Dhru Purohit Show - Modern Life is Creating Cellular Confusion, Here's How to Optimize Your Day to Overcome It with Dr. Kristen Holmes

Episode Date: August 26, 2026

This episode is brought to you by Tiny Health, Branch Basics, Cozy Earth, and LMNT. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, I sit down with Dr. Kristen Holmes to uncover why living out of sync with your body’s natural clock can undermine your health and longevity. Dr. Holmes breaks down the hidden costs of circadian misalignment and explains why the timing of your sleep, meals, and light exposure matters more than most of us realize. She shares practical strategies to help get your body back in rhythm. We also explore the psychological side of living in sync, including how stress, perception, and unresolved childhood experiences can shape our health, relationships, and sense of purpose. Dr. Kristen Holmes is the Global Head of Human Performance and Principal Scientist at WHOOP, where she leads research on the connection between physiology and behavior. A former U.S. National Field Hockey Team member and accomplished Ivy League coach, she holds a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Queensland. Her work focuses on translating science and data into practical strategies for improving health, performance, and recovery. In this episode, Dhru and Dr. Holmes dive into: (00:00) What Circadian Misalignment Looks Like (3:42) The Hidden Cost of Circadian Misalignment (9:36) Why Late-Night Eating Disrupts Your Health (12:56) How to Maximize Your Longevity Potential (19:48) Morning Light and Sleep Consistency (23:18) Timing vs. Willpower (25:52) The Psychology of Misalignment (35:05) How to Reset Your Circadian Rhythm (41:20) Dr. Kristen Holmes’ Personal Journey (46:13) Healing From Childhood Trauma (53:07) How Stress and Perception Shape Your Health (57:53) How Couples Can Get Back Into Alignment (1:05:44) The Path to Self-Love and Purpose Also mentioned in this episode Aligned: The Data-Driven Guide to Performance, Recovery, and Human Potential For more on Dr. Holmes, follow her on Instagram, Threads, and LinkedIn. For more on WHOOP: Instagram, X/Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube. This episode is brought to you by Tiny Health, Branch Basics, Cozy Earth, and LMNT. Right now, Tiny Health is offering my community their biggest offer yet: $50 off your first gut health test. Just head to tinyhealth.com/dhru for $50 off your first test. Your gut has a story to tell; Tiny Health helps you understand what it's saying. Branch Basics is now available nationwide at Target. Shop their lineup of safer cleaning essentials including laundry detergent, surface cleaners, dishwasher tablets, and stain remover. And if you're grabbing the Premium Starter Kit, you can get 15% off at BranchBasics.com with my code DHRU. Right now, get 20% off the Cozy Earth plush towels. Just head over to cozyearth.com/dhru and use code DHRUP. Right now, LMNT is offering my listeners a free 8-count sample pack with any purchase. Head over to drinkLMNT.com/dhru today. Sign up for Dhru’s Try This Newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Kristen Holmes, welcome to the podcast. I want to jump right in. Living in alignment, not living in alignment. These seem like very small things that you talk about in your book. But when you get into the data, which obviously you have access to so much of it, you realize that these tiny little things like getting the sunlight in the morning, like being mindful of how closely you eat to bedtime, they seem so small.

They seem so innocuous. And yet they over a period of time have profound impacts on our life. So could you take a little time there and walk us through that schedule of what is like misalignment look like? Like, why is that misalignment? We know from the data that contrast really matters, right? We want to create as much contrast between the day and night as possible. So that means as much bright light during the day as humanly possible, right? You want to be out in the natural light and even artificial light is helpful.

our body is expecting to be awake and alert during the daytime, during the biological day. So one way to create misalignment is to not get a lot of natural light during the day and to deprive yourself of light within 20 minutes of waking up. That basically creates confusion at a cellular level. And that confusion is really the basis of aging and disease. When we don't do what our body expects or wants from an endogenous, from an internal perspective, that creates cellular confusion. And that cellular confusion obviously is going to come at a cost. There's really good research.

This guy, Daniel Widrid, he does incredible research looking at just the role of circadian disruption. And one of the things that he and his team published recently is looking at brighter days and darker nights and its impact on health. then sure enough, when you have brighter days and darker nights, when you have this contrast, it's predictive of all-cause mortality. So we know that this contrast really matters. And when we think about it from a biological perspective, contrast is going to create amplitude, circadian amplitude. And so across all the physiological variables that you can track like heart rate and heart variability and blood pressure and SPO2, like they all have a circadian rhythm, the more contrast you have between the day and the night, okay, the more light during the day, okay, the kind of

activity and food that you're putting in your body over the course of the biological day, and then fasting at night, you know, darkness at night, low activity during the night, you increase your amplitude. And you can imagine if you look at someone who is on their deathbed, they're 90 years old, they have no amplitude. You look at a robust, healthy individual at any age, and they're going to have lots of amplitude. You create this amplitude by creating this contrast. And I think that's the message that no one seems to be getting, but I think it's so core, right? It's like you want to preserve your amplitude.

And you do this by these really simple, democratically available, and free behaviors. That is, lots of light during the day, lots of darkness at night. You are fueling for activity during the day. and you know based on and you are highly active during the day and then once the sun goes down within an hour a couple of hours or so you just start to wind down you're not eating anymore you're not you're not you're not you know drinking anymore you're getting ready for but that is what we are built to do which is why I think a lot of the pain that we are facing as a society mentally physically emotionally and I would argue argue spiritually is because of this misalignment you talked about the cost

and that a lot of times people don't get the cost so let's just take one example. You know, there's this mismatch where we're designed to get light first thing in the morning. A lot of people don't. Sometimes people say, hey, Dr. Kristen, I'm not a morning person, right? Yeah. And they don't get that light in the morning or they take their time. And then often if you get a little bit of light, it's walking to your car while you go to the office, which again is indoor and indoor when besides the actual walking itself. Yeah. But what's an example of the cost of that? You know, when you're young, you can get away with so much. Your circadian rhythms, I think, generally, are going to be less sensitive to these

perturbations. I think we know that, right? As you age, your circadian robustness declines. The amplitude is going to change over the course of your life. I would argue, though, and we see this in the data, that younger individuals are actually quite sensitive to things like alcohol. They're sensitive to short-sort. sleep. They're, you know, they're just as sensitive. And that said, they have because their body is

more robust, like their organs are younger, like you kind of have the perception that you're able to kind of rebound. And you are to a degree, but that's still taking money out of the bank, right? When you think about it from, you know, you've got this a finite amount of cash in the bank. And you can imagine when there's no more cash like you're dead, right? So you have to understand that even though you're young, like you're still asking your body to do a lot of work that is contributing to your pace of aging, right? Like, you know, to think that you're fine, there's no logic in that, right? Like when you really unpack it, all of these behaviors that are creating this general misalignment are coming at a cost one way or another. The cost of the lack of light exposure,

for example, that impacts when your body feels sleepy at night. And, We know that one of the most important behaviors is sleep-wake consistency. We know that sleep-wake consistency, sleep-wake regularity, as it's also known in the literature, is a greater predictor of all-cause mortality and disease than sleep duration. Now, sleep duration absolutely matters, but sleep consistency is the mother of all behaviors, right? You want to create as much physiological stability as possible, and we see this in the regular Jane's and Joe's. We see this in, you know, Tade Pogacha, you know, the Tour de France winter this year. Like he has enormous physiological stability, right?

And one of the things that creates that physiological stability is a sleep, wake, consistency. It is one of the major drivers of longevity and quality of life. So, but that's a hard behavior because people are not thinking about their day and backing into a situation where they are able to fall asleep at a consistent time. And it starts with the daylight you're getting in the morning. And so I think people just, again, don't associate what's happening earlier in the day with their ability to fall asleep. So I would argue a lot of these morning, not morning people just have gotten, they've just shifted their circadian rhythms. Right.

And we know that timing of sleep kind of matters, right, when you're going to bed after, you know, 12 o'clock or, you know, 12 a.m., 1 a.m. We know that your fasting glucose is, you know, going to be elevated the next morning, right? There are repercussions to a delayed circadian phase. We know that those individuals don't have the same sort of lifespan as kind of the early morning folks. I think a lot of the kind of early, the chronotype conversation is, I don't think there's the kind of variability that our society says there is, right? And there's been a lot of experiments that have, I think, challenged this idea of like these widely variable sleep wake. timings, right? We don't really differ that much. It's more in the tune of like 30 to 30 minutes or so, as opposed to like three or four hours, right? That's just this modern invention because we have

all of these, you know, kind of constructs in modern society that allow us to bypass our endogenous rhythms. I got you on record saying, you know, all these different ideas that some people are not mourning people. Some people are kind of and if we actually leaned into being a little bit more in alignment, we'd see that this is our natural sort of rhythm as human beings. Am I getting that right? Kenneth Wright's experiment out of Colorado. He basically put a bunch of adults on a mountain who were early types, late, you know, late types, and put all these folks on a mountain.

And I think within like 48 hours or something, everyone was falling asleep 3.3 hours after the sunsets within 30 minutes of each other. when you remove artificial light and you remove a lot of the you move netflix you remove all the distractions that exist like you remove you know you've got your meal um at a set time and that's it there's no more food for you um when you kind of take out those those things you're like well i guess i'm just going to sleep that's a i think a really good example that does challenge this notion that we've got these wildly different chronotypes and there are differences but again they're they're much smaller than you know, they're to the tune of an hour or so, right? Like they're, when you look at all of the data that exists.

So if you're interested in reducing illness burden, reducing disease burden, you know, one path is stabilizing sleepway consistency and really trying to get to bed a couple hours before midnight, if you can. You know, I would say 10.30 is probably, you know, 10 o'clock, you know, a few hours after the sun goes down is generally the time frame that is correlated with, you know, longevity and quality of life. Let's pick up on that theme of longevity, quality of life, and bring it into the food conversation. You know, you have some pretty important concepts, ideas that you talk about inside of the book around this. And one of the biggest ones that shouldn't be news to people that wear their whoop consistently, but is news to a lot of people who may not have a whoop or don't track.

And that's the idea of how close they're eating to bedtime. Can you break that down? What we see in the data is when individuals are reporting a late-night meal, their recovery the next day is compromised. So the summary statistics that we have that looks at a variety of factors is suppressed relative to their baseline. And when we're controlling for other confounders, right? So we control for sleep-wake consistency. We control for the other recovery detractors, right, when we're looking at this data set. We're really isolating the effect of these late-night meals. And then we also, when we pull apart the resting physiology, we look at hardware variability,

which is a proxy measure of your autonomic nervous system function, which is very important number to just be aware of trends on average. We can talk about that if you want, but your HRV would be suppressed and your Harvey variability would be higher relative to your baseline. And again, every now and again, not a big deal, right? But if you're doing this constantly, right, over time, you can imagine your resting physiology takes a hit. And obviously there's some metabolic consequences as well, which we're not able to measure on who per se, but there's other studies that have been done that do show, indeed, these late-night

meals tend to have metabolic consequences. Again, if your calories over the course of the day are the same, it's not going to make you gain weight, I don't think, per se, like eating late. I don't know that that evidence exists, but it does impair markers of resting physiology, which obviously is important. And then we do know there has been some really great studies that have done that have looked at what you're eating. If you're eating a high quality protein, for example, let's just say you can't get your macronutrients across the day. You don't want to be starving at 3 a.m. That's going to wake you up and that would be suboptimal. So having some high quality protein, you know, 20 to 40 grams before bed is definitely not going to hurt your sleep. So what

you're eating does matter. And I think people who are reporting late-night meals probably are generally having higher fat, higher carbohydrate. And I think what is important to note is when you're trying to fall asleep, that is very much you want to drop into a parasympathetic state. You want your heart rate variability to be high. You want your resting heart rate to be low. And if you're digesting food, which is also a parasympathetic activity, you're essentially competing for resources there. Right. So you're your parasympathetic. You're, you're, trying to kind of get into those deeper stages of sleep, but your body's also trying to digest. It's going to prioritize digestion at the expense of getting into these deeper stages of sleep.

So I think, you know, there's a few things happening there in terms like from a dynamics perspective. But net net, late night meals generally when we look at population data on our platform, which is millions and millions and millions, I can tell you that you should avoid it for the extent that you can. Yeah. Would you go even one step further? I thought I heard you say that, you know, ideally like not eating in that sort of three to four hour window before bed so that your heart rate has a chance to come down. Digestion is kind of in that place. Would you call that like an ideal sort of for those that are focused on getting the biggest bang out of their sleep, maximizing their longevity potential that that's a habit they should be stepping into?

A few weeks ago, I took my tiny health at home gut test and out of the 100 plus markers they screen for. The test flagged one thing as my number one priority, reducing my elevated levels of a bacteria called Klebsia. Now, I had never heard this bacteria before. When Klebsia grows out of balance, that's one of the things that my gut health was uniquely dealing with, it's been linked to all sorts of stuff, but especially a flare-up of eczema. Now, I have no history of eczema, but about a year ago, I started noticing some mild eczema on my right hand. This is exactly why I was motivated to take the tiny health gut test because I wanted to, to get to the source early before a small patch of eczema became a much bigger issue.

The report also showed me that one single species, a bacteria called P. Volgatas, was taking up almost 17% of my entire microbiome. Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with this bacteria. But when one species is hogging that much real estate in the gut, that starts to signal that a gut might be out of balance. Now, Tiny Health's report showed me that they wanted to see other dominant strains come up in percentage, and that matches the research that they've done and all the historical research that's out there on Centinarians around the world, whose gut microbiomes share one

common thing, a healthy diversity amongst a bunch of different species that are out there. You know, when it comes to your gut health, every functional medicine doctor that I've worked with says, test, don't guess. Tiny health was one of the tests that consistently came back as recommended from peers that I trust because of how good their technology is. Shotgunnetic sequencing built with researchers from Johns Hopkins, Mayo Clinic, Harvard, and Stanford, reading your gut bacteria down to the strain level. My report came back with a detailed action plan matched to my results, foods to focus on, in my case, cinnamon, garlic, oregano, more mushrooms, specific fibers, probiotics I could be taking, as well as other healthy lifestyle factors that I could focus on

to radically improve my gut microbiome. Now, this sounds exciting and you want to figure out what's going on with your gut health. Right now, Tiny Health is offering my community their biggest offer yet, $50 off your first gut health test. Just head over to tinyhealth.com slash drew to claim your discount. Again, that's tiny t-I-N-Y health.com slash dhR-U for $50 off your first test. Your gut has a story to tell. Mine sure did. Tiny help helps you understand what it's trying to say. Personally, I don't think you need to stress about every single product in your home, but making a few thoughtful swaps can go a long way. That's why my wife and I are here. huge fans and have switched to branch basics a long time ago. But the truth is, becoming parents

made us double down on that mindfulness. It became even more important. Branch basics makes human safe, fragrance-free cleaning products with plant and mineral-based ingredients that are screened against thousands of known and suspected harmful chemicals. What I really appreciate is how simple they make it. Their concentrate mixes with water to create cleaners for just about everything you need in your home. From the kitchen and bathroom to windows and even laundry. Instead of having a different cleaner for every job, which is kind of mostly marketing, it simplifies the whole routine and has become a permanent part of our household. And here's the great news.

Branch Basics is now available everywhere you shop, Target, Target.com, Amazon, and of course direct at branchbasics.com. Tossing the toxins has never been more convenient. And if you're grabbing the premium starter kit, you can get 15% off at branchbasics.com with my personal code for my audience, which is Drew, D.H. The premium starter kit comes with the concentrate, refillable bottles for your everyday cleaners, and an oxygen boost for stubborn stains. Just use the code Drew, DHRU, for 15% off the premium starter kit at branchbasics.com.

After you purchase, they're going to ask you where you heard about them. You know the deal. Please mention our show. It goes a long way. If you don't have these kind of crazy performance goals, right? You want to try to eat your macronutrients. You want to try to distribute your macronutrients evenly across the day during the daylight hours, when you're most active, when you're using them, right?

And so, yeah, I mean, after the sun goes down, you know, an hour, hour and a half after that, you want to just have your cutoff like that. All right, that's my last calorie. And essentially, I think what a good rule of thumb for most humans is you're eating your calories during a 12-hour window. And then the other 12-hour window, you're fasting. You just give your body a break, you know, that it doesn't have to worry about digesting food. It can pour all of its resources into recovery.

and regeneration. And there seems to be enough evidence to support that. But I would say, you know, we know from the data that I think it's close to 64 percent of Americans are eating over the course of a 16-hour period, right? So they're bypassing kind of that 12 hours by four hours, right? So that's a really big window to be asking your body to maintain homeostasis, right? And we want to give our body a break. For some folks, you know, if you're working with a primary care physician, you know, maybe 10 hours is a better strategy for you, right? I think it depends on what your metabolic goals are. I think it's a powerful lever. And I published a paper a couple years ago in sleep where I basically ran an experiment where I took some of these circadian

behaviors, kind of what I've seen in the data as being sleep promoting. And one of them was viewing morning light. One of them was reducing stress throughout the day through breathwork protocol. The other one was zone two, which is extraordinarily recovering, promoting, and correlated with higher quality sleep. And then finally, time restricted eating. And I actually saw all four of these behaviors helped improve sleep-wake consistency. So by creating this like these daytime behaviors that I know are related to kind of circadian alignment and sleep, we actually saw it improved sleep-wake consistency. So people were falling asleep at a more consistent time, which then in turn improved

parasympathetic tone. So it improved kind of their cardiac profile, cardiorespiratory fitness, as well as parasympathetic tone. So we saw, and then time restricted eating, which was interesting, actually had a direct effect. So it was mediated by sleep consistency as well, but we also saw

direct, the only of the four, we saw direct effects of time restricted eating on improved cardiac profile. That's great. So it's like the combination of you know, the right amount of activity, you know, time restricted eating, eating within a particular

window. Was morning light a part of that too? Morning light? So morning light was one of the protocol. So I basically gave them four protocols to consider. And we had 30 with 79,000 folks, I think, in this study. So it was massive. It was actually featured, sleep featured it. They had kind of a separate kind of editorial commentary. They got some, some researchers from Washington University to kind of write about the paper. And what I think people loved about it is that these are, these are, this is incredibly powerful therapeutic intervention that is free. You know, like it doesn't cost you anything, right? But it.

it's just this awareness that, okay, sleepway consistency really matters. How do we engage in behaviors during the day that can not facilitate that, knowing that it's such a hard behavior, right? Given all of the traps in modern society, it's a hard thing to do. We even see on our platform, as much as I'm on about sleepway consistency, our average sleep wake timing is 67%, which is really low. You look at like Tade Pogacha, for example, Tour de France winter, and it's just top of mind because I just look, I just did a few analysis on his data and it's public so I can I can share it he's he's at 87% right so he's creating the opportunities creating conditions via sleep with consistency for incredible incredible physiological

stability over the course of a year you know like this guy's capacity to recover is just insane some of that is genetic of course but a lot of it is just his the behaviors that he's engaging And number one is the sleepway consistency. If every one of us just improve that a little bit, I mean, we see it correlate with ice hockey efficiency, with pool times, with swim times, with run times, with exit bad velocity, exit ball velocity, you know, Tour de France winners, performance metrics and golf. Like, it is just mind-blowing the power of sleepway consistency. No, thanks for driving at home because that's one of those things that people still are on the train of, hey, how much did you sleep? which obviously is important to some degree, but you don't have any conversation.

You know, people often will ask me, even in my men's group, people say, oh, how'd you sleep last night? You know, and obviously a subtext of that, you know, if you're hip to this data

that you're talking about is like, oh, what time did you go to sleep last night? You know, where you on schedule? You know, how stable was your sleepway consistency. Like that, how stable, yeah.

Because I think what people don't realize is that sleep with consistency drives quality. Yeah. If you wake up at the same time every single day, you view morning light, you're going to back into your natural pressure for sleep, which is going to tell you how long you need to freaking spend in bed.

And again, like, I just don't think people understand the process of like we just talk about, oh, spend more time in bed or, you know, go to sleep at the same time. But it's the daytime behaviors that help create conditions to make that possible, right? And that's where we just need to be a little bit more strategic about our day, right? And that's my whole kind of thesis is that if we think we don't need a strategy, We have lost our minds because to go back to the original conversation around modern life, right? Like we have to like recognize where modern life is like sabotaging us and then just build that awareness into our into our days, into our family structures, right?

So we can just be healthier, right? And and not get sick every winter. And like, you know, like that's like you don't have to, you can opt out of that. You can with behaviors. one of the big ideas and this is pulled off this theme that we're talking about right now but a big idea in the book is your body runs on timing not willpower and there's this quote that you have which is your body does not run on willpower it runs on timing and this goes into this thing here that I'm sort of shutting up the contrast for my audience that hasn't had the chance to read the book

but I hope you pick it up the link is in the show notes aligned aligned fantastic read get on Amazon I think it comes out on August 25th which the interview will be out by my time is if you don't create these strategies, if you don't create these habits, you're forced to try to use willpower to navigate your day. And willpower doesn't last. You can't bank on it for most people. It's a short burst.

Rather, the alternative to willpower is you're creating that container, which is exactly what you've been talking about. How do you create that container throughout the day where so many of these things automatically end up taking place? And also, too, if you get thrown off here, and there, if it's truly here and there, it's no big deal because you have such a foundation that your body is resilient and can tap into that recovery to get back on the wagon, so to speak,

versus other people. If you're regularly tapping to willpower for many aspects of your life and you fall off the wagon, a lot of people, every time they fall off, quote unquote, it's harder and harder. And now their life doesn't look like anything with their potential for their longevity. their sleep, their recovery could actually be. And this is what I tried to do in the book are what are the big levers, you know, from a physiological and psychological perspective that we need to be thinking about in order to have more control over our energy production and our attentional capacity and our

motivation. The great news is that it's not really rocket science, but in the great news, too, is that we don't have to do it all the time, right? But it's just understanding what are the big levers? And if I can just design a life where I'm doing those big things like 80% of the time, I create enough buffer in the system where the other 20% of the time, I can have some freedom, you know? And that's definitely how I live, you know, and it's taken me some time to get there. But, you know, I don't have to be perfect, right? I can live life. I can enjoy it. I can absorb travel,

right, but I've created enough buffer in my system that it allows me that flexibility. You just have to figure out, okay, how do I create this alignment as often as possible? That reward is some flexibility in the other 20% of the time. You talked about physiological and psychological. When it comes to psychological misalignment, what are the top things that you see are going on on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, monthly basis that become the big part of people? sabotaging their chances to be in alignment. Let's talk psychological.

Well, I think trauma, you know, can really interfere with our ability to engage in these behaviors we're talking about consistently, right? Like, you know, trauma can make you feel stuck. I really do believe and subscribe to a lot of the research that, you know, kind of talks about trauma as being an injury to the nervous system. So I feel like a lot of the things that we talked about, a lot of these behaviors that we talked about are going to improve the robustness of your autonomic nervous system, right? Which hurry variability is a measure of, right? But a robust autonomic nervous system allows us to respond and react to stress in an appropriate way. When we are a victim of trauma, we have not healed from that trauma. We can keep revisiting that trauma in our autonomic nervousness. system essentially stays stuck in this kind of fight or flight or kind of hypervigilant state. And that detracts from our ability to be present in our life, to engage in our life, to have the

energy that we need to make better choices about our life. So I think, you know, one of the chapters I devote in the book is toward, you know, how do we how do we think about this healing journey, right and so for some folks that's going to be relevant for other folks maybe not but I really think that the path to healing is through the autonomic nervous system and engaging in a lot of these recovery behaviors that I talk about in the third part of the book you know is you know that the being in nature and in journaling and you know obviously getting therapeutic support if if if that's your path so we have all these like little micro traumas and I think the the idea is that you're building um a more kind of resilient and robust foundation around your internal state, right,

and in that you're able to then respond and adapt to external stress in a way that's more aligned with who you aspire to be in the world, right? Because that's the ultimate kind of, I suppose, goal is that we want to be able to, you know, live our values with more joy and more energy and I think unresolved trauma can definitely impair that in ways that are really are big, right? So it's kind of making this notion of recovery away being in the world creates this foundation that allows us to have a platform to deal with this trauma in a more, I think, a less friction-filled way. Yeah.

Can you expand on that a little bit and some of the themes in the book, meaning like some people look at unresolved trauma and are like, you need some big intervention or years of of work and therapy. And that might be needed for some people. Some people swear by different programs that are out there, like a Hoffman method or other sort of bridge. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Other things that are there. And some people are like, uh, nothing has to be either or, but it's, hey, you could do those things, but that can be a journey and that can take time. And sometimes something works and something takes you a step closer, then, you know, you're still trying to figure it out. But you've got to devote daily attention to the practice because trauma is not in the mind.

It's in the body. So if there's not an opportunity to have daily things, even if it doesn't look like you're getting to the source of your trauma, like, what's that thing that happened to me, you know, or how do I unpack it and it makes sense? You're still actually healing it on a daily basis by, you know, giving your body the support system it needs. There are only a handful of brands I've talked about consistently for years, and cozy earth is one of them. So when I heard they were bringing the same premium comfort that we all love beyond the bedroom with their new beach towels, I got super excited.

As a new dad, I'm spending a bunch more time outside trying to get my son, that healthy sun exposure, whether it's afternoons by the pool, weekend trip, or just getting out with the family whenever I can. And the beautiful thing about the cozy earth beach towels is that I can take the same comfort that we're used to. at home and bring them into these special moments. Now, a couple of things about these beach towels. The first thing I notice is how unbelievably plushed they feel. We all know those rough, scratchy beach towels that somehow never seem to dry you off. These are the complete opposite of those. They're oversized, incredibly absorbent, and have that same luxurious feel that I've come to expect from everything cozy earth makes. It really does feel like wrapping yourself in a luxury hotel towel after a nice swim. One of the reasons I've recommended cozy earth

for so long is that they don't just make premium products. They stand behind them. Their betting comes with a 10-year warranty, so you can feel good knowing it's built to last. Oversized, ultra-plush, and completely built for your best summer days. Head over to cozy earth.com and use my code D-H-R-U-P for an exclusive 20% off. That's D-HR-U-P for an exclusive 20% off. And if you see a post-purchase survey,

mention that you heard about Cozy Earth right here. Some flavors instantaneously remind you of summer. Lemonade iced tea is one of them. The problem is that most bottled versions are loaded with sugar. So what starts off as a refreshing drink quickly turns into an energy crash. That's why I've been reaching for elements new lemonade iced tea all summer long. It has that same classic flavor, but instead of being filled to the brim with sugar, it combines real black tea extract with the premium electrolyte formula that I've been using for years at this point.

Long recording days, workouts, travel, because I realize that a lot of what I think is low energy is actually dehydration. or low electrolytes. Your body doesn't run on caffeine. It runs on processes that depend on electrolytes like sodium, potassium, and magnesium. That's what Element has always done incredibly well. Supporting hydration, helping with focus, and helping keep your energy more stable throughout the day. And by the way, if you want to try it, Element is offering a free eight-count sample pack with any purchase. Just go to DrinkElement.com slash Drew.

That's drink, D-R-I-N-K-Element, L-M-N-T dot com slash D-H-R-U. So this summer, if you're going to reach for something refreshing, make it something that actually supports your energy. Check out Elements' new Lemonade Ice Team. I think that was a big turning point for me, you know, decades ago now, in terms of my own healing journey, that this, I think it was the recognition that this isn't just, you know, you can't just go to therapy for six months. and, you know, it's really, it's more of a way of being in the world. You know, like every day I am building in an opportunity to build a more robust autonomic nervous system. And I kind of keep going back to that because that's trauma is going to basically make your

autonomic nervous system not work as efficiently as well, right? Like so we want to make sure that on a daily basis, we're in a situation where we're kind of actively building that robustness. And a lot of it is sleep, right? Sleep quality is literally correlated with a robust autonomic nervous system. You know, but just these many practices of like, just, I mean, exercise, right, is going to help appropriate exercise, right? Is going to help our autonomic nervous system functioning, sleep weight consistency, reducing alcohol intake, you know, eating during the daylight hours and getting, you know, nourishing food in our body, like hydration, right? Like all simple things.

But if you can just do some of those simple things, as much as you can throughout the day, you're building that armic nervous system robustness. You are actually on a path to healing. Like that is going to accelerate your healing, right? A lot of the physiological stuff. And to your point, those are things that you can really action. Sometimes the mind is just tough, right? But what you're doing by engaging in these recovery practices is you are actually quieting the mind.

Like you're giving yourself an opportunity to be more. discerning about the things you care about in your life, right? Because, again, your autonomic nervous system is able to kind of transition from, you know, this parasympathetic state to sympathetic state, right? And when you, when it's able to move flexibly, right, that is absolutely correlated with positive psychological functioning, right? But when it's stuck, that's when we struggle. So a lot of these just behaviors that we can engage in.

that we've identified will help, again, build that autonomic nervous system robustness, which will help with more positive psychological functioning and kind of get you out of that that stuckness, right? That, you know, trauma and other, you know, mental health disorders can sabotage. So the beginning of the podcast, we were talking about like, what does like an ideal day of alignment look like, right? And when I say ideal, these are different practices, you know, there'll be some things that we can incorporate, some things that people are working towards, but when it comes to some of these psychological things, you've already said that some of the physiological working out supports the autonomic nervous system, you know, getting morning sunlight.

These things all help. What are some other things that you haven't mentioned, like in the book, you talk about how the importance of devoting even like 10 minutes a day to like active sort of recovery for you and how important that is. What could that look like or anything else that you haven't mentioned? Like where would you schedule it? Where could it be most helpful? And what could possibly the exercise look like?

When I talk about heel, the heel framework, you know, the L in heel, so it's heart, which we talked about that on nervous system, energy, mitochondria, A is this autonomy and L is love. And I think autonomy, I think folks should keep that in the front of their minds in the sense that carving out time to be by yourself with your thoughts can be really helpful. Especially in today's world, I think that, you know, there's a real poverty of attention, right? because everything is designed to pull us into someone else's world, right, and take us out of our own world. And I think for someone who is trying to get clear about their life, that is very much a distraction. And so I think carving out time to, you know, be alone with your thoughts is really becoming, I think, the superpower of the 21st century. But we need to be strategic about building that into our day. And, you know, for me, generally speaking, after dinner, I go for a walk. And, you know, sometimes I can corral one of my kids to go with me. But oftentimes these days, because they're teenagers and, you know, they've got their own lives. I end up being by myself a lot of the time. But it's just auditing my day a little bit and evaluating, you know, what I think really served me, where I was able to live my values, where there was maybe some dissonance. And then I, you know, after I go through that process, which I think is really a

passionate view. And maybe I might, one of my favorite practices is, it's called meta. It's, you know, it's this kind of loving kindness meditation. Like, I love that so much. Like, and you can direct it toward yourself. And oftentimes I'll direct it to myself to start. And then I'll direct it to someone, you know, neutral and then maybe someone I love. Did you explain it a little bit more like, yeah. How do you do it? Are you sitting? Are you walking? I'm walking. So generally, I kind of have gotten away from sitting. There's so much sitting, right? Like, and this is, again, a construct of modern life. I have a commute and I'm, like, sitting in my car. So the last thing I want to do is, like, is sit. So,

so I basically all of, like, my meditation and mindfulness is, is walking. But yeah, it's more of a mindful walk. I've got a trail behind my house, so I'm really fortunate. Like, so I, I'm able to walk in this trail. But, but the loving kindness meditation is, is you just basically, you know, just think of like a very short sentence, a little mantra, you know, you know, and, you know, that you can can say like I am full of joy and peace you know just anything like that that resonates with you or it's maybe connects you to your values and you just kind of repeat it and you can do this for a minute a couple minutes um and then in you're thinking about yourself you're directing that energy toward yourself that compassion and that love toward yourself and then

um you can think about someone neutral um and then think about someone's a loved one and in a literally just assigning kind of a sentence or two, you know, I wish them peace and happiness or, you know, it's whatever kind of comes up and you think about that person and you really put that energy out into the world. And what that does from an autonomic nervous system perspective is that it deactivates your nervous system. It reduces your heart rate, right? And when you can kind of stack that loving meditation on top of being out in nature, you're kind of getting this like double whammy, right, in terms of its impact on the autonomic nervous system. So that's a great way to kind of spend some of that time. Other times, you know, I'll breathe through my nose, you know,

so I kind of keep my mouth shut during this time and really focus on nasal breathing, which is also really adaptive in the book I talk about. I have the core inputs and one of them is just this how to breathe properly, something that we don't talk about a lot. It should be automatic, but again, you know, just the way modern society is constructed, it's, it's maybe not as obvious as it should be. And then I think, too, like just being outside as the sun is, is kind of low on the horizon is also really sleep promoting. It's telling your body that it's getting close to produce, you know, close to time, close in the time where it should be producing melatonin, which is going to help us get into a nice restful sleep and it, in a light.

is in the absence of light is is a big cue for that. Also being out in the in the light as it's as it's low on the horizon is can protect us from blue light at night. So just a fun fact for folks. If you do have to have access to blue light at night, that can help counterbalance that effect. That's the kind of autonomy piece. Just being out alone and then maybe using some of that walk to just like I said in the

beginning, just auditing, you know, what went well and what didn't go well. And, and, you know, writing some of those things down could be really helpful too. Like, when you get back, just like jotting it down in a journal, we know has really powerful impact on your psychological functioning and can actually help you sleep better when you're kind of writing down things that are bothering you. That has an incredibly powerful effect on just letting go of that things and kind of stopping the rumination that can often interfere with sleep. And it'd be one of the causes of kind of that 3 a.m. wake up. I think those two, the autonomy and that and that self-love are really are big pieces of kind of

that heel framework. You know, you talked about your story a little bit or hinting at it at least. Would you mind sharing a little bit for our audience over here? You know, there's so many, we all have our own stories. There's multiple chapters of your story, just like anybody else's story that's there. But yeah, maybe some of the early life stuff I think would be really, as relevant as we're talking about trauma. And everybody has a different degree of this.

And some people may not have that big T trauma that they've gone through in life. But I think hearing somebody's story always helps people ask the question or see, is there something in their life that they went through that they didn't get a chance to sort of, you know, unpack in the way that it needed. So, yeah, if you wouldn't mind sharing a little bit about your story. as you write about in the book, I think that'd be really, really powerful. To your point, like, I think everyone has kind of, has been through something, you know, that that's had a,

had a profound impact on, on, on, potentially their adult life. And that was definitely that my case, you know, I, my, you know, it was really sad. My mom struggled with depression her whole entire life. So, you know, and I think one of the ways she tried to deal with that depression was, was her drinking. And, you know, she was, I would say kind of a non-function. alcoholic. My dad traveled a lot. He was a wonderful dad, but he, he worked a lot and wasn't

home. So, you know, we were kind of, my brother and I were left, you know, under my mom's supervision, which there wasn't a lot of because she was like drinking most of the time. And, you know, there are patches of the day where she would be available and engaged, but mostly, mostly not. When I would come from school, she'd be asleep generally. And sometimes we would get dinner. Sometimes we wouldn't. You know, we would sometimes be eating like dry pasta. So there's, you know, some food insecurity there. I was sexually abused for the first 10 years of my life. So there's that. I was really lucky in that I found sports. And that became an outlet for me. I played, you know, I just poured all of my energy. into becoming as good as I could be at, you know, the sports that I played and academics. And so I suppose like a lot of people who have been exposed to various types of trauma, like we become high achievers, you know.

And after my mom died when I was, I had just graduated from college and just came back from the World Cup. I was on the U.S. field hockey team. And I think that was the moment where it all came kind of crashing down. And I realized that all of these things that I was chasing and all of these achievements that I was, that I was after, you know, didn't have its roots in a healthy place. You know, I was just, just running, you know, and trying to bury all the pain that I had never addressed. And after my mom passed, it just kind of came crashing down. And I had just, you know, there's a really dark times for me.

and, you know, that's when I was able to seek help. And it took me, I ended up quitting the U.S. team. And this was, I guess, in after 98, this was in, you know, 99. And, you know, just really worked through all of this. It's been a work in progress ever since, you know. And I think one of the problems that I always had was being very outcome focused, you know, and I feel like I always felt like if I didn't have, you know, if I wasn't scoring goals and, you know, getting baskets and, you know, achieving this next same U.S. team, like, that I just would disappear, you know, and I just had this belief that I would, like, literally disappear. And, but as you can imagine, you know, that creates a scenario where you are, you know, you're just, you're never fulfilled. You're never happy. You cannot access any joy. And that was absolutely my situation, you know, like, no matter what I achieved, I never felt, ever felt good enough, ever.

And so, you know, I think that year was so formative in helping me relearn what self-worth actually is and how to find some sense of internal peace and to really start to identify, like, what are my values? What do I care about? What actually makes me happy? Like, these are things that I just had, I had no idea. And so, you know, and so a lot of the book, you know, I have a PhD, you know, I have a PhD, you know, I have a PhD, you know, I have a PhD, you know, in psychology. I'm trained, but, you know, a lot of the, the, what I read about in the book is from this kind of very deep kind of personal experience. Yeah, I appreciate you sharing about it and, you know, writing about it in the book. And I think for a lot of people who were listening, they might have not gone through the exact same situation you have. And who knows, you know, maybe many people have. We know the statistics on especially things like sexual abuse for, for young women is like, it's way higher than like most people have any idea about, like,

Like, what is it, like one in three, you know, have been sexually abused at some point of time in their life. So saddening. But even if somebody listening today, they haven't gone through the exact scenario as you, I think they can identify with the idea that, you know, maybe you've had a really bad breakup or you lost a job that really impacted your confidence or something really tough. You lost a family member or whatever it might be. And it was a tough situation.

And you may have not had the tools or the friendship. or the other things to help you reflect on in a way that would be, let's say, healthy. And it's so easy to use the busyness of life to cover up, you know, addressing it and kneeling with it in whatever way that's there for you. For that person who can identify with that theme and they might be doing with that in their life, what's the first step that you'd say for them? When we have insecure attachments as a younger child or, you know, have been sexually abused, like it, and it's not something that we have maybe proactively dealt with, it is probably rearing its head in some way in our life or even on a subconscious level. Like we know, for example, that individuals who have undergone trauma as a child have lower heart rate variability, right?

Like the autonomic nervous system is, is, you know, is, which again is kind of this proxy indicator of how well we can adapt to our life, right? And so, you know, we know that there's this physiological connection to trauma that can impair the quality of our life, right? Our ability to engage and show up and be present. And I'm not a believer in like over-therapides. It's like, you know, if you're doing great and you're happy, you're living your values, like your relationships are good and they're, you know, fluid and dynamic.

and the people around you are supporting your values and you have the space to grow and evolve and design a life that allows you to be that person you aspire to be, then carry on, you know, but I think for people who do maybe feel stuck in their life in psychology, we call that cognitive dissonance, right, the internal tension, that something in your life just isn't quite right. You know, I think getting help is the first step, you know, is being able to talk to someone neutral, right who whose only interest is to help you get on the best possible path i think is a beautiful first step um and there are so many options now i think for for like mental health platforms like where you can zoom and and talk to someone and you know you don't even have to have your camera on

like there's just so many ways to i think engage help now um but i think asking for help um is is huge um and building your you know what we know one of the our core psychological needs is self-efficacy, feeling like we have the skills and resources to engage in our day and in a way that feels good. And so therapy can kind of help you build that efficacy, right? Like that feeling like you said it earlier, like you have the tools, right, to navigate some of these challenging emotions, right? And maybe it shows up in, you know, you have these outbursts, like, you know, these angry outbursts, right? Like with your family and you're like, what is going on with that, right? Or, you know, maybe you feel really unmotivated.

you know, for big patches of time, right? Like these are things that are, you know, are, we don't, we don't have to accept that as a normal aspect of life, right? There's going to be times in our life where, yeah, things that aren't great, but, but this, this kind of chronic feeling of just like, gosh, my life isn't going in the way that I want it to go. Pushing that under the rug, you know, is just it's just not the path. I'm so grateful that I confronted it, you know, in the time of my life that I did. And it is ongoing work, you know, for me.

But I think that's part of like, to go back to our earlier point of making this notion of recovery and healing a part of your day is, is I think important in modern society, right? And because we're exposed to a lot of stuff, right? just even, you know, the earthquakes in Columbia, right? Like that, you know, for some folks that really impacts them. Like, right, you know, like there's, you might be exposed to a third three-car pile up. Like, you know, it's just like there's a lot of things that we're exposed to, right, that

create this, this tension internally, right? And, and, and so this daily accessing piece on a daily basis and in reconnecting to, you know, who you want to be and how you want to express yourself is really important. And sometimes we need help to kind of get us on that path and to change the story, right, that we're telling ourselves. Like, I haven't talked about my personal history a lot, right? And so it still kind of makes me emotional. But I think it's that recognition that almost like that's not, like not who I am now, right? Like that's not a part of my identity. That's not part of the story that I tell myself today. And in a lot of the work that I've done, and I'd say the advice that I give is that you have control over the

story. You can choose how you think about today, you know, and I think that's where it becomes really empowering. And that's where I would say, you know, people need to focus on is what can I do today to relearn these pathways and to create a new narrative for me. myself. Yeah. And I think for a long time, we primarily thought of that through the mind and thinking. If that's the only tool, it can think the process worse. And in fact, a lot of what you're talking about in the book today is like how to quiet the mind through the body, how to create that piece inside through creating the right container. If your body has the right balance of joy, recovery, and stress, because stress is a good thing.

It can be a good thing. For sure. It will naturally respond in a way that feels to us as it's in a peaceful state. And that'll be reflected in all the things that we use to, you know, track that, like our loop. And if we don't have those things, it's just going to make it so much worse for us to try to navigate that. You know, one thing that it kind of brings to mind. I'd love you to chat about this, kind of a little bit of a transition over to

it. I was hoping you talked to our audience about this. I don't know if it was a survey or if it was a proper study that you guys did talking about people who went through stressful days and how they perceived it. Oh, yeah. And how that impact. Can you talk about that? Because I think this is related a little bit. It is definitely related when I was coaching at Princeton. This was very much foundational to kind of how we thought about coaching. And this goes, I'm a psychophysiologist, but yeah, so I think about these interrelationships. And the study is published in emotion. I think a year ago, May. So this is a proper study. There are 39,000 folks in this study. And basically what we looked at is we were looking at lots of different things. We had all of the

physiological data. So we, you know, we were looking at, we actually had blood pressure. Folks were doing a blood pressure cuff three times per week. And we had all of the other physiological data that we track via WOOP. So we used WOOF as our data collection method. And then we also had a survey. And we were actually asking about sleep anxiety. that paper is in review right now. And then the other thing that we ask them is their perception, how they perceive their day. Did they perceive their day as threatening? Or did they perceive their day as challenging?

And threatening is, you know, essentially it taps kind of self-efficacy. Do I feel like I have the skills and resources to do what's asked to me? Did you feel like you have the skills and resources to do what's asked to you? If you say no, then that's like a threat situation. If you felt like you did that you perceive your day as challenging. And what was interesting is that we didn't see any differences in the cardiovascular kind of signature of those individuals, the cardiac signature of those individuals over the course of the day. So there are no meaningful differences there in terms of threat perception versus challenge perception. But what we did see is that the individuals who perceived their day as threatening had lower quality sleep than the individuals who perceived their day as challenging, which when you hear it, you're like, of course, right?

But I think what's important for people to take away, and it kind of goes back to this idea of healing, right? If we're in a situation where we are constantly in this threat appraisal, it is going to impact our ability to restore and regenerate overnight. And you can imagine like the cost of that over time. You've got this threatening appraisal, right? You're stuck in this kind of fighter flight, right, which doesn't allow you to get into these deeper stages of sleep at night. Therefore, you don't recover as good, you wake up tomorrow with less capacity, you wake up tomorrow more vulnerable, physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. And so from my perspective, I think this is an incredibly powerful insight in that we need to recognize when we're in a scenario where

we are in this state of threat. And, you know, when I was at Princeton coaching, when you're in a threatening state, you either totally disengaged, right, where you kind of get apathetic, or you overcorrect and try to try hard, and you try harder, right? Both put you in a very, you end up generating inappropriate energy, right, for whatever that task is, right? You end up either too apathetic, so not enough heart rate. And, you know, emotionally, you are maybe, you are maybe, you know, you get, you're just apathetic or, you know, and, you know, mentally, you're just not as engaged, mentally, less focused. And on the other end of the spectrum, if you're kind of overtrying, you know, your heart rate is too jacked up and you're, you become disoriented and you're not able to kind of

focus in the way that you need, you know, maybe you're more irritable. So it puts you in these, in these states. So I think as a parent even, like, and a coach, like understanding when an individual under your care is in this kind of threat state versus challenge, you can then help them reframe in a way that gets them back into the challenging. And that's actually the language that I used coaching is like, we want to get the athletes and the challenging. Because when you're in the challenging, you are generating appropriate levels of energy for the task. And so it's a really powerful reframe. And of course, at the time, I had no idea that the more time you're in this challenging, actually, the better you're going to sleep, that was like this wild psychophysiological unlock, right?

I think it can become consequential for us if we're in this constant state of threat. We don't ask for help. We don't know how to ask for help. We can really impair our sleep, you know, which is going to impair our ability to recover. In my own relationship with my wife, anytime we find, you know, and couples fight about stupid stuff all the time. Especially we're new parents, right? Your new parents. Oh, my God.

Navigating that. that, you know, making sure that the baby has everything that it needs. It's so easy to be already at a heightened state because sleep is a little bit off. And you're learning things. You've been through it before, of course. And we like to try. I'm not going to say we're always perfect in it. When we really notice that it's kind of spiraling, right?

Somebody's a little bit in a heightened state than somebody else is reactive and is in a heightened state. It's like, okay, if we can, especially, you know, We're lucky we have a nanny that's there. Let's just go for a walk outside. Take just a beat. Like take 15 minutes, 20 minutes. Just like, let's walk outside, side by side. We don't even have to talk about anything, you know, necessarily.

We don't have to say anything. Just walk outside, be in the sun, get fresh air, get perspective, move a little bit. And it's crazy how something as simple as that for a 30-minute pop out, a little walk around the neighborhood. And then sometimes we'll decide to pick back up the conversation. It's like it always ends up starting off with, look, one of us saying, I'm sorry. I was just, I didn't sleep that well or I thought you said this and, you know, I was worried that I didn't do that. And you just realize like how much stuff. There are times where things genuinely matter.

They have to be discussed. It's part of a bigger part in conversation. But how much just like does not matter? I know. Because you have gotten trapped in that heightened space because physiologically you're going through this really tough time. I think all the right things. like textbook-wise, you created distance. You found kind of a neutral, relaxing environment

away from the stressor. You know, not that your kid's the stresser, but, you know, the environment can create stress. And then you just created some space and time just to be together, you know? And a lot of times, to your point, that's all you need to have in order to resolve a situation is just a little bit of space and time to breathe,

you know, and to create just a little bit of a different perspective on the situation. And I think we forget how important it is to have space with our partner where we can just be. And there's like kind of no agenda per se other than just to be together. You know, and the stuff ends up that matters, I think ends up surfacing. But in a way that, you know, there's no defensiveness. Right. It's just like, so I think that that's, that's like such a wonderful strategy for couples, you know, to, to maintain connection is just to kind of carve out, even if it's like 10 minutes, you know, where you're just together and there's no agenda, you know? Yeah, totally. I want to toss one more thing here as we're running down and

I want to pass it back to you just on this idea of creating alignment. And I can't take credit for this. This is a dear friend of mine in my men's group, Adam Cobb, coach Adam Cobb. And he was sharing and opening up that him and his wife, one of the things they were doing because they had a daughter, then they had twins and their life like, you know, just twins on top of already having a young daughter's a lot. And they were saying like, man, it's like we would try to do date nights because everybody says, hey, date night and a weekly date night is a way to reconnect, is a way to be together. And it's so important for a healthy marriage and having that time for you. And to go back to this idea of circadian biology, date night would come.

And being parents, having twins, it comes to the end of the day. And they're just like, dude, we're exhausted. Like the last day, like, we're like, we just want to sleep right now. Yeah. But, you know, they felt like they're giving up because it's like, oh, you're not, you know, devoting that time to your partner. So they'd rally. They'd get to the restaurant.

But, you know, it's at the end of the day. They're sitting down. they're trying to enjoy a meal inherently because it's also the end of day. It's like what's the final stuff that's floating around in your wife's brain and your brain that's part of that checklist. And it's tougher.

It's not that it's impossible. It was tougher. And they were like, well, how did we originally connect? We originally connected. We would go for coffee. And we get, you know, we go for a workout afterwards.

And they're both into fitness. Shout out to his wife, Daisy. We're both into fitness. and we would do a workout together or take a class, and then we'd have brunch. And it's a completely, and instead of getting the nanny for date night, get the nanny for a brunch date. Yes. And it was taking advantage of all the things.

Morning light, getting coffee, walking together, enjoying their calories earlier in the morning and getting a chance to connect after having moved, which is a whole different state of psychology than sitting down at the end of the day, you know, talking about everything that didn't get done. So it just made me think about that, bridging the gap between some advice that a friend gave me, but also this theme of many of the things you've been talking about on the podcast today. Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters.

On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research. Together, we can carry the fire and help create a world free from the fear of cancer. Register today at pmcf walk.ca.ca. I love that. Yeah, I think, you know, earlier in the day is better. I mean, just even to exactly your point, like, by the time you get to the end of the day, you've already made so many decisions, like your, you know, your patience is lower,

your tolerance is lower, your capacity for kindness is lower, and your capacity for compassion is lower. Like, yeah, doing stuff earlier in the day. is generally going to be better. And I think as new parents, preserving your sleep is actually so important because that's going to directly impact how you show up during the day. So you want to try to, yeah, figure out, okay, how do we connect during the daylight hours as much as possible?

And I know people have jobs and it's, but even if you're using, you know, the weekend time to do that, like, you know, it's just figuring out how do I, how do I create that balance? And I think for folks who have resources, you know, that's where you leverage, you know, the help that you have. But, but yeah, I feel like that is an amazing strategy and I'm totally on board of that. So many concepts inside the book. Again, if people can check it out, they get a chance to read it, they can audit their life and take a look at those key areas. And I think that's especially important in this day and age. And I've definitely been a part of this, I'm going to loosely call it a problem, but it's part of an evolution and wellness.

and health in societies, there's a lot of focus on what's the right supplement, what's the right diet to eat, what's the toxin that's in, you know, our latest food. And those things are great. I love to geek out on that. I'd love to, you know, figure out the right environment or I'm always looking to love, you know, learn about more evidence-based supplements that I can incorporate in my routine. But a lot of the unlock that we're actually looking for comes down to these often would seem like light interventions, but actually have the biggest profound impact on our life, especially when we doubled down on them over a period of time.

So I really see your book as being, you know, the host of that conversation of like, hey, look, do whatever you want to on the other side, but also realize if you're actually looking for alignment, then these are the things that you want to make sure you don't miss out on. Because when you do miss out on them, many of these other things that you think might be bringing you help, and having the quote unquote perfect diet are often things that may not have that big of a bang

if you don't have recovery, you know, sleep, consistency, you know, and optimized sort of, you know, HRV or the right amount of activity that's there. So that's how I see your conversation is sort of in the zeitgeist that exists today. Thinking about some final closing thoughts, anything you want to leave our audience with today. And thank you for that. I do, I really did try to put in the book, you know, what I see as being foundational from a psychological and physiological perspective. And hopefully this gives people just a basic understanding of what can help move the needle in their life if living a long, healthy life is a goal, right? And some of these are just the big levers that I've seen in the data and what I've learned in all of the academic pursuits that I've had over the course. of my life. And I think for folks, the most important thing is, and I, you know, I think I'm hesitant to say this because, and I think this is a really good, really good question. But I think self-love is so important. And I think it's, we're in a world where I think comparison is, is so easy. And I think we need to really

get out of that trap and focus on the things. things that really help us live our purpose day to day and and in being honest with ourselves about our behaviors in terms of how they are contributing positively toward that versus negatively. And I think that that self-honesty is is actually how you build integrity within yourself and is the path to self-love. My hope is that this book helps you build the integrity within yourself, the knowledge of what is actually the path to that? Because I think when you have integrity, you then create conditions that allow you to truly love yourself. And I think honestly, that has been my personal work and

it might not be everyone's work, but is just getting to this place where, you know, I do feel like enough just as I am, as a human, right? Without any externalities, right, is just feeling really good about who I am as a human. And so, yeah, hopefully that answers the question. Well, that's a beautiful answer. It's, I think about how many times in someone's life, and, you know, my audience is about 75% women, 25% men. And I think men and women go through this and they also uniquely go through it in different ways. But how many times your life have you felt that your body is working against you? That it's not listening to you. It's doing something you don't want it to do. And

I often think about that, especially in the context of today's conversation, it's like, how often are you loving yourself, which also includes, of course, your body? How often are you loving it back? How often are you creating these conditions to say, okay, today was a tough day. And still, I'm going to try to shoot to go to bed at a reasonable hour because I deserve that. I care about myself. And even if things didn't go exactly as I wanted, even if I felt I could have shown up better, that's part of the journey. That's part of the work. Even reflecting on that is part of the journey, part of the work. And I'm still going to give myself the love and attention that I deserve. And it's amazing what happens when you

step into that place. It's that joy that we're looking for from the outside. There We're hoping that somebody else gives us, gives to us, that, that, that's some thing, some material possession, some experience. We are just consisting, nothing wrong with those, but we're just consistently giving that thing to ourselves first, which is, which is part of this self-love conversation. Like I said, I think that that peace and joy is, is an inside job, you know, and, and, and it's, it's, it's part of the daily work, you know, and, and, and, but I think what's really beautiful about it is, when you build that muscle, it doesn't feel like work anymore. I crave those moments, you know,

where I feel like I'm generating evidence, you know, for the person I know I want to be in the world. That's what the work gives me, you know, and then I feel like I'm actively building that integrity within myself. And it allows me to step out into the world with, with firmer persuasion, you know, because I know that I always can return to that piece, you know, no matter that the, piece that I've built inside me and whatever happens, you know, if I were to lose my job tomorrow or if I, you know, like, whatever would happen to me, you know, it's like I, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm more than that thing, you know, and, and I always have like this internal compass that is, is what's guiding me, um, most importantly. And, but I, I think you need to, you need to cultivate that,

you know, and, and, and, and take the time to, to build that inside yourself. Beautifully said, Dr. Kristen Holmes, global head of human performance and principal scientists at Woop. You guys have given us so much incredible data over the years, largely thanks to your work in the space of research. The book is out there aligned, the data-driven guide to performance recovery and human potential. But really, you know, the subtitle is, how to love yourself more. It really is. How to love yourself more. I love yourself more. It's out there. pick up a copy, everyone. We have the link in the show notes. And Kristen, such a pleasure to have you on the podcast today. Thanks for having me. This is an honor. I love your work and so grateful for all the contributions that you've made to the space. Yeah. It's just amazing.

Hi, everyone, Drew here. Two quick things. Number one, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you haven't already, subscribe, just hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world to me. And it's the number of thing that you can do to support this podcast is share with a friend, share with a friend who would benefit from listening. Number two, before I go, I just had to tell you about something that I've been working on that I'm super excited about. It's my weekly newsletter and it's called Try This. Every Friday, yes, every Friday, 52 weeks a year, I send out an easy-to-digest protocol of simple steps that you or anyone you love can follow to optimize your own health. We cover everything from nutrition to mindset to metabolic health, sleep, community, longevity, and so much more. If you want to get on this email list, which is, by the way, free and get my weekly step-by-step

protocols for whole body health and optimization, click the link in the show notes that's called Try This or just go to Drew Perot.com. That's D-H-R-U-P-U-R-H-I-T-com and click on the tab that says try this.