythm my body
00:25:35
yeah so it's it's in the literature there's time restricted eating and there's time restricted feeding um and time restricted feeding
00:25:42
generally if you're reading the literature is going to refer to Mouse models time to eating will refer to human uh studies Mouse models being
00:25:50
studies they yes sorry um yeah mice the studies done with with mice are just
00:25:55
time restricted feeding and and uh humans would be time restrict to eating and not to confuse this with
00:26:01
intermittent fasting which I know is a Hot Topic and people love talking about it um Tim restricted eating basically
00:26:08
has a cading component so it's really about the timing of when you're eating your food in relation to the light dark cycle intermittent fasting is basically
00:26:15
just reducing calories and so tempting does not have a calorie um uh component
00:26:22
to it it's more about the the timing and there's been some a lot of interesting studies um that have been done that show
00:26:30
if you eat you know within uh you know kind of 8 to 12h hour window uh you will
00:26:37
have uh much better metabolic outcomes and this is pretty this is well
00:26:42
established um and I and if we see in the whoop data that if you're um if you stop eating three hours prior to when
00:26:51
you sleep to when you fall asleep markers of sleep and Recovery are are uh
00:26:59
exponentially better um so timing of meals really really does matter and
00:27:04
there's no question that uh and we we know this from from other research you're more primed to metabolize food um
00:27:13
closer to when you wake up in the morning so earlier in the day you're going to be much more primed to utilize
00:27:20
the the nutrients that you're um that you've digested so does that mean we should be eating we should have sort of
00:27:27
an earlier EA window yes yes you know Brian Johnson of course yeah I know he stops eating at 11:00 a.m. which is
00:27:32
crazy so which is insane and not super practical but I think if you can stop eating around when the sun sets you'll
00:27:40
position yourself to improve your metabolic health and I and I would go so far to say that you know regardless of
00:27:46
what it is you're eating because a lot of folks cannot afford to you know eat high quality food that's just a reality
00:27:53
and a lot of those folks do suffer from you know at higher rates of C CIO metabolic dysfunction but if if we can
00:28:01
just consolidate our eating window to 8 to 10 hours we get ourselves like 60% of
00:28:07
the way to our our kind of metabolic goals again it's not to say that content and quality does not matter it
00:28:13
absolutely does but if we aren't going to if if we if we can't focus on that
00:28:20
for whatever it might be consolidating our eating window so eating every single
00:28:25
one of our calories between you know an 8 to 12 hour window we will improve our
00:28:31
health and what's your eating window so I do about 10 hours okay yeah so I I
00:28:37
definitely I pretty much don't eat after the sun goes down when you say the sun goes down sun sets yeah is that like
00:28:44
5:00 p.m. I mean now it's early yeah so I give myself like an hour window yeah
00:28:49
like four right now it's it's definitely early but um but for the most part I can kind of get away with it based on my
00:28:56
lifestyle so ideally between sort of 7: a.m. and 4 p.m. and then to make sure
00:29:02
you're not eating you know two to three hours before you fall asleep yes that's the big key I think um is is you want a
00:29:09
nice big buffer between uh yeah when you when you have your L calorie and and when you go to
00:29:16
sleep because that they're both so digestion is a
00:29:21
parasympathetic activity what does that right so that means so your autonomic nervous system has two brand is your
00:29:27
parasynthetic and and your sympathetic your parasynthetic is your rest and digest right um we also want to be in a
00:29:34
parasynthetic state when we're sleeping so when we are digesting food we're
00:29:40
basically kind of confusing our system in terms of where it should apply its resources right so it basically diverts
00:29:46
resources away from you know the sleep and the restoration and and that's what you know if you have a big meal you'll
00:29:51
notice your heart rate is really is a lot higher right and your stress score is higher right some of the features on
00:29:57
on the whoop app and when you are not having to digest you'll see your stress score is lower you'll see your heart
00:30:02
your your heart rate is lower your heart rate variability would be higher in those situations we want to make sure
00:30:08
that when we're sleeping we are not diverting any resources away from sleep
00:30:13
I mean alcohol is another one right like you just to metabolize alcohol you're diverting all you know significant
00:30:18
resources away from the Regeneration and the recovery that needs to happen during sleep um by bouncing you out of deeper
00:30:24
stages of sleep so same sort of effect happens with food and we see this you know at population levels on the app
00:30:31
it's just very apparent that meal timing and alcohol are are really the two biggest disruptors to a good night's
00:30:38
sleep so interesting because I've always wondered there was a time in my life where I routinely ate super late at
00:30:43
night because I would work very very hard during the day I would basically forget to eat I'd get home
00:30:50
maybe 9 or 10 at night I would then order the food yeah at 9 or 10 which
00:30:56
means it comes at 11 12 and then I'd eat at 11 or 12 yeah it's very stressful for
00:31:02
your system yeah tell me about it the interesting thing that I started to notice was when when I did that I woke
00:31:08
up feeling like I hadn't slept yeah and I've always wondered why so I arrived at this own sort of self self constructed
00:31:16
conclusion that if I put food into my body at midnight it basically keeps my
00:31:22
body on for a couple of hours yeah that's exactly right that's a perfect way to describe it I would see the the
00:31:27
exactly that in the loop data which is I would see that my heart rate went up to about 70 beats per minute for the first
00:31:34
3 hours it was almost like my body was was still walking around or something still and then 3 or 4 hours in it would
00:31:39
start to fall again back to I don't know 45 the food yeah and we know you know there's there's a really nice study that
00:31:46
looked at basically everyone is eating the exact same meals and they're relatively the same age like it was a
00:31:52
really beautiful design um and they basically looked at folks who are eating after after 3 p.m. and folks who are
00:31:58
eating before 3 p.m. and the folks who ate a bulk of their calories before 3
00:32:04
p.m. had um significantly better metabolic outcomes and lost more weight
00:32:10
um so again there's no calorie restriction component here you know they're all kind of eating similar diet
00:32:16
similar macronutrient distribution similar calorie content and um and it's
00:32:22
the folks who were eating bulk calories prior to 3 P.M who had the best outcomes exercise
00:32:27
one of the issues that I have sometimes in my life today is one of those days where because I was up very early this
00:32:33
morning it meant that I didn't go to the gym this morning which means I'm probably going to get home after being
00:32:39
in the studio being at the office today at maybe 78 p.m. and I'm super hungry
00:32:45
then usually right and I also need to work out so sometimes what happens is I choose to work out first and then
00:32:51
obviously it makes the meal late at night but there's also days in my life where I end up working out and I'm known
00:32:56
for this at like 11: or 12: p.m. at night wow
00:33:01
and there was this old train of thought that that was a good thing to do because people would say oh you're going to be
00:33:07
tired when you get in bed but that's doesn't seem to be what happens yeah does it do you feel more energized I
00:33:13
feel more energized yeah well not surprising right you know adrenaline cortisol like all of the kind of
00:33:19
hormones and chemicals that you need to kind of get to a place where you can exert that energy are are kind of
00:33:27
flowing through the system and it takes time for them to go back to to normal levels so to kind of get back to
00:33:32
homeostasis is going to take some time and and so yeah I mean it would make sense that you're um you know kind of
00:33:39
activated um after exercise so for some folks there is a lot of individual
00:33:46
variability I think with exercise timing some people are impacted more but I honestly think that it has more to do
00:33:52
with the light you know usually if we're in a gym it's generally well lit right you're not in a dark gym so you're
00:34:00
getting exposure to um to light which is going to make you feel like more activated and it's again telling your
00:34:07
body that it's time to be awake and alert on that point of light there's a
00:34:12
school of thought that says you should look at lights when you wake up in the morning my my partner always gets up in
00:34:18
the morning walks out into the balcony and sits out there for 10 or 20 minutes in morning I love that yes I love to hear that yeah she's the best so
00:34:24
annoying she gets everything right oh I love it um yeah but but for sure that you want to get Light Within you know
00:34:31
100,000 lucks is is pretty much what you want to get within you know 5 to 20
00:34:36
minutes of waking up to tell your body like it's time to go 100,000 more oh Lux
00:34:42
so just like Photon energy so pretty much if you're outside for five to to 20
00:34:49
minutes it sounds like your girlfriend is like nailing this protocol you'll get all of the photon energy that you need
00:34:55
to tell your system that it is time to be awake can't you just go look into a lamp or something um it will just take
00:35:01
longer because it doesn't have the same light intensity but if you're waking up you know prior to when the sun gets up
00:35:08
yeah Turn All the Lights you know you want to try to mimic day as much as possible and then once the sun does come up it's good to get outside and before
00:35:14
you get in bed you referenced that you read books versus being on an iPad or screens Etc
00:35:22
um does the same philosophy and principle apply to light exposure before
00:35:27
sleep as to food exposure before sleep oh no question right absolutely um we
00:35:33
want to try to restrict light basically after the sun goes down we want to dim our home environment to the degree that
00:35:39
we can um we want to try to minimize all artificial light in the lead up to bed
00:35:45
all artificial light yes yeah you want to make it as dim as possible so you know they're a lot of night like blue
00:35:51
light blocking glasses the filters that you can put on your iPad and your phone activate all of those um but but again
00:35:58
like we don't we want to protect our melatone release right and for all the reasons I kind of have explained when we
00:36:05
don't have it is linked to every disease and disorder right so we we know this so
00:36:11
we want to protect our melatonin release and the only way we can Rel melatonin is by Darkness we we need to
00:36:19
be exposed to to Darkness in order for that Master Clock in our brain to know
00:36:24
that it's time to go to sleep um and again be able to tell our body our tissues and organs and cells and our and
00:36:31
our body what it needs to do at that moment when I was at the headquarters in Boston um not so long ago I saw them working on sleep masks
00:36:39
and I think I've always been quite dubious about sleep masks you know you get on those planes and they hand you a sleep mask in the little bag I always
00:36:45
what a bunch of weirdos you know like putting that strapping that thing to your face how embarrassing I'm one of
00:36:51
those weirdos now yeah I mean it's hard even the Little Dot on your you know from your alarm clock or your TV is
00:36:59
going to emit enough light we're so sensitive to light artificial light so natural light
00:37:07
like the moon totally fine but any other type of light is really going to impair
00:37:12
our ability to get into these deeper stages of sleep where all the restor restoration and regeneration happens do
00:37:18
you use a sleep mask I do yes what's your sort of routine there um yeah just
00:37:24
when I start to feel sleepy I just put it on and go to bed do you listen to anything when you go to sleep no I don't
00:37:32
is there are you aware of any research that might indicate that listening to serial killer documentaries at 3:00
00:37:39
a.m. I think in principle anything that activates you uh stimulates
00:37:45
you cognitively or um makes you energize you probably want to avoid reading yeah
00:37:52
interesting I think there's a group of us out there I'm yet to meet them but I but I know that I'm not alone that I
00:37:57
like to listen to Horror and Thriller and serial killer stuff at um you know
00:38:04
very late at night and it helps us to sleep or at least that's what we tell ourselves I think if you perceive it as
00:38:10
helpful it probably is you know and I think that's where and if your objective data shows that you're getting you know
00:38:17
the requisite time in these deeper stages of sleep then go with it I think
00:38:22
I think what is actually there's definitely the cold dark quiet right you need your room to be cold you need to be
00:38:28
dark you need to be quiet so there's environmental stuff you need to um you know stop eating a few hours before bed
00:38:34
ideally um you need to have stable sleep wake time ideally these are all things that are going to drive getting into
00:38:39
these deeper stages of sleep but the other thing that you probably do really well is you manage stress throughout the
00:38:45
day you know like you I think that's another like the things that we do
00:38:51
during the day how we you know whether or not we're living our values right do our behaviors align with with things
00:38:56
that we care about are we thinking about the things that we want to be thinking about are we managing our relationships effectively so all the things that can
00:39:03
manifest as stress negative stress um will invariably rear its head during our
00:39:11
sleep but if we're managing those things during the day proactively and relatively well generally speaking like
00:39:17
sleep should happen you know pretty naturally there's a huge group of people
00:39:22
who listen to podcasts like this and as they listen to these podcasts they just feel more depressed about their
00:39:28
situation you know because they've they believe they're trying their very best
00:39:33
and they're still struggling especially as it relates to sleep and I think I've always wondered what the message one can
00:39:39
send to them and also you know I think there is a huge component of sort of
00:39:44
personal responsibility and choice that you speak about as well and that I believe in as well but what is the most compelling
00:39:51
message for those people that do have a choice they they know deep and side much
00:39:57
of it is a lack of discipline they know they could not watch YouTube they know they could put their phone away at 9:00 p.m. they know they could not eat the
00:40:04
cookie super late at night they know they could deep down they know they could make a different set of choices but they listen to these podcasts over
00:40:10
and over again whenever I have the health experts on maybe they even take notes but they just don't do it yeah
00:40:17
what is the most compelling thing you can say to those people that do have a choice but
00:40:23
continually choose a bad option to get them pushed over the fence to
00:40:29
the positive circadian rhythm body clock loving side yeah so if people are trying
00:40:36
to develop new habits you have to understand how that new habit links to
00:40:44
your values so the things that you believe in the things that you say you care about right if I know growth and impact are my two most important values
00:40:52
presence is another one how what do I need to do every single day to back into
00:40:57
that so I can align my behaviors with the things I say I care
00:41:03
about and I think when folks are struggling um they don't really know who
00:41:10
they want to be in the world and they don't maybe understand exactly what it is that they value they're fuzzy about
00:41:18
their desires about their values and I think you end up when you're fuzzy about your desires and things you value end up
00:41:24
you're flinging yourself in all sorts of directions emotionally physically mentally right and and I think that's
00:41:30
kind of the project is figure out what you care about and then align your
00:41:35
behaviors and create outlets in your life and that frankly might mean getting rid of people you know who
00:41:44
don't support those values and and I think we're way too lenient on our
00:41:51
circle of friends um and in the sense of you you know I think
00:41:57
we we keep people around in our life who don't NE necessarily help us become a
00:42:03
better version of ourselves have you had to shed some people yes
00:42:10
absolutely why did you shed them because it it didn't really support who I wanted
00:42:16
to be who did you want to be um I wanted to be able to wake up at a very simple
00:42:22
level with as much joy and energy as I as I could and I I want to be present
00:42:27
for my kids and um yeah
00:42:33
so and and and so I think and and I think folks are
00:42:39
engaging in behaviors that
00:42:48
um I think you know create um a situation
00:42:55
where yeah I don't know how to say this that like just say
00:43:00
it yeah I mean I think you know for me um you know
00:43:07
I I grew up in a in a household where you know my mom was an alcoholic um you it was a tough
00:43:14
environment and um you know she ended up you know dying of therosis and um you
00:43:21
know it's not easy you know so being in that kind of environment so
00:43:27
I think for me you know you end up
00:43:32
um it's it's crazy how when you when you live that life you end up repeating
00:43:39
those patterns and and I think you know I had I had
00:43:46
to you know even though for me personally I made choices where you know
00:43:52
I I I really have never drank alcohol right because I saw how it destroyed my family
00:43:59
and but yet I was still hanging around with people who were engaging these behaviors and and it just was impacting
00:44:06
me at my core and um it didn't mean that I didn't love those folks but I had to
00:44:12
get away um you know and a lot of this was you know related to you know I was
00:44:17
an environment at at a university where you know that was just like the norm
00:44:23
like it is just wild to me how educational institutions normalize binge
00:44:28
drinking at a level that is just so destructive and you know and just to be
00:44:38
I suppose to just be around that all the time like was just really not allowing
00:44:43
me to to show up daily as the person that I wanted to be even though I wasn't engaging in that behavior like it's
00:44:50
still like it just yeah it just made me feel um um like I couldn't be the
00:44:57
version of myself that I wanted to be so yeah just it's a lot of hard decisions
00:45:03
you know but um but I let go of a lot you know to to be able to create an
00:45:09
Environ and infrastructure that supported who I wanted to be in this world when I talk about being able
00:45:16
to change your behavior and break a habit it is nothing in the context of
00:45:24
someone who is INS snared by an addiction of sorts it is nothing it's a completely different conversation yeah
00:45:31
what is it like growing up with a mother who You observe at a very young age you
00:45:37
how old I mean my whole life your whole life yeah like she as a child when you when you see a
00:45:46
parent someone you love that is in that is sort of grip by addiction what is that
00:45:52
like yeah I mean I think at a at a fundamental level
00:45:58
um you just feel deprioritized I think generally you know like you you know I
00:46:04
think you feel um you know you're you're you're
00:46:10
unsupervised number one there isn't a lot of supervision you
00:46:15
know so you end up like really having to to offend for yourself um my dad worked
00:46:21
a lot you know he was definitely workolic um such a good man um so much
00:46:26
integrity and and but I think that was his form of Escape but it kind of leads
00:46:31
you know you got to figure out how to eat you got to you know you got to figure out how to do a lot of the basic stuff on your own so you develop a lot
00:46:40
of Independence I think but it it's hard to um you know form emotional
00:46:47
attachments I think um as an adult unless you really work through that you know because you're you're afraid that
00:46:55
you're not going to be taken care of what did you come to understand about your mother's addiction and what she was
00:47:02
struggling with if anything at all yeah I mean I think what was so sad
00:47:08
about that time period is is you know I think it was well understood you know I
00:47:14
think um a lot of those behaviors I
00:47:19
think to degree are normalized and I don't know that there the connection between depression you know she was no
00:47:26
she she had massive seasonal effect disorder which one of the reasons why I'm so interested in you know um kind of
00:47:32
everything related to to light and and just the opportunity there for for for health but um you know she had major
00:47:40
depressive disorder and you know was not diagnosed Pro properly I don't even
00:47:45
remember I have no idea if she ever even went to the doctor to you know to try to get treated um so you know I I think the
00:47:55
the biggest thing that I learned is that we can actually make choices um and and I know
00:48:03
that there are you know when you look at regions of the brain we understand that people are predisposed but I think
00:48:09
there's a lot of things that we can we can actually control to reduce our vulnerability to um to some of these
00:48:17
diseases how has that experience defined and shaped you when you look back and connect
00:48:23
dots yeah I mean I just always you I was very competitive high level a athlete
00:48:30
representing um the US and and so there's definitely trying to understand my own body and my psychology so I could
00:48:36
perform my potential but there's no question that like this whole everything that like underpins the work that I do
00:48:42
is is trying to to understand you know how we can improve our own situation so we can
00:48:52
um you know self actualize and and live our potential and um so that was I
00:49:00
always you know felt um so bad you know for my
00:49:09
mom why you know that she wasn't able to
00:49:14
become the version of herself like I wasn't able to realize
00:49:21
her potential and she had so much
00:49:29
I can't believe you did this to [Laughter]
00:49:34
me would you like a tissue
00:49:42
thanks you're very um you're a very special person and it all makes makes ton of sense why you've got such an
00:49:48
incredible incredible drive and Mission to you I didn't I didn't know any of those what You' just said but I've never
00:49:54
talked about that public so I'm just yeah what a what a wonderful way to have
00:50:00
channeled such a unimaginable pain to then sort of fix
00:50:07
you know hundreds of thousands of people's other lives and help them get closer towards their own potential yeah
00:50:16
I and I I never want to like project my values onto other folks
00:50:22
but but I think that's always been like a the core of like why I do what I I do
00:50:28
is and the reason why I coached for so long is I just love seeing people like
00:50:34
realize their potential or understand their potential knowing that we're always of course a work in progress but
00:50:41
I just like I want like everyone to be able to wake up and
00:50:46
feel you know be energetic and and be able to like really really live the
00:50:52
things that you you care about you know and and just and understanding I think the path to that you know requires some
00:51:00
work you know in terms of making sure that you're attending to some of these non-negotiables that we're talking about
00:51:06
and I think sometimes it takes folks time to connect those dots and there's a lot of wonderful learning that comes
00:51:13
with that but I think if I can kind of help accelerate some of that wisdom and
00:51:18
keep people from experiencing I think some of the pain that I felt you know it's worth it to me it's the most incred
00:51:25
incredible incredible thing that you've committed your life to because me and you are both aware that there's going to
00:51:31
be a ton of people who are either on a path towards such an addiction or are
00:51:36
currently enthralled by such an addiction and the work that you're doing the message you're spreading is going to
00:51:43
prevent and lift some of those people out of that situation which has has a wonderful karmic effect on the world and
00:51:48
I think if there's anything that we can convert our pain into it is it is
00:51:53
exactly that I want to talk about alcohol I've recently quit drinking alcohol I think it was about 3 to four
00:52:00
months ago now um it was so interesting I had a conversation with some of my best friends I said this on a podcast a
00:52:06
couple of couple of months ago and one of my friends was an alcoholic so he
00:52:13
managed to um quit alcohol and he's writing a book about it and then as I look across the group of my other friends none of them are alcoholics but
00:52:19
they're all sort of casual Drinkers and we were sat there together around this table having dinner and he was telling us about this he's writing about
00:52:26
quitting alcohol and I was at there thinking that book that he's writing
00:52:31
doesn't necessarily resonate with me because I've never had I've never felt
00:52:36
like I've had an addiction or really to be honest any problem with it yeah I am such I was such a casual drinker I would
00:52:42
have maybe one glass of wine a week if that there's probably months I've gone without any alcohol at all so I couldn't
00:52:49
think of a reason to quit so really I was saying to him is there another book that someone else could write for me
00:52:56
that just takes those people that are those casual drinkers that are right on the fence and just gives us a reason to
00:53:02
nudge over the other side and because I have this podcast I thought you know I'll just try and quit and see if see what the implications are for my
00:53:09
life alcohol Health circadian rhythms what are you what's your
00:53:15
perspective on all of this well I I like to think about it I love this the the
00:53:21
principle of non-neutrality right and and this is
00:53:26
is how I like to think about behaviors and and how I've kind of always thought about it is if you've got a series of
00:53:34
behaviors we talked a lot about about sleep um and and you know physiological
00:53:39
things and you've got the psychological things and they're either going to support your your values kind of who you
00:53:45
want to be in this world or they're not and and I think that's the lens with which I look at alcohol you know in what
00:53:51
way is this supporting my values of growth and impact and and presence and
00:53:57
compassion and um tolerance you know the the things that are like core to who I
00:54:02
want to be in this world and and I think when you look at it through that lens the choices become really clear to me um
00:54:09
if you're honest with yourself and you have some degree of self-awareness understand what you care
00:54:14
about I think choices become a lot clearer like there's way way more
00:54:21
clarity about how to live your life um in in the micro which is really what
00:54:27
we're talking about these just many choices throughout the day does it does it does it support who you want to be in
00:54:32
the world or does it not and and there's very little gray actually and the gray are excuses in in my view and and we can
00:54:40
rationalize and make stuff all you know all day long right to to to make
00:54:46
ourselves feel better but when you can step back from all of that and look at it really you know taking yourself kind
00:54:54
of out of the equation and look at it from a a very objective standpoint um
00:55:00
you know I think a choice like alcohol becomes very clear but it helps me to socialize
00:55:08
Kristen yeah if if you need alcohol to bond or
00:55:13
to you know form a connection there's probably something
00:55:19
else going on that is unaddressed in from my perspective is that such a thing
00:55:27
as such a small dose of alcohol that it doesn't matter in your opinion yeah I mean I
00:55:34
think it depends on who you are um and I I think there's a lot of individual
00:55:40
variability there as as well I know R Resveratrol is is something that's
00:55:45
talked about a lot and there's uh you know suppose there's in wine and
00:55:51
grapes there's ratol and that's been linked to um enhanced uh health and
00:55:57
well-being but I think you'd have to drink like 10 b or something to get the amount of resp respirol to actually make
00:56:03
a um uh to to make a dent I don't think that's the argument um so yeah I don't
00:56:10
know that really any amount of alcohol is is going to be is going to be helpful and we know from the literature that
00:56:15
just one to two drinks per week uh will can have you know negative implications
00:56:21
um on on health so um it's actually I don't know that any like even in a
00:56:26
moderate amount of alcohol is good for you what's the implications for our Cadian rhythms that we've been talking
00:56:31
about yeah it's mainly because it impacts sleep it's going to impact when you go to bed and when you wake up um so
00:56:38
I think that's the biggest the biggest impact and I think again when we go back to melatonin um you know it's when you're
00:56:47
disrupting that that sleep onet offset um that's going to uh obviously have all
00:56:53
the downstream negative effects that we we've already spoken about so I suppose if we're drinking we're staying out
00:56:59
later so we're exposing ourselves to to light um so yeah there's lots of uh we're going to be eating later uh
00:57:05
there's other um behaviors that accompany drinking that kind of you know
00:57:11
pile on the the negative effects I was reading some research from the Sleep foundation and it says that a 2007 study
00:57:18
with 29 young adults found that moderate doses of alcohol up to 1 hour before
00:57:23
bedtime reduced Mel Onin production by nearly 20% that's the study on alcohol and
00:57:29
melatonin in young adults a 2018 study of 4,908 Finnish participants found that
00:57:36
Sleep Quality was was reduced by 99.3% after one glass of wine and by 24%
00:57:44
after two glasses of wine and by almost 40% 39.2% after three or more glasses of
00:57:51
wine or an equivalent amount of alcohol yeah which is is really really staggering that your Sleep Quality will
00:57:57
could di 40% after three glasses of wine oh yeah it's I mean we see it is we just
00:58:04
finished this analysis actually looking at alcohol and markers of recovery so heart rate variability and heart rate
00:58:10
and literally with every drink it is just there's a linear relationship in the decline like and it is significant
00:58:16
um so I mean yeah it's we're talking even one drink um will produce
00:58:22
clinically significant reduction in heart rate and heart R variability this was maybe the most
00:58:29
compelling motivator for me to quit alcohol was when I got my whoop the first time and then I think it was
00:58:36
someone's birthday or something so we went out and I had a glass of wine or something I woke I woke up the next day looked at my heart rate variability
00:58:42
which is the a measure of how well I'm going to be able to deal with stress and load and all those things the next day how well my body's going to be able to
00:58:48
deal with life and it was flashing red which is like a warning and and it says on there when I clicked on the flashing
00:58:53
red thing it was like like did you have a really stressful day are you sick or
00:59:00
did you drink alcohol last night and I felt so targeted I was like how does this thing know that I had one glass of
00:59:07
wine last night with my friends why is something flashing red with inside of me people keep Diaries on whoop don't they
00:59:13
they keep like the whoop Journal I it's called yeah so it's a go mine of information actually really yeah what
00:59:18
have you learned from that in terms of alcohol I imagine that's where a lot of the conclusions yeah mean we see a six
00:59:24
per reduction in next day recovery after alcohol on average so this is you know
00:59:31
one drink to 10 drink you know it's just basically looking at the the average is 6% okay so theage of okay recovery so if
00:59:39
someone's having if someone was B Bing drinking it they could have a 30 or 40% reduction yeah but it kind of and we we
00:59:46
might and and that specific data point might we might have controlled for you
00:59:52
know the the 30 drinks or you know it's it's probably somewhere in the range of five drinks you know per night and and
00:59:59
the average recovery reduction is six 6% and that's relying on self-reporting right so I wonder if there's biases in
01:00:05
what there might there might be yeah people that had 10 drinks think they had four but I think yeah exactly I don't
01:00:11
really remember how many drinks I had so yeah any drinks I had interesting super
01:00:16
interesting the other thing we obviously drink is coffee yes caffeine surely there's a correlation between circadian
01:00:23
disruption and CA that's definitely one of the Circadian kind it definitely can disrupt circadian rhythms if we're
01:00:28
having caffeine you know within eight to 12 hours I would say of
01:00:34
when we intend to sleep um it's going to impact our sleep onset of course um and even if we're you know tired enough
01:00:40
where we have you know we're sleep deprived um we might might fall asleep
01:00:47
but it will invariably end up disrupting or fragmenting our sleep so we're not kind of getting into that deeper stages
01:00:52
of sleep we're not achieving the sleep quality that um that is going to Le you know allow us to wake up feeling
01:00:58
restored and refreshed so timing of caffeine is really important what of this conversation makes me have a huge
01:01:04
amount of empathy for shift workers oh and when I say shift workers I don't I don't mean people working you know
01:01:10
warehouses I mean doctors nurses firefight firefighters the police um truck
01:01:18
drivers people that are baking yeah anyone who's up between the hours of you
01:01:24
know for more than two hours between the hours of 10 P p.m. and 4 a. is considered a shift worker so it's yes
01:01:30
there's a lot of a lot of individuals walking around who are shift workers but people who are you know literally up
01:01:36
during the biological night um you know it's it's a huge sacrifice we know those folks on average are going to die 15
01:01:44
years sooner it is you know shift work is considered a carcinogen by the World
01:01:50
Health Organization it's you know shift work is um those folks make an enormous
01:01:55
sacrifice they're going to die 15 years sooner on average I mean that's terrifying I
01:02:04
know is anybody is anybody trying to Sol for that yeah I mean that's a lot of the work that I do is is looking at shift
01:02:12
work you know and trying to understand you know what other levers you know can we deploy to offset some of the the the
01:02:20
impact of of being awake during the the biological night and you know time eating as a lever you know really
01:02:26
thinking about when we're eating protein um you know when we're viewing light
01:02:33
um you know what what do the what's the Cadence of of of you know on off um so
01:02:41
we minimize the disruption dadian rhythms I mean the fact is like the roster size at these hospitals are just
01:02:47
simply not big enough to be able to uh I think deploy schedules that mitigate
01:02:54
some of the the risk associated with this disrupted circadian rhythm but it
01:03:00
is frightening and um you know there is a lot of work to try to understand how we can mitigate some of the the negative
01:03:06
effects but it's it's it's it's a tough problem to solve it's not just I guess
01:03:12
it's not just that those individuals will die you know on average 15 years earlier but their quality of life I
01:03:19
imagine won't be as good because if they're not sleeping yeah consistently
01:03:28
it'ser fol these profs you know who are having
01:03:33
to operate counter to the Natural Light Dark cycle so let's talk about that then mental health depression
01:03:41
suicidality what's the correlation there between yeah so there's a lot of interesting research I mean you know one
01:03:47
is just you know we talk about just the lay person so getting outside of shift work we come back to shift work you know
01:03:52
if you look at um this most folks experience social jet lag right which is
01:03:58
basically characterized as um you know a a big a difference between our weekday
01:04:06
sleep schedule and our weekend sleep schedule right so pretty much anyone you know between 20 20 to 30 probably is you
01:04:15
know kind of falls into this bucket of of having social jet lag but one of the things that we one a research study we
01:04:21
saw looking at specifically a social jet lag in and college students they saw that for every hour of variability
01:04:30
between week day and weekend schedules they saw a 177% increase in non-suicidal
01:04:36
ideation so these folks aren't committing suicide but they're
01:04:42
fantasizing about committing suicide and that increases 17% and this was more pronounced than individuals who were
01:04:49
already vulnerable so kind of coming back to circadian disrup ion being present in
01:04:55
100% of mental health issues we can see where shift workers would be extremely
01:05:00
vulnerable right to mental health issues given that their variability and we look
01:05:06
at the whoop data it's basically random in terms of looking at their sleep wake time it's so variable that it it's like
01:05:13
we can't even see a patter it's random which is frightening why is that
01:05:18
frightening because you know the more variability you have like the more
01:05:25
psychological and physiological uh you know negative consequences there'll be is there a
01:05:32
correlation here between how we deal with stressful events in our lives as well because I'm assuming there must be
01:05:38
absolutely managing stress throughout the the day uh and and the degree or even during the night um can uh
01:05:47
definitely increase your tolerance for stress so you know deploying breath work
01:05:53
for example um as you know on demand self-regulation tool to pay down in the-
01:06:00
moment stress can be and to activate the parastic branch of the nervous system can be really powerful so you know I
01:06:07
kind of call these mini moments of deactivation so doing that proactively for folks who are in these high St
01:06:12
Stakes high stress environments is an amazing strategy um because lots of
01:06:18
those folks again if you think about just Baseline when you are engaging in shift work and you're awake during the
01:06:25
night your system is humming at a uh a a kind of a stress level that is above
01:06:31
what would be normal right like your your system is having to work so much harder to maintain homeostasis because
01:06:38
you're doing exactly the opposite of what your body wants to do so all the kind of biological preferences are being
01:06:45
um bypassed right when you're up during the the biological night so to pay down some of that stress you know these many
01:06:53
moments of deactivation are absolutely critical for that population so that means uh just
01:06:59
literally taking 30 seconds where you're doing the physiological sigh for example which we know has emerged as being the
01:07:04
most efficacious breath work technique in the moment to reduce not only in the moment anxiety and stress but actually
01:07:12
you know your perception of anxiety and stress like in the future what is that sign the physiological sigh it's
01:07:18
basically a double inhale followed by an extended exhale perfect it's exactly
01:07:25
right so basically like when you're crying um it it you know you kind of do
01:07:30
that double double inhale all B extended exhale but that like reduces stress in
01:07:36
the moment in a really powerful way and if you do that you know five 10 times um
01:07:42
you're end up activating the parastic branch so you're reducing your heart rate um and uh and and you know kind of
01:07:50
doing that throughout the day is is a great way to um mitigate Nega negative stress accumulation there's a pretty
01:07:56
unfortunate Paradox a pretty tragic Paradox in the fact that our shift workers some of them like doctors
01:08:02
especially are the people that we need to be most focused firing on our cylinders exactly yeah but those are the
01:08:08
people that are from what I've learned today about the Circadian rhythm most likely to suffer with things like focus
01:08:15
and sleep and all of those things that are imperative to showing up well yeah I mean there's a relationship you know we
01:08:21
know that with every 45 minutes of sleep deprivation acur on the W platform we
01:08:27
see a 5 to 10% next day decrease in mental control mental control executive
01:08:32
function so we we measure this um with an MC and a Stroop so these kind of uh
01:08:38
performance tests to measure executive function and we see for every 45 minutes
01:08:44
of sleep dat AC crude we see up to 10% decrease or decline in next day
01:08:50
executive function and what does executive function mean for people that are our ability to make decisions okay use the word there sleep
01:08:58
debt what is sleep debt so that's basically what you need versus what you
01:09:03
actually got and that's highly individual right and and that's one of the kind of beautiful things on the wo
01:09:09
platform is that we learn your your body we learn how efficient sleeper you are
01:09:14
we learn what your optimal sleep wake time should be and we basically tell you how much time you need to spend in bed
01:09:21
so a lot of the work that my my team has done specifically at whoop is to try to
01:09:26
understand you know what is this relationship to of sleep debt to other performance metrics that we care about
01:09:32
right that tell us a story about someone's ability to kind of function in their environment and one of the studies
01:09:39
that we did um was looking specifically at business Executives so CEO types um
01:09:46
and we we basically looked at um it was this this one was a six-month study um
01:09:51
looking at two different cohorts uh both you know I think equal distribution between men and men and women and and
01:09:58
what we saw was for every 45 minutes of sleep debt acred in these Business Leaders we saw a 5 to 10% decrease in
01:10:06
next day executive function so the leader's ability to make decisions in the presence of sleep debt um you know
01:10:14
gets gets worse the more sleep debt you acrew we did a follow-up study and this
01:10:19
one was wild so we basically looked at um it was roughly it was about 70 uh
01:10:26
business executive CEO types and we looked at um all of their objective markers sleep at being one of them and
01:10:33
we look at the psychological safety of their direct reports during team
01:10:38
meetings and Define psychological safety you're how um how safe you feel to show
01:10:45
up in your environment as your true most authentic self and what we saw is again for every
01:10:54
45 minutes of sleep that the leader had there was a significant decrease in
01:11:00
psychological safety of the direct reports so they felt less safe in their
01:11:05
environment to show up as their true self when their leader had 45 minutes of
01:11:10
sleep debt acred and and some of these folks were carrying a couple hours of sleep debt so and there was a linear
01:11:17
relationship between the amount of psychological safety and the amount of of sleep that the leader had so and what
01:11:22
was so interesting and compelling about this research is that the leader had no idea they couldn't perceive their own
01:11:29
cognitive physical and emotional declines right but that's what's so Insidious about sleep deprivation is
01:11:36
that you can't really tell when you're operating at a lower level you just adapt to that lower level
01:11:44
of functioning but everyone around you can feel it right just with how you hold
01:11:49
hold your face how you emote um the kind of eye contact you make how tolerant you
01:11:55
are um and you you think about how sleep deprivation you know it and I think this
01:12:03
is really what this research surfaces it's just it's not just sleep deprivation just doesn't impact me right
01:12:10
it's going to impact every single person I come in contact with and from a business perspective just from a sheer
01:12:16
like numbers perspective Google um did a study called Aristotle and they looked
01:12:22
at psych they looked at a bunch of different metrics related to team performance and what emerged in that
01:12:28
study is being most predictive of team performance was the degree to which the team had psychological safety felt safe
01:12:34
in their environment to kind of show up as their as their true self and they brought in to the tune of $4.5 million
01:12:41
more than teams who are lacking psychological safety so this is like a really
01:12:48
important concept that I don't think a lot of people talk about but when we go back to this concept of the principle of
01:12:53
non-neutrality right and what are behaviors that promote enable you to
01:12:59
live your values and and kind of show up as as your your best self as consistently as possible minimizing
01:13:06
sleep debt is right there at the top of the list it's fascinating and as it relates to sort of accident and injury
01:13:12
is there a correlation between sort of injury of oneself and accidents you commit on others correlation between
01:13:19
that and sleep debt it's very well established that um the more sleep that you're you're carrying you know the more
01:13:26
accident prone you are um you know the the the the more risk you're going to
01:13:31
take um and uh yeah we see this in in the medical field we see this um you
01:13:37
know in in you know just car accidents and yeah it the list goes on and on car
01:13:42
accidents a 2016 study by the foundation for Traffic Safety found that drivers who reported that they usually sleep
01:13:48
four to 5 hours per day had 5.4 times the crash rate of drivers who
01:13:56
usually sleep for seven hours or more a day which is horrifying yeah I know it's
01:14:02
it's uh yeah I mean we look when we think about you know sleep it's it's we're not
01:14:10
getting better at it as a society and I and I think we're we're kind of coming at this conversation from the long the
01:14:16
wrong lens you know we're telling folks just to spend more time in bed without addressing the behaviors that are
01:14:22
actually enabling us to fall asleep and stay asleep you know that's to me that's
01:14:27
that's the conversation and and it's not about spending more time in bed and yeah that might be what needs to happen but
01:14:33
it's it's about you're not going to get there for folks who who are not thinking
01:14:40
about all the Circadian things that we're talking about and um you know some of the environmental stuff the cold dark the quiet yes that matters but um but at
01:14:47
a foundational level I think folks are not engaging in the behaviors that are going to enable us to pay down the sleep
01:14:55
deprivation the other study that I found that was super interesting um was that a 2021 study found that less than seven
01:15:01
hours of sleep is associated with increased risk of injury and if this is sustained for
01:15:07
at least 14 days the risk of muscle and bone injury is 1.7 times almost two times higher yeah so as someone that
01:15:14
goes to the gym a lot and likes to work out if I have a high sleep debt then I'm
01:15:20
much more likely to get an injury almost two times more likely get injury if that's sustained that's right which is crazy yeah it is yeah and you know I'm
01:15:29
so grateful that I think folks are finally realizing that sleep is the
01:15:34
greatest natural performance enhancer that we have on this planet um yeah it's
01:15:41
and that is certainly super evident in all the research that we're doing what about sleep and
01:15:47
sex sex with a partner is a health promoting behavior and we have found that in our in our
01:15:53
research when what research have you done yeah I we just we actually haven't published it yet so this is preliminary
01:16:00
preliminary data but um but we people who um are reporting that they're having sex uh before bed so within a few hours
01:16:09
of of when they intend to sleep with a partner have um better markers of sleep and Recovery you said with a partner
01:16:15
very intentionally there I did yeah we don't we don't see the same effect um
01:16:21
when folks are are having sex with without a partner in reporting it how do you have sex without a partner I mean
01:16:27
that all right I should say a partner like a spouse or a boyfriend or you know someone who you're consistently with so
01:16:33
we're not we're talking about I guess not one night stance sorry I should have clarified it I thought you meant with
01:16:38
without a human at tool oh God yeah we're I'm talking about human sex here yeah does masturbation have the same
01:16:44
implications do I um we didn't we didn't see big effects with masturbation are people reporting that they're onop they
01:16:50
sure are they are I should say that it is complet completely optional to track so people can opt into tracking these
01:16:56
things again it is completely deidentified we have no ability to to know who's doing what in terms of
01:17:02
Journal tracking and behaviors um but uh yeah so we don't actually see uh any big
01:17:08
effects with with masturbation and any markers of sleep and recovery so no no strong no strong effects there we said
01:17:15
something earlier about exercising before bed now if I have sex before bed and you
01:17:21
know it lasts a long time time yeah is that not then going to produce a
01:17:28
ton of adrenaline and wake me up again so after so it depends if you
01:17:33
ejaculate then um you will then release oxytocin which is kind of a
01:17:41
calming chemical so guys typically after they ejaculate feel sleepy because of
01:17:48
the release of of oxytocin but then that goes back to my point about masturbation don't you really oxytocin when you
01:17:53
masturbate yeah I think I think the oxytocin is about connection okay right
01:17:59
so it's it's that's I think that's and that might be why we see these strong effects when you're having sex with a
01:18:07
partner or a spouse um is is that you're you're getting this
01:18:12
benefit of this this beautiful connection with your partner and and spouse provided it goes well um and then
01:18:18
you release this oxytocin which is you know kind of makes you feel uh connected and safe and um so all of those I think
01:18:27
those that kind of condition uh helps I think you fall asleep and and potentially stay asleep it does make
01:18:33
sense because I do get very very tired after I've had sex with my partner and I've always wondered why that is I don't
01:18:40
know that women uh it seems to have women want to maybe stay up and snuggle
01:18:46
and talk a little bit more after sex so but but guys it seems get sleepy and
01:18:52
want to fall asleep and all want to run off a bit of a
01:18:57
stereotype that goes back quite far prehistorically as you know this podcast is sponsored by whoop and people often
01:19:02
ask me why I chose whoop over all of the possible wearable options and I've tried
01:19:07
many of them but whoop for me stands out for several reasons a because of its noninvasive design B Because of its
01:19:14
unique analytics and C a membership model that continually evolves with the
01:19:19
product but the biggest GameChanger for me which is reason d is wop's ability to Foster meaningful Behavior change for me
01:19:26
with whoop I've been more attuned than ever before on how my daily activities can impact my sleep and stress levels
01:19:33
and their features like the whoop coach feature which they recently announced and the journal and the weekly planner
01:19:38
Have Been instrumental in helping me to maintain health and fitness habits that I previously struggled to achieve
01:19:44
consistency with if you're looking to improve your health and fitness this year Beyond January then you've got to
01:19:49
give whoop a try go to join. whoop.com / CEO and you'll be able to get whooped
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01:20:54
the other thing I I would love to talk to you about because it's become a huge Obsession in my life is this word guess
01:20:59
it's not a word it's an acronym HRV heart rate variability been become absolutely obsessed with it maybe a
01:21:05
little bit too obsessed with it one might argue I just check it every day so the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is I look at it yeah um just
01:21:12
to understand how my body has recovered from the night before right um what is
01:21:18
HRV it's most simply the time interval between Heartbeats and um it's a function of the heart but
01:21:26
it uh originates in the autonomic nervous system and as we talked about the autonomic nervous system has two
01:21:32
branches the parasympathetic and the sympathetic Paras sympatic thr and digest sympathetic is you know fight or
01:21:38
flight and they're both competing to send signals to the heart when you are super recovered your your heart is going
01:21:45
to be responsive to both branches of that autonomic nervous system in a very kind of um Dynamic way so so whatever
01:21:53
you want to do and what's happening in your environment you're able to basically make a match the more
01:22:00
recovered you are that makes sense so um you're be able to respond and react to
01:22:05
environmental stress and in kind of a a more High performing way I suppose is the best way to say it so um heart
01:22:13
variability is is kind of a measure of that ability to adapt to your
01:22:19
environment in a functional way and a high har variability which is more
01:22:24
varying beats heartbeats is is better yeah more
01:22:30
variability the better so higher hearty variability should be correlated with uh
01:22:35
a better adaptation to environmental stress so a low heart rate variability would sound something like this boom
01:22:41
boom boom that's exactly right very very consistent not good right a high heart
01:22:47
rate variability will sound like bum bum bum bum boom so really varied perfect
01:22:55
beautiful paral that variation is is better yeah You' think that if something
01:23:01
was consistent yeah it would be better I know in all other cases it is but in the case of heart R variability it's very
01:23:08
counterintuitive and what's great is hearty variability is is modifiable to a degree um you know what's what's a good
01:23:16
what's an average heart rate variability so it's all based on genetics it's really tough right cuz I don't know what
01:23:21
your heart rate ability was when you were born right so I don't I don't know like what your
01:23:27
potential for heart R variability is and and I think that's the only thing that I think we
01:23:33
can say and I think how people need to think about it is when you come on to a you know the woot platform for example
01:23:39
you're going to get your your hearty variability you're going to develop a baseline And I think what people need to
01:23:45
understand is that every Behavior you've every choice you've kind of made leading
01:23:51
up to that moment is going to determine like your Baseline hearty variability so
01:23:56
if you you know drink and take drugs and have a lot of childhood trauma um that
01:24:02
might actually yield a lower Baseline heart variability relative to your own
01:24:08
potential right um so it's it's it's very hard to compare because of all of
01:24:14
that um but then just genetics heart size um gender like all those things a
01:24:19
biological sex all those things have an impact on um on your heart variability on your
01:24:24
Baseline so you don't want to compare there's no good um that said I think the higher the better generally what what's
01:24:31
the average well it depends on age so it decreases you know every year your heart
01:24:36
variability is going to decrease um much a bit I think it's like 3 to four% or
01:24:41
something that's terrifying I really which is kind of a lotas the average on Theo platform you know from the 20 to 30
01:24:47
year olds is somewhere in the tune of of kind of 65 70
01:24:53
30 to 40 year olds a little bit lower 40 to 50s you it's kind of in the 50s range
01:24:59
I think so definitely gets worse as you age but I think why people are obsessed about it is it's just it is a really
01:25:06
good marker of just the overall state of your mental physical and emotional
01:25:12
health do women and men have variance in their heart they do yeah so generally men would have um uh higher heart R
01:25:19
variability than women I think at Baseline your heart size I'm trying to
01:25:24
get my heart rate variability up what what are the most important things for me to be thinking about CU
01:25:30
I've it seems to be a bit of a mystery this heart rate variability thing so there's definitely some things that will
01:25:35
directly impact your heart rate variability sleep wake time so stabilizing when you go a to wake up yeah um wake wake onset being kind of
01:25:42
the number one priority you want to wake up at a regular time every single day you want to get a huge ballus of light
01:25:48
as soon as you wake up you want to get a lot of natural light during the day okay all these things are going to impact
01:25:53
inflammation and cortisol like all the the things that are kind of circulating in our body that um we need to be
01:26:00
circulating and we're not doing some of these behaviors they're not circulating in our body which have negative
01:26:05
Downstream effects um you want to mitigate stress throughout the day so um
01:26:10
you know stress is not bad um but we need to proactively uh manage bouts of
01:26:18
stress with appropriate levels of rest right when we are going going going and um we can only
01:26:26
sustain that for so long so just being proactive with stress rest Cycles throughout the day really important as
01:26:32
we go we want to eat a bulk of our calories in the morning you know lots and lots of protein um we want to make
01:26:39
sure that we get lots of protein I think folks don't probably get enough protein
01:26:44
um want to get lots of protein um bias early in the day um stop eating a few
01:26:50
hours before bedtime make sure you're hydrated throughout the day um yes
01:26:56
absolutely so I can go down a very deep Rabbit Hole in terms of optimal training protocols but but in some um we want to
01:27:05
make sure that we're uh polarizing our training in that we're doing you know zone five which is you know kind of Max
01:27:13
effort where we're out of breath a couple times a week okay two to three
01:27:18
times a week and then we want to do zone two which is kind of um um you know just a a lowlevel you know 60% of our max
01:27:26
heart rate we want to do that for you know 200 to 300 minutes per week which I
01:27:31
know sounds like a lot the the recommendations 150 minutes I think it's a little I don't think that's enough
01:27:37
frankly but um if we're talking about optimizing heart variability that would be the protocol we want to strength
01:27:44
train a few times a week that would be a way to maximize interplay between the cardiovascular and the nervous system
01:27:51
right there is definitely way to train to do that and what I just described will kind of get you there roughly so we
01:27:56
talked about time restricted eating or stopping our feeding with know three times before uh three hours before we
01:28:02
intend to sleep huge um no alcohol obviously again if we're interested in
01:28:07
optimizing our ability to adapt to environmental stress that is and improve our Harry variability um really
01:28:14
important we we we obstain um for alcohol and then I would say you know
01:28:19
spending sufficient time in bed is be really important that is not accumulating uh sleep
01:28:25
debt what about having friends yes connection you know folks being around individuals who support your values um
01:28:34
is absolutely essential we talked a little about exercise there but there's
01:28:39
also just like the general sedentary of Our Lives I I I was looking at some
01:28:44
research a couple of years ago which I included in my first book which shows that we're get in the Western World
01:28:50
we're getting increasingly more sedent it's kind of like this downward graph that just shows every year people move
01:28:57
less because we've got Ubers now and we have we're working more in offices and we're working even more from home now
01:29:04
and we're optimizing activity out of our lives and surely that has an implication
01:29:10
for heart variability as well there's no question that sedentary Behavior you know I think where we go wrong is we
01:29:15
think I can wake up and work out for an hour and then that gives me license to sit for the rest of the day but but we
01:29:22
know that for individuals who are sitting for more than 4 hours in a row
01:29:27
so Consolidated sitting for 4our blocks um is associated with increased
01:29:34
mortality rates so four hours of sedentary Behavior which you know
01:29:39
Consolidated right so the ideal protocol if we want to um you know basically uh
01:29:46
improve all these parameters of Health that we're talking about specifically card variability you want to break up your sedentary time so every you know
01:29:54
half an hour to an hour you'd want to get up move around for 5 minutes or so
01:29:59
and then get back to your work in 2020 you wrote an article where you offered five ways to improve our HRV
01:30:06
and HRV as I say is super important because it's linked to all of these Health markers it's linked to immunity it's linked to all of these things that
01:30:12
really really matter um and one of the there was a couple of sort of surprising suggestions you made in that article one
01:30:18
of them was about practicing gratitude yeah I mean I think I think what the research says is that
01:30:26
actually receiving gratitude um has the
01:30:31
most uh powerful effect on our on our mood and our feelings of well-being so
01:30:39
if I were to receive a thank you letter for example and really internalize that like that's going to have the biggest
01:30:45
long-term effect on my feelings of of of well-being um but there's also great
01:30:51
resarch that shows giving um thanks as well and expressing gratitude um also has you know lots of positive
01:30:59
implications for our psychological functioning and I guess this brings into Focus the psychological element of
01:31:05
health and HRV and all and sleep and all these things that we've talked about like Stress and Anxiety you're currently
01:31:12
finishing a PhD in Psychology right that's right yes and again it links to something that
01:31:18
was written in that article as well where you talk about a growth mindset again that's psychology yes why does
01:31:25
this matter this growth mindset thing this you know gratitude psychology why does that matter yeah I mean it I think
01:31:31
it relates to just our you know whether or not we feel that growth in the future
01:31:38
is possible you know do we do we feel like we have the potential to grow and to
01:31:45
learn and do we feel optimistic about the future I mean that's really what
01:31:50
growth mindset is right right and and you can imagine if you don't feel optimistic about the future you don't
01:31:55
feel like growth is possible you feel really Limited in your capabilities right and you feel Limited in your your
01:32:02
happiness so I think that yeah there's I think a really strong connection between
01:32:09
you know believing that the the future is is positive and and that is going to manifest in in in a measure like heart
01:32:17
variability you know it's going to it's going to manifest physiologically I there's this um author
01:32:23
called sha Anker oh Shan Aker yeah from Harvard his name yeah AER he does a lot
01:32:29
of work on this idea of growth mindset as a way to sort of counteract stress which I find fascinating he does yeah he
01:32:35
found that doctors in a positive State of Mind perform diagnoses 19% faster and
01:32:40
more accurately than doctors that are neutral and he also found that positive employees are 31% more
01:32:47
productive than negative employees yeah and I and I and I think our life
01:32:55
circumstance you know kind of certainly can tilt us in one direction or another
01:33:01
but I I do think that we have a a genetic predisposition to you know the cup is uh half empty versus half full
01:33:08
you know I think there's something to to that to that research and that literature but all the things that we're talking
01:33:15
about I think provide a foundation right so a lot of the physiological stuff that
01:33:20
we're talking about this Cadian stuff the sleep stuff the recovery stuff right the Stress Management you know when
01:33:25
we're eating our food the how we're training right all of these things kind of position us to I think
01:33:34
leverage our our mindset um in in a way
01:33:39
that is the most productive right when we're not kind of taking care of these physiological things you know we don't
01:33:45
feel like we have purpose talked about this we don't feel the skills and resources to do the things that we want to do in our life um it's really hard to
01:33:51
talk ourselves into a better future right um and and and it's it's hard to
01:33:56
kind of move around our our mindset but if we can just kind of attend to some of these physiological and psychological things we can actually start to take
01:34:02
more control of our mindset so I think a lot of times this is I think frustrating in the field of psychology we we talk
01:34:09
about how we talk about grow mindset without actually talking about the behaviors that actually underpin that
01:34:16
you know and and and that's I think a lot of the work that I'm trying to do is is that you know there's there's these
01:34:22
core influences physiological and psychological that if we can understand
01:34:28
and build an infrastructure to allow those those kind of behaviors to come to
01:34:35
life in our every day we're in a position then to have like a growth
01:34:40
mindset right but without that that that Foundation of good habits and good
01:34:45
behaviors good habits and behaviors it's hard to believe that the the future is is bright brings into question something
01:34:52
that I know a lot of people think when they hear conversations like this they think oh but I just don't have the motivation Christen you know and there's
01:34:58
this ongoing conversation about which comes first is it the action or is it
01:35:03
the motivation there's clearly in my life I've seen this clear two-way link by through what I do and how I feel and
01:35:10
how I feel and what I do yeah so if I want to influence the other I do the other I if I want to feel great I have
01:35:16
to focus on my actions and if I want to act great I have I focus on how I feel for example you know what I mean
01:35:23
um cuz people hear you know the discipline that you practice in your life and they go God you must have so much motivation you know the people that
01:35:31
are watching junk TV at 3:00 a.m. in the morning and eating junk food at 3: a. in the morning they look at you and go just
01:35:37
got just she just got something I just haven't got so I can't relate you know I can't become a
01:35:44
Christian what is the message those people need to hear the ones that feel like motivation is their problem m
01:35:52
I mean I think it's understanding how do we actually produce
01:35:58
energy right because that's really at the core of what motivation is
01:36:04
right it's it's it's it's the energy right and and a couple things influence
01:36:11
our energy production or put a ceiling on motivation it's called um well it's
01:36:17
appraisal so how we um how relevant we think a task
01:36:23
is and and then how we are perceiving the task is it hard is it easy is it
01:36:31
challenging right so appraisal and perception are going to work together to
01:36:37
put a ceiling on your potential for motivation okay so appraisal I hear is
01:36:43
being like the why like why this matters totally that's how relevant is it to me
01:36:48
so interesting because in my book I wrote this thing called the discipline equation and I think you know I think you've kind of
01:36:53
summarized it a little bit there yeah yeah yeah definitely I mean this is well understood right in the field of of psychology and and Physiology that yeah
01:37:00
you you we all have potential motivation and the and the two things that move around is how we appraise a situation
01:37:06
and how we perceive it so in my discipline equation this is the equation discipline equals the strength of one's
01:37:12
y plus the reward of the pursuit minus the cost of the pursuit perfect I love
01:37:18
that yeah that's beautiful um and and I think that would hold that holds up clearly um book yeah than glad
01:37:26
you said that yeah no it for sure but I I think and I I I would I say you know
01:37:33
one of the reasons why I think my teams were always so successful is I just deployed that principle over and over
01:37:39
again in my environment how I helped my my athletes understand the why their personal why like why were they showing
01:37:45
up every single day to the field how is that attached to their individual values
01:37:51
not my team values to their personal values right and then I made the
01:37:57
environment challenging right so they get get excited about the work that they're doing every day right and I try
01:38:03
to do that on an individual level and that's why a lot of teams underperform frankly is that they don't leaders don't
01:38:11
understand the relationship between um appraisal and perception like I literally think if you can understand
01:38:16
that and you've written a book about it right so people can read this book and if leaders can adopt that and understand
01:38:23
the importance of setting of creating an infrastructure where you tap into the person's individual values and how that
01:38:31
relates to the task you have motivation like you will you will increase the
01:38:36
ceiling for potential motivation it makes me think in some ways that people listening to this right now are without
01:38:43
knowing it in a upward reinforcing spiral towards the person
01:38:49
they want to be or in a downward reinforcing spiral away from the person they want to be because if if you're
01:38:56
showing up and acting in the right way then you're going to release energy you're going to feel good which means you have a better chance of showing up
01:39:02
and acting in the right way and that Spiral goes upwards but if you're showing up in the wrong way it means you're probably going to be a little bit
01:39:08
depressed you're you're going to be have a lot of circadian disruption you're not going to feel great which means you have
01:39:13
less chance of showing up in the right way the energy low energy all of those things it's a downward spiral so if
01:39:19
you're in that downward spiral I would I would guess the way the only way to break out of it I mean is you listen to
01:39:26
a podcast but that's not going to help you break out of it alone it's gonna start with you T making one different
01:39:32
decision yeah at one point and that can be a tiny tiny tiny decision yeah and
01:39:37
and I think that's like a lot of the work I I'm doing right now is trying to figure out what is that actual taxonomy though if someone really wants to make
01:39:43
change where do they start where did they start you know I'm going to say it sleep wake time like wake up at the same
01:39:51
time every day and get as much as light as humanly possible within that will set
01:39:57
the tone for the rest of the day and put you in a position where you can fall asleep at a regular time night after
01:40:04
night like you have to address that the second thing is I would consolidate your eating window you know keep it within a
01:40:11
10-hour time frame eat all of your calories within a 10-hour time frame and try to leave a couple hour buffer
01:40:17
between when you attend to sleep and your last calorie like just those two things things are pretty low barrier to
01:40:23
entry right and that will increase mood you'll improve your body composition
01:40:29
right just by naring that window you will you know all the effects that we talked about in terms of the cardio
01:40:36
metabolic effects from just stabilizing sleep wake time the mood effects from stabilizing sleep awake time that will
01:40:41
back you into having a better relationship with light right which we know light is at the core of human
01:40:48
health and functioning so those two things I would I would say is the place to start um and
01:40:53
there and I think the downstream effect of just those two things is is is pretty
01:40:59
profound and then I you know I think in in parallel just figuring out who who do you actually want to be in the
01:41:05
world like what is your what do you want your identity to be you know and I and I don't know that
01:41:12
people actually think enough about that you there's so many distractions in this
01:41:17
world I mean we can just drown ourselves with just stuff that's is just coming at
01:41:23
us content all the time and we we can't discern we haven't done the work to be
01:41:29
able to discern what what is what is actually important to us like we don't have the capacity to direct our thoughts
01:41:35
and our attention in a way that's rewarding right because we we haven't built that skill or that muscle so I
01:41:43
think like getting that under control is another way is is like really figuring out what is my relationship with
01:41:49
technology like what do I want that to be you know how do I actually want to spend
01:41:54
my my my time have you written that down for sure
01:42:00
absolutely and what format does that take or what medium did you use is that a vision board or something oh just like
01:42:06
yeah pen and paper I mean I have yeah I mean I Evernote you know I I I revisit this quarterly um you know what do I
01:42:14
value what do I care about how do I want to spend my time and that has been the basis for which I make all my decisions
01:42:21
what does your Evan note say oh I mean in terms of like my how I think well I have my list of of values right that it
01:42:29
always starts there right is what are your values so growth impact tolerance compassion and presence um those are my
01:42:37
top five values and I and I I meditate on those I whenever I you know I'll look
01:42:42
for I have some of my favorite authors that have written extensively about all those different things like you know
01:42:49
James Baldwin on compassion and tolerance and um um Ein ran on on impact
01:42:55
and and growth I I love her work but yeah I mean I think really connecting to
01:43:00
what do those beliefs and values actually look like in action right if I
01:43:06
don't know what what what growth looks like if I don't know what tolerance looks like in action how do I actually
01:43:14
play that out in my in in my in my day-to-day right so you have to you have to write about it you have to internalize it and then have to practice
01:43:21
that behavior right so in in my Evernote is it's I have a kind of like what does this look like in action like what are
01:43:28
the things that I can do that I can practice to live these values and then it's having an outlet for those things
01:43:35
what what kind of things do I need to do you know like my PhD that's not a goal I don't have any goals like goals are
01:43:42
total BS in my view it's it's like living your values like the P my PhD allows me to live my values of of growth
01:43:50
and impact right if if I want to be if I want to impact Health at scale I need to
01:43:55
have the credibility I need to know how to run experiments I need to be a scientist right and and so it's not yeah
01:44:04
the I'm reaching this goal of getting a PhD but it's allowing me to live my values of growth and
01:44:09
impact and and I think that's where folks kind of get it wrong is they're like I want to run a 10K and then what
01:44:16
happens after you run the 10K and and I use that principle in in my life like I'm not it's it's like I'm always just
01:44:24
trying to live my values and I and I and I don't evaluate success on like
01:44:29
achieving something it it's all about my scorecard is am I living my values to my
01:44:36
fullest like that to me is a win and that's how I evaluated my environment
01:44:42
when I was coaching collegiately it was like are we living our values and when you do that you you kind
01:44:49
of always you always win you know and I it has a you know kind of
01:44:56
second order effect in terms of how you think about competition right like that's another area where like I don't
01:45:03
compete I stopped competing a decade and a half ago like we wouldn't even like our when you know my team at Princeton
01:45:11
like these are just little things but when we talk about going back to like in infrastructure to support your values
01:45:17
like we didn't even list our opponents like I didn't want want them thinking about how I don't want them like
01:45:24
changing how they acted throughout the week how they trained the quality what
01:45:29
they did behaviorally based on our opponent that didn't matter right if you want to perform
01:45:35
consistently you need to you know show up every single day with quality right
01:45:41
and and being willing to apply yourself in a way that um is going to you know
01:45:50
create the output um that leads to the kind of quality that allows you to
01:45:55
replicate you know performance levels and it's it's about Learning and Development and it wasn't about an
01:46:02
opponent right and that's why that's why teams underperform right that's why individuals underperform is they've got
01:46:08
this arbitrary kind of metric that they're or like team that they want to beat that they're focused on right or
01:46:14
person that they want to be that they're focused on instead of looking okay what is my bar like and and going back to
01:46:20
question am I actually living my values I think everything kind of works itself out if you can just do
01:46:28
that Kristen we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're going to be leaving
01:46:33
it for the question that has been left for
01:46:38
you what is the last thing that you would say and I imagine the context
01:46:45
there and this is just me taking a guess is that if there was a last thing that you had to say what is the last thing
01:46:51
that you would say I think figure out who you want to be in the world and
01:46:57
then set up your life so you can be that person Kristen thank you so incredibly
01:47:04
inspiring in so many ways I you know I would I would promote whoop but I feel like you already have um just by being
01:47:11
so inspiring so smart so wise and that's I mean everything that whoop is in a nutshell
01:47:19
um there's so many thank yous that I want to give you for so many different reasons but I think the most important
01:47:25
thank you that I'll give you is for both the hundreds and thousands of lives that
01:47:31
your work has nudged in a better Direction and transformed in many cases but also for the millions and millions
01:47:39
and hundreds of millions of lives that you're going to nudge in a much better Direction over the course of the next
01:47:45
decade and decade and decade and decade um it's a a tremendous service to
01:47:51
humanity having the potential service to humanity having the skills the
01:47:56
storytelling abilities the wisdom and that deep innate sense of drive that you have and it is a service to humanity
01:48:04
that Humanity increasingly unfortunately needs um and I'm so excited to to watch
01:48:09
that play out for you I I deeply believe this is the very start of your journey in many respects even though you're
01:48:14
several decades into the work that you do but there something tells me that this is just the beginning so Kristen
01:48:19
thank you for your generosity thank you for your wisdom and thank you for your time appreciate you I appreciate you so much Stephen thank you for all your good
01:48:27
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