WHOOP Podcast - Sleep and Stress: The Latest Study Powered by WHOOP

Episode Date: April 17, 2024

On this week’s episode WHOOP Global Head of Human Performance, Principal Scientist Kristen Holmes is joined by WHOOP SVP, Research Algorithms, and Data Emily Capodilupo. The pair is here to talk about the link between sleep, stress, and blood pressure. Kristen and Emily will be talking about an upcoming study conducted by our team here at WHOOP, that you our listeners and members can be a part of. Kristen and Emily discuss an overview of the study (1:50), why we are conducting this study (4:32), the protocols of the study (12:14), the power of big data collections (22:34), breaking down stress (26:35), how anxiety impacts sleep (32:27), how we perceive stress (39:55), and understanding sleep patterns (49:16).Resources:Harvard Health: Stress ResponseWhat Happens to the Body During StressEmail Research StudyNavy Seal Box BreathingDr. Rangan Chatterjee: Breathing TechniquesSupport 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 Whoop podcast or sit down with the best of the best, help you unlock your best performance. I'm your host Will Amette, founder and CEO of Whoop. Good news. Our spring sale is happening right now. You can get 10% off your WOOP membership by signing up today. That's at Woop.com. Okay, this week's episode, Woop Global, Head of,

of human performance, principal scientist, Kristen Holmes, is joined by WOOPSVP Research Algorithms and Data, Emily Capital Lupo. The dynamic duo is here to talk about the link between sleep, stress, and blood pressure. Kristen and Emily will be talking on an upcoming study conducted by our team here at Woop that you, our listeners and members, can be a part of. Our study will be looking at people's stress data through the night with blood pressure as the primary data collection touchpoint. You must be a WOOP member to participate, but the great news is that you can join WOOP now with a 30-day free trial and participate right away.

Never been a better time to join Woop. That's a free trial also at Woop.com. Kristen and Emily discuss an overview of why we are conducting the study, the participation protocols, the benefits of a larger and more diverse data set through the use of virtual Woop Labs, how stress and sleep are linked, how we perceive stress, and how this study will help people better understand how they sleep. If you have a question was answered on the podcast, email us, podcast at WOOP.com. Call us 508-443-4952. All right, here are Kristen Holmes and Emily Capital Lupo. Hi, everyone.

I'm so excited to be back here on the Woop Podcast. My name is Kristen Holmes. I am the global head of humor performance, principal scientist here at Woop. We are launching a sleep, stress, and blood pressure study where we are looking at people's stress data through the night with blood pressure as the primary data collection endpoint. This is really a call to action as we need to recruit thousands of people and data science and performance science need your health. Our esteemed SVP of research algorithms and data, Emily Caprolupo and I are going to get

into all the fun details around how you can be a citizen scientist and particularly, potentially advance our understanding of how sleep, stress, and blood pressure are connected. Emily, say a quick hello. Hey, Kristen. Thanks so much for doing this. Oh, I'm so pumped. So recruited participants will be asked to take three readings over the course of a 15 to 30-day window. At the completion of the study, participants will be eligible to receive a personalized report on their sleep and stress data, a free accessories item, and will be entered into a raffle.

to win several prizes, including personalized insights based on our findings. You must be a WOOP member to participate, but the great news is that you can join WOOP now and participate right away. So there has literally never been a better time to join Woop to get bonus insights into your sleep and stress or just simply to get started on your health and performance journey. So the main point of the pod today is, you know, M and I really want to educate everyone on why we are doing this study and how folks can participate. We also want to acknowledge an important moment in that we are launching digital loop labs. The digital research experience enables members to be co-builders of new and emerging features and be citizen scientists contributing to important

scientific research, as well as pushing forward research across multiple health fields. Continuous and novel data streams allow us to improve our algorithms. This is the first of work that Emily's a sensational team does, as well as our coaching abilities, which is a lot of what my team is involved in, and prove out and improve whoops overall effectiveness at creating lasting positive change in people's lives, which, of course, is at the very core of our mission. Emily, super pumped to talk to you about this study and just talk about global impact of stress and sleep and their interconnectedness. But before we kind of get into those details, tell folks why we're doing this study.

Yeah, so a couple of reasons. First off, among other things, the NIH, the National Institute of Health, declared April National Stress Awareness Month. In addition to this being a particularly good time to be thinking about stress, stress is something that Whoop thinks about all the time. The World Health Organization declared stress the epidemic of the 21st century. It's one of those things that we've gotten inappropriately complacent with. Like it's so casual to be like, oh, I'm stressed or like this is stressful, like to the point

where I don't think enough people really understand what stress is, why it's important. But we keep looking at stress in our woop data and it keeps coming up. as such a significant factor and such a poorly understood one, you know, people ask us about how to improve sleep. Well, sleep impacts stress and is impacted by stress. And, you know, people ask us how to improve their workouts. Well, if your mental health and stress is such an important part of that is not in check, it's just hard to make progress and unlock performance, our core mission, if your mental health is in the way. And so in, honor of National Stress Awareness Month, but also in honor of all of our members who ask us

about this all the time, we set out to do this initiative and really understand that bi-directional relationship between sleep and stress, leveraging so many things that WOOP does really well from our stress monitoring feature to all of our sleep functionality. And to tie that into a couple of different research questions that my team and your team have been batting around. And so to get, you know, enrich that data with this intentional additional data collection, as well as to add an objective marker of stress. So in this case, we're leveraging blood pressure, which is known to be, you know, an objective marker of stress. And then, of course, we're also including subjective information, so how you feel about stress. We're going to tie

this all together in order to do some really novel. and hopefully groundbreaking research on the subject, as well as to give the Woot members who participate direct individual insight into their stress because it's World Stress Month. So for any Woot member who participates, they will get a personal report looking at their stress and sleep and how those things are related. So you'll get information just about you, as well as, of course, the information that we learn broadly across the population. So two unique opportunities to learn, everybody will get to see the population analysis, but for those members who participate, every single U.S.-based

Woot member over the age of 18 is eligible to participate, that's going to give us an opportunity to really help you understand your stress in a very personalized way. That's the motivation for the study why we're doing it now, you know, the more you understand your triggers to stress, the better you understand stress broadly, the more you're going to be able to take action and reduce the stress in your life. Because one of the things that, you know, in looking at the whoop data and doing research on the subject that keeps coming up for me is stress in our society is out of control right now. But there's a lot that's in our control to bring it into control, right? So it's something we're actually not at all powerless to handle,

but there's so many new and sneaky ways that stress has increased in our lives, and we do need to be intentional about reducing it. So my goal with this study is that we're going to help people understand their own reactions to stress, how stress shows up in their body. I want people to take away an appreciation for how much stress they've normalized. and stop being okay with that, and then learn a couple of tips and tricks to reduce stress in their life. I love that. It's a beautiful overview, Emily. And I'm excited to dig in a little bit deeper to some of these aspects of stress and some of the interventions that we know are helpful in proactively managing stress. I think to your point, it's, I think, the recognition of when

stress is adaptive, you know, when we're kind of perceiving stress as really challenging. And I think, our hypothesis going into this study is that when we've received stresses as challenging versus threatening, it probably has a, you know, we might not see it manifest in a negative way in our sleep, for example, you know, in markers of recovery and things, in blood pressure. And so we're excited to see, have some of these subjective questions running alongside so we can kind of contextualize our objective data. So excited to dig a little bit more into that, but That was a beautiful explanation on just kind of what stress is and why it's a problem in our society and what we're hoping to learn. Yeah.

And can I just add to it? We're very excited about this study. I hope you are too as you listen to it. Two important things to take away. One, if you're listening to this and you're not a WOOP member, but you are otherwise eligible in that you're based in the U.S. and above 18 years old, you can join a WOOP right now for a 30-day free trial. and start the study on night one. So while we're saying that this study is exclusive to Woot Members, this can be the very first thing you do as a Woot Member.

So anybody who really wants to join and deeply understand stress in their body, don't stop listening and say, oh, this is just for members. Great time to become a Wootenberg. And then the other thing is, you know, we keep talking about like, oh, you have to participate in this study. I really want to highlight the total actual actual. participation time in the study is under an hour. It's really easy to take these three readings, you have three different times over the course of 15 days, and you will unlock really, really

valuable insights. I participated in an earlier internal version of the study. It was really easy, and I learned a lot of interesting things about my body. And we'll dig into that as we go through this podcast, but I'm very excited for the things that we're going to be able to bring to people. well, what's required of you to unlock these insights is really light. So must be 18 or older, U.S. base, a whoop member, blood pressure cuff. Yeah. So we are using blood pressure as an objective marker of stress. This has been well established in the literature, as well as, you know, in our own laboratory.

When we developed our stress monitor feature, we actually were using blood pressure data that we collected in our own physical lab here in Boston. And so in order to capture acute changes in stress as you go through this five-minute breathing exercise in the morning, we're going to use three blood pressure readings one minute apart. And so you need to have access to an FDA-approved blood pressure cuff in order to participate. We'll put links in the show notes to eligible blood pressure cuffs. Amazing. So why don't you go through the protocol? all. So what are people going to be doing exactly? Sure. When you sign up for the study, you're

signing up for three nighttime morning pairs of data collection each about a week apart. And so what it would look like is at night, you fill out a survey, answer a couple questions about what you've been doing, all very fast, takes three minutes to do this. Then you sleep wearing your whoop-strap. And so we do ask that you make sure that it's charged, at least, you know, charged enough going into this. And then in the morning when you wake up, about half an hour after you wake up, we ask you to answer a couple more questions about how you're feeling, both in terms of how you slept, how rested you're feeling as well as stress about the upcoming day. And then we have you sit still and breathe deeply for a couple of minutes, take a blood pressure reading, continue to breathe

deeply, take a second reading, wait a minute while breathing deeply again, take a third reading, and then you were done. You can do absolutely whatever you want after that. And then a week later, you do it again, and a week later, you do it again. And so the sort of active part of the study is two minutes at night. It takes about five minutes in the morning and that you wear your bootstrap overnight in between because we're collecting all kinds of really important data to understand your stress and, you know, do whatever you want in between. So while the whole protocol takes about 15 days and if you can't do it, you can spread them out even longer, it doesn't ruin the study. If you do it over, say, 30 days instead of 15, the actual active

part of the study is really light and pretty easy to accomplish. Amazing. Okay. So I have quite a few questions, because I know many of our members have, you know, certain routines that they engage in in the morning. So you say breathing deeply. So just slow-paced breathing, or do we really want people breathing deeply? Do we prioritize the exhale, the inhale? Why don't you go through exactly how you want people to breathe? That's a great question. So we've left it pretty open. We want people to breathe deeply and intentionally, but we haven't specifically said, you know, this many second inhale or anything like that. There's a number of different breathing protocols that are all effective at, you know, for slightly different reasons at different things. But we do know that when you do breathe intentionally sort of slower than what feels naturally, regardless of how you do that, you're bringing more oxygen into.

your body. And that creates this parasympathetic response that just calms you down. Slows your heart rate. Slows your heart rate. And, you know, is very good for reducing stress acutely. And we expect to be able to see that in the blood pressure reading. Right. So we don't want people doing like a tumo super oxygenated type of breathing, which we do offer in the app. So we would want to do physiological sigh, which is a double inhale followed by an extended exhale. So that would be a good option or just, you know, very simple, slow-paced breathing that emphasizes an extended exhale for, you know, so. Yeah.

And I think, like, for people who are less comfortable with breathwork, you know, just think about filling your belly and don't worry too much about it. For people who are more comfortable with it, you know, box breathing is a great, a great option. You can think about, you know, four second inhale, four second hold, four second exhale, four second hold. You can imagine thinking about as a box. The Navy SEAL have been all about box breathing. They've really made this quite popular because there is quite a lot of good research around that. So there's a number of different ways to do this.

What we really want is people to do something that is comfortable for them, that they feel like they can sustain for a minute. You don't want you breathing in a way that's stressful. Yeah. And what we don't want is just like breathe naturally and you're like scrolling your phone or something like that, which will do quite the opposite. I actually read this fascinating study that came out of UC Irvine. They define something called email apnea, which is that when we read our emails, we don't breathe. And we breathe much less deeply and faster. and it's because it's stressful to us.

So we'll link the study in the show notes, but the takeaway is that we don't want people to, when we say like, wait the minute, to think that they're relaxing because they've started to associate scrolling on their phone with downtime. That's actually a place we've tricked ourselves, and the psychology behind us is fascinating because we actually have a measurable stress response, which shows up in elevated respiratory rate. shallower breathing. So please actually take the minute to slow your breathing, put the phone away, and hopefully, you know, if it's effective for you, we will see that in the blood pressure data. And we'll make all of this very clear in the instructions. Another question, M, so

you have to wait 30 minutes between the time when you wake up to when you start this breathing and blood pressure reading. So in that 30 minutes, can I drink coffee? Can I have a glass of water? Can I view the morning sunlight? Give me a laundry list of things I can and cannot do. Yeah. So the 30-minute period allows all of our sleep momentum to dissipate.

So it is important that you wait 30 minutes between waking up and doing the study. Unfortunately, you cannot eat or drink exercise or exercise. do any, like, exposure to extreme heat or cold, which would include taking a shower or a bath. You know, you can get exposure to morning sunlight. You can, you know, you want to stretch or meditate or anything like that. You read as much as, you know, I think email is a source of stress. That's probably not healthy first thing in the morning. You know, if you want to check your email or get a little bit of work done, that's not going to impact the study. But we don't want people ingesting anything, exercising, or extreme hot or cold exposure, because those things can interfere with

your blood pressure. And then we won't get as good of a read, as reliable of a read on what's going on in terms of your relationship between sleep and stress because you'll be adding a lot of noise in between those readings. So adherence to these instructions is really important, you know, in order for us to have clean data. So, you know, I think one of the great opportunities to be able to do this digitally, that is, you know, not require folks to have to come into a lab, is that, you know, we can, we can collect way more data sets, you know, talk a little bit about the importance of these bigger data sets. Why does that matter for training your algorithms? Yeah. And can I back up before I answer that question? I just want to say that,

Because there is this requirement around getting a clean recording condition, we've written the study in such a way that it's quite flexible. So, you know, while the fastest way to complete the study would be night one, night seven, night 15, if the morning of night seven, you know, you have to do daycare drop off or, you know, you really want to work out or whatever. You didn't, you slept in and you didn't mean to. It doesn't impact the integrity of the study if you do it on like night six or night eight or, you know, nine or something instead. And so you can take up to 30 days to do. these three ratings, and we did that so that you can pick a day where you can afford that half hour of downtime before the reading. And then as soon as that breathing and blood pressure recording is over, you are free to do absolutely whatever you want with the rest of the day. And so hopefully that flexibility as well as the fact, Kristen, as you mentioned, that this is done entirely from home makes this something that's relatively easy to fit into your life. And before we talk about the data sets, just is there anything with the evening reading?

that is that you want folks to be aware of, or that's going to be included in the instructions in terms of protocol? We'll include everything in the instructions, but there are far fewer. Nighttime's a little bit more Wild West. You can go to bed at whatever time you normally go to bed, and we're not super sensitive in terms of like, you know, between the time that you take the survey, how quickly you need to go to bed or anything like that. So a lot more flexibility at night.

We do just want to capture that evening moment because it gives us context. in terms of how you change throughout the night. So it is important to get that surveyed. Actually, it won't allow you to do the morning session if you didn't complete the survey the night before. That's just how it's set up in the app. But, yeah, that's much less restrictive. And when, I'm going to say when and not if,

but when you sign up, the app will walk you through all of this. So do not feel the need to be taking notes throughout our podcast. the implementation in our new digital Woop Labs feature is really elegant. It walks you through every step. It sends you reminders when you're eligible for, you know, the next set of readings and all of those things. So we really do handheld throughout and hopefully, you know, like I said, I think we're trying to enable our members to get really valuable insights. We want to make this as easy as possible where we've added these bits of friction like the survey and the blood pressure reading is because it really does unlock a really, really interesting. next dimension of information. We wouldn't be asking you anything if, you know, we feel like

we have to earn the friction. And we were really thoughtful about what goes in to the study. I think we have earned that friction. So, you know, hopefully this is something that you can fit into your day. But to answer your question about the large data set, a lot of it is about diversity. A lot of times when you hear large study, it's not that we need a lot of people. It's that we need a lot of different kind of people doing a lot of different things, experiencing very different stress levels. So we can tease apart the variables of, you know, when you start at this stress level before bed, sleep like this and then wake up like that, you know, what happens? If you breathe one way versus another, what happens if you have been sleeping really well, you know, previously and then like have a poor night sleep versus if you're a chronic poor. sleeper, what happens? If you're male versus female, if you're ovulating versus menstruating,

if you're pregnant, if you have high blood pressure, if you have low blood pressure, if you worked out, if you didn't work out, if you worked out close to bed, you know, or if you work out first thing in the morning, all of these factors impact how this data shows up. And so when you start to think about statistical analysis, the more variables you have, it's multiplicative. So it's like raises to the next power in terms of how many people you need to capture that you can picture it as like a grid of the demographic sets that we're trying to capture. And so we really want to make sure that we're not going to report out at the end of this, something that's like, oh, here's how healthy young males respond to stress or how their sleep is impacted by stress, but actually

something that is representative across the board. And so it's not that we need a lot of people. We need a lot of different people. And in order to get an acceptable number of people to have statistical significance times all of these different dimensions that we want to understand these relationships across, that ends up being a lot of people. And, you know, we're really lucky to be able to do research at WOOP where our member base affords us, you know, these large studies that traditional academic routes could never rally just to, you know, we want to do this thing for international stress awareness month, this would be, you know, just a massive and totally impractical undertaking. But we're hoping that we're hoping that we can activate our member base and that we

know that we have this diversity within our member base. And, you know, we can uncover these insights that we can publish and, you know, make available to the world, you know, for free. Anybody who wants to understand these things, because like I said, you know, I agree with the World Health Organization, stress is a massive epidemic. It's really scary what it's doing to us. I think we don't appreciate it nearly enough. We don't appreciate how much more stressed we are than the generation before us. We don't know how to leverage it, I think, effectively. We don't know how to leverage it. To me, that's the biggest opportunity is being able to understand how stress manifests during your day, you know, what is adaptive versus maladaptive? And then being able to

frame it in a way that is productive. Yeah. And I think like there are so many things that are scary and on the rise and out of our control, right? Like, you know, I can't adapt a couple of, you know, good habits and counteract the fact that, you know, breast cancer is on the rise or something like that. But, you know, stress is very much on the rise. And there's a couple of things that if you're just aware of. you can very meaningfully bring down your stress levels. And, you know, maybe now is a good time to get into it.

But I think people don't appreciate all of the good things that that does. It's not just, oh, and then I'll stop feeling stress. Like, you can literally stress yourself into type 2 diabetes. Like, you can literally stress yourself into all. Well, yeah, hypertension for sure. Let's talk about stress. What is it? What happens when I'm stressed?

why is it that I can stress myself into type 2 diabetes? So when something tells us, a trigger in our environment, that we need to activate, we have what's called a physiological stress response. And let's imagine the sort of classic, you know, evolutionary example of this, right? Like there's a physical threat, a tiger. So I see a tiger, and the absolutely desirable correct response here is that I activate my stress response. And so what does that do? It's going to cause my blood sugar to rise.

Why is that important when there's a tiger? Well, if there's more sugar in my blood that's going to go to my muscles, they're going to be able to fight or run faster. It's also going to go to my brain, which is going to allow me to react better. it's going to allow me to make better decisions. Mobilize energy effectively to deal with that environmental challenge. Exactly. I'm also going to see my blood pressure rise. Why is that important when there's a tiger?

Well, if my blood pressure rises, that's going to send oxygenated blood to my brain, right? Which, again, I want to react faster, make better decisions. And so the blood pressure rising is super helpful. Another thing that happens is we release clotting factors. Why is that important? Well, if the tiger successfully nicks me or bites me, right, I want my blood to clot. Right. So all of these things, when they happen acutely in the threat, are like absolutely what I want to happen.

But what happens now if, like, the thing that's stressing me out isn't a tiger, right? It's like slack pinging me nonstop. And I'm like, oh, I have to respond to that. oh, I have to respond to that, right? Like, you end up with, instead of this somewhat rare occurrence of, you know, tiger, and it said the super common occurrence of, like, my phone pinging, instead of these acute activations that immediately dissipate, you get these chronic activations that don't get a chance to dissipate.

And going back to the tiger, right, like, if there was, in fact, a tiger and my blood sugar elevated, and I then ran, right? I leveraged that blood sugar. And so, yes, my blood sugar rose, which, you know, when we think about diabetes, we're like, oh, that's bad, right? Blood sugar. But if I use it to run, then I burn it. And so the elevated blood sugar becomes energy I use.

That's an adaptive example. Right. That's the adaptive example. If I have this stress response to the phone pinging nonstop, my elevated blood sugar, literally I'm sitting on my couch. I'm lying in bed, right? So we don't burn it. That's a non-functional acute activation.

Yeah. And so because we don't burn it, then you get this moment of like, okay, well, I became like acutely insulin resistant. And then it just sits there as elevated blood sugar that stays high because my activity level didn't match it. And so when we keep activating like, hey, have high blood sugar, have high blood pressure, you know, increase these clotting factors. and we don't then use those things, they don't dissipate, and we do them over and over and over again.

The thing that is incredibly adaptive becomes, well, what do you call it when your blood sugar is elevated all the time above what your body needs? Well, that is literally, you know, pre-diabetes and then diabetes if it gets bad enough. And we've seen that like when you're chronically stressed, that's highly correlated with type 2 diabetes and that when you can, that you can go in and manage that stress and reverse that. And so I think just being aware of where are all these little stressors in our life and, you know, what are some of the ways you can manage those things and reduce those things? And a huge first piece of that is awareness.

I think a lot of people describe their leisurely phone stuff and like, oh, my friends, they're paying me all the time as something that they enjoy, at least. Like, their first reaction is that they enjoy it sometimes, but, you know, nonetheless, it's very stressful because it keeps activating you. Right. And I think it's really kind of going through your day almost and realizing, okay, what are the things that create these non-functional acute activations, right? And I think notifications on phone and Slack are absolutely in that list, right?

I think we know from the research that it's not really a productive use of activation, right? It's, you know, you get a little bit of a dopamine hit, you know, and, and, but that, that isn't, I think, when we look at how stress during the day is going to manifest in our sleep, for example, and we're thinking about these non-functional acute adaptations, right? These notifications, these, you know, our phone ringing. We need to probably create patches of time throughout our day where those are all shut off, right? and we're kind of intentionally programming time in our day to go in and, you know, react to our Slack, for example, but getting constantly pulled away from the moment is really where we actually increase our anxiety levels, right? So maybe let's talk, Emily, how an increase in our anxiety levels and, you know, kind of this constant, you know, these constant acute activations

without appropriate levels of deactivation actually impact our sleep at night? Yeah. So I think high level, there's a couple pieces. Like sleep impacts stress, stress, impact sleep. Sleep impacts stress because sleep deprivation is a stresser, right? Like, we all have a certain capacity to, like, be annoyed, to take on stress, right? to have something challenging and be resilient to it. And you can think of that reservoir as smaller when you're sleep deprived and larger when you're well rested.

And we all know this, right? Like you wake up way too early and you're irritable because you're tired. And so you snap at your partner and then you're like, sorry, I'm just really tired. Right. If you've ever experienced that, then this is just. just kind of, you know, trite. But when that, like, reservoir is depleted, you know, we, or, you know, smaller to begin with, we have these outsized effects or responses to things. And so, like, the same, like, objective input elicits a larger stress response. And so then on the other

side, how does stress affect sleep? It's a couple of things. One is that when stress really gets mismatched from, you know, productive stress and it becomes anxiety, it makes it really hard to sleep because what we start to see is rumination. So a huge, huge percentage of what used to be thought of as, you know, sleep onset insomnia. So like trouble falling asleep, it used to be thought of as a sleep issue is now understood to be a mental health issue. It's stress. It's a worry issue. Worrying, right? And so because I am stressed about all kinds of of things, you know, because I am getting stimulated by my phone, I delay sleep or have trouble sleeping because I'm thinking about all of these things. And that's really helpful to be aware of

because there are things you can do that are free or close to free, right? Like, there's a lot of research that shows that if you just write down what you're worried about before bed, and it doesn't have to be, like, journaling sounds kind of, I think, intimidating to a lot of people. Like, you do it on a post-it note or scratch paper and throw it out like it doesn't have to be this like you know fancy leather bound journal or you know like a thoughtful prompt or anything just like scratch paper back of you know a packaging or whatever what what's worrying you write it down that that somehow helps you stop worrying there's good research around that you know this concept of scheduling worry you know every day you just yeah you just kind of write it I think when

you put, when you put language in, in meeting to it, it actually does help you process that, that worry in it in a more, you know, functional way. And yeah. And, you know, if you're lucky enough to have a partner who cares, sometimes doing this with somebody is really helpful. You know, for me, my husband and I have ritualized that like end of day check in. And so we talk about, you know, what we're grateful for, what we're maybe. annoyed about, and it helps us avoid going to bed, annoyed, kind of process things that maybe need to get processed. And, you know, I've loved doing this ritual with him, but I also find that it helps there. So, you know, if there's somebody you can, in a productive, healthy way,

like unload on a little bit and share your worry, sometimes that makes it easier too. And if you don't have that person, you know, even just doing that with yourself, but like you said, kind of articulating that thing, writing it down, saying it out loud, you know, you can, you can, do this with yourself in the mirror. If that's kind of what works for you, then you don't even need the cost of the pencil. But making space for that so that you can kind of have closure and put that to bed. So kind of going back to the question, this, you know, stress turns into anxiety and worry turns into sleep onset insomnia, difficulty falling asleep because you're ruminating on the stress. And there's, you know, these fairly simple, and I'm talking about

you know, two to five minute interventions that you can do that can dramatically lessen that, make it much easier to fall asleep, translate to getting a better night's sleep so that you're not waking up tired, which, you know, kind of makes you more likely to then be stressed again the next night. So that's... And we'll reduce the cortisol during the day, right? So if we're doing these many moments of deactivation throughout the day, we won't get that kind of inappropriate spike of cortisol during the night, you know, that 2 a.m. wake up that people experience. Yeah. And I'd say like this has been one of the things that I've loved about the loop stress monitor feature in the roughly one year that it's been out is that, you know, I can reflect on it as part of my end of the day

ritual and say like, where are the places where I was stressed? And, you know, what do I remember doing in those moments? And does that feel like sensible to me, right? Like is an appropriate level of stress. Yeah, because one thing I really want to highlight is we're talking about stress as a negative and the goal is not to never experience stress stress can be and is an extremely important thing not just because I'm like when the tiger comes I want you to be able to run but also like in a normal life like I reasonably expect to not encounter any tigers or like other imminent threats to my life but being stressed for example right now while we're recording this podcast, there's a healthy amount of stress that makes me focused. And, you know, like what we were

talking about in the tiger, right? Like, there's that getting slight elevation and blood pressure, slight elevation, blood sugar gets, you know, fuel and oxygen into my brain, and it's going to help me say smarter things. And if I couldn't mount some amount of a stress response, what that would look like to you is apathy. And like what we would think about that clinically is depression, right? That's the inability to activate when a situation requires it of you is what depression is, right? Your level of activation is lower than what the situation demands for anxiety is when the level of activation is above. And inappropriately so. Right. Inappropriately above what the situation requires. And so I don't want to be terrified about this podcast because that starts to be

become not productive as well, right? I get like super in my head. But I also don't want to be apathetic. So I want to in this moment where, you know, it's so important to me to help people understand, again, during National Stress Awareness Month, but also in general, how important understanding and having, you know, a healthy relationship to stress is, I deeply care about this. And so I bet, you know, if you looked at my blood pressure, blood sugar relative to baseline, they probably are a little bit elevated. And that's good. So the goal is not zero. The goal is not like lie on your couch, hyperzzen, 24-7, right? That would be bad. There is definitely a time in place for those activities. But the goal is not zero stress either.

Let's talk a little bit about how we perceive stress. And you kind of hinted at this a little bit. You know, is it threatening? Is it challenging? And then do we have the appropriate response to match the demand, right? And it's, it's, we either have a bunch of demand matches. And we can almost think, think of that as, you know, we, we come with the capacity, right? We're well slept. We've had consistent sleep, quality sleep, appropriate duration of sleep. And that basically allows us to come to our environment with a fuller tank, right? And when we have a fuller tank, we can engage in environment and get and generate appropriate levels of arousal for the situation so in that i think that allows us to frame situations as challenging right like you're able because you're you know not

depleted and you know you're coming to this you know relatively recovered let's say i know you have a baby so sometimes that's not always the case but but you can you are able to generate an appropriate level arousal, you know, you're able to mobilize the, you know, your, your energy in a way that allows you to perform to your potential, right, in this, in this moment. Talk a little bit about that role of kind of perception and how we've baked that into the study design. Yeah. So the same objective thing, you know, let's call it this podcast, right? Like, to go back to that same example, right? If I think about this as a fun challenge, as an opportunity to educate, you know,

our listener base about something that's important, I have an appropriate level of arousal that can let me peak, right? Like there's this, the parabola, right, where if I'm not activated enough, way too calm, there's a, you can think about this as like apathetic or like, I'm not taking this seriously, I don't think it's important, and I'm probably going to give, just like the answer that comes to the top of my head, not necessarily the best answer to a question, maybe it's a little bit shorter, and it'll be less interesting, right? If I appropriately appraise the situation such that I'm elevated, but not too elevated, there is a sweet spot where that's going to get me

to say the best possible answer that I'm capable of producing. And if I'm too stressed out, then I get really in my head. I over- You're disoriented. Your heart rate's too high. Like, you start sweating. Yeah, right. All those things. And so now I'm like nervous about pleasing you or saying the wrong thing or who knows what, right? And then that also causes me to give bad answers. And, you know, I think one way to maybe think about if you had it just right is, you know, tonight when I'm brushing my teeth, am I going to go, oh, I should have said this to that question, right? Like those moments are going to tell you that like maybe you appraised it like slightly wrong or, you know, who knows? But the important point here is like, we want to have an appropriate

stress response. And our world stimulates inappropriate stress responses to a lot of things that, you know, like the pinging phone, there's no real threat. Right. the psychology behind why we treat that like one and why that causes this reaction is out of scope for this podcast, but completely fascinating. Maybe something we can get into another time. But the point is, is that we have, we're getting stimulated in a way that generations before us never were. And we're getting stimulated all the time. And if we treat those things physiologically as equivalent to, you know, a tiger, then we're always in this elevated state. And there's,

it's not just that, you know, we elevator, you know, blood sugar, blood pressure, you know, clotting factors, all these things. We also divert resources away from other things. Like, we digest food less effectively when we are stressed because, you know, back to the tiger, it's like, oh, if I need to run, like, do I need to spend resources on like, you know, digesting food? No, that can wait until I'm safe again, you know, instead I'm going to put all these resources into my legs to run away or whatever. And so we need to be able to almost like zoom out a little bit and say, you know, oh, like I'm really stressed right now. Is that appropriate? Does the situation need it? And then build the tools for ourselves to be able to say like, you know, I'm going into

this podcast recording. Why is my heart racing? Why am I freaking out? And what we know is that if you go into, like stand in front of a mirror in the bathroom and do what's called like hero posing, so you put like your hands on your hips, you spread your legs little bit. Think like the classic like Superman pose and like old timey comic books, right? You stand in that position. You're like I got this. Like your blood pressure comes down. Your confidence goes up, right? Like you can reduce your stress in like 30 seconds of hero posing. They did a study on surgeons who like did this hero posing between scrubbing and operating. And, like, medical errors went down because, like, that is a situation where I really want my surgeon to care. I want them to care a lot about getting it right. But I don't want them to be so scared of messing up that they can't act. I certainly don't want them to be so calm and, like, cocky. Like, I got this that they're not vigilant about all the different things that could go wrong. So it's like, I want you to be a little stressed.

Like, I'm, you know, asleep and cut open on your table. Like, care about getting this right, right? There's a healthy level there. But don't get so freaked out that, you know, you're going to get really errors and not think of things. And so if you take a moment when you feel your heart racing before a situation or even just like schedule time throughout the day, like, you know, am I showing up in the way that feels appropriate to what this day is demanding? And you'll breathe for a minute. there's research that shows that like a minute of intentional breathing or like 30 seconds of hero posing, right, can make a measurable difference that lasts, not just in the minute while

you're intentionally breathing. But hours after. And so we can interrupt our day. And I think that's the thing that is so powerful. It's not just, hey, stress is killing you and you don't realize it, but also stress is killing you. And like, if you schedule six minutes, you know, throughout your day in like one minute intervals, you know, before you eat lunch, you know, right before this meeting starts while you're waiting

for a friend to get back. As you're walking down the hall, 30 seconds of breathing, yeah. You know, can we do these things and interrupt them and bring our stress levels down because the world is sort of trying to trick us into being way more activated, way more stressed than likely your life requires. Some people out there do have dangerous lives. And so it's different. But if you're like me and you're just like chilling in a beautiful, gorgeous office building and like, you probably shouldn't be stressed all the time. And so, like, can we take these minutes to pull our stress levels down and then, you know, enjoy those benefits for, like, the hours of the fall?

Your short-term performance will benefit and your long-term health, no question will benefit. Yeah, a ton. And you'll feel better. Like, if you can find these six minutes, like, do it for, well, do it for the 15 days of our study, please. But, you know, if you're not going to participate in the study, you know, even just try and do this piece for a week because I think.

you know, what you'll find is that it's amazing what a tiny amount of time can do to change the trajectory of your day. And you know, invariably, you end up increasing your tolerance for stress. Yeah. You know, which is also like a really, I think, important framework to think about these, these modalities, right? Like you become more resilient, which I think is important given, you know, just the complexity of the modern world and how it's not really setting us up for success. You started this podcast, Emily, by talking about the World Health Organization and how they've kind of declared stress, you know, is an epidemic. The epidemic, right? And I think in probably number two, and I think there's a very strong relationship, as we've already outlined

between stress and sleep, right? I think the number two epidemic is, you know, people aren't sleeping enough. So the other aspect to the study is that we really want to try to understand sleep anxiety. So folks who struggle with sleep, what does that look like on our system? We want to try to understand that so we can coach you more effectively. And this is an area that I'm personally so passionate about it. I know you are too, Emily. Like we really want to try to because I think sometimes like data can stress us out, right? Like especially if you struggle with sleeping.

And so we want to be able to create an experience for our members where we understand when it's sleep anxiety and we can coach you to a best. future. Yeah. And thank you for bringing this up because I think the big thing that we'd love to take away from this study is understanding when sleep, what does the sleep issues look like when they are caused by stress? And what do sleep issues look like when actually stress is healthy and instead they're caused by something else?

So we know that circadian disruption is a massive source of sleep issues. These are complicated because they're highly intertwined because one of the ways that we can end up in a disrupted circadian rhythm is that we stay up late scrolling our phone. So we stay up late stressing ourselves out, you know, in the name of fun or whatever. But, you know, we do these things. And so we disrupt our circadian rhythm. But a lot of the coaching that Woop has in the platform today focuses on the circadian side. A lot of the coaching that we're doing around sleep focuses. around, you know, timing and duration. So, you know, getting enough sleep and then a healthy

circadian rhythm. And, you know, in the year since we've launched the stress monitor feature and been really pouring over this data, we're understanding more and more that there's this really important relationship between sleep and stress. And if stress is the thing that's disrupting your sleep, then just coaching you on the circadian stuff and like, hey, Kristen, get more sleep. hey Kristen, your optimal bedtime is 907, like all those things. It's not enough. It's not enough. And it's going to get frustrating because following that advice will not solve your problem. And so a big goal of the study is to understand stress and sleep so that we can specifically understand what does that look like when that is the cause of disrupted sleep and that, you know, we can eventually then bring

into our product, you know, so not just giving you this one-time report, but how do we then build features around, you know, you and I might have very similar looking sleep in that, you know, we had the same eight hours and 22 minutes or something like that. But if your issue is circadian and minus stress or vice versa, the actions that we need to take to, you know, unlock sleep performance, right? Get our sleep to that next level. It could be wildly different. And that's really the magic and the power of whoop is how do we figure out not just generic

advice, like, oh, X percentage of people have this issue. And, you know, here's a couple of things that work for, you know, new moms or, you know, women in their 30s or whatever. But how do we actually say, like, okay, Kristen, this is what I'm seeing in your sleep. And so for you, you know, do these things. And that could be very different advice, even if, like, you and I are sort of equally well or poorly rested than what I'm getting. Yeah. Imagine, like, you know, when you keep your stress level below two and a half on average over the course of the day, you exercise and you report having higher levels of control, you know what? You sleep really well. You know, those are the kind of, that's the experience, I think, that we want to create for our member, like, that

personalized. This study is going to help us unlock that. Yeah. And that's what I'm super excited, is to really deeply understand that. And so, you know, I appreciate in advance people answering those questions and really helping us understand this because, you know, we looked in academic literature to just see, like, you know, is this already understood and it's not? And what we're aiming to do with this study is, you know, by several orders of magnitude, the largest of its kind that's ever been done. So just an absolutely massive study that's really going to help us look at the intersection of a lot of different important variables so that we can tease them apart so that we can create actionable personalized coaching in our app and so you know we said it at the beginning but i think

it's worth saying again like this is really important and this is going to help us understand things about you as well as things about all of us that the world doesn't understand right now so that you know we're not in a place like 10 15 years from now where like the world health organization is saying this is the most important thing going on right now because what I get excited and really encouraged by with stress is that there's so, so much in our control to do about this. And so it feels like an epidemic that really doesn't have to be an epidemic. Always the highlight of my week when I get to sit down and chat with you, Emily. So thank you. I'm so pumped to be able to collaborate on this study with you and cannot wait

to find out what we learn. Yeah. And we'll be back to talk about the results, of course. We'll be back, and everybody who participates in the study is going to be invited to ask us questions. And so if you participate, you actually will shape the analysis that we will do and what we'll talk about in the follow-up question later this summer once we're done collecting all the data. So we're really excited not just to answer all the questions that you and I have when we design this study, but also all the questions that we haven't even thought of that our members in the study participants are going to think of. so that we can really make sure that, you know, as you participate in this thing, you're really getting value out of it.

So I think my team is scheduled to analyze these data end of July through August. So we should be back in September, right, talking about the results. That's what we're hoping for. Yeah. All right. Thanks, Emily. Thank you, Kristen. Thanks to Kristen and Emily for walking us through all the protocols,

the benefits, and how to get involved with this great study. Once again, our spring sale is live. So head to whoop.com to save 10% on your WOOP membership. If you enjoy this episode of the WOOP podcast, be sure to leave your rating or review. Check us out on social at WOOP, at Will Ahmed, at Kristen underscore Homes 2126. Have a question to what's answered on the podcast. Email us, podcast, at Woop.com. Call us 508-443-4952.

If you're thinking about joining Woop, you can visit our website to sign up for a 30-day free trial. New members can use the code Will, W-I-L, get a $60 credit. WOOP accessories. That's a wrap, folks. Thank you all for listening. We'll catch you next week on the WOOP podcast. As always, stay healthy and stay in the green.