WHOOP Podcast - How to train your brain: Neurophysiologist Louisa Nicola details how exercise, sleep, and nutrition help our brains perform

Episode Date: June 15, 2022

Neurophysiologist Louisa Nicola joins the WHOOP Podcast to detail the intersection between brain health, physiology, and peak performance. Louisa sits down with WHOOP VP of Performance Kristen Holmes to explain the role sleep, nutrition, and exercise play in growing our brains, how the brain ages, and the steps we can take to keep our brains young. Louisa discusses training your brain (5:54), exercise and brain aging (12:28), brain health and resistance training (18:19), nutrition (20:57), hydration (25:34), sleep deprivation and the role it plays in immunity and injuries (32:05), measuring inflammation and stress with HRV (37:13), and how alcohol affects the brain (43:17). 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. We sit down with top athletes, researchers, sciences, and more to learn what the best in the world are doing to perform at their peak and what you can do to unlock your own best performance. I'm your host Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of WOOP. First, a reminder, you can use the code Will to get 15% off a WOOP membership. Okay, this week's episode, all about training your brain and led by, of course, Christ, Holmes, who sits down with neuroscientist Louisa Nicola for an in-depth discussion on peak performance, brain health, athletics, and longevity.

Louisa was a triathlete who represented Australia at the World Championships, but found her way to neuroscience after being hit by a car while she was training on a bike ride. She discovered the mind-body connection as part of her rehab, which led her to founding her company Nero Athletics a few years later. She's since gone on to work with some of the best athletes across baseball, basketball, and more to ensure their mental game is just as strong as their physical game. Kristen and Louisa discussed the intersection between brain health, physiology, and peak performance, the role sleep, nutrition, and exercise play in growing our brains, how the brain ages and the steps we can take to keep our brains young,

how sleep deprivation leads to a higher risk of injuries and a weakened immune system, and how staying on top of your hydration is one of the best ways to stay on top of your game. A quick reminder, we have new ways to interact with the Whoop Podcast. You can email us, podcast at Whoop.com, or you can call our new listener line and leave a question or comment, and it might be answered on a future episode. That's 508-443-49-5-2. We are taking questions now on nutrition for next week's episode. Okay, without further ado, here are Kristen and Louisa Nicola.

Louisa, welcome. Oh, Kristen, I'm so excited to be here, finally. I know, I'm so grateful for the opportunity to chat with you about all of your good work. I really think the work that you've done over the last decade is truly groundbreaking on a lot of levels. You've built this incredibly elegant and highly actionable framework that is helping top performers across the globe improve their brain health and performance levels. So, you know, perhaps to start, I'd love for you to share with our listeners, like, you know, what made you so passionate about pursuing this work? And to be clear, the work that you do is really hard. You've had to really think about this from

the ground up. You know, I'd love to hear kind of how you get started. It's been a crazy, I would say a crazy adventure. I started off, I'm Australian. I live in New York City now, but I started off as a triathlete. So if anybody knows triathlon, I'm sure we all do. It's a It's an endurance sport of three sports, so it's very demanding. And you are a two-time world champion. Well, look, I came 13th, so I wouldn't call it a world champion. But it was a look, and so it was very hard to do. But I did, and I was in love with triathlon.

Everything that I think I am today, it's because of that endurance sport. So in 2012, I suffered an accident. I was hit by a car when I was traveling on my bike. and it was it was very traumatic i broke a few bones my beautiful bike snapped in half and you know it was like the end of an error it was like how am i ever going to perform again and you know i was going through a very hard time and it took me around six months to get back on the bike after surgery and i met this guy he came to do a training camp in australia and it was usane bolts running coach and he was doing a run camp for um the australian national

team. And I remember him saying to me, he said, Louisa, this was 2012. He said, actually it was 2011. He said, Louisa, he said, the only way that you're going to get back on the bike is if you train your brain. And I said, what do you mean by that? He said, I'm going to hook you up to this machine and I'm going to show you how powerful your brain is. So he took me into this room and he hooked me up to this machine. I had no idea what it was, but I had electrodes coming. I put this cap on. I had electrodes coming out of my head. And he took me through a triathlon mentally, okay? And it was a two-hour event.

And we saw on the reading that my brain mimicked exactly what it would and my heart rate exactly what it would when I actually do a triathlon. And I thought, wow, I haven't moved. Why does my body respond that way? He said, because it's the signals from your brain. And I was in love. I saw my first EEG scan and I absolutely fell in love. And that's what it was, an electroencephalogram.

So I went on to study medicine with a major in neurophysiology. Had you already started your education at this point? So you must have been through your undergrad and your graduate work. Yeah, I finished my undergrad and my master's. And so that's when I went back and studied medicine. And, you know, it's interesting. I think it was a blessing in disguise because if I was still, if I never got hit and I was still pursuing the goal of being world number one triathlet,

I probably wouldn't have pursued medicine in any way. you know, without really understanding and training the brain, we can actually reach peak performance. So maybe just walk us through kind of your thesis, you know, because I think both of us interact with a lot of high performers, professional athletes, and they focus a lot, as they should, on their specific craft, you know, and if we think about this from the standpoint of not just professional athletes, but, you know, surgical teams and surgeons and, you know, special operations, you know, they're all about practicing the craft. Why do we need to train the brain. So it's a very interesting question. You know, back in 2012, we never heard of

the brain. It was all about sports psychology. And sports psychology back then was dictating how well do you manage pressure or how well can you keep yourself calm in a stressful environment. And when I was understanding, I thought, okay, that's great. But that's very much the mind. Okay. But in my perspective, and there's a lot of neuroscientists who, who, it's a controversial topic. Is it the mind? Is it the brain? Is it just one? And I was always, you know, dictating the thesis that it's brain first. And if you can work on the hardware, which is the brain, then that will guide the software. And I thought about things such as, well, if somebody's very stressed, what does that mean? And obviously, when you go through and you study medicine,

you learn about cell biology, you learn about inflammation. You learn about what inflammation does. And you look it, you know, various inflammatory biomarkers and you think, what does this do? You learn about what it does to the nervous system and how, you know, if this exasperates the nervous system, it can end up leading into certain diseases or it can lead into just anything, maybe chronic headaches. So I was looking at it from a hardware perspective. I was thinking, wow, we have this brain and through the food that we eat, through the way we sleep, the way we exercise, we can either grow a better brain, a better performing brain, or we can, you know, decrease it. And so that's when I thought, oh, we have to, we have to learn about training the brain. So I started my

company in 2014, which is literally the intersection of neuroscience and athletic performance, which is neuroathletics. And we look at three domains of peak performance, we would say. It's the nutritional domain. And that's where we look at, well, what are you eating? What are you ingesting? How much are you drinking in terms of water and hydration? We look at the neurophysiology domain, which is, that's where sleep comes into play. And then we look at the exercise domain. And I really want to dig in that with you later on because the way you exercise, the way you train dictates how well your brain is performing. Sometimes in elite sport, when the margin of error is very thin, people turn too physical.

how can I sprint or how can I get off the mark, you know, that 0.0 second faster or how can I improve my shooting accuracy? Do I just keep shooting the nets? And sometimes it turns out that you can only go so far when it comes to your physical limits. This is why we're not running the 100 metre dash in three seconds. There's only so fast that you can go. If we can get your brain and your neural networks firing that bit faster, then that may be the difference between you jumping into the water that point second faster. So the margin of error is very fine, but when it comes to training your brain to respond to a stimulus, that can really mean the difference between you becoming first or you becoming fifth. So it's improving the communication between those cells essentially, those networks. Absolutely, yeah. And you have found some very clear protocols that help make those connections fire more quickly or be able to respond to stimulus in a more effective, efficient manner. Yeah, that's correct.

Getting at the margins that you're talking about. What about the layperson? And I can imagine that if we're talking about, you know, these practices and protocols related to brain functioning, brain health, and using that as a vehicle peak performance, I can imagine the margins or the opportunities for the rest of us could be actually astronomical or life-changing. We're not talking about 0.03 seconds here.

We're, you know, talking about potentially huge life changes. So maybe just talk, you know, what is the opportunity for the rest of us? Well, let's take a step back. Okay, so I've actually outlined for people watching on YouTube or just listening in, I've actually outlined a talk that I did. It's all about how the brain ages. Everybody listening has a brain. So this is actually for everybody.

And so when you look at the, we've got these theories of aging, okay? Theories of the brain aging process. And there's around 12 theories of how our brain ages. And there's three that really stand. out to me. And I'm going to talk to you about those. So the first one is theory one states that we have white matter changes. So as we age. So let's just do, let's do a little, a quick recap of neuroscience. So we have white matter and we have gray matter. Now white matter, brain tissue, it's a type of brain tissue that houses all of our myelinated neurons. Okay. So this theory suggests

that white matter changes as we get older, okay? We get these white matter lesions, and that's just, that's just due to brain aging. So let's just keep that. Let's go to theory number two. Theory number two states that we have a dysregulation of dopamine receptors in the frontal lobe. So dopamine is a, we hear about this often from wonderful Andrew Huberman, but it's a molecule and it's a neurotransmitter, a chemical that's released in response. to a goal. So it's also the motivation molecule. The theory number two states that as we get older,

we have less motivation. We have less dopamine receptors in the frontal part of our brain. And that's scary because, you know, whenever I tell my mother, who is 65, I say, mom, you need to go out and exercise. She's like, I'm just lacking motivation. And that's completely normal. So as we get older, we have less motivation and drive. The third theory that stands out to me is that we have cognitive decline just due to neurodegeneration. So everybody right now, over the age of 25, we're getting further towards cognitive decline just as a natural brain aging process.

So we know that. So what can we do to help us maybe push pause or maybe, I would say, reverse this cognitive decline? We can do many things, and they go into the three domains. They go into the nutritional domain, the exercise domain and the neurophysiology and sleep domain. Let's talk about exercise for a moment here because this is a work podcast and I know that there's so many people listening that are athletes.

So if you're thinking, well, how does exercise play a role in the brain aging process? Well, it turns out, Kristen, that both resistance training and aerobic exercise have a massive role in how well your brain ages and how well your brain functions. So, and I'm sure you've touched on this a lot, but I think it's really important for your listeners to understand that there is, you know, back in 1999, this is when the very first scientific study came out that showed the correlation between aerobic activity and the brain. So in 1999, the first study that was done was on mouse and it was done on a daily aerobic activity. And they found that mice who performed daily.

aerobic activity grew twice as many neurons in the hippocampus. So it was 1999, Kristen, that we first realized, wow, there is a relationship between the brain and training. Now, you realize I said, grow new neurons in the hippocampus. That's called neurogenesis, and that's the formation of new neurons. Neurons are brain cells. But it's important to note that this was done in mice. It's not done in humans. So 1990, and we knew that it was, we could grow new neurons in mice. We didn't know if it could be done in humans. Fast forward to 2017.

There was a study that concluded that engaging in daily aerobic physical activity starved off Alzheimer's disease by 20 years. Whoa. That was huge. Okay, so we're on to something. Then in 2019, one of my favorite studies, it was a systematic review. So it was Harold Etal. he pulled together all of the studies that were done on physical activity and the brain.

And he had a focus on resistance training. And he found that, wow, resistance training does more for the brain than aerobic training. He found that resistance training releases various myokines. Myokines are muscle-based proteins and various hormones that act on the brain and that can grow the brain structurally and functionally. and that was huge. And then I'm just going to point out one more study in 2021. I'd be remiss if I didn't conclude with this one

because they took a group of mild cognitive impairment patients. Now, MCI is a pre-dement state. They took these patients and they put them through resistance training for six months. And what they found was that they grew new connections in the hippocampal subregions. So what do we have here? Well, we know that there's a difference between aerobic physical activity,

which is your long endurance bouts of exercise, and then there's resistance training, which is lifting heavy at the gym. And I think the way to go when it comes to brain aging is resistance training. There are just so many more benefits to the brain when it comes to growing it and performing at your peak than with aerobic activity. Surely both have their place.

sort of variety over the course of a week is probably optimal. But if we don't engage in resistance training, we're really, we're basically in a position where we're just allowing this neurogenitor process to kind of happen on a timescale of its own, as opposed to being able to dictate that time scale with intentional type of resistance training. Absolutely. And just to just to be clear, if your listeners are thinking, well, Louise, what's the difference between aerobic physical activity and resistance training. Well, when we engage in long, you know, endurance events, for example, we release this thing called BDNF.

You know, the 2000s was all about BDNF. Brain-derived neurotrophic factor. It's a growth factor in the brain. And that was great. But when we do resistance training, we release these myokines, as I mentioned earlier. It's a muscle-based protein, so it's released from the muscle. and they act on metabolic and endocrine pathways. Now, if they act on this,

that means they have a direct and an indirect on cognitive performance. So one of them, one of these myokines is insulin growth-like factor 1, IGF1. What we know is that if you go and do, let's just say, bench press or a squat at 70% of your one repetition max, you're going to get a massive influx of IGF1.

and IGF1 acts on the brain and the cognitive functions. There is another wonderful, wonderful hormone that is released during exercise. And it was founded in 2012 by a group of scientists. And it's called ERISON. ERISN is a muscle-based protein that when it's released, it crosses the blood-brain barrier. And so that was huge. That was a very big milestone in resistance training

and brain health. So it doesn't get released anything near as much when you're doing aerobic activity. And this helps with cognitive performance, such as accuracy, thinking, information processing, speed, memory. Gosh, that's absolutely incredible. So if you know and you can share, you know, what would be the ultimate protocol in terms of we're looking to maximize, optimize brain health, you know, how often should I be doing this resistance training? You know, how heavy is it 70% of my kind of one rep max? Like, what actually is the protocol? recall if we're really interested in a leopard's for brain health. It's that theory of more is better because it's like, well, if I'm releasing all of these myokines, then more is better. However,

we have to take so many other things into consideration. And if it is just for preserving brain health or staving off Alzheimer's disease, then you really want to be doing a minimum of three days per week of resistance training at 70% of your one repetition max. I say that. because what a lot of people are doing is maybe going in and lifting light weights. When it comes to specific, and that's, yeah, you really need to be pushing yourself. Yeah, so there's a bare minimum three days per week. So for folks who might not know what they're kind of one rep max is, there are some matrices on the website that folks can go into and basically just

calculate what your one rep max might be. but that's worth kind of testing and understanding, right? If we know that there are specific parameters, you know, that you have to reach in order to kind of get these benefits. Kind of want to look at it as if like once you reach rep six, that's kind of like the threshold. It's like you only want to be able to get to maybe six reps and then that's really heavy.

That's a safeguard to say that maybe you're working at the 70% range. Wow. Okay. So exercise. Anything else in the exercise domain that you want to cover? There still is a role for a road. physical activity and when it comes to things such as neurodegeneration and starving off these neurodegenerative diseases you i have a lot of my athletes i call patients and i call everybody an

athlete you know and we've got some 60s and 70 year olds i get them working in that zone 2 range as well which is great for a mitochondrial biogenesis and we know that the mitochondria is what gives us energy and when we look at the studies on centenarians those who live to 100 and more they have a greater capacity of mitochondria. So we still get people to be training at least two hours per week in that zone two range, which is very easy, very light, long endurance events. Love it. Yeah, we're actually digging into all of our zone two data on whoop just to see what we see.

So just kind of a retrospective analysis, like just seeing if there's any clear ties between prolonged zone two effort and HRV and resting heart rate and sleep market. texture, you know, just seeing what the impact is, because I think to your point, there seems to be a lot of evidence that it's, you know, one of those tenets of kind of successful aging and really increasing lifespan. So just trying to, but there isn't actually a ton of literature around it. So, yeah, so it would be interesting to see what we see, but it would be great to go a little bit deeper and understand the impact on the brain. Let's tap into nutrition. And, you know, maybe just an outline, you know, we're kind of talking about longevity, you know, peak performance, but just

health span as well. Give us a rundown of just how nutrition impacts these pathways and what are some very tactical things that we can do. What do you do with your patients and your athletes to help them understand what it is they need to be supplementing, how do I need to think about their nutrition if they're indeed interested in peak brain performance. I love this area because it's very elusive. we everybody is looking for that you know who do I trust do I trust the carnivore do I trust the vegans like who do I trust there's so many there's so many things out there so I want to preface this by saying that everything that we do at neuroathletics isn't opinion based nor is it we look at you from the outside and we think that this might be good for you and your goals no we practice

what I call genomics based medicine which is every single person that comes to us we do a full blood analysis. We understand what's happening in your body. But along with that, we also do genetic testing. So we go through and we look at your genes and the different snips. So we can see, for example, when it comes to a gene and these alleles, alleles, you know, you get one allel from mom, one from dad. And if, for example, somebody comes to us and they have the apo-e-forging, and they've just got one all-l, that predisposes them to Alzheimer's disease. Okay, more so than what's somebody who came to us and didn't have it. So then we'd have to modify their diet, their exercise, their sleep,

according to that genetic makeup. So everybody is different. So if you're listening to this and you're thinking, well, what does Louisa say when it comes to nutrition? I did want to preface this by saying that it's very individualized. Okay. And then we then take another step forward and say, well, if you are an NFL athlete, when it comes to the NFL,

They are predisposing themselves to concussions. They're getting hit in the head at various velocities. So I really want my job then is to safeguard that brain. So the brain is made up predominantly of fat and water. Have you heard of DHA? Yes. So omega-3 fatty acids, which usually come from fish, like sardines, mackerel, and salmon. Salmon, salmon.

Yeah, omega-3s are made up of EPA, DHA, and ALA. And when you look at the brain, the brain is really made up of D-H-A. So we want to be feeding our brain with these omega-3 fatty acids. And the best way to do that evidently is through the fish that we just mentioned. But with these NFL athletes, I'm looking at how can we not overdose per se, but really safeguard them and really protect their brain. And so I'm getting them to also supplement. Some of them are supplementing with two grams of EPA and two grams of DHA.

I'm currently supplementing with two grams of EPA and two grams of DHA every day. And this has an amazing effect on the brain. It also has an amazing effect on inflammation. We see a decrease in inflammatory biomarkers when we have it, when we have omega-3 fatty acids. So when it comes to an NFL, athlete as well, I've now been getting into, I'm now subscribing to exogenous ketones. And so I interviewed Dr. Dom Dacostino, who's doing a lot of research when it comes to

post-traumatic insults, like a TBI, and a ketogenic diet. And he's found that there is enormous benefits to athletes who are getting in a hit in the head to have a, to have a ketogenic diet and being full of, you know, utilizing their fuel, utilizing fat as fuel rather than glucose. And so I think that when it comes to, you know, the brain and the brain aging, we know that certain diets like the ketogenic diet is probably the best for the brain and cognitive performance. Would you call this kind of neuroprotective type of behaviors or kind of practices? Yeah, neuroprotective practices. And look, and then, you know, know, apart from the obvious, which is hydrating correctly, we also do sweat tests with

your athletics, you know, something that I realize that a lot of the athletes, they weren't really hydrating properly. And you think, well, how hard could that be to hydrate? Well, it turns out that there is a somewhat significant mathematical code because depending on how much you sweat, you need to really replenish that with electrolytes, electrolytes, sodium, potassium, magnesium, not just water. So, but if you're listening and you're just a, you know, you sit at a desk all day, you will still benefit by hydrating because just a mere, you know, 2% of dehydration can affect your cognitive performance. That's how well you're making decisions, how will you reacting to stimulus?

That's incredible. Do you want to talk a little bit about sodium in the brain? Because I think that's not well understood and it has obviously huge implications to your point on brain performance. We're going to be talking about electrolytes. And the brain, a very misunderstood thing as well because a lot of people think, well, why would I need to be taking electrolytes if I'm not sweating? And it's interesting because this comes back to understanding the brain. So our brain is made up of neurons, which are nerve cells. And these

cells are just like the cells in your body. But the only difference is they have these little legs. They're called dendrites. And these, that's the way, so the way that these dendrites, they synapse with each other. They form connections with each other, and that's how we produce thoughts and actions. That's how they communicate with each other. And they do this through this thing called a sodium potassium pump. What's sodium and potassium?

They're electrolytes. You know, when it comes to how well the brain is performing, it's like, well, how well are you hydrating? Electrolites conduct different nerve singles, which regulate a fluid balance in the brain. but when it comes to sodium particularly, sodium is very critical for the brain. A sodium deficit,

I've actually got some, I've got some links up right now because I've seen some wonderful studies done in athletes when sodium is deficient. A chronic sodium deficit can lead to subtle cognitive impairments such as the way that you might shoot a ball in the basket or the way that you may react when you're in a car a lot of traffic accidents and car accidents are formed by

reaction time so these fluids like calcium magnesium phosphorus these are all electrolytes that are needed for your brain to fire an action potential okay and for your brain to signal you know and to actually form these nerve signals but also when you look at the the disease process of mild cognitive impairment, or you look at Alzheimer's disease or different types of dementia, they have a deficiency in phosphorus. They have a deficiency in calcium. So we know that just because you aren't sweating, just because you aren't going out and running, you still need to be hydrating with these electrolytes for your brain to be functioning optimally. Now, is that miscommunication that's happening? Is it a function of absorption or

an imbalance of an electrolyte imbalance for these folks that you just mentioned who are experiencing this kind of neurogenitive disease or decline? You know, what exactly is the root cause? Well, it could be an imbalance, yes. But it also could just be, you know, I describe the brain as energy. Let's just say you wake up in the morning, okay? And imagine a glass full of water. Okay. Every time you take a sip of water, that is you've taken a sip of your brain to energy. Now, a sip is kind of like when you maybe get up and you go for a run. You've taken a sip of your brain energy because you've depleted some brain energy. Let's just say you get on the phone and you get on the computer and you reply to some emails.

That's another sip. You have a conversation. That's another sip of water. And by the end of the day, you're really at the bottom of the glass. So you have to keep during the day replenishing that glass or your brain won't be functioning at its peak. Got it. Okay. Wow. And then I just assume there's some sort of probably formula in terms of if we think about temperature and humidity levels and how much more water we need to actually be bringing on board. You know, there's probably a simple way, you know, if you're feeling thirsty, it's probably too late. I think I've heard that a lot as an athlete and, you know, competing in high, you know, really high temperatures. Is there anything else outside of that that you would recommend for just the normal person to just gauge hydration levels and whether or not they're getting enough to really optimize your brain function? You know, I always say as a bare minimum,

of having 2.5 liters per day. But again, it depends on as well, body mass index, how tall are you, how big are you, and how much energy are you exerting throughout the day. So for me, for example, I'm a three-liter person per day. I'm also having a sachet of its element L-M-N-T or element salts in my water. And now that it's moving into summer here in the United States, it's very crucial of that too. Talk briefly about what is that actually doing it's replenishing the lost sodium intellectualized so it's pretty much balancing out my system so even though i'm not a sweater i'm not that person who even if i'm doing an endurance of it in a triathlon i wasn't sweating like profusely like some people so just because i'm not sweating profusely

i'm still replenishing i'm still hydrating i'm still giving myself the electrical energy that they need let's dig into sleep yeah uh i know this is an area that is just near and dear to both of our hearts The connection between sleep and the brain is, I think, relatively well documented, but why don't you surface kind of some of the highlights there and how you think about it with your athletes and patients you treat? Let's talk about athletes, first and foremost. Sleep is obviously paramount. What we're seeing during the NBA playoffs, so I work with, you know, let's just say one of

the Miami Heat players. And during the playoffs, like he's just flying around, you know, two, three flights a week. and it really upsets me because his circadian rhythm is all off. And if you look at the injury, if you look at the injury report, isn't it funny that a lot of injuries occur during the playoffs? And we succumb to the conclusion that it's because they're under so much pressure and they're training and they're doing so many games. It's like, but no one's looking at the, why, what's the link between sleep and injury?

And that's a really crucial thing. So sleep is this beautiful process that we're all missing out on, because we're either not sleeping enough or we're either not sleeping well. So I'm going to talk about some key relationships that all athletes, and when I say athletes, guys, I'm talking about everyone, anyone who exercise, everyone is an athlete, okay? So I've got some data pulled up on my screen. So let's first touch on the relationship between sleep and endurance events.

So with respect to endurance events, a lot of the research, the most profound research shows that sleep deprivation inhibits performance through an increase in perceived exertion. So if you are sleep deprived, they did this study, it was 11 male subjects and they completed 30 minutes of self-paced treadmill testing. And they found that they deprived them of sleep for 30 hours before doing these exercise protocols. And they discovered that there was a decrease in efficacy to push harder. They also found after sleep deprivation, there was no differences in thermoregulatory function or oxygen consumption, but these people just could not push far enough. So if you are sleep deprived, even by one hour, okay, sleep deprivation is different

for everybody, but if you are, if you, as an individual, you are sleep deprived and you want to go and do an endurance event or even train, you're not going to be able to push as far as what your body can do. Your mind is just going to be giving up on you. So that's the relationship between sleep and endurance. Then there was a wonderful study done during the playoff of sleep and accuracy, shooting accuracy in NBA players. And I love this study because it showed that the players who are sleep-deprients,

had less accuracy when doing jump shots or free throws into the ball. So that's also a huge issue. We're messing up our cognitive functions when it comes to sleep and performance. This specific study on NBA athletes, they showed an impairment accuracy of free throws. And they also did dart throwing. So dart throwing accuracy was found to decrease significantly after just one night of sleep for five hours. So it was actually a decrease in 53%. That's massive. So now let's talk about immunity. So there was a wonderful study that was done in PNAS. And it's a wonderful journal. And they took

a group of healthy individuals and they deprived them of sleep for just six hours. Now, I live in New York City. When you look at Wall Street, the regular person is probably telling you, I sleep six hours a night. And that's like you're you're accelerating yourself to death. And here's why. We have around 20,000 genes in the human genome. What they found was in this study, they took the group who had slept six hours a night for one week. Okay. They found that they had a change, an epigenetic change of three percent. That means that out of their human genome, if you do the math now, let's try and do the math, you've changed around 750 genes. Okay, that's a, that's an epigenetic change of 3% when we look at genes of 20,000. They looked at these, let's just say 750 genes. What did

they change about these genes? Well, they showed that with this sleep deprivation of one week, of six hours a night of sleep, they showed that they upregulated the genes responsible for tumor growth. Oh my goodness. And they downregulated. the genes responsible for immunity. This is why we get sick when we are tired and stressed. So if you are sleeping six hours per night, you are not just doing a detriment to yourself in your cognitive abilities,

such as your thinking, your information processing speed, how you feel, your emotions. You're also accelerating your way to death, literally. And we have, this is not an observational study. This was a human, randomized controlled study. And we now have evidence to show that we change ourselves epigenetically. I just put up a post on Instagram yesterday saying that, for example, Alzheimer's disease,

95% of patients with Alzheimer's disease now in 2022 have the non-genetic form, meaning that they won't predisposed to Alzheimer's disease due to their genetic makeup. No, they got themselves there through diet, through lack of sleep. So that's what epigenetics is. you are changing your genetic makeup by sleep deprivation. That should be mind-blowing to everybody. Yeah, that's incredible. And how do you, you know, in your practice, you know, how are you leveraging, you know,

tools like WOOP to kind of help people think about their sleep and how do you think about HRV and what, you know, we know it's especially a proxy for inflammation and you've mentioned that several times as being one of the most important things like, you know, when we have inflammation, we just can't think, we can't perform. Our brain doesn't function as well. So, yeah, just curious kind of how you use the platform with. your with your athletes. Inflammation and stress, we're seeing this more and more come up in the scientific literature as being the holy grail of what exasperates different diseases. Okay, so inflammation

when it's sleep too. Oh, it impacts sleep. You know, like there's a relationship potentially bi-directional between inflammation and sleep and sleep and information. Oh, absolutely. So we have all of our athletes using a whoop and I track a lot of this on the back end and every week we get the whoop report and we look through it. And what I'm looking at, here's the thing, I'm not looking at every single day. What's your hate? I'm looking at trends because I want to see how well is the neuroathletics protocol impacting you and what are the trends? What did you look like in last month? What were the trends in your sleep performance? And what are the trends in your HRV and your balance? So when we look at this and we're, if we are on the road to optimization and longevity,

I'm really looking, I do look at HRV. And the wonderful thing about whoop is you don't just have the metrics you now have your own personalized coach that can tell you hey hey louisa today your your hrv this is actually true um i've got allergies right now and i've traveled from new york to la and my word picked up on it it's like hey louisa you should just take it easy today because your hrv is 120 and my hrv is like usually 180 so it tells you so then i know okay if my hrv if i've got a low hrv then i'm going to have a low performance. That's how I say to my athletes.

I'm like, if you've got a low HIV, don't go out and do a hard run because you're just going to be increasing the amount of stress that's placed on your body, increasing the amount of inflammation. You're going to have a bad sleep that night. Because if you're really stressed that day, it's going to be really hard to wind down at night.

It's going to be real hard to get into deep sleep and get into REM sleep and slow wave sleep. So you're going to do yourself a detriment. So I listen to what it says to me. I listen to my personalized coach because it's very much based on biometrics and biofeedback. And you can in turn listen to your body and give it what it needs. How hard is it to convince people to spend extra time in bed? I mean, I find that even now that there's way more education and there's way more evidence to support the connections between performance and sleep and sleep and longevity and health span.

and disease prevention, but yet people still really struggle. What kind of solutions do you offer people to really get them committed and to prioritizing sleep? I always say that the way out of everything is education. I think when people have education, okay, when you have education, you know, you then become motivated and excited to do something. But one thing that I've been really honing in on is your overall sleep. sleep environment and it's the hub in which you sleep in. So how do we optimize our sleep environment? Well, we want to be, we want to get our athletes sleeping in a very cold, dark room. I say very

cold. And that's because in order to fall asleep and stay asleep, our core body temperature needs to drop at least two degrees. So how do we do this? Well, if you are a hot sleeper, If you just naturally, you know, if you have a lot of body heat during the night, you might want to invest in a temperature-controlled mattress and work on thermal regulation. So that's one thing that we do. Another thing is having a completely blackout dark room. When you look at, you know, sometimes more often than not, the reason why REM sleep is low or the reason why slow wave sleep may be low as well,

it's not so much the quality of sleep. it is a quality of sleep, but sometimes it's total sleep time. It's how long you are just spending a sleep. And so if we want to increase this and I want to get my athletes to do this, I literally say get to bed at 10 p.m. every night. That's when lights up.

10 p.m. is lights out at neuroathletics. And if you can stay asleep or just stay in bed until 6 a.m., you've gotten yourself an eight-hour sleep there. So you've gotten yourself a head start. So I try and make the, the room as inviting and exciting as possible. For sleep.

For sleep. Well, yeah. Yeah, and sex. Those are the two things that you can be doing in a bedroom other than that. Cold, dark, quiet room. I love that. Is there any practices during the day that you invite your athletes to take on that will help their sleep at night?

Well, practices such as minimizing exposure to light past 8 p.m. We know that. But also. Great. It's incredible to see the thermal effect of food for, you know, I always say if you're going to sleep at 10, make sure your last meal ends at 7.30 so you have time to digest. You know, we have this thermal effect of food, you know, because we have to dehydrate, we're going to release of cortisol when we eat.

So, you know, we're already getting a bit hot and we're up and we're awake. So you want to be able to calm down the nervous system before you're going to sleep. Other methods are, I always say if you're going to be stressed, get all the stress, get all the bothers out of your head onto paper before 5 p.m. And we go through so much in our society now, through Instagram, through Facebook, through emails. So much happens in our head. And we need a place to store that.

And so instead of storing that in the brain, so you fester over it during sleep, store it in a journal and put it there and then close the journal up. So there are certain practices. And also I always say, you know, I don't promote day drinking. Kristen Holmes, I don't promote day drinking. I also don't promote night drinking.

However, just like caffeine, okay? Caffeine, you know, there's a half-life with caffeine. Always say don't have caffeine past 12 p.m. But alcohol has a half-life too. And one of the biggest disturbances to sleep and these sleep stages is alcohol. And the ingredient in alcohol, ethanol, really goes in and blunts REM sleep, rapid eye movement sleep. So if you are choosing to drink, just remember, even if it is 7 p.m., it's still going to disrupt your sleep.

So, you know, maybe having it at around 1 p.m. if you really need that glass of wine. Alcohol doesn't just impact that night's sleep. You end up with a REM rebound effect, the next sleep. So your architecture is further kind of compromised. We don't know a lot about REM rebound and how the body is compensating and what that compensatory effect actually has on the system and the brain. but I think that that to me is also concerning that we know that the subsequent nights of your sleep are also compromised and that you're pulled out of what is an optimized sleep architecture.

I know folks don't like to hear that drinking is bad, but I think all the evidence points in the direction that drinking is unfortunately really tough on our brains and our bodies. I know we're at a time here and this has been a really fascinating discussion and I think a lot of really important takeaways. I love how you just very simply outlined, you know, how we can use exercise to enhance our brain performance and what you're doing with your athletes, how we can leverage nutrition, how we can think about our sleep. I think that's a, you know, it's a very simple, very clear framework. I think some really some very clear behaviors folks can grasp onto and build into their own, into their own life. I think, too, how you're using a technology and your

environment to kind of help your athletes manage and track these variables. And I think improve the conversation between you and the athletes that you're working with. I love that. It's effective in that way because that's certainly the way that we built it is to be able to foster conversations, you know, between the experts and the individuals who are seeking to optimize performance. So just love all the work that you're doing, Louisa, and thanks for sharing all of your expertise and wisdom today. Kristen, thank you so much for having me on the Whoop podcast. I absolutely love you guys. I've been a fan of whoop for five years now when I first got my hands on that warp strap. And I love it. I'm excited to see the research that you guys are going to be doing,

and I'm excited to connect with you further. I love it. Where can folks find you, Lisa? I know you're really active on a lot of different channels and love the stuff that you put out. I mean, it is just incredible the way you are able to make, I think, complicated science, very consumable, digesterable, you're one of the best public educators of science out there and just where can people, yeah, follow you. If you go to my Instagram, which is my name, Louisa Nicola, underscore at the end, on Instagram, I have a link in my bio that takes you to all of our things. If people want to learn more, we have a very active weekly newsletter that deconstructs these scientific and medical practices that you need to perform at your peak. So I would say, listening to that,

we have a neuro experience podcast as well where we literally outline it's like a neuroscience university so you can find all of those on my Instagram thank you to Kristen and louisa nicola for coming on the whoop podcast if you enjoyed this episode please leave us a rating or review subscribe to the whoop podcast you can check us out on social at whoop at will Ahmed and you can now email the whoop podcast that's podcast at woup dot com or you can call our new listener line and leave a question or comment, and it will be addressed on a future episode. That line is 508-443-49-2. That's 508-443-49-2.

And then lastly, 15% off, a whoop membership, use the code will. All right, that's it for this week, folks. We'll be back next week. Thank you.