WHOOP Podcast - How sleep, physiology, and psychological safety affect your work performance

Episode Date: June 8, 2022

To unlock your best ideas, creativity, and performance, it is essential to create a safe space – part of which can be done with the right interpersonal behaviors, and part of which is done at home with a good night’s sleep. To examine this, WHOOP VP of Performance Kristen Holmes sits down for a discussion with Harvard business school professor and behavioral science researcher Dr. Amy Edmondson on the concept of psychological safety. Dr. Jemma King from the University of Queensland in Australia and researcher Nadia Fox also join the podcast to detail new groundbreaking research on the intersection between psychology and physiology and how that manifests in metrics like sleep debt and HRV. Learn more about psychological safety (3:23), stress responses (9:08), burnout (11:23), cognitive functioning under stress (14:52), sleep deprivation (18:09), the study findings (25:50), slow wave sleep and mental control (28:41), cognitive fitness (29:53), sleep debt and psychological safety (32:27), and sleep consistency (41:17).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

What's up, folks. Welcome back to the WOOP podcast where we sit down with top performing athletes, scientists, researchers, and more to learn what the best in the world are doing to optimize their performance. And what you can do, too, to unlock your best performance. I'm your host Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of WOOP. A reminder, you can use the code Will to get 15% off a WOOP membership that comes with the new WOOP 4.0. is shipping on demand. Got a great episode this week. We're examining how your sleep, your psychology, and your physiology affects your performance in the workplace and in your everyday life. High performing teams have one thing in common, and that's psychological safety. To unlock your best ideas, creativity, and performance, it is essential to create a safe space, part of which can be done with the right interpersonal behaviors, and part of which is done

at home with a good night's sleep. To examine this, Woop VP of Performance, Kristen Holmes, sits down for a roundtable discussion with Harvard Business School professor and behavioral science researcher, Dr. Amy Edmondson, alongside Dr. Gemma King from the University of Queensland and Australia, and researcher Nadia Fox. Dr. Edmondson introduced the concept of psychological safety and defines exactly what it is and how that is one of the keys to high performance in our interpersonal relations. Dr. King and Nadia then dive in on some groundbreaking research on sleep debt and cognitive functioning and what that can tell us about different factors like stress responses, burnout, and how all of this can be measured with HRV.

And for those of you who missed it, last week we announced Woop Unite, which is a major initiative here at Woop, a pioneering solution that empowers organizations to elevate the health and resilience of their people. I think that ties closely to this conversation led by Kristen Holmes. You can check out whoopunite.com to learn more and see if Woop Unite is right for your organization. Without further ado, here's Kristen Holmes with Dr. Amy Edmondson, Dr. Gemma King, and Nadia Fox. To help us cut through what is frankly a lot of noise is none other than the leading expert on all things team, professor of leadership and management at Harvard Business School, Dr. Amy Edmondson. Amy, welcome. Thank you so much. Also on the pod with us today, our fabulous return guests and esteemed research collaborators, Dr. Gemma King and Ph.D. candidate Nadia Fox. Welcome, ladies.

Hello. Last summer, Dr. King and Ms. Fox were on to discuss our groundbreaking findings on sleep debt and mental control and executive leaders. We just completed the second leg of that study, led again by both Dr. King and Nadia, where we studied the influence of stress, sleep, and HRV on mental control and leadership. In this study, we tapped Dr. Edmondson's psych safety scales for the study and discovered some novel findings. We will discuss today that linkage we found between physiology and psychological safety. So, Amy, most of our listeners have probably heard of the term psychological safety, but could absolutely benefit from just a foundational understanding. So maybe first you can tell us what it is. I think the simplest way to describe

psychological safety is a sense of permission for candor. Not that it's easy, but that you believe your voice is welcome in whatever context you're in, whether that's a work team or a friend group, that you believe it's absolutely okay to speak up with concerns, dissenting views, ideas, questions, requests for help, and all of the rest of those behaviors that we think of as interpersonally risky. They're interpersonally risky because people, might not think well of you if you engage in them. But in a psychologically safe environment, you know that, no, that's what we do. What are organizations leaving on the table by not really digging into this and figuring out, you know, how do we actually create a framework

where we enable this for our employees and we actually create an environment where this really truly, this concept of psychological safety really truly exists? You know, what are we leaving on the table by not doing it? If you really stop to think, that we live in the knowledge era, right? We live in the digital era. We live in the knowledge era. That all of the, you know, nearly all of the value you create

comes from directly or indirectly the ideas, the capabilities, the talent of your people. Now, if some portion of that talent remains hidden or unexpressed or, you know, held back because of people's concerns about how others will see them,

it just stands to reason you're leaving value on the table, that it's just not being, it's not being tapped. You know, we're, I think, excited about this kind of next frontier of looking at the relationship between psychological safety and physiology. You know, what type of behaviors can individuals kind of think about to enable themselves to come to the table and, you know, help create and facilitate this, you know, environment where we, we can really, you know, maximize the psychological safety of the group. I think we feel really grateful that we have your kind of

mentorship and consultation on digging into this next frontier of research. What are your thoughts on just this linkage? When Gem and I met four years ago and she said she wanted to study this, this relationship between the leader's physiology and how much sleep they were, how, you know, and the kind of, you can imagine, we can all think from our own experience of being in a good state of mind or less. She wanted to study this and its impact on the psychological safety of the team, I thought, and I still think, that it was quite ambitious, that it was by no means a given that you could show. I thought it was a real phenomenon, but the ability to actually show a significant relationship, that's pretty impressive. Because there's a real

distance there between, you know, my sleep last night and then my team's telling me that they believe it's okay to speak up. So I think it's a stunning result and I think it has enormous implications for the future of leadership. Really excited to kind of dig into that now and talk about this relationship between, you know, our physiology and psychological safety and talk about the study. Nadia would love for you to dig in on how does feeling unsafe impact our autonomic nervous system. Yeah, Kristen, well, I think because we have two central branches of our autonomic nervous system, is our parasympathetic and our sympathetic nervous system, there are really two main ways that feeling safe or feeling unsafe can affect us.

So I guess when we feel safe and calm and relaxed, essentially, that's when our parasympathetic nervous system is activated. And that's our rest and digest system. And it really does essentially just that. It helps us downregulate our arousal. So essentially lowering our heart rate, our respiratory rate, while also activating those metabolically expensive processes like our digestion, our metabolism, and our immune function,

amongst sort of many other things. But on the other hand, when we are experiencing feelings of unsafe or maybe we're exposed to a threat or a stressor, that's when a chain of biological responses happens within the body, triggering our sympathetic nervous system. And that's essentially our body's evolved flight and fight response. When that happens, when that activation takes part in the body, that leads to the release of adrenaline, which increases our heart rate, our blood pressure, our oxygen, and also the release

of fats and sugars into our bloodstream, which further sort of helps to fuel that fight and fight response. So when we look specifically at the effects of how feeling unsafe might have on our autonomic system. We essentially see that these resources that are normally helping fuel our metabolically expensive processes, like I said, digestion, metabolism, immune function, even our executive functioning. So how well we can think and process in the moment. While all these are active and firing when we feel safe, when we have parasympathetic dominance in our body, instead, when we feel unsafe and we feel stressed and we feel threatened, that's when they

become suppressed or even potentially offline in order to channel those resources to fuel that fight-and-fight response and help us better process that stressor in the moment. So, you know, what are the negative effects that our bodies will actually experience when we're kind of in this fight-or-flight response? I think it's important to consider the fact that our stress. response is universal. So regardless of the type of stress-aware experiencing, whether it's a physical stressor or a psychological or emotional stressor, our body is going to still have the same stress response. And the degree to which that stress response impacts us, either positively or

negatively, can really depend on a couple of factors. And one of those, for example, is our appraisal of the stressor. So do we consider that stressor to be a thing? threat or instead a challenge, as well as how much resources do we have in the moment when we're facing that stressor? Are we well rested? Do we have good recovery and support that makes us feel like, you know, we can cope with that stressor in the moment? And also the duration and the severity of that stressor, they're all going to sort of culminate to impact. So when we look at a stressor that might be more acute or mild in nature, that can actually be quite adaptive for us. It can be even beneficial.

I mean, if we take the example of an employee in a workplace, say they have a presentation in front of their colleagues later that day, if they're feeling sort of a little bit anxious, mild stress, that can actually serve as a motivator. It can help them think, okay, you know, buckle down, really overprepared, and that can really benefit performance in the long run because of that sort of motivating force of the stress. And I think likewise, when we look at use stress, which can take place more when we're exposed to a physical stressor, say heat or cold exposure, if we're going into a sauna for a certain amount of time or a cold bath, that can really be also beneficial to our body because it helps us adapt sort of in the long run when we're exposed to stress in the future. but I guess it's when a stressor is more complex in its nature or the duration of the stressor

that that's when it can more likely have negative effects sort of on our body. Burnout and, you know, there's common terms that folks can identify with. Yeah, exactly. And when we look at burnout, there's not only consequences for health, there's also consequences for their performance. You can imagine the first scenario where there's an employee who has this mild, stressor. Once off, after the presentation's done, they can get back into that parasympathetic modulation and downregulate from that stress. But it's when that stress is constant or

repeated. Maybe it's not just one day. Maybe it's multiple times throughout the day, throughout the weeks, throughout the months. That's when we're leading, yeah, into more burnout territory. And the reason that is consequential is because we're continuously activating that flight and fight system and it's not having time to downregulate. And when we look at those expensively metabolic processes like immune function, digestion, our executive functions, if they're going offline and they're being down regulated, that's of course going to have consequences for not only health but performance. Because in an organizational setting, if your executive functions are offline, they're the fundamental things you need in order to

deal with a lot of the stresses that we're faced with in the modern world. Beautiful explanation, Nadia. So, you know, one of the measures that we use in our research is hurry variability, right? And you kind of just gave us a really great explanation in terms of what actually, because HRV is a function of the heart, but it manifests in the nervous system. So all the dynamics you just described are really, you know, characterizing HRV. When we think about using HRV in our research, why do we do this? You know, why is this a great marker for us? It's really a, you know, a measure of adaptive capacity. So just talk a little bit about how we're using that and what it is. Yeah. So I think if we break down what essentially

heart rate variability is, it's the time intervals in between a heartbeat. So if we think of someone who has high variability in their heart rate, that's essentially someone whose heartbeats are going to be close together at times, but they're also going to be further apart at times. And that's essentially a reflection of them being able to effectively switch between their parasympathetic and their sympathetic nervous systems. So as we spoke about before, you know, raising that heart rate under conditions of stress and responding to that stressor, but at the same time being able to downregulate when that stresser passes.

So that's why we see someone who has high heart rate variability. It means they're really effective in being able to adapt and respond to those environmental challenges, but then downregulate at the same time. Whereas someone who has low heart rate variability, in particular if their heart rate is sort of high all the time, it means they're sort of more likely to be in this sort of heightened arousal state than more in that sympathetic sort of activation state. And so we see heart rate variability being a really effective marker in research

because of its connection with the Vargas nerve, which we know has connections to the brain, to the heart, to the gut. It's this incredible nerve that sort of stretches over a large part of our body because of that connection, we see heart rate variability being used as, you know, a biomarker of autonomic control, executive function, emotional control, because it really gives us a good indicator of an individual's ability to adapt, react, and respond to their direct environment. Gemma, why don't you explain just what happens to our cognitive processing when we're in this kind of flight or fight mode that Nadia just described?

Yeah, a really good question, Kristen. Our brain's really a prediction or a threat assessment modeling machine. So we're constantly making calculations and choices about metabolic expenditure as everything we do has an energetic cost. And it really needs to be weighed against our internal energy budget. So to simplify this, you know, when we're stressed, we quickly assess, you know, how big of a fight do we have on our hands? Is that baddie, you know, bigger and meaner than me?

you know, how far have I got to run to safety? How many mates do I have around me to help me? How well have I slept? How nutritious was my last meal to fuel this response? And, you know, we do this really quickly and sometimes we'll concur, you know, we're pretty under-resourced to face this threat. And, you know, there ain't no time for thinking and we just need to move. So, you know, I think all of us have experienced this, and we call this, you know, mental banking. You know, the lights just go out. And this is when your brain betrays you in these critical moments. And, you know, just when you need to show up and sound really smart, you're often embarrassingly just sound really dumb. And even, you know, disassociated. I think all of it,

all of us have experienced this at some stage. So, you know, this final flight response, it really has a range of physical consequences, like in the moment, as Nadia explained, and, you know, more broadly has, you know, quite significant behavioral consequences over time. So we find that you can become, you know, less agreeable, less flexible, probably less cooperative in the team. And so this, you know, gives you this sub-optimal ability to really perspective take. And I think that's super important when you're talking about high-performing teams. And we can become, you know, quite myopic and even intolerant of others. And so this is really terrible for fostering and maintaining psychological safety, you know, in the team. You know, obviously we're in this world

every day. So, you know, for us, it's table stakes. But I think it's actually quite shocking. to realize how little people think about the relationship between their lifestyle behaviors and how it impacts them cognitively and physically and how that's going to really enable them to show up in their environment in a way that feels really good. Maybe just kind of tap into that a little bit, Jim, in terms of what you see and in the environments that you operate in. Yeah, this is a really good question because people think, oh, we have to, you know, as leaders, as members of team, that, you know, it's really about.

interpersonal dynamics. It's about, you know, meeting the organizational values and, you know, there's mission statements. But actually, you can think about all these things. You can try to do all these things. But often what will happen is your physiology will betray you. And when you're in a meddala hijack, when you're blanking out, when you've been really stressed, you haven't slept, your tolerance for novelty innovation is really low. You become less cooperative. You have a tendency to not want to, you know, share or share ideas. And so, and people will start to think, well, these, these sound like little microaggressions to me. You know, these people aren't team player, but actually, they're probably just really stressed out. And they don't have the neural

architecture to be, you know, cohesive, to be cooperative and to do all the things that you need to foster psychological safety. And so I think a lot of people can misinterpret the behavioral effects of sleep deprivation and stress as a personal disposition, like that person isn't, you know, who I want to work with. That person isn't a very good person. But actually, they're just suffering from the consequences of a physiology that hasn't been looked after. And I think more and more people are starting to understand just the importance of getting the basic human physiology straight. It's like concentric circles. First, in order to lead others, you've got to lead yourself.

Once you lead yourself and you've got your physiology under control, then only then can you start to think about having an effect on others, having effect on the team, and then having an effect on an organization, and then having an effect more globally as a global human citizen. So it very much starts with a physiology, unless you get that right, it will betray you at some stage and you're not going to be as optimized as you can. So, Gemma, how does the body differentiate between physical threat and psychological threat.

I feel like teasing this apart is really important. Yeah, this is really interesting. I think people don't really understand this concept that our stress response system is really not very good at differentiating between physical threat and psychological threat. And that's why they manifest in HRV. Yes. You know, an individual on the platform, they'll wake up

and, you know, they'll see their HRV is suppressed relative to their baseline and they think, well, I didn't even train yesterday. But, yeah. But what did you, did you have an argument at work? Did you do a presentation? We see this all the time. And I think this is really going to be fascinating if we can tease this part. But, you know, like you, we respond to emotional stimuli, even if it's real, like you actually have something that's, you know, difficult or even imagine. So, you know, our brains have a hard time differentiating between seeing something and imagining it. And our stress response system will react as if it's a physical threat. And even particularly in the case of social, ostracism and rejection. It's one of the most stressful things that you can do to a human is to socially reject them. And we know, like being a cortisol researcher, we see enormous spikes in cortisol if somebody, you know, ostracizes you or rejects you. And I imagine that if you

really, you know, dug down into the data and you looked at people who have these, you know, heart rate variability changes and they haven't done a lot of, you know, cardiovascular output that day, you ask them, did you feel rejected? or humiliated at any time during a day. I imagine I would say, yeah, actually, because that really sends the physiology off in a negative way. And we know that the brain is constantly scanning for in-out indicators, group in and out indicators.

And this uses up an enormous amount of, you know, of cognitive real estate. And we know there's an article in the Journal of Human Nature, and it says that we spend 70% of what we think about and we talk about is actually directed to social matters. Now, this is an extraordinary amount of time thinking about where is our place in the human and the social dynamic, social hierarchy. So status? Yes, affiliation.

Am I accepted? Am I part of the team? Am I off? And we don't even know that we're doing it, but we're always looking for indicators in-out, in-out. And we know that if humans don't feel safe in a group, they'll divert, you know, a significant chunk of their mental processing into what we call it. or social threat processing. So is this co-worker going to throw me onto the bus? Are they talking

about me behind my back? This is incredibly metabolically expensive. And it means that our brains are really not on the task at hand. So if you're a leader and you don't have psychological safety within your team, you've literally got people with half a brain walking around trying to, you know, do your job. And this is, you know, if you're in a dangerous job or if you've got, you know, no foul environments, you've got, you know, critical moments, this is, this is a problem. And I think leaders really need to understand the cognitive decriments that are associated with social threat and the lack of psychological safety. Nadia and Jam, that was an amazing overview, I think, which really outlines some of the reasons why we want to do this research. It's really the goal is to try to unpack the physiology and the psychology and understand, you know, what is influencing, what?

And can we give folks a playbook on what behaviors are really most important in grasping? if indeed we want to create a better environment where we can all thrive and utilize our skill sets to the fullest. And so over the last three years, we've been working on two research projects. Both are complete, and they were designed and conducted in collaboration with Mike Eviro at McKinsey and Company. Nadia, why don't you just describe these two studies and just what we found and why it matters? The big driving passion behind this research was really this idea of marrying these two worlds of physiology, and psychology in order to really understand how it impacts optimum performance. And in particular, amongst these really high stress, high stakes population.

So although we know a lot about the factors that can help drive performance amongst our elite athletes, what we really wanted to understand was what might be helping or hindering performance amongst our more cognitive athletes. So these professionals who rely on their cognibilities every day in order to succeed and perform. And here I'm talking about our executives, our leaders, our frontline workers. And so in this collaboration with McKinsey and with Wu, we have this amazing opportunity to investigate this line of inquiry with the business executives who were invited to take part in McKinsey's executive leadership program. So across both these studies, which took

place in 2020 and 2021. We collected physiological data, psychological data and cognitive data of these business executives over a three to five month period. So essentially our physiological data was everything within the WOOP device, but particularly relevant to us was the sleep metrics and the cardiovascular metrics. So sleep, heart rate variability. Psychology-wise, we were interested in understanding our leaders' experiences of stress, how they appraised. their stress, as well as the emotions and their perceptions of their own performance and psych safety, of course. And then we had our cognitive measures. So in particular, working memory and mental control. And just to give a little brief explanation of what those are, so working memory is

our ability to sort of take an information, temporarily store that, well then also processing new information. And then we think of mental control or inhibitory control. That's our ability to essentially suppress those more pre-potent automated responses and instead choose more sort of wise, more well-measured appropriate responses. So like we spoke about, a massive advantage of using a 24-7 biometric capture device like the whoop is it really provided us with this rich contextual data of our leaders across this time period, both in their home life but also within in their working environment. And that's what really enabled us to unpack how physiology, psychology,

and cognitive factors impacted and influenced real-time leadership performance. And in turn, the direct team environment, essentially. Yeah. What did we find? You know, what were the most important predictions of performance amongst these leaders in these studies? Yeah. So the real hero of both these studies was sleep, essentially.

it proved to be really invaluable for leadership performance, both from a cognitive perspective but also on like an interpersonal team level. So if we first look at the impact of sleep on our leader's cognitive performances in our first study, we found that for every 45 minutes of sleep debt that was accrued by our leaders, that led to a 5 to 10% decrease in mental control performance that day. So if we break down a little bit, I'm sure. sure a lot of our listeners will be familiar with sleep debt if they use the WOOP device, but that's essentially a personalized metric algorithm created by WOOP, which takes into account how much sleep an individual needs the night before versus how

much they got. So if they're not needing their sleep need, that's when they're going to have a sleep debt. And it's actually quite a bit of a longitudinal measure from the perspective that it's not just taking into account the previous night's sleep debt, but it's taking into account the sleep debt from the night before, so two nights ago, essentially. So it's a little bit more richer context of how much sort of sleep debt our leaders had. Do we know on average how much sleep debt? That would be an interesting point. I'm just curious. You know, I would imagine that

45 minutes is, we'd be lucky if folks were walking around with 45 minutes of sleep debt. It's probably more like in the 90 minutes to two hours. You know, and it just, I see what, you know, with athletes who first come on to the platform, you know, on average, they end up accumulating about two hours of sleep debt. Like, they just don't meet their sleep need. Yeah, no, totally. And I think in our follow-up study, we got a little bit more deeper into that where we could see almost a difference of two hours of sleep debt between leaders who were getting zero sleep debt and some were getting up to two hours when we're looking at the two extremes there. So, yeah, when we think of 45-minute sleep debt leading to a 5 to 10% decrease. Some of our leaders, you know, are potentially getting

two hours. And like you alluded to, Kristen, that's going to vary across populations that we're looking at. Like, that's just our, you know, really small sample of leaders. But we can imagine how that might vary amongst, for example, our special forces or our frontline workers in hospital. I remember before I got an epidural, I said to my doctor, I said, what did you do last night? How How long have you been asleep before you put that needle in my spine? Yeah. How many drinks of alcohol did you have? I know.

Did you go to that party last night? Don't come here. Yeah, and I think that's a completely sort of, you know, valid question to ask because the results from our first study also alluded to, you know, these really restorative impacts of sleep. And we found that for every 30 minutes of slow wave sleep. That led to the opposite, essentially. It was a 5 to 10% increase.

in mental control performance. So, yeah, while sleep can impact how well we think, react and respond, it can also help restore those abilities and give us that edge. I just love that how we found terrible news, but we backed it up with some really good news, that you can actually eliminate the detrimental effect of sleep deprivation by just getting into that deep slow wave sleep. Yeah.

You know, I love that we've kind of given someone hope. What to do, what's not to do. That's a significant. If you think about a leader who's got to, you know, impress a client or, you know, get a bid proposal or get something across the line, being 10% more stupid the next day, it's pretty significant when in this super competitive world. That is the difference between winning or losing a project or a client. 10% is not marginal. Like that is like significant. You know, as the day accumulates and as you take on more cognitive load and, you know, you're more physically afted, more strain you put on. I would imagine that that's quite exponential in terms of the decrements of just your mental control across the day. If you are a knowledge worker, if you actually make your money through your brain, like this is your mechanism of success, you need to take care of your cognitive fitness in the same way,

say an Olympic athlete takes care of their physical fitness. You know, it's the same. If this is what you're using to be successful, you need to really look at it and keep it fit. That's such a great point. And I think people need to also recognize the role that exercise plays in cognitive functioning, too. There's some really some new studies that have come up recently just looking at resistance training and its impact on the brain and learning and memory. It's incredible. Brain derived neurotrophic factor from running. And do you know why humans produce that neuro steroid when they run?

Well, from an evolutionary perspective, so humans, we believe, used to be persistent hunters. So they actually would, you know, run along and chase down. their prey and because we had a small surface area on top of our head and we could sweat we could actually keep our core body temperature low where animals on the savannahs of East Africa probably didn't sweat as much and then they would run and run and humans would chase them often for hours sometimes days and these beasts would overheat fall over and humans would drag them home and so that was one of the reasons why we we sweated and so when we were running we actually needed to know how to get home because it was often

and long distances. And so, you know, when you're putting pressure on the bottom of your pads, of your feet, we know there's receptors there that increases the oxygenated blood to your brain by 20, 25%. We also know that when you put weight onto your long bones, it produces a hormone called osteocalcium, which we know increases spatial memory. And so there's research from NASA when the astronauts get back, they do have decrements in their memory because they're not putting pressure on their feet and on the long bones. Yeah, Mother Nature has given us this incredible, you know, memory boosting mechanism in order

so, you know, our hunter-gatherers could run for long distances, get the prey, drag at home and actually remember how to get home. So you think about, you know, we really need to be like, you know, perambulating, walking, moving. Yeah. And, you know, for cognitive health. Yeah. And that's why sitting is just the new smoking, you know, in terms of actually what it does

to our bodies and our minds. Yeah. Yeah, that's what I'm standing right now. Yeah, 50% standing, 50% sitting. That's right, that's right. And if you can do some squatting in there too, that's also can be really helpful. Just as an aside. All right, Nadia, keep going.

Yeah, after we established, I guess, this impact of sleep quality on leadership cognitive performance, we wanted to then understand how these sort of detriments to sleep might then be impacting direct leadership performance, sort of within the organization. So after we identified, obviously, the importance of psych safety for not only team, but organizational success. In study two, what we really wanted to do was ask the question, does leaders sleep quality at night before a meeting with their team have any impact on how psychologically safe their direct reports feel in that meeting?

So essentially, if a leader wakes up, do they have sleep debt, how much sleep have they got and do their direct reports feel more able or less able to tell their leader they made a mistake or challenge that leader in ideas they might be proposing or, you know, do they feel more or less comfortable to say, hey, I've got a risky idea. I don't know if it will work or not. So we wanted to see whether that psychological safety fluctuated as a result of their leader's physiology and essentially their recovery. It's incredible. Yeah. And as we spoke about with Amy Edmondson, it's drawing a bit of a long bow. I mean, it sounds intuitive that someone's

sleep and recovery would have these flow-on effects to those within our environment, but actually being able to measure that and show that. So how we actually went about doing that was we asked our leaders within the program to nominate three to five of their close. direct reports within their organization. And those that were able and willing, they completed psychological safety surveys throughout the week for the duration of our study. And what essentially this enabled us to do was take our leader's physiology, so their sleep reports from their whoop device, and correlate that with levels of psychological safety within meetings the next day with their direct reports.

And essentially what we found was leaders who had higher levels of sleep debt that day that they had meetings with their subordinates, their subordinates reported lower levels of psychological safety. And in turn, we also found that leaders who got more sleep the night before they had meetings, their subordinates reported higher levels of psychological safety. A really important caveat of these results is to talk, talk about the fact that, you know, these business executives, these CEOs were invited to take part in the executive leadership program. So they're really these high performing leaders. And

when we look at the data, we can see that they did this incredible job at creating psychologically safe environments for their subordinates. And how we know that is because we saw sealing effects in our data. And when I talk about sealing effects, what I mean is the average leader within our sample, they were getting a mean psychological safety score from their subordinates of a 4.3. So that's out of a, yeah, that's out of a 5.5. Yeah. So if 5 is the best rating you can get, on average, they're getting a 4.3. So you can imagine how surprised we were when we saw among such an elite sample that their physiology, their sleep, their recovery was able to shift that. And I guess that raises a really important question,

if we can see a shift in psychological safety amongst elite performing leaders, what's happening on other levels of organizations? What's happening amongst... Exactly, managers who maybe might not be aware of the benefits so much of psych safety, or perhaps they don't have the training or expertise as managers or leaders to cope with, you know,

the responsibilities of their jobs. They might not have personal assistance, and what have you, I want to know, you know, how is their sleep impacting the psychological safety of their teams and how is that then impacting team and organisational success? It's really, this result's really shocking because there's no way that the subordinates knew what the boss was doing the night before. And I actually don't, they probably didn't even know that they were sort of ranking them lower.

You know, it's just probably what is a subconscious appraisal. Yeah, and once again, it comes to the value of collecting both that physiological data and that self-report data, because we have a lot more to analyze within our study too, and part of that is really breaking down. How did leaders feel that they were feeling subjectively, and does that pair up to what their physiology is actually saying? And it highlights the value of getting multiple points of feedback if you're a leader, not just your subjective experience of recovery and how well you thought a meeting went,

what's happening maybe out of your conscious awareness inside your body based on your recovery? I think it's really important to kind of step into, you know, how can organizations and leaders really think about sleep within their teams or organizations? Like, you know, I think they're, as we outlined, there's a huge opportunity, obviously, sleep matters, right? And sleep deprivation is going to impact everyone in your organization. Like, that's just the reality of what we found here. So I think this really puts a higher level of responsibility on organizations to really think about this more intentionally.

You know, Gem, what's your kind of take? I mean, you're inside this world every day, working with organizations, implementing these programs, you know, using MOOP to try to help increase self-awareness. You know, where do you see this going? Yeah, I think like, you know, I've been doing a lot of work on burnout and using a burnout tool to try and ascertain what are the factors that are really driving the stress within employees. and we've actually found some really interesting findings. So, you know, typically you think, okay, you're in an organisation and, you know, say, you would imagine people say, I'm really stressed because I've got no resources, I'm not getting trained properly, I've got no career progression, I'm working really long hours.

But actually when we dive into the data, what we're seeing is that people are getting stressed around things like body image, the inability to find time to exercise, you know, lack of sleep, lack of intimacy. These are quite shocking findings for us. This is really important information for leaders and for organisations because often in organisations, they can't increase the resources. They can't reduce the amount of hours that people are working. And so what you can do as a leader is really look at those individual physiological pressures

that are creating allostatic load on the system. So you think of like, you know, there's a bridge or like a system where you've got all these things that accumulate and build up that create, you know, the propensity for burnout, you can't do, you can't affect those organizational things. But what you can do is say, okay, get some more sleep, get some more exercise, eat a little bit better. And then what it does, it just lifts the pressure in the system. And then you've got more resources to then be able to deal with those bigger things,

those organizational stresses that you don't have in your control. And we know that, you know, or from all of the, whoop data that just something simple, like going to bed consistently can have a dramatic impact on, you know, the follow-in effect on the next day. And I think that's, you know, just knowing what we know from all the research that we've done at Woop and some of the ongoing research that we have, sleep consistency does indeed just continuously bubble up as being the biggest behavior related to sleep that seems to predict mental and physical resilience. So, Gem, what are some things, you know, are you

doing anything with organizations to help enable the consistency. Obviously, how we view and interact with light is very, very important in enabling, you know, that kind of pulse of melatonin at the right time so people can actually fall asleep. So there's kind of that piece to it. But what about for folks who are just naturally want to fall asleep at like 1030 or 11, but have to, you know, get up, that sleep pressure comes later for them because they have a, their chronotype is more of a night owl. are organizations like allowing those folks to come in a little bit later, for example. To me, that seems really obvious. A perfect world.

You absolutely love that. You know, you can do test your chronotype. You can go online and do a little survey. And we know that there are people that just work better. Like you and I are very different. You work really well in the morning where my brain kicks in at three o'clock. You know, so I'm probably more of the night hour. You're more of the bear.

So what we say is that if you can't get much sleep, at least get consistent sleep. and all the executives and, you know, management consultants that they work, but they've got terrible sleep habits up very, very late. And I said, you're better off not going to sleep one night at one, then getting really tired and going to bed at nine, and then sometimes at 10. You're better off just actually going to bed and say 11.30 the same time every night. So then every little tiny clock and every cell of your body actually knows what to do.

When your body feels uncertain, when you've pushed through that sleep pressure, which is what, you know, 16 hours after the first phytone exposure, your body gets, it gets worried because it's like if you're up at night, past your sleep pressure, it's only because of typically two reasons because you're getting chased or you've got to chase something. And so the melatonin, you know, be starting to going down and it'll go, well, you're not ready for bed, so adrenaline and cortisol goes up. And it takes longer and it's harder for you to get into that deep slow-o sleep.

So, yeah, consistency. I've, you know, I've struggled with it, but I'm, absolutely I'm starting to do it now. And one of the things I do is I stop my revenge bedtime procrastination, which is trying to, you know, staff at night watching Netflix or reading something really interesting by putting an automatic timer on my, on my modem that just goes off automatically at 9.30 every night. And so I put my modem way away in a cupboard up high.

And so once it turns off for me to get off the couch or get up and go and turn the motor back on. I've actually got to, I've got to get to pull the chair, I've got to, you know, climb up into the cupboard. And what I've done, I've actually created space between my impulse and action. So when my adult brain isn't working, I've kind of built in a mechanism. So by the time I get up, I go, you know what, stop being naughty, go to bed, go to sleep. And so I've kind of hacked my brain. So the technology does my adult brain for me. Nadia, if you want to just explain the mechanisms by which sleep kind of impact psych safety and we've kind of done that, but just how do these two studies kind of link together? And what is the

advice that you'd give executives who are thinking about how sleep is impacting work performance and just the environment generally? Yeah. So I think when we look to the results of the first study where we saw, you know, lack of quality sleep was impacting executive functions. And then in our second study, sleep was impacting how psychologically safe our subordinates or the leader's subordinates were feeling. Sleep on executive functioning could essentially be a mechanism by which we're also seeing this decrease in subordinates psych safety. And a potential reason for that is when we think about what mental control is or inhibitory

control, it's essentially our ability to be able to control our attention, our emotions, and our behaviours. So if you imagine it as, you know, the little voice inside our head when we're reaching for that fourth donut and it's saying, please, resist, resist. Or it's the voice that's sort of, you know, the voice of reason that, you know, is trying to stop us snapping at someone if we're feeling frustrated or maybe us showing impatience or anger when we're, you know, under-recovered. So you can imagine in the case where there might be a leader who's underslept. And, them meeting with their direct reports, perhaps they are showing their impatience, perhaps they're a little bit less tolerant, or maybe they're not making the usual banter or jokes or lightheartedness

that they normally would when they are over recovered, all because potentially their mental control or their inhibitory control isn't firing as it normally is. As subordinates, anyone's been in the experience where you're picking up these things potentially from someone in a position of power and no one wants to poke the bear and especially if that's your, you know, commander in chief. So that could be reasons why these subordinates are drawing back and maybe they're not taking that meeting as an opportunity to say, hey, I stuff something up or, you know, I need, I need more help, I need more support or even disagreeing with that leader. So I think a really important draw away from these results, particularly for leaders, or really.

anyone who's in a leadership position or anyone who's working within a team, whether it's a teacher or a coach or a team leader or a chief, anyone who is interacting with other people and anyone who has the potential to influence somebody else's day, somebody else's performance needs to realize that recovery and individual health, it's not insular, it's not isolated just to that individual person, because once again, whether we're consciously aware of it or not, our energy levels, our moods, our attitudes, even our decision-making ability, so how cognitively flexible we are in the moment and the decisions we make, they can and they do have the ability to influence and impact those around us.

And so, you know, if a leader wants to be able to create an environment, that's psychologically safe, where people feel they can, you know, speak out and raise innovative ideas or, you know, ask for help if they need to. Leaders need to consider, well, whether I'm aware of it or not, my health and my recovery and how well I've slept can have a direct impact on those factors. And I think any one of us who is interacting with somebody else, our aim should always be, as Amy Edmondson pointed out to, speaking compassionately and honestly and to have trust in those around us that when we bring our vulnerabilities and we ask for help or, you know, it's very vulnerable also to say, I've stuffed up. And the way the people around us respond to

that can really be a moment of learning. So I think, you know, if we go into the world with the aim of creating environments that are for learning and are for innovation. If we want to be able to cultivate those, I think it really starts the night before. Or if we think about the sleep debt algorithm, a few nights before, you know, exactly. So, you know, what you bring to the table the next day and what essentially you're bringing out of those people around you really starts at home. As Gemma said, you know, in order to lead others, you first have to lead yourself. I love that we have a metric that people can focus on and, you know, knowing that if they're meeting their sleep need, they're keeping sleep debt at bay, you know,

they are going to be positioned to contribute to psychological safety and in a super meaningful way. And I think that is contributing to society in an incredibly positive way. So just thank you to you both for all the innovative work, being ambitious and creative and really trying to find ways to create these links so we can help folks understand how behaviors impact their physiology and then impact their psychology and then impact environments. I think this is, it's really groundbreaking. Yeah, no, thank you. And thank you for, you know, being so generous with your technologies and the innovations within that technology that enables us to really conduct this research and access these types of populations. Yeah, well done, guys. Well done, Nadia.

Well done, Kristen. It was being a great project. If you enjoyed this episode of the WOOP podcast, please leave us a rating or review. It's a great way to share your feedback. Check us out on social at Woop at Will Ahmed. You can also now email the WOOP podcast, podcast at Woop.com, or you can call our new listener line. That's right. And leave a question or comment. comment. And your question may very well be answered on the next episode. That call line is 508 443-4952. That's 508-443-49-2. And then lastly, you can get 15% off a WOOP membership if you use the code will. All right, that's all we got for you this week, folks. We will see you next week.

Thank you.