WHOOP Podcast - How Sleep Impacts Performance: Kristen Holmes and Emily Capodilupo discuss the benefits of REM and slow wave sleep, effects of sleep deprivation, how much sleep you need, and the best ways to maximize the efficiency of your time in bed.

Episode Date: January 7, 2020

Why is sleep important for everything you do? Kristen Holmes and Emily Capodilupo talk about sleep architecture and the 4 stages of sleep (2:30), what happens when your sleep is cut short (4:51), the benefits of slow wave and REM sleep (7:42), mood regulation (15:09), not knowing you're sleep deprived (17:16), a needed culture shift with how we view lack of sleep (22:15), how much sleep we actually should get (25:06), time asleep vs time in bed (26:14), experimenting to determine your sleep need (33:19), sleep regularity (37:24), why your body performs better when it can anticipate sleep (41:33), and tips to fall asleep when your body wants to (44:51).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

We discovered that there were secrets that your body was trying to tell you that could really help you optimize performance. But no one could monitor those things. And that's when we set out to build the technology that we thought could really change the world. Welcome to the Whoop podcast. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of Whoop, where we are on a mission to unlock human performance. At WOOP, our clients range from the best professional athletes in the world to Navy SEALs to fitness enthusiasts to Fortune 500 CEOs and executives. The common thread among WOOP members is a passion to improve. What does it take to optimize performance for athletes, for humans, really anyone?

On this podcast, we dig deeper, we interview experts, we interview industry leaders across sports, data, technology, physiology, athletic achievement, you name it. How can you use data to improve your body? What should you change about your life? My hope is that you'll leave these conversations with some new ideas and a greater passion for performance. With that in mind, I welcome you to the WOOP podcast. Hello everybody. Kristen Holmes, VP of Performance Science here at Woop, we are kicking January off with our new favorite concept, not resolutions, but rather restolutions. I know it's clever.

So in the spirit of restolutions, I'm here with resident sleepback Director of Data Science and Research and my absolute favorite person on the planet to talk about all things. Rest, Emily Capital Lupo. Thank you, Kristen. In today's pod, Emily and I are going to dig into what is happening to the body during the various stages of sleep and why these states are absolutely critical to both short and long-term performance. We'll also talk about the mechanics of sleep in terms of regularity, sufficiency, and efficiency, and what they mean exactly, and most importantly, how you can leverage whoop sleep data to better underage. your personal sweet spot. The reality is, folks, when you are in your optimal sleep groove, pretty much everything else in life corrects itself. Okay, Emily, biological sleep. It's complex

and dynamic, but we're going to do our best to break it down in a simple way. These are things that Emily does very, very well. So there's, of course, the anatomy, but we're not going to really talk about that. But we are going to talk about the architecture, Emily's going to dig into the sleep stages, and then the actual behaviors and tactics behind the good night's sleep, drives efficiency, regular inefficiency. Okay, so starting with the sleep stages, Emily. Why don't you bring us through what that looks like? Sure. So there's four different stages to sleep. The first one is actually not sleep at all. It's wake. And then within sleep, there's what we call light sleep. That's sort of, you know, where all sleep begins. Then there's slow wave sleep,

which is the physically restorative part of sleep. And REM sleep, which is an acronym, it stands for rapid eye movement. And that's the mentally restorative part of sleep. And that description, it's a little bit of an oversimplification. But all stages of sleep are quite complex, but sort of generally sort of slow-wave sleep is when a lot of the physical damage that we do to our bodies all day long-long get sort of repaired. And REM sleep is when sort of we take our short-term memories, we consolidate them to long-term memories. It's also where we have the most exciting dreams. And so it's sort of generally thought of as being the sort of more mentally restorative part of sleep. When do you get the, so looking at REM specifically, what kind of part of the night do you tend to spend the longest in REM?

Yeah, so it's actually really interesting. So there's these graphs, which is basically like over your sleep, you know, what stage of sleep you're in. And they're called sleep architecture graphs because they almost look like little city skylines. But you typically, you know, you fall asleep. Most people fall asleep within about 10 minutes of trying to fall asleep with, athletes and young people, it's even faster, and you typically have light sleep for at least 10 minutes, sometimes longer, and then you tend to get your first big chunk of slow wave sleep. And then what you see more or less the first half of the night is that you have these long

chunks of slow wave sleep, sort of broken up by light sleep, and then kind of these small little pieces of REM sleep. And then in the second half of the night, it almost kind of switches. And so you start to see the slow wave sleep periods get shorter, the REM sleep periods get longer, still kind of broken up by light sleep. And so where slow wave sleep dominates in the first half of the night, REM sleep dominates in the second half of the night. And there's actually a lot of information to be learned not just from sort of am I getting, you know, enough slow wave sleep or enough REM sleep, but where in the night those stages are happening? Because what I just described the sort of slow wave sleep dominating the first half, REM sleep dominating the second half is sort

of typical healthy sleep in non-sleep deprived individuals. What we see is that if somebody gets up early and so you know your body really in the sense that they're it's a short yeah short so five six hours into the night you disproportionately are losing REM sleep because REM sleep is what happens in the second half and so you've already gotten most of your slow wave sleep look four hours in and so you're probably only missing out let's say if you cut your sleep short two hours you get six hours instead of eight hours you probably only miss like 20 minutes of slow wave sleep but that could be over an hour of REM sleep and so then what happens is you're actually REM sleep deprived. And there's some evidence that we actually

have separate homeostatic mechanisms that regulate like slow wave sleep deficiency and REM sleep deficiency. And it's not just like one sleep deficiency. And so now like, you know, fast forward to the next night. You're short on REM sleep. You actually got all the slow wave sleep the night before that you needed. And so what you see in the following night is that REM sleep creeps earlier. And so great sign that you like didn't get enough sleep last night is that you're actually getting REM sleep like too early in the night. I think that's such a great point. You know, if people are really geeking out of their data and want to get it right, you know, that's a great indicator that, okay, I'm probably not spending enough time in bed. And you can look at when you're spending, you know, at what phase during the night, you're actually spending more time and remember. So I have sleep and you kind of want it to, you know, map in an optimal kind of an appropriate way to facilitate the kind of restoration that you, that you really need to kind of, you know, perform at your best. Yeah. So I think I would always really encourage people to kind of look at that graph and to understand like that the way things are shifting from night to night has a lot of information, not just looking at like the summary statistic that says like, oh, I got either 87% of my sleep or even that I got, you know, an hour of REM sleep or whatever. You know, if you're cutting your sleep short and then you see it start to creep up earlier and earlier in the night, that's like a really great sign that your body's saying I like am not getting, I'm not getting enough sleep. And that's going to be like more.

more robust than like any summary statistic that we can provide 100%. Yeah, so dig into the sleep graph. I think, you know, the app itself obviously has just tons of information beyond, as Emily mentioned, the summary statistics. So if you really get into that graph, you can start to look at your individual architecture and make sure that you're, you know, kind of flowing on that graph in a way that's ideal. Yeah, and this is something that we've actually written about quite a lot. If you go to whoop.com slash validation. There's a white paper that I wrote, I think, in 2015. And it's like why sleep staging is important for athletes or something like that. And we actually show you a couple of different sleep architectures and sort of what they mean and how to interpret them. So if you want to geek out

further, go there. Let's, how about we talk about some of the anabolic benefits of sleep real quick? So just from an athletic perspective, but, you know, just anyone who generally wants to, you know, perform better in their training and, you know, what they're doing during the day. Sure. During slow wave sleep, we produce 95% of the human growth hormone that we're going to produce in the entire day. And so anybody who worked out, you know, during your exercise, you break down your muscles, you damage your bones, you sort of all this physical damage takes place. And the process of getting stronger happens when you sleep when we go in and we sort of take all that damage and rebuild those systems stronger than they were before. And so if you don't

get enough slow wave sleep the night after a workout. You don't produce the growth hormone that stimulates that process. And sort of human growth hormones, sort of the big one, it's really important, but there's other hormones that get produced during this time as well. But that recovery process, the physical recovery from your exercise that makes you stronger happens when you sleep. And so like the biggest thing that, you know, we try and help our athletes avoid is sort of like, you know, working out really hard. And then, you know, because tomorrow's a rest. day and therefore kind of like goofing off tonight because you don't have to perform tomorrow, but you really want to think about sleep not just as preparing you to perform the next day,

but also as where like that performance like turns into a physiological gain. And so you need to get good sleep before you work out in order to exercise well and to perform well in the workout. But you'll really also need to get that good sleep after you work out or you're not going to get that like return on investment on your workout. And this is another way to think about your data. You know, if you're in a situation where you might suspect you're kind of overtraining or overworking, i.e. you're, you know, kind of building up high levels of cortisol, which is kind of that stress hormone.

That's going to really get in the way of our ability to get into those deeper stages of sleep. You can, again, look at your data to see, okay, after really, if I feel as though I'm kind of creeping into that overtraining situation, you know, non-functional type of training. Have a look at your sleep. if you find yourself really, you know, kind of lower from your baseline, it could be an indication that you're not getting the kind of recovery that you need. So I think that's a, that's, again, to use your data in a way that can kind of help you understand, you know, if you're training an appropriate way, that's actually helping you get stronger.

Because if you're not getting into these deeper stages of sleep, right, Emily, you're really not going to be able to capitalize on the work that you've done the previous day or the days leading up to that. Let's talk about REM. Obviously, you know, mood concentration effort, you know, mindset activation, you know, all of this is enabled by getting, spending enough time in REM and that's going to carry over to the next day and really help you be a more productive, more effective human being. So talk a little bit about just maybe some of the research that exists out there around kind of the importance of REM and how that carries over into our daytime productivity. Yeah, so REM sleep, we talk about being like the mentally

restorative part of sleep, but anybody who's ever done a sport at really any level knows that athletic performance is very physical, but there's also a huge mental game to it. And if you think about any, you know, aspect that requires focus and reaction times and all of that kind of stuff, it's very, that's like the sort of the mental restoration that REM enables. So there's a study done in 2011 at Stanford University and they looked at the reaction times of collegiate basketball all players. This is Sherry Moss study. We'll link to that in the show.

Yeah. Amazing paper published in the journal Sleep in 2011. Highly recommend you read it. But one of the things that she looked at was the reaction times for the athletes. And she showed that, so they used this test called the psychomotor vigilance test. And it's really simple, but elegant in its simplicity where basically you have a button and they have a black screen and like a green dot appears in the middle of the screen. And as soon as you see the dot, you need to push the.

the button. And so your score is like the time between when the dot technically showed up and like when, you know, you push the button. So a lot of things actually physiologically have to happen. It's like you have to see it. Your brain has to register what you're seeing. Oh, it's super short. Yeah. It's well under a second. Right. And then you send like that motor signal, you know, from your brain to your finger push button and button gets pushed. And so when they extended the sleep of these basketball players by an average of 111 minutes per night, their PVT, the psychomotor vigilance test time decreased by 12% which is huge and so if you think about things like say basketball while we're talking about sherry maz study you know you have very short periods of time to

like you know spot your friend across the court pass them the balls you realize the ball is being passed to you to catch it and then to sort of shoot it before somebody intercepts you and like you know put it exactly into that little circle you know with the right amount of force all these things so there's so many like shooting a basketball is like not really about strength like You know, everybody at the high school level or middle school level is strong enough to, like, shoot that basketball. And so it's just about, you know, exactly how much force to apply and exactly the right angle and all these different things. And that's mental. And so REML.

Your perception of depth and, you know, yeah, all of that. So depth perception, just sort of your physical awareness of like where you are in the court and how much time you even have. Like, do I have a moment to like, you know, plant my feet and set myself up or do I just need to sort of shoot? And like that decision-making process of like, do I'm just going to kind of yolo a little bit? Or kind of really, you know, make this a nice shot. If all of that stuff is getting improved with REM sleep, like if you're not getting REM sleep, sort of all of that stuff goes away. And so obviously Sherry Ma's study also showed that things like sprint times,

which are sort of more pure strength-based assessments, they also improved. But the fact that like, you know, the PVT improvement and then also in-game, like field goal percentage improved so both this sort of abstract study of reactivity but also sort of this real life application of it both showed that like the more sleep you're getting she didn't look at sleep stages just the fact that they were getting more sleep so I'm adding additional research to sort of attribute that to REM sleep but sort of when you need that physical or that mental restoration in order to perform at your best yeah so I think you know bottom line And there's a really good study by Banks in 2007 where they looked at, you know,

folks who were repeatedly restricting their sleep less than seven hours a night. And they saw impaired daytime cognitive functioning on a variety of tests. So these declines essentially accumulate to levels that are really comparable to what's found after actual severe acute total sleep deprivation. So I think the bottom line, and this is what we're going to talk about next, the sufficiency, you know, how to think about how much time you. you actually need to be spending in bed because that, you know, is going to help us back into the performance levels that you describe, you know, in terms of being able to really understand

how to apply effort in a way that's optimal. And you simply can't do that on short sleep, right? When you're not actually putting yourself in a situation where you're enabling these sleep stages to kind of, you know, materialize throughout the night in a way that's, that's optimal. Yeah. And I think just before we move off of REM sleep, um, for all of the non-exam sleep, um, for all of the non-exam athletes out there. Rem sleep is also really important in mood regulation, which is sort of part of cognitive well-being and sort of that ability to like, you know, control your anger and like be present

and like all these different things and like just your mental health in general. And so if you're not getting enough REM sleep, you sort of, I mean, everybody knows what like a cranky toddler looks like. You know, we control it better, but adults have that same like sleep deprived cranky toddler thing within us and so it's like you become just like shorter with people and like um less understanding and less dynamic and interesting and so all the REM sleep is it's hugely important for athletes but it's hugely important for everybody yeah um you think about it as like mindset activation you know like i think we you know we think conceptually okay i can talk myself into a better future but and you can to a certain degree but there's just realities that are happening if you're not

spending enough time in bed right it's just it's there's just too much evidence that that tells us otherwise so um i think too you know there's some other really cool dingus i think did an awesome study where you know you're getting six hours of sleep per night for two weeks straight basically your mental and physical performance declines at the same level as if you'd stayed awake for 48 hours yeah i mean that's insane to me but and that's i think you know we talk about this a lot emily like you you can't perceive your own cognitive physical declines, right? Like, I don't know when I'm in the basketball court that I don't have the same depth perception or I don't have the same level of awareness of what's around me, right? Or, you know,

I'm in the office and I don't necessarily notice that like my mood, I'm a little bit shorter and, you know, I'm not as engaged or, or present. So that, the capacity to access all of that, like that, that mindset and that presence is really contingent on, on how the foundation of all of that is really the sleep, right? This is going to enable all the things that we're talking about in whatever environment we're in. Yeah, I think that's such a good point that sort of a lot of people have no idea how sleep deprived they are and they have no idea how it's affecting things because it becomes so normal. Right. And also like one of the things that you lose as you become sleep deprived is that like self-awareness. Right. So you sort of like, and one thing, there's

actually an interesting study. Is there a happy oblivion? all that, though. No, I'm just kidding. Well, except that everyone else is going to get annoyed with you, I guess. Truly. That's a really good point, Emily, like that you, you know, you lose that kind of self-awareness. And essentially, you just end up running, like, on low power mode. Is that a good way of describing it?

Yeah, that's actually my mentor, Andrew Phillips, always kind of described it that way. Oh, nice. It's basically like if, you know, everybody with an iPhone knows what sort of low-power mode looks like in Arctonics, but it's amazing how sort of similar our bodies are. Yes. When we're sleep deprived, we start to lose any sense of sort of like long-term planning, long-term thinking.

And we start to become very reactive and very focused on like short-term optimizations because we just don't have the capacity to think long-term. And so what starts to happen is we see that we make like really bad dietary decisions. We tend to reach for like higher fat, salty, sugary foods. It becomes much harder to kind of like get gritty. This is kind of to bring it back to athletic performance. you know a lot of that whole like dig deep and like you know yeah reach to the bottom and kind of pull out that like you know last little bit like we lose that ability to kind of access things that are are there right um but sort of you know that dig deep goes away and like that's happening both like in this sort of mental level where we sort of stop caring about or being able to prioritize these other things but it also is happening sort of physically like our bodies are sort of saying like okay we're in low power mode so like what is non-essential right so you start to see things like

you know sleep deprived people they have thinner hair and more brittle nails and like their skin's not as like elastic and nice and those are like the things we can see but your vision narrows for sure driving sleep deprived is very similar to driving drunk you put people in so much danger uh when you drive sleepy and so many people who like would never drink and drive you will go drive on three four hours of sleep. It's insane. Yeah, it's, please don't do that.

We start to see all these processes. And so like hair, skin, nails, those are things you can see, but it's going on internally as well, which is why we see things like high blood pressure is more common in people who are chronically sleep deprived and every form of cancer is more prevalent. There's a lot of really interesting research that goes on with like shift workers who

are the sort of like chronically sleep deprived and like easy to identify population. And they just, you know, any chronic condition, that they have it so much worse than everybody else there's so many things that you can see and not see and that you can sort of understand immediately and in the long term that you're just sort of your body can't do everything that it's built to do if you're sleep deprived and so there's these kind of like short-term things where maybe you like fumble your words a little bit and you're

like um a little bit you know in a bad mood or something like that or you miss more free throws for playing basketball but then there's these sort of longer term things where like these like repair process is that your body needs to maintain day after day to function optimally just sort of don't happen and then you kind of put them off and so then you start to see you know organs are failing and people seem to age faster and stuff like that i mean there's not one process in the human body that is not influenced by sleep yeah you know and i think that's what makes it the root cause to a lot of bad things that can happen and in your life of there's a great chuck sizler um He's obviously one of the most, you know, I think published researchers in the area of sleep medicine.

He has a quote, though, that I think for anyone out there who are kind of leaders of people, sleepless machismo is worst and nonsetical. It is downright dangerous in the antithesis of intelligent management. That's a great quote. Isn't that just phenomenal? I think about that a lot, you know, as I kind of navigate different high performance environments and kind of how people think about sleep. And, you know, there's just not simply not enough education that happens around sleep, I think, in the medical world, in education.

I think some school systems are kind of getting on board with this concept of, you know, thinking about biological preference in the context of students and, you know, when to go to school, when to, you know, I think that's a whole other kind of can of worms. And we can maybe dig into that when we talk about regularity. But yeah, I just think conceptually, like really focusing in 2020, if you're a leader of people, consider focusing on sleep education within your environment. Yeah, I think it's such an important thing, you know, for leaders to be thinking about because there's definitely a culture of sort of if you're sleep deprived and sleepy, that it sort of indicates that you're important somehow. And you're working really hard. So much to do and you're doing all this work and like all that stuff.

And so people kind of wear their sleepiness like a badge of honor. Yeah. But I think we need this culture shift where it needs to be just as unacceptable, you know, to show up for work on, you know, four or five hours of sleep as it is to like show up hungover or high. Like you're equally unprepared to work because of decisions that you've made in the last, you know, how many hours. And so to think about like part of, you know, the way that like I would not tolerate in my team if they showed up, you know, like hungover or whatever. And we're like, oh, I can't work because I was, you know, drinking last night. Like it should be like that not okay. And like to just kind of shift that. culture and obviously like there's so many factors and you know it's easier said than done but I think we need to kind of think about it as at least as a goal of being that important right right if I'm not going to get sleep tonight then I need to know that tomorrow I don't need to do anything productive you know like I'm not going to be influencing people I'm not going to be you know like I think that's to your to your point I think that's kind of the ultimate you know I think in terms of where we can get to as as as human beings to think about those decisions and

the context of what behaviors and what things are going to be required of me in the future. All right, cool. So we talked about kind of the architecture. Now let's kind of get into the mechanics in terms of sufficiency and efficiency and regularity and kind of how those kind of three pillars of sleep kind of work together to help us be as, you know, high performing as possible. So I think this concept that we can't store sleep, right? You know, you can store food, water in your body, but you can't store sleep.

Why don't you talk a little bit about just that reality? Yeah, so we regulate sleep in our own bodies in a somewhat interesting way. We're sort of as soon as where they call the state sleep or pleat, which is like you've sort of gotten all the sleep you're going to get, you just wake up. You can't stay asleep when you do not need sleep, which is completely different from sort of all of our other processes if you think about it. um like we can store food that's what fat is we can keep drinking water once we're not thirsty and you know we'll just urinate it out uh but as soon as you're done sleeping sort of i mean short of like drugging yourself which is not sleep that's sedation um you know when you sort of run out of sleep need you wake up and so your body drives that like i think that's what's important

yeah like you're just your brain will be like done done um and so what that means is that you need to get the sleep that you need every single night. You can't kind of like bank it on a moment where you have this opportunity. There's no sleeping equivalent to eating a big breakfast because you're working through lunch. So in a pretty recent study, researchers analyzed health, medical histories, and sleep totals of a group of more than 130,000 men and women ages 40 to 69. So with the data, researchers were able to link sleeping less than six hours as well, as sleeping more than 10 hours to cases of metabolic syndrome and a bunch of other related symptoms. So knowing that, okay, less than 6 is bad and many can argue less than 7 is probably

not ideal, but also more than 10 is also not great either. So how much sleep do we actually need to get? Yeah, that's a great question. And an interesting study that I want to get to in a second. Good. So what we see is that sort of as we age, we tend to need less sleep. sort of, you know, everybody's familiar infants sleep, you know, most of the day, sort of children need a lot of sleep, sort of teens need a ridiculous amount of sleep way more than they're getting. And then sort of as we start to get into our late 20s, 30s, 40s, you know, the amount of sleep that we need per night goes down.

But there's a link to guidelines, too, just from the sleep foundation. There's a very important difference that I think a lot of the literature is confusingly lazy about with the difference between sleep and like time, dead. to sleep, what we at Woop call time in bed. And so what happens is that as you get older, you need less sleep, but your sleep efficiency. So that's the percentage of the time that you're sort of dedicating to bed, that you're sort of in bed trying to sleep, in which you're actually asleep, starts to go down. So it starts to take you, you know, eight hours to get seven hours of sleep. And then, you know, nine hours to get seven hours of sleep as you get, you know,

older and older. And so as we age, our sleep gets less efficient. So our time in bed, need often goes up unless we're very intentionally taking steps to improve sleep efficiency. But the actual amount of total sleep that our bodies need goes down. And this is because as we age, a lot of sort of other things slow down, we become less active. Right. And so we're sort of like creating less of a intense sleep. And also things like we're telling our body we need less sleep. You know, it's almost like you want to kind of keep a lot of those behaviors alive. Like you want to keep training you want to keep weight lifting like doesn't just because you're older doesn't mean you should stop doing those things like I think we often are telling our body to slow down because

we don't uh continue with the behaviors that tell the body to to stay active and yeah continue with these processes and I think another piece and the literature really hasn't um sort of satisfyingly answered this question yet because a lot of these studies that look at like how much sleep do people need at different phases of life they're not really talking about like sleep need in an objective sort of, you know, since they're looking at survey data. And a lot of them are sort of looking at like sort of given your lifestyle, how much sleep do you need? And that gets kind of coupled in a way that's a little bit problematic. Because, you know, somebody in their 30s who maybe has like two little kids at home and they're at the peak of their, you know, you're trying to like make

partner. And so they're working really, really hard. Yeah. You know, so really like burning the candle at both ends, like their life could be really physically demanding. Plus maybe they're trying to work out and do all these other things as well. They're going to need a lot of sleep. and then take that exact same person in 20 years, you know, they're empty nesters. Right. You know,

they've made partner and they're sort of sitting back at work a little bit, like, you know, enjoying the fruit of their labor. And, you know, maybe they've sort of switched from intensive working out to kind of more of like the recreational golf on the weekends or whatever it is.

Not hating on golf at all. But sort of that same person, all of a sudden, like their life is a lot less demanding. And so what the research hasn't satisfactorily like separated yet is like, how much of the fact that like at age 50 that person needs less sleep than they did at 30 is because they're sort of doing less versus like actually a physiological need. Now there are certain physiological processes that definitely change with age.

I mean just being in your reproductive years has whether or not you have kids. Sort of there's processes and hormones and all these things that we're like producing at different levels. So it's a little bit of like a complicated question, but the sort of a lot of research that says things like, oh, women need more sleep than men. will then also sort of say that women sleep less efficiently than men and they're kind of coupling sort of women need more time in bed on average to get the same amount of sleep but do they actually need more sleep or you know is it because they're both working and then also like kind of taking care of kids and all these things and like when men and women with exactly equal demands sleep at similar efficiencies

like do they actually need more time like the literature hasn't really answered that question in a satisfactory way yet And that's really like, individual data. Like in a lot of these research days are awesome. And they give us these kind of broad stroke kind of ideas about, in this case, you know, how much time we need to be spending in bed. But I think that's where the data can be really, really helpful. Because everyone's individual life circumstances are going to be completely different.

Their life goals are different. Like what they're trying to achieve is different. So I think having some data can really anchor you and help you understand, okay, you know what, given my life demands right now, I actually need, in order to, to get the kind of quality sleep that I need to actually optimize my, you know, the restorative stages, I need to spend more time in bed. And that might just be your reality. So I think just having, having the data, though, helps you answer those questions and kind of takes the guesswork out of it. So one of the things that you mentioned in the study that you cited was that sort of short sleep

was bad, which, you know, we've been talking about for the last 20 minutes, known. But one of the things that might surprise people to hear is that long sleep is also bad. And I think this kind of goes back to the point that I was just making, that actually long sleep is often a comorbid symptom and not actually the primary cause of the bad things that it seems to be correlated with. And this is sort of the big problem in all physiological research. The symptom of other medical conditions potentially.

Right. It's the difference between correlation and causation. So correlation means, you know, it just happens to occur at the same time as another thing. Whereas causation means that like sleeping too long is causing these problems. And the literature is not super. clear. And what I think is going on is actually that long sleep is this comorbid symptoms. So the same things that make us have lower life expectancy, you know, or, and like obesity.

Yeah, it's obesity, hypertension, depression is a big one. Totally. You sort of chronic disease, right? People with COPD, like, you know, they're going to sleep longer because they're not going to sleep well. And so it's not that these people are, and also I think a lot of the research that talks about like long sleep being a bad thing. If you actually read what they're saying, or read their methodology, they're talking about extended time in bed because a lot of times they're using like self-reported sleep diaries. It'll sort of say like, oh, I got in bed at 10 p.m. and then I got out of bed at 8 a.m. and then they'll be like, okay, that's, you know, 10 hours of sleep, but it's not, right? If you actually had staged the sleep, you would see that

like these people are not sleeping very efficiently. At least that's my suspicion. right um and we actually can see that in our data yeah we see that in our data they might be spending you know 15 to 20 percent in deeper stages of sleep but are actually spending 10 hours in bed right so occasionally you see people like you know they have the flu they have mono and they they really do get like an insane amount of sleep 12 hours of yeah but you don't really tend to see people like sleep not not be in bed sleep uh you know 12 hours and like now after night after night. What you see is these people who are spending a lot of time in bed, it's because they're sleeping extremely inefficiently, and that's caused by the same thing.

That's, like, causing this, like, shortened life expenses or these other comorbidity. So I think those studies are really interesting. It's definitely something that's kind of, like, worth paying attention to. But I don't actually think that, like, you know, for a healthy person who's like, oh, I just, like, rolled around in bed for nine hours. Am I getting diabetes? Right. That's not what, like, this research is telling you. I think that's such a great point. So how do we, how can we help folks understand, like, what their sleep need actually is? So we obviously, whoop can kind of help you tell that over time.

What are some kind of short-term questions people can ask themselves? Like, you know, I think, are you overweight? I mean, that could be a good question to ask, because generally speaking, if you're kind of overweight, as we pointed out, you're going to be spending more time in bed, potentially. So that could be kind of a driver. You know, are you productive, healthy, happy on seven hours of sleep, or do you feel like you need nine? You know, there's some of these subjective kind of questions folks can ask themselves. Is there anything else that people can be asking themselves to kind of determine their sleep need? Well, there's a really great little experiment you can do because one thing that we've seen over and over again is that a lot of people think they're getting enough sleep and they're not.

And so a great way to kind of prove this to yourself is like to make your room totally dark to like, you know, turn off your phone, put it out. of the room like tell everybody to leave you alone make sure you can sleep and literally just try and sleep in right so it's like if you have if if you get into bed and you wake up naturally you know like do this for a few days because there's a little bit of a habit that happens that's really important well go into it at like what you think is not like this is sort of again this is an experiment right for somebody who's like oh I'm getting like six hours a night and that's fine the way to like kind of prove to yourself is like if night after night you can just naturally wake up after that you might there are there's a known genetic variant that actually does make

you need less sleep there's one it's pretty rare um you probably don't have it even though you think you do um and so you might be that but assuming you're not like if you sort of give yourself this opportunity in this like perfectly conducive sleep environment and try and sleep in like see what your body will do because if your body's going to go like oh wow amazing opportunity and take 10 hours of sleep that's a great sign that you are sleep deprived right right right And so I think, like, you know, you have an opportunity at some point in 2020 to do this. It's a great experiment. It feels really good.

But I think that kind of going back to the Sherry Ma study that we were talking about at the beginning, one of the things that was so interesting about that study is on average, the athletes at the beginning of the study in baseline before they started the intervention were getting close to eight hours of sleep per night. So you wouldn't have looked at these athletes and said that they were sleep deprived. That's actually amazing for collegiate, like, athletes. Truly. Stanford. And then we'll see. You know. Yeah.

I mean, they're working hard, athletically, academically. So they were already doing what like most people would look at and be like, wow, that's amazing. But then Sherry Ma said, I want you to sleep as close to 10 hours per night as you can and to like really try and make this happen.

And on average, they increase their sleep by 111 minutes. And they actually, on average, slept over 10 hours a night. And again, this is time in bed. This isn't sleep.

Right. But, and then all these match. tricks improved. You know, their field goal percentage and games improved. Their free throw percentage improved by 10% or sorry, 9%. The field goal percentage was improved by 9.2%. They're like sprinting times went down. Their vertical jump. Vertical jumps improved. They like didn't get injured or sick nearly as much as like you would expect just based on like statistics from previous years. Things like their mood improved, all this kind of stuff. And they weren't describing themselves

as sleep deprived at the beginning. So if that's what happens sort of, when you get that like almost like last inch. Imagine what happens when you're going from like sleep, you know, like six hours to eight hours because these benefits are very nonlinear. And so what I think is so cool about the Stanford study is that it was really looking at like that tiny last bit that like most of us don't even really think of as like,

oh, whatever. Right. But huge, like statistically significant. To be clear, those are not marginal games. No, those are huge. They're massive, massive games. Yeah. And, you know, we're already talking about division one athletes.

So, you know, it's not like, you know, they were already had great staff. Yeah, exactly. Well, I think this backs in really well to just this concept of regularity, right? Because regularity is what, if you can understand when to go to bed and when to wake up, everything else kind of writes itself for the most part. That's going to help drive the efficiency, right? So if you stabilize or you kind of can kind of anchor the sleep wake time, it basically kind of sets healthy circadian, which in turn is going to influence all the other clocks

in the system and all sorts of good things kind of happen relative to that in terms of your microbes and, you know, you're maintaining natural rhythms and aligning the gut and the brain and hormones and all that's good stuff. So maybe next we can kind of talk about, all right, how do we figure out when, and you talked a little bit about this, like, you know, when, when is my natural pressure for sleep? And in this kind of maybe the experiment that you kind of cited for people to try in 2020 is really just determining your chronotype, you know, figuring out, okay, am I a early rise or am I, am I a night owl, am I a lark? And what does that mean for when I need to go to bed, when I need to wake up?

And then once I know that, doing that over and over and over again, because regularities correlated with all sorts of wonderful things as I just cited, as well as that really cool study from nature if you want to talk about that real quick sure so in 2017 andrew phillips who's a researcher out of harvard medical school um did this really interesting study where he had he monitored uh the sleep consistency which is basically just the sort of you know are you going to bed and waking up at the same time every day of college students not athletes just regular students um and he looked at how consistency related to their GPAs so um these sort of they would report their bedtime and wake times for the whole semester,

and then he looked at sort of their GPAs compared to their baseline GPs from the semester before. And on average, a sort of 10% increase in his, he called it SRI, it was just his metric of sleep consistency, correlated to a 0.1 on the like 4.0 scale change in GPA. And what was really interesting about this study is that the high sleep consistency, the high SRI, as he called it,

regularity, yeah, regularity, it's the R. They actually didn't get more sleep than the low SRI group, but they got the sleep at the same time day after day. And that's the goal, right, to spend as little time in bed as possible, but get the restorative sleep you need. Right, like the reason why, you know, we're all sleep deprived, right, as it's a country, is because there's so many things we'd rather be doing.

And so the real, like, hack to sleep is to figure out how to like spend, every second that you're asleep sort of getting benefits. And again, in Phillips study, he was looking at sort of self-reported sleep times. He was not, so therefore he was really talking about time in bed, not sleep. So that's the sort of separate issue we've been talking about throughout this whole podcast. But the real point here is that they didn't dedicate any more time to sleep over the course of the semester. They just dedicated smarter time to sleep over the course of the semester by having a consistent sleep and wake time. And so sort what this shows us is that like there's so much behavior around sleep that helps you sort of like get more out of it and there's a lot of things you can do uh in order to sort of get more benefits from that like same you know seven half eight and a half hours whatever you have and so what whoop did after this philip's paper came out that was uh was we looked at um you know three million sleeps because we have that kind of data uh in order to try and understand why was it that sleep consistency or sleep regularity as philips called it um

sort of increased GPAs, right? And what we found was that in people who had higher SRIs or higher sleep consistencies, that they actually were getting a lot more slow-wave sleep and a lot more REM sleep. And what this seemed consistent in our data, and also I think is proposed by Phillips in the discussion section of the article, that this is sort of a circadian effect. And so basically when our circadian rhythms, which is our body's internal biological clocks,

when they can anticipate sleep, and sort of knows when it's coming. It's a little bit anthropomorphic, but when it knows that, like, hey, I'm going to go to sleep at 10 p.m. And what happens is at 8 p.m., about two hours before what they call, like, anticipated sleep onset,

we start to produce the hormone melatonin, which is our sleep promoting hormone. And so by the time it gets to 10 p.m., we're at that, like, critical threshold to, like, sort of enable sleep of melatonin. And so when we get into bed, like, hormonally, we're in that, like, bed, state and so we fall asleep quickly and we get right into a slow wave sleep and we start you know our

body's like okay I know this is coming I want to do this if your sleep is a surprise or you know your body's anticipating sleep so at 8 p.m. it starts to produce melatonin but then at 10 p.m. you're trying to write a paper but your body's like now at threshold levels of melatonin for sleep all of a sudden your paper writing is going to be bad you know talk about the GPAs right so because your body's like sleep time and you're like no I'm trying to focus and so your ability to to kind of have these, like, really clever, insightful, like, ideas to put into your paper sort of going away because, like, hormonally, you're sort of in this immediate pre-sleep state. So now you're fighting your melatonin, you're trying to suppress it.

And then, say, now it's 2 a.m. You've been fighting sleep for four hours. Eventually, you're going to win that fight. You've, like, suppressed melatonin. Then you get into bed, and your hormones are all confused. Now you've sort of, like, gotten that melatonin level down. Now you're releasing cortisol. Right. So you're releasing cortisol. You're probably stressed that your paper is not going well or whatever. And then you get into bed and you're like not going to sleep as well. And I think that's where, you know, I would hear this all the time from my student athletes when I was at Princeton is I get this surge of energy at 1 a.m. I'm like, yeah, that's because you basically didn't succumb to your natural pressure for sleep. You overrode that. And now you're in a situation where your body is in fight or flight and, you know, you're activating the sympathetic nervous system. So you're releasing all these hormones that are, yeah.

they're helping you stay awake because, and that obviously is going to stress the system and it's going to interfere with any other bit of sleep that you might be able to get that night, not to mention your paper's going to suck. Yeah, and it works the other way too. So like, let's say you've trained your body now that like sleep happens at midnight, right? So now, you know, you're not going to start producing melatonin until 10 and then your body's sort of anticipating that like sleep onsets at midnight, but, you know, you've gotten through this tough part of the semester and now you want to crash at nine, let's say, well, now you'd have

nowhere near the amount of melatonin you need to you're going to roll around in bed you're going to stress out and it's going to be three hours you know you can kind of like by creating these like behavioral cues you can kind of indicate to your body like I'm trying to sleep and speed that process up a little bit um things like turning off the light and like going through a nighttime routine definitely help but like your body sort of didn't know that that was coming and so when you surprise your body either by trying to go to bed too early or by trying to not go to bed when it's anticipating that you're going to go to bed like your body's like it's not ready and so it's kind like the difference between like walking into a meeting and you've gotten your you know your notes

and your powerpoints you know rehearsed and all buttoned up versus like showing up in a meeting and being like what are we meeting about what am I supposed to do so the the bottom line with regularity is that it's it's going to be unique for every every individual is going to be different you need to understand what your chronotype is you need to run an experiment where you understand when your natural biological pressure for sleep, i.e. when are you going to release, you know, serat melatonin? And, you know, what does that pre-bed routine need to look like in order to kind of really help optimally facilitate, you know, whatever that natural pressure is? And then, you know, there's a couple of things during the day that you need to do to, I think, run this experiment effectively

is you need to stop probably drinking caffeine by two. I would say that's safe to say. And then, you know, probably stop eating around seven. Keep your workout before. four and then obviously all the environmental as emily mentioned before you know room dark cold and you know tell everyone to leave you alone get your phone out of your room notifications off and really kind of see right when do i actually start to feel dim the lights in your house when do i actually start to feel sleepy and then allow your body to go through that natural process and then if you can for a bit see when you naturally wake up you know and once you do that over and over again you'll start to, I think, land in that sweet spot where, okay, I need seven hours and 54 minutes

to get the, and I need to go to bed at, you know, 10 and wake up at, you know, 620 in order to get that optimal, you know, restorative sleep. And that's where the data can be really helpful to kind of see, all right, where, you know, am I spending 40 to 50% of my total sleep time in in these restorative stages? You can start to look at the data and kind of analyze that. Yeah, so sleep consistency. Yes. What's so great about it is that it's a behavior, and that means that you can control it. Yes.

And so what we see is that, like, if you have higher sleep, like, sleep consistency explains a 3% difference in sleep efficiency. And so when you're sleeping more consistently, that's, like, the easiest thing you can do to improve your sleep efficiency, but it also explains big differences in slow wave sleep and in REM sleep. And so, you know, if you can't get all the sleep you need, doing it at least a time where your body's going to be anticipating it and be ready to take like every advantage of that time that you're giving it. You're going to get so much more out of the sleep than if you sort of get a short

sleep at a random time. Yep, totally. And I will say, you know, just working with athletes, it's the first thing that we address is, all right, let's figure out when you need to go out of bed and when you need to wake up because that's going to, if you can get that right, you'll have to spend less time in bed or you'll know exactly how much time you need to spend in bed in order to kind of get that you know quality sleep that you need to to really restore yeah so many people they're like you know they want me to tell them to like take this weirdo supplement like this herb and all this stuff and it's like accurate sleep wait time there's a lot of great supplements and products out there and all that kind of like fancy stuff but if you don't have your basics in place like everything else is

just kind of inexpensive waste of time yeah just layering inefficiency your bed needs to be comfortable like if like before you spend any money on like cool roots and stuff like yeah go get black Get the basics. Yeah, 100%. Just do those basics. And then it's like sleep consistency. And then it's like once you're actually behaving in a way that's conducive to sleep, once your environment is conducive to sleep, then it's like if there's still an issue, then we know

that there's an actual issue. So that's when it's worth talking about things like, you know, are you magnesium deprived? Right. Let's explore that. And like, you know, can we start these other things? But like taking magnesium and like, you know, you have city lights and noises streaming in your bedroom door when you have a roommate who won't shut up. Like, yeah, like it's probably better to not be magnesium.

museum deprived, but like it's not really going to move the needle. I think this is Restolution part one in the books. Yeah, so let us know Instagram or email what other topics in the spirit of restolutions that you'd like us to cover. Yes. If you're not already a WOOP member, you can join our community for as low as $30 to begin. We provide you with 24-7 access to your biometric data. as well as analytics across strain, sleep, recovery, heart rate variability, and more.

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