WHOOP Podcast - A Behavioral Psychologist's Tips to Identifying and Managing Stress Styles with Dr. Jemma King

Episode Date: July 12, 2023

On this week’s episode, WHOOP VP of Performance Science, Principal Scientist, Kristen Holmes is joined by behavioral psychologist Dr. Jemma King. She has a PhD in human behavior and is an emotional intelligence and performance under stress expert. Jemma is a research fellow at the University of Queensland School of Psychology and works as a specialist external advisor to McKinsey and Company. Kristen and Jemma will discuss Jemma’s work as a behavioral psychologist (2:45), defining stress types and styles (3:45), behaviors that can help mitigate stress (11:35), dealing with stress before bed and throughout the night (23:50), a study out of Oxford around moving the body forward (34:51), Jemma’s work with the Australian Special Forces (36:30), what Jemma is obsessing over at the moment (48:50), the Wim Hof Study powered by WHOOP (54:00), and the best ways to prepare yourself before a stressful event (56:20).Resources:Stress and Health Study Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

Hello folks. Welcome back to the WOOP podcast. We're sit down with high performing individuals to unlock what the best in the world are doing to perform at their peak. And what you can do to unlock your own best performance. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of Woop. And we are on a mission to unlock human performance. On this week's episode, WOOP VP of Performance, our principal scientist, Kristen Holmes, is joined by behavioral psychologist Dr. Gemma King. She has a PhD in human behavior and is an emotional intelligence and performance under stress expert. Gemma is a research fellow at the University of Queensland School of Psychology and works as a specialist external advisor to McKinsey and

company. Kristen and Gemma discuss Gemma's work as a behavioral psychologist. The different types of stress and stress styles. You'll actually learn what type of stress style you have and how to manage that. The various behaviors that can help mitigate stress. So think about meditation, breathing protocols, healthy eating, and more. How to deal with stress before bed and throughout the night. That's right. Secrets to unlock your whoop scores. Gemma's work with the Australian special forces. What Gemma is obsessing over right now. That includes gut biose. home health. The Wim Hof study. Woop is helping Gemma and Wim put on. That's right. Wim Hof, the famous breather and cold resilience man. And finally, the best ways to prepare yourself before a

stressful event. A reminder, if you're looking to join Woop, new members can use the code W-I-L-L at checkout and get a $60 credit on apparel and accessories. Once again, that is the code W-I-L-L-L for a $60. credit when you sign up. If you have any questions you want to see answered on the podcast, email us, podcast.org.com. Call us 508-443-4952. Here are Kristen Holmes and Dr. Gemma King. Gemma, I'm so happy to have you back. So good to see you again, Kristen. We're going to talk about stress. Your favorite topic. It's an epidemic. It is an epidemic, which is good for your job. Whenever I tell people that I am a stress researcher, they're like, oh my God, can I be your guinea pig? And I say, line up. There's a huge line in front of me.

So when people come to when they're like, all right, I need, we're hiring Gemma, tell us a little bit about what they hire you for. Oh, it's so many things. Like I really have this kind of broad remit of topics that I consult about. So it really starts down at the micro or the physiology. So, you know, during my PhD and now within organizations, I look at, you know, physiological aspects of stress, sleep and strain and, you know, what are you eating that impacts your stress levels? What are you thinking within your head that, you know, increases your stress? And then I really look at sort of team dynamics, organizational behavior.

Yeah. And then, you know, more broadly, where do you fit in the world? And is that really in alignment with your goals and values? And I find that when people are not living in alignment with their goals and values, their meaning and purpose, they actually feel quite stressed. Yeah. That dissonance, right? Yeah. There's like, you know, there's a huge dimension of factors that I look at. So, Gem, maybe let's start by just defining stress. How it can, you know, give us kind of the clinical definition. And I guess how do you, when you're consulting. folks or working with folks and you kind of set the stage, you know, how do you, how do you define stress? Yeah, stress really means in layman's terms, different to everybody, but if you look at the academic terminology, there's like chronic stress, which is when, you know, you've got high levels of stress that exceeds where you feel capable of coping with it. And so you sort of have

this internal check. Do I have the resources to manage what's in front of me? And, you know, chronic stress is more prolonged in nature. It's more than just the usual day-to-day stress that we experience. And that's when it exceeds your resources. And that's when we see this accumulation of stress. And then it often leads to mental health issues, depression, anxiety, and cardiovascular disease. And we know that's all worsened by chronic stress. Then there's acute stress with kind of like in that moment's stress. Which is totally natural and normal. You know, we're all going to have levels of, you know, kind of pronounced stress throughout the day, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. But when does it turn bad? So obviously it goes from acute to kind of chronic. You know, what is that? What would kind of, what would be the criteria, I suppose, where, okay, it's no longer just acute, but it's become chronic. What is going unmanaged that basically leads to kind of chronic stress? Yeah, this is a really good question. It's different for everybody. And there's so many factors that go into your stress resilience or your capacity to deal with stress. And then, and how this manifests is different in a lot of people. So how capable you are of dealing with stress really goes back to even before you're born. So, you know, epigenetics. What sort of environments were your grandparents in, your parents,

then there's your interuterine environment. So the amount of stress hormones that your mother produced actually has an effect on the growing neural architecture of the fetus. And so we find that people who had a very stressed out mother, and even in terms of psychological stress, but also the amount of nutrients that they absorbed when you're in the intrauterine environment, that does change your stress capabilities.

And then there is modelling. So how did your parents and your family and your people around you deal with stress? And then, you know, did they, were they capable of, you know, dealing with lots of stress or were they quite histrionic? Then there's things like in the moment, like what is your blood glucose level? We know that when you have dips in blood glucose level, that your capacity to deal with stress changes, how much food you've had, where you are in your memory, menstrual cycle, how much sleep you have. I think that's the biggest factor of how much you can

deal with stress. And then so to answer your question, how long does it take? Well, what I see in my research and when I'm consulting with people, you can be in sort of a high level of stress, I think for about eight weeks. And then your typical circuit breaker will manifest. And so the circuit breaker is your stress style. People have different stress styles. There's a bit of a continuum. So people are either very what we call expressive and so they might express their stress emotionally. They might cry. They might get angry and it's quite visible emotionally. And then there are people who are much more mental stresses. So when they start to get stress, you find their mental capabilities start to get suboptimal. So they might

get scatty, they might get forgetful, they might get foggy-brained, or can't make decisions. And then on the other end of the spectrum, there are somaticisers. So these are people who manifest their stress physiologically. And so they might look quite stoic. You know, they maybe don't even realise that they're stressed. And what will happen is their bodies will give away. And we see this, you know, around, you know, eight weeks of high intensity stress is when your body starts to manifest stress. And that's because stress hormones, cortisol, that hormone houses or like, you know, benches, any non-essential metabolic processes within the body that's not designed for immediate survival. So when you're really highly stressed, things like your

digestion changes and your immune function changes. So typically your body is, engaging in housekeeping duties, like going around scavenging up cancer cells, viruses, bacteria, parasites. But when you're really stressed, your body thinks, I don't have time to do all that housekeeping, you know, scavenging up all those little things. I've got a big thing coming. And so what happens is you'll find that your, you know, a lot of your immune functions shut down and then you'll get maybe immunoglobulin G or A that will get a spike in the beginning. And basically what this is is preparing your body to be, say, eaten by a saber-toothed tiger. But the internal housekeeping immune function actually gets stopped. And so what we find

is people will get really, really sick. You know, say you're about to go on holidays and you work really, really hard for a couple of weeks leading up to that holiday, and then your body will clap out when you get on holiday, because your immune function can only hang on for so long. Yeah, I think you hear that all the time. People are like, I was on holiday, but I got sick, you know, and I think like the key is, of course, not to get yourself in that situation, clearly. You know, it's hard for it, right? Like, we've got so much pressure to perform. Yeah, there's a lot. Schedules, deadlines, mortgages, kids. Parenting, yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of stress. what would you say? I mean, we're going to get into the tactics, but I think just when we're, you know, on it, I think, and I know, Jim, you talk a lot about this, you know, these, how do we deactivate in a meaningful way so we can manage that acute stress in a more elegant way, right? So we're not in a situation where we get sick, you know, and I think, and I don't mean to like flex the fact that I haven't been sick since 2017, but I'm going to for a second.

You know, and... Is you're such a good sleep at Christian? I am vigilant. I am vigilant. I am vigilant about my sleep and my meal times. But I think there is a taxonomy of behaviors that will, are immunoprotective, right? And can keep us from getting sick, right? If we adopt those behaviors consistently, you know, what would you say from your experience?

You know, when you're working with these kind of high stress, folks who are in high-stakes environments, they've got a lot going on, what are the few behaviors that you would recommend they adopt to protect themselves from, to enable this housekeeping that you're talking about, right? We don't want to be in a situation where we're not allowing our system to do that protective housekeeping that you described, I think, so beautifully. Like, what are the few behaviors that can kind of get us down a better path? Yeah, I think it's a really good question. is awareness of your stress style. So understand, are you a somaticizer?

Are you someone who manifests stress physically? Like, you know, do you sit there finding yourself, you've been clenching your jaw for the last half an hour? Do you feel a tightness in your chest? Do you feel exhausted? And then once you see that first instance and sign of stress, or do you start to feel forgetful or do you start to feel a bit weepy? Know that that is a trigger.

That is the sign. that, you know, stress is starting to accumulate. And once you know that, have your personal protocol. So have your formula. Not all stress is equal, and you have to understand that there are different types of stress that would trigger, be triggered by different types of events. And so understand which types of events are more likely to set you off. So, you know, there's about five different types of stress.

So there's, you know, physiological stress. So this is when you actually, you know, you don't do enough exercise, or maybe you do too much exercise. There's emotional stress. So maybe you've got people in your life that sort of suck the bone marrow out of you and really drain you emotionally. Or maybe you're stressed because you're lonely and you feel like you haven't got enough, you know, social interaction, connectedness and intimacy in your life.

then there's sensory stress. We've all got that because we've all got phones. We all have night time lights. We live in noisy environments. We have like this stimulus coming in all the time. Then we've got mental stress. And so this is where we live in a very cognitively draining environment. It seems like every week we have to learn a new device, a new app, a new system. like we're always under cognitive strain. Then we've got, I think, what you call this desire stress. So this is like when you compare yourself to others and that constant need to want a new thing

to see everybody else having amazing holidays, big houses, new cars, new technology, you know, amazing handbags. And that comparative stress is incredibly draining. and, you know, that need to desire. Or there's, on the other hand, there's people who have a lot of stress because they deny themselves things. They said, I've got to save. I can't do this.

I can't, I can't go on holidays. I can't enjoy myself because I need to save. I'm worried about the economy. So that's stressful. And then we've got, you know, the greater, higher consciousness stresses about life, purpose, meaning, direction, where you fit in the universe. you know, is your daily endeavors actually in alignment with what you want to do? So once you work out what type of those stresses is actually driving your stress,

then you can do something about it. And so then I'm very much about a targeted approach to stress. So we all know that we've gone on a holiday. We feel absolutely cooked and we, you know, spend two weeks somewhere or a week or whatever. And then we go back to work and you think, I am still exhausted. and that's because on that holiday you didn't actually diminish the types of stress that made you stress in the lead up to that holiday because you're still scrolling on your phone you've still got your kids asking can I have this can I have that you still have that

you still have to pay for that big hotel bill and so you've still got all the stress even though you're lying next to a beach you know a beach or you know sitting in the sun you're still scrolling right so you actually haven't eliminated like you know that sensory stress or that comparative stress or that emotional stress. You may be engaging in physical rest. So match your rest to your stress. So that's sort of broadly. But then so what are some practical things you can do? And we speak about this a lot, Kristen. And this is really much, you know, very much the foundation of our research is have those pillars of health. So, you know, sleep is absolutely imperative. If you're going to put your attention anywhere, making sure you have sleep

consistency, good quality sleep is where you get your biggest bang for your bug. And I think that a lot of people, you know, may think they sleep, but unless you're measuring it with like a device like the whoop, you actually don't know if you're hitting slow wave sleep. You don't know if you're getting REM sleep. And unless, you know, as we know, unless you're hitting slow wave sleep, you're not clearing away all the metabolic byproducts of thinking. You know, you know, that product adenosine. You may wake up feeling absolutely exhausted or unhappy or anxious or depressed. And what humans like to do is we like to post-rationalise. We like to wake up and say, you know what, I feel terrible today. It's probably my relationship. It's probably my job. I hate where

I live where actually you probably just didn't get into deep slow wave sleep for sufficient amount of time. You didn't clear away the metabolic byproducts of that day or the last accumulative effect of the day. And that stuff makes you feel crazy. And so when people come to me and say, I feel really stressed, I feel really strung out, the number one thing I ask, first up always, is how is your sleep? And then, you know, they go, I don't know, I say, get a device, go away, have a week of, you know, good hearty sleep, early bit to bed before, you know, 10 o'clock, and then come back. And then I'll work on concentric circles going out from sleep. And so it'll be, what are you eating? There's a whole lot of foods that actually

diminish the quality of your sleep that you don't necessarily know are doing that. So things like heavy protein before bed, high levels of sugar, alcohol, it's the key. It's the killer. Even MSG, monosodium glutamate before bed, which I, it's a, glutamate is a neurotransmitter. So, you know, for those that don't know what MSG is, it's that product, the flavor enhancer that they put in food to make it taste delicious. And what I'm seeing, um, so is my data. I know. And I actually think this is, it's a culprit. It's like criminal. Yeah. So when you look at your data, so just for people who don't, don't know. MSG, you know, it makes food taste utterly delicious. People say it's in Asian food,

but it's in Mexican, Italian, French, any type of takeaway food or a restaurant food typically has MSG in it. And you get this like, oh my God, this food taste delicious. And then when you're going home, you feel like absolutely exhausted. And then you might get into bed and go to sleep and you have crazy dreams all night. And then you wake up like super exhausted and thirsty. Now, if this is happening to you, you've probably had MSG. And what I see in the data is you've got lots of light sleep, hardly any slow wave sleep, and lots of REM sleep. So that's what that crazy dreaming is.

So there's another culprit. So, and, you know, and Kristen, you speak about this a lot. Light exposure before bed, which kicks your circadian rhythm off in the wrong direction. So, you know, if you've got lux in your eyes over 80, you know, this is really going to hit your retinal. and kick off that system in the wrong direction. Then other things that really impact your sleep is, you know, cognitive rumination, emotional rumination.

Like, what are you thinking about when you get into bed and lie down? Like, I've got strict rules. When I'm horizontal, the only thing I'm allowed to think about is nice, calm, non-emotionally evoking, relatively boring topics. Otherwise, your brain cannot differentiate between, imagining that thing or actually seeing that thing. So if you're lying in bed thinking about stressful things or an argument you had or what's what do you have to do tomorrow, your brain will start to produce stress hormones as if that thing is about to happen. Your brain's got this

better be safe than sorry policy. And so it'll say, I don't know, you're thinking about stressful things. I may need to fight, run or, you know, activate. So I'm just going to secrete a few, you know, stress hormones just in case and that's terrible for sleep so yeah so sleep big things so gem that will impact not only your ability to fall asleep generally but even if you're if you're really tired you might fall asleep will that end up fragmenting your sleep that rumination oh absolutely so yeah it bears its head at some point right you get exhausted and if you've got this accumulative amount of you know stress hormones you know once your body starts to process it it'll wake you up and And so what I really advocate is throughout the day is having what I call nano intervals or nano intermissions.

So every time you go to do a new task, go to a new tab, change, you know, to a phone call. If you go on to that next page, what I do is I stop and literally have 30 seconds of resonant breathing. And this is this sort of intermission in your day and then get onto the next thing. And those little punctuated, you know, fracturing the intensity of the stress I find is incredibly helpful. So while the time you get to bed, you're not just like surging with like stress hormones and you just like maybe have to take a sleeping tablet or, you know, people will drink alcohol to sedate them. But when you've just punctuated the day, it seems like, you know, it's a little bit easier to get to sleep. Yeah.

And then there's. And let's just stay on that just for a second because I think, I think folks, feel like it just sounds so simple. But I think that that is the way to like not get sick on your vacation, you know, is to be to your point, like you map stress, like a stressful situation with like a mini moment or a nano intermission of rest. You know, and you just do that proactively throughout the day. And it probably doesn't have to be a lot, right, Jen? That's, you know, 30 seconds a minute where you're just consciously deactivating. And you mentioned resonance breathing, which I know we both are huge fans of.

Yeah, so I've got a PowerPoint slide, and I can share this with you. It's literally a wave form and it's got a little blue ball that's timed for like six breaths in, six breaths out. And, you know, I have it on my desktop. I think I sent that to you, Jen. My son and I use it at night. Yeah, and you just pretend you're sucking up the ball and then bringing up. And honestly, that is. is like it's money it's so simple and so quick and then jem i want to talk i'd love to get your insight um you know one of the things that we hear a ton from members is just waking up at you know one a m two a m and i know that it's the cortisol right that's starting to rise like what what what is happening during the day or before bed that basically will wake you up or not wake you up you know like i know like if i'm

I'm ruminating before bed or I have emotional conversation or maybe I haven't managed stress as effectively. The chances of me waking up at 1 o'clock or 2 a.m. are higher, I suppose, if I'm managing kind of my emotions and my stress really proactively throughout the day. Is that actually what's happening? What's kind of happening in the brain during that moment of waking? Yeah, this is a really important question. And it's something I get asked all the time. And to be honest, you know, we don't know for sure why people will, you know, work at 2 a.m. every morning or 3 a.m. But there are a lot of theories, and I'll just go through some of them. So, you know, typically busy people, knowledge workers who've got a lot on their plate, you know,

you do accumulate a lot of really important high stakes thoughts and decisions you've got to make. And we don't always have enough time to deeply think about them. So we'll sort of bank it. and so we'll fall asleep exhausted. And then, as you know, the REM component of your sleep architecture is where you consolidate memories. It's where you make sense of your emotional world. And I also think that people don't understand that the REM part of your sleep has a very

important forgetting function as well. I call it the defrag part of the sleep architecture. So it's basically when your brain says, okay, do I keep, delete, do I file that away? do I, you know, is that important? Where do I, what box inside my head do I compartmentalize that thought? And so when you're in that REM sleep, sometimes these decisions are so important that it'll actually wake you up. So then you can consciously, using your prefrontal cortex, decide about this, where does

this thought get filed? And so a really good antidote for that is. brain dumping is where you name to tame. So have a pad beside your bed with a pen and then you brain dump all of the things that's been, you know, been cogitating on during the day. And I find what's even more helpful is that you have dot points and say, okay, decide whether or not to hire this person or to change jobs. And what you do beside that point, you actually put a time. And so you almost have like a worry hour the next day. So you say, okay, at 10.15, I will think about that topic. Then you put the next topic. Okay, at 1035, I will think about that topic.

And so by adding the time to that list, it really does placate that sort of anxious part of your brain that really needs to disentangle these thoughts. And I just think, you know, that's fascinating. it's really, really helpful because your brain's really naughty. And if you say to your brain, don't think about this thing, don't think about this thing, what does your brain do? It'll absolutely turbo think of that thing. So what you're doing is just placating that kind of anxious part of your brain that wants to sort this stuff out.

And, you know, at 3 in the morning, it's quiet. It's, you know, it knows that there's no other distractions except you and your mind. So that's why it'll say, wake up, wake up. But there is other theories, and this is, you know, something that I'm utterly fascinated in and something we're doing research in is the impact of your gut biome on sleep. So we know that inside your digestive tract, you've got, you know, around about two and a half kilograms of gut biome. I don't know if you can translate that into pounds, what is two and a half kilograms.

It's a lot. You've got like hundreds of millions of different types of microbes in your digestive tract. 5.5 pounds. It's a lot. Just to think of that. It's like crazy. And so we know that they also exhibit diurnal fluctuations. And so these things.

Circadian rhythm. Yes. Yeah, they really do. And they are hungry little critters. And so if you're going before bed eating a lot of simple carbohydrates, a lot of sugars, what you're doing is you're feeding, you know, a lot of those certain types of these gut biom. And it's like giving them junk food fairy floss. It's like they're getting food for free because you can, they can digest these sugars very, very quickly. And so they'll proliferate.

and they have, you know, quite short, quick reproductive cycles. And so you get this proliferation of gut biome. And there is some theories that they will send out bioidentical hormones as human hunger hormones. And that is what's waking you up. And so, you know, people often will get up and be really starving hungry and they want to go and eat. And, you know, I call these false hungers. So don't always believe your hunger because if you've got an overactive or, you know, proliferation of, you know, certain types of gut biome, you will be hungrier and then they, there's a theory that this will actually wake you up. And so I really strongly advise don't have a lot of sugar before bed, more to the point that, you know, sugar is like putting fire in the furnace and it will create increase your metabolic basal rate like throughout.

the night you get a higher resting heart rate if you're literally feeding your body with sugar and so yeah so what's the relationship to cortisol i kind of i kind of go back to that like if you're eating sugar and basically you're asking your you know body to digest that that's going to make you stressed right is is it the cortisol that wakes you up or is it the like what is actually what do you think mechanistically is happening there? Well, you know what cortisol is? It's actually just the hormone that releases the energy that you need to fight or flight. Right. You know, so it was released glycogen from the liver. So it literally is a signal to your body to drop as much, you know, fuel into your bloodstream so you can run. Right. And so if you've got high levels of cortisol, your body's

thinking, I need to like, you know, dump all of this sugar into the bloodstream for your big muscle groups, if your heart and your lungs, to fight or flight. So another thing, just before we move on about gut biome, there's a great company that we've been doing our research with at the University of Queensland called Microbum. And they interestingly have found that those individuals who have got low gut biodeversity are more likely to wake up at 3am than those with heterogeneous gut biome. So it means that they've got, so the larger amount of species, different species that you have, the less likely you are to wake up at 3am.

So yeah, really interesting. I don't know, what is the direction of causality? Not sure. But so I think there are many factors at play that will make you have disrupted sleep. It's clearly modifying the relationship between cortisol and that probably. You know, I mean, that's got to be mechanistically what's probably happening. Yeah. And also there is that theory of the bimodal sleep where, you know, for the better part of, you know,

250,000 years humans might have had two phases of sleep. Yeah. where they'd go to sleep when the sun went down and then they'd wake up in the middle of the night and the adults would go around and, you know, whittle sticks, converse, have sex, do stuff and then they'd have a second sleep cycle and so it was the industrialised revolution where humans were then pushed into a one sleep cycle and then the advent of lights so we stayed up later and then as you know I mean you know more about this than me the impact of light on your psychotic rhythm. Yeah, it's, I think that it's definitely worth noting that when we're viewing

light out of phase of the natural light dark cycle, we put our body under tremendous amounts of stress. You know, and I think that's, you know, some of the research that's come out recently, just showing the impact of light viewing between the hours of 11 p.m. and 4 a.m. has a pro-depressive effect. It actually impacts her dopamine system is in our mood. And do you remember progressing yes, I know, which is just insane. You think about teenagers, they're up all night and they find they wake up and they're hungry and grumpy. Yeah, exactly. I know. You're more, like, you know, as you know, when you don't sleep, well, the next day you produce more cortisol. And also you are cravings for salty, fatty, sugary foods the next day. So, I mean, it's just like this vicious, you know,

deprecating cycle like you're tired so you eat more and you eat more and then so you don't feel good about yourself you ruminate more and because you're eating bad foods you actually have worse sleep and yeah I think there's so many people in these terrible cycles and I think something I haven't mentioned is the importance of exercise so we know that our human physiology is like this amazing pharmacological factory that produces all these anti-anxiety and sleep promoting hormones. Like, you know, there's myokines in muscles. We've got osteocalcium when you put weight on your long bones

that increases, you know, spatial reasoning and memory. And, you know, and if you're not moving your body, your brain actually thinks there's something wrong with you. So there's a sedentary depression hypothesis. So if you think about humans for the better part of our, you know, existence, we were rarely, rarely still. We were always moving, weaving, collecting sticks, like just doing something. Forward motion is like such a critical piece of like our evolutionary, yeah. Which Huberman talks about. But if we were, if we were sedentary, it typically

meant that we were sick. Yeah. And so no longer relevant. Yeah. And our brain, a primitive brain would would then make us retreat and sleep. So sleep because the best thing to get better is sleep and then retreat so he wouldn't infect the clan with whatever we have. And retracting socially and sleepiness are two symptoms of depression. So I honestly think our sedentary nature is often misdiagnosed as, you know, depression anxiety. And also I honestly believe sleep deprivation is often misdiagnosed as depression.

and anxiety. So yeah, move your body. There's a really interesting study that's out of Oxford, and they said, if you want to get your biggest bang for your buck in terms of improving mood and reducing anxiety and depression, is to move your body forward in an environment that is green, preferably where you can see water with a person, another person, with a shared goal. You're checking so many boxes. light connection movement yeah so if you want to if you want to stay sane and happy go for a walk

in the green with a friend and have a goal directive we're going to go to that awesome cafe and sit down and chat and like honestly that is that's super protective you're moving sunlight laughing um and burning calories and you know and and strengthening bones yeah yeah perfect i love it All right, let's shift gears a little bit. You've done a lot of your research has been with Aussie Special Forces, so you've worked a lot with both men and women in Australia, military and armed services. Talk a little bit about just that experience and, you know,

how does stress kind of manifest in those environments? Maybe talk a little bit about PTSD. But yeah, just would be curious kind of what your experience. has been and how that might be a little bit different than working with knowledge workers, for example. Yeah, it was a really fascinating environment to go into. So I did a part of my PhD at the Australian Special Forces. And my topic was a preemptive approach to stress using emotional intelligence training as a moderator and then using biomarkers as a proxy for stress. The reason I used biomarker, so I used cortisol and immunoglobulin A, and the reason I did that was because the people in that environment

are typically underreport their levels of stress for many reasons. And so then having an objective way of measuring stress, I thought, was really important. How many saliva samples did you take? Oh, my God. Ew. It turns my stomach just like thinking about it. even like just remembering it like and and you know like those chips of snort is really what brought me to you yeah yeah like there's got to be another way to measure this

yeah yes thank you because I honestly was sitting in a lab and actually one of my lab assistants fainted because it was in Australia it's super hot super gross and I was like oh my god I'm done with this is like surely there's another way and that's when HR me yeah And that's when, you know, Matt, who was running the human performance wing, the Australian Special Forces, was the first woup wearer in Australia. And so he actually heard of the weep through an American Special Forces operator. Give Matt a proper shout out because he's kind of the man behind the scenes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. So former commando was injured in 2010, got blown up by a Russian anti-tank mine. and then actually rehabilitated and went back for a fourth tour to Afghanistan.

So intense. And, yeah, so he was really incredibly interested in, you know, human performance optimization and, you know, looking at the continuum of health that, you know, there's, you know, there's not like a healthy bucket and a sick bucket. You know, we've got to have this continuum of where you can, you know, still be operational. And then using all of these things we're talking about. and, you know, the military is super data-driven. So, you know, this is when he found the whoop and was like, this is it.

It really suits our purposes. So just going back to your question, you know, these guys were operating in sort of like this really austere environments where one minute they had to be dealing with diplomats and partner forces and, you know, nation state people, people who didn't speak English. and then the next minute they're having to hunt Taliban. And so that required an enormous amount of emotional flexibility. So be able to be calm at one minute, but then, you know, activate, you know, into a combat situation within seconds and then down, regulate and come back. And so a lot of my work was really looking at how we could train this emotional flexibility, emotional management, emotional perception, understanding that emotions is dark.

and that you can use that to make effective decisions depending on what context and, you know, how to upregulate those around you, how to moderate the emotion and the stress of your team and those partner forces. And so it was really, yeah, it was actually like a lot of fun and really, really fascinating because they said to me, okay, you're teaching stress, you really need to know what kind of stress that we experience. So, you know, I got chucked out of a plane, chucked off a tower, got to, you know, use their weaponry.

You know, a whole lot of things did a full mission profile. Yeah, so just, you know, really got to, so it was like an ethnographic immersion into this environment. And so what we were really looking at is, as I said before, a preemptive approach to stress is getting all of these tools into their toolbox or into their vernacular. So when the high stakes, high stress moments came, they were already fairly equipped to pull these out of the toolbox. And so this took engaging in stress inoculation activities. So you never really want to work out what is your stress style, how you respond

to stress in that moment. You want to have a pretty good idea. of, you know, how you respond prior to those moments. So there was a lot of stress inoculation activities. And a lot of contextualizing the science in, in their particular world. So Matt, the commander, he would stand there and tell stories and say, this is what happened to us. This is what happened when these guys got blown up. This is what happened when you got stressed. This is, you know, like had all these amazing stories. And then I would, we would oscillate between me and the theory. And so I would come in and give psychophysiological theory to all the stories that he told. And I would tell the basic principles of the human

stress response system, you know, cortisol, testosterone, oxytocin, and kind of tell stories through hormones and physiological processes. So it was a really effective model. And was that process to try to get them to understand their emotions and understand the root of those motions, what's actually happening physiologically, so they could manage them more effectively? Yeah, so understanding the bidirectional nature of emotions and physiological responses. So, you know, you'll get, your body will send messages up to your brain, and then your brain will then, you know, praise that in a way that you will make an emotion manifest, or then you'll have emotions that will then like actually transmute into physiological reactions. So there's

very much a bi-directional relationship. So getting them to really understand all of those things. Emotional perception, being able to look at someone's faces and infer what are they thinking, what are their next actions, emotional perception in yourself, as I spoke about, what's your first instant sign of stress. And so lots of context-driven education for their environment. And so some of the things that we taught in terms of how to be some of the protective factors to stop you from getting PTSD was, you know, there was a formula. In order to be protective, you needed to be intellectually stimulated, socially connected and physically active. And so, and you needed to have a multi-dimensional identity.

So don't just be utterly consumed with the concept that I am a commando. I am a special forces soldier. Actually, you know what? You're a multi-dimensional, complicated human that has multifactorial skills and interests and connections into community. The reason we did this is because if you do get injured, And the one thing you are is a commander, and now you're an injured commando, that's a very dangerous proposition. You put yourself in a terribly precarious situation if you are just

a unidimensional human. And so it happens to athletes to, you know, I mean, you see this. We work with Australia Institute of Sport, really high level athletes. You must see this all the time. I know personally just transitioning out of, you know, international competition. Like you, it's a It's a challenge, you know, because your identity is wrapped up in that. Even knowledge workers, like, you know, if you're a CEO or if you're a lawyer and then you lose your job. Are you retire? Yeah, when you're retiring too, that's a big one. And so it's just about having multiple touch points in your life that if one thing's falling down, at least you've got your community, at least you're of service.

At least you've got a hobby. at least you're, you know, you've got a sport that you love. At least, you know, your partner still wants to talk to you. So that was a lot of that. And then, you know, as we talk about the biopsychosocial model, so looking at all those factors in your life that create allostatic load. And so allostatic load is all those little pebbles that sort of like way down the bridge. And it's okay, one pebble, two, pebble, three, pebble, 16 pebbles, 100 pebbles. pebbles, maybe okay. But then when the big truck comes over that bridge, that's when the bridge falls. And you think, oh, it was the bridge that did it. Well, actually, no, it was like the 16 million

pebbles that you piled up into your life. What are those pebbles? So how you sleep, how you move, what you let run around on your head, how you ruminate, because we know thoughts become chemicals and those chemicals do damage to your body. Thoughts aren't just ephemeral. you know, concepts that are out in the ether, thoughts become tangible chemicals that impact your immunity, impact your digestion, impact your, you know, cardiovascular health. So that's, you know, another thing. How you interact with your significant other, your kids, how you interact at work, how you interact in your team, and then how you interact with your broader community organization, and then how you show up in the world. So they're all the factors that we looked at.

in terms of reducing allostatic load. And so this is what we talk about energy management, knowing what factors deplete you and knowing what factors replenish you. And that really goes back to those, you know, those five types of stress as well. Knowing which, you know, which things that are really like sucking the bone marrow out of you.

And you see yourself as a vessel full of energy, some there's got, you know, punch holes in the side of that vessel. where it just leaks out, you might be pouring in more energy in the top of that vessel. But if you've got holes punched in the bottom, you don't even know you've got these holes. It's a, you know, it's a sun's zero game. So building this toolkit, do you, did you have any data on, you know, individuals that then experienced a traumatic event that could potentially lead to some sort of post-traumatic kind of stress disorder or event?

Like, did you know, did you, were you able to quantify kind of any buffering of for individuals who really had a great grasp of these tools and then kind of incorporated them into their life. Did that buffer them from these kind of stressful events or were we able to? Yes, definitely. Yeah. We found, we find that the special forces guys actually have lower levels of PTSD than say normal army guys or community. I think because they're they are, they've got really high IQs. They have this bent for mastery and that they really understand the need to watch, you know, their physiology, watch their psychology. And so when we went through and did my research, I did two years of research and then spent several years then consulting back, we found that the guys that we trained in the emotional

intelligence training, it was like a five-day package, that those guys actually had, you know, better cortisol profiles, better immune function profiles. But they also had better memory recall. They actually had more accurate shooting. Yeah, and we had more guys get through the really, really hard commando selection course. It was an 18-month course. So attention to emotional intelligence factors was absolutely protective, and it actually helped them in their vocation.

Jamma, we ask all of our high performers this question. What are you obsessing over right now? Oh, my God. like where do I start? I've got so many. Let me think. I am obsessing over. I love, I'm really super interested in the impact of gut biome and blood glucose levels on like leadership performance and decision making. So that's, I'm doing a lot around, you know, the psychophysiological impact on our behaviours and I'm looking at what else I've been looking at I'm really interested in chemo signalling so the impact of our emotional expression and how this actually sends off

chemicals efferent chemicals that humans can subconsciously pick up so you know when you walk into a room and you're like, oh, you can cut the air with a knife. I'm like, well, something's been going on in here. Well, when we know now that, you know, if you're tired, you actually produce a lot more cortisol the next day or if you're stressed, you produce cortisol and people can pick it up. And there's research to, you know, show that we've got receptors on our skin and in our paranasal sinuses that are really, really potent detectors of other people's stress. So like that whole concept of emotional contagion and being aware of that within teams,

like sporting teams. I mean, our psychological safety finding right there. Oh, yes. Yes. So as we know, we did a great study with Amy Edmondson and Boop and McKinsey. Nadia, Nadia Fox. And yeah, that gorgeous PhD Nadia Fox. Shout out to Nadia.

And we, yeah, we found the. that those leaders who were sleep deprived and stress, their team members had lower levels of psychological safety when that leader was like the night before hadn't slept enough or was stressed, which is amazing because the subordinates that answered our question, they had no idea what the boss was doing the night before, but they could just feel that something was a bit off. And so they were a bit more protective. retractive, retractive. It's the chemo signaling.

Yeah. I mean, it's just wild. Absolutely. Like how you can see it in your face, you know, just 45 minutes of sleep. Yeah. And yeah, you're putting off so much more cortisol. And also there's all these micro expressions and you're probably a little bit shorter. You can't even perceive, yeah, that they're happening.

Yeah. I'm also really interested in psycho neuroimmunology. So, you know, that is, have you heard about the blisterbox study? That's when, I think it's Janice Keekot Glasser. She did this study where they got couples into the lab, and then she had this little device, which was a box that you attached to your skin, and it rubbed a blister into the skin of these people.

And then what she did is she drew a needle into the bliss and drew out the blister solution and looked at immune... markers. I think there was like interleukin six or something. And then she got these couples to either get along in the lab and talk about nice things or she got the couples to argue. And what she found that those couples that argued, their blisters took, I think it was like six days extra to heal than those couples who didn't argue. And I'm probably butchering the stats here, but the basic premise of this study is that the quality of your relationships is highly correlated with the quality of your ability to repair and recover. And so you think about in sporting teams, like all, you know,

if you've got any type of, you know, friction within a sporting team, this is a really huge physiological performance hinder up. And this is something that we spoke about a lot with the Australian Olympic swim team going into Tokyo. We talked about the importance of, you know, trust, psychological safety and good feeling because if you have any type of friction with your team members, that produces, you know, chemicals,

that are performance inhibiting chemicals. Ruin your sleep, you know, how's your immune function and make recovery a lot slower? That is fascinating. Yeah, we're super fascinating. Gemma, we're super, super pumped about our Wim Hof study. Why don't you give us a one, two, about what we're trying to achieve with that

and what that's gonna, I know we're ramping up here soon. Yeah, this is super exciting. So just to give you a bit of background, so I work with a company called Wilson Asset Management, and Jeff Wilson, the founder, the chairman, he's this amazing, incredibly philanthropic man. And so he is friends with Wim Hof. And Wim said, you know, I want to do some research, you know, around my method. And Jeff, who I work with, said, I know the person to help you with that. So we met Wim and he said, yeah, he's so charismatic and excitable and he said, I want to test, you know, my method. And so we can't really exactly give the complete details of what we're testing. But basically we're looking at, does the

Wim Hof method have statistically significant improvements in knowledge worker, physiology and psychology. And we're using the whip device on all of our participants. So we're going to have some really hard objective data to really deep dive into the Wimhoff method. So watch this space. It's kicking off very soon and hopefully we'll have some incredible data to report on our research. So yeah, thank you to Woop for providing the WOOP devices for this study. You know, This is a really big contribution, and it's really going to make it, you know, really scientifically valid. Yeah, thanks so much, Jim. Yeah, we're really excited.

It's an area that is relatively untapped from a research perspective. And I think putting together the breathwork and the cold, it's such a beautifully designed study, too. Like, I just, I love the design. I think it's going to enable us to show effects. There's so much rigor behind this. Yeah, there really is. It's really beautiful. So I'm excited for this.

Okay, final question, Jim. What are the three simple ways to mentally prepare or calm yourself during a stressful situation? Oh, this is a good question because everybody is going to face an stressful situation. So I actually, I haven't got three things, but I'm really cognizant of what we call anticipatory stress. So what are your thoughts in the lead up the night before? or a couple of days before, be very disciplined about what you think about because when you're talking about, like, you know, winning a race or performing in a speech, you know, hundreds of a second or every single word matters. And so stressing in the lead up to an event is very

metabolically expensive. It actually draws your vital energy. So night before, be very disciplined about what you're thinking about. Don't eat heavy meat the night before, don't have MSG, don't have alcohol, hydrate. And then in the morning, when you get up, if you haven't slept very well, don't worry about it. Okay, humans are okay with one night of sleep deprivation. What is, what is dangerous is sleep deprivation plus sleep deprivation. You've got to decouple, the anxiety about not sleeping and not sleeping, because one night's totally fine. So just look for evidence that, oh, you know what,

I actually feel not too bad. In the morning, I would have protein for breakfast. I wouldn't have any sugars for breakfast because you get this blood sugar fluctuation, so I'd have, you know, some good protein. I would photone gaze. I would get light into my retinas that would activate my, you know, circadian rhythm in the right direction.

I would oxygenate my brain in the morning, so I'd make sure that I would do some kind of like exercise. And then before that stressful event, I would have a battery of success recalls. So I would be thinking about all the times when I actually did really well. I would not be at all thinking about what if I mess up, what if I fumble, what if I do the right thing. So my mental capacity would be all around positive success. you know, good affirmations. Then I would visualize or remember off by heart the first three slides or the first three minutes of that talk or the first three seconds of that race.

And then right before that stressful event, I would spend time resonant breathing, you know, like through the nose and then out through the nose that we know. Yeah, you know that inside the paranasal sinuses, you've got enzymes that produce nitric oxide, which, you know, that's a vasodilator, and it sort of drops your blood pressure, and it just has an extra calmative effect. Then if I got really, really stressed and started to panic, I would do a vagus nerve reset. And that would just reset the frenetic messaging up to my brain, and it would help me reset. and regain, and then I'd just keep resonant breathing. And then if I messed up, I'd be like, whatever, you know. Amazing.

Well, Gemma, thank you so much. This has been a fascinating conversation and so many interesting insights. I appreciate your time and your expertise. Always great chatting to Kristen. Thanks for having me. Big thank you to Dr. Gemma King for sharing her insights on stress and emotional intelligence. If you enjoyed this episode of the WOOP podcast, please leave us a rating or review. Please subscribe to the WOOP podcast.

You can check us out on social at WOOP at Will Ahmed. If you have a question once he answered on the podcast, email us, podcast at WOOP.com. Call us 508-443-4952. New members can use the code Will W-I-L, get a $60 credit on W-W-A-Ccessaries when they sign up. Okay, that's a wrap, folks. Thank you all for listening. on the wood podcast. As always, stay healthy and stay in the green.