WHOOP Podcast - Stress Monitor: A New Way to Monitor and Manage Stress

Episode Date: March 29, 2023

On this week’s podcast, WHOOP Founder and CEO Will Ahmed is joined by WHOOP Chief Technology Officer Jaime Waydo to dive deep into the new Stress Monitor feature. Stress Monitor measures your stress levels in real time and helps you manage them with scientifically-backed breathing interventions developed in partnership with Dr. Andrew Huberman.  Jaime is a product and technology executive with over 20 years of experience leading companies including Alphabet, Apple, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, among many others. Will and Jaime discuss the new Stress Monitor feature (4:58), the Stress Score scale (7:05), how to use the breathing interventions developed in partnership with Dr. Andrew Huberman (10:30), monitoring your recovery and how it impacts your stress levels (15:50), using the Stress Monitor before going to sleep and waking up in the morning (20:20), how the Stress Score is calculated and showing up in everyday events (27:05), Jaime’s background in the tech industry (31:35), a behind-the-scenes look at the building of Stress Monitor (35:00), and how the feature will continue to be developed and integrated throughout the WHOOP platform (40:25).Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

Hello folks. Welcome back to the WOOP podcast. We are on a mission to unlock human performance. I'm your host Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of WOOP. Very exciting episode because we are announcing the launch of the new WOOP stress monitor. That's right. It's the stress monitor. It measures your stress. levels in real time and helps you manage it with scientifically backed breathing interventions developed in partnership with Dr. Andrew Huberman. This has been a feature in the works for about two years and in the last six months I've been using it every day. I am at a stress level right now of 1.2. It's on a scale of 0 to 3 so I'm reading this with a 1.2. You know, zero to one you can think of as being like low stress, one to two, mid-level, probably a good level of alertness.

And then two and above, that's a high-stress state. And I am joined today on this podcast by Jamie Waito, our chief technology officer. Jamie is a product and technology executive with over 20 years of experience, leading companies such as Alphabet, Apple, and NASA, where she literally sent robots to Mars, and we go into all things stress monitor. We talk about how our team at WOOP came up with the stress monitor and a lot of the crazy science that went into making it. As many of you may know, we have WOOP labs, which is responsible for recruiting individual participants and doing data collection studies. So we literally had people come in. we'd have them do mental math, we'd put them in ice baths, we'd put them in hot environments,

essentially all sorts of things that we knew would trigger stress, and then we measured the physiological response. Jamie and I also talk about the science behind the real-time data reading. So again, if you're on whoop, you can go into your whoop app and in any given moment you can look at your stress level, and that's measured again by the stress monitor, and it is in real time. We talk also about the scale, which I've explained a little bit. We go into the breathing interventions and our collaboration, our partnership with Dr. Andrew Huberman. Dr. Andrew Huberman, if you don't know, is one of the leading neuroscientists in the world working

out of Stanford, has a very popular podcast. And these new interventions allow you, for the first time on Woop, to do exercises like breathing exercises that will literally make you either more relaxed or more alert. but allow you to create autonomic control. And that's a big theme with measuring your own stress. Again, you can only manage what you measure. We talk about some of the everyday stresses that cause spikes. Jamie's got a great story of her own around some of her peaks.

I get into some of the interesting things I've found cause stress in my own life. Yeah, I'm just really excited to hear from all of you, like what are the different things in your life that are going to trigger the stress monitor. I think you'll find this feature one of the most playful and exciting features that we've ever launched. Again, because it's so real time and it's so personal. You'll find that there are interesting things that trigger stress or trigger relaxation in your life. Could be spending time with your dog makes you more relaxed. Could be a nightmare that you weren't even aware of triggered stress in the middle of the night. Different foods, different people, different thoughts,

different phone calls. All these things have an interesting moment-by-moment effect on your body. And I've just found the stress monitor personally a fascinating way to look at those. A quick reminder, if you're new to Whoop, you can use the code Will, W-I-L, when you're checking out, and get a $60 credit on W-W-E-Ccessaries. This is, frankly, a good time to join Woop because we're coming out with a bunch of features. So that's at Woop.com. If you have a question, you want to see answered on the podcast, email us, podcast at Woop.com. call us 508443 4952 and with that let's get into the conversation with Jamie

Waitup Jamie. Jamie welcome to the Wooop podcast I'm so excited to be here well this is very exciting to have you finally on hopefully the first of many and we're going to get into your amazing career and everything you've done but I think first off we have to announce this very exciting new feature the stress monitor so tell folks exactly what is the whoop stress monitor? Yeah, the whoop stress monitor is a real-time measure of your body's physiological stress. It's looking at your real-time HRV and your heart rate, and it's giving you a measure in the moment of, is your body stressed or not? And then it's coupled with interventions that you can have to increase that level if you want to increase it, or decrease

that level if you want to decrease it. And all of that's backed by science. We've partnered with Dr. Huberman on some of those interventions and really working to connect the mind and the body and be able to give you the tools that you need to not only understand what causes stress during your day, but then what do you do about it? Well, it's a really good description you just gave. I think part of what makes this feature so exciting is if you think about a day in the life on whoop, you're waking up in the morning, you've got a sleep score, you're understanding your recovery, maybe you're filling out your journal. Then there's kind of a lot of quiet.

Maybe you'll check in around lunch or maybe you'll have done a workout in the afternoon. You'll see how that went. And then kind of before bed, you're looking at it to get ready for sleep and what you need to do. What's so powerful about the stress monitor and you and I have both been using it for, I don't know, six months or something now is it gives you all this information and feedback throughout the quiet moments of the day. And I think we're going to explore that. in this conversation. But I think that's probably one of the most exciting things about the new whoop stress monitor is how it allows an individual to understand what's happening to my body in any given

moment. And what are some of these things that may subtly actually trigger a huge spike in stress? Or on the flip side, you know, may be very calming to my body that I may not have otherwise noticed. And my experience has just been an incredible level of awareness, self-awareness coming from using this feature. Let's start by just talking about the stress score scale, right? So we've got the stress monitor.

Talk a little bit about the scale. Yeah. You know, I always think when you're developing a new score that it's a little bit art and a lot science. Yeah. And I think that that's true of the stress score that we've come up with. We really wanted a score that was differentiated and clear that it was different from your strain and your recovery scores.

And so we dropped it down. into those single digits. And then we really wanted a score that is positive. So there's no negative numbers on it. And so it's starting at zero. And then we wanted something that was granular enough that you could start to understand the peaks and understand the measurement. And what we really found was that scale of zero to three allows you to understand low, medium, and high stress and get the understanding of the peaks that are happening through your day and the valleys in your day without being confusing that it's somehow coupled to one of the other scores that we also have on the product.

Yeah, and I think it's safe to say zero to one would be like very low stress. That's right. So if you're having a good night's sleep, you'll probably see that your stress monitor during sleep was like under a 0.5, right? That's right. And you wanted to be nice and flat during sleep too, I've really learned. Yeah, we'll talk about stress during sleep, which is a pretty fascinating concept. One to two is sort of varying degrees of activation, right?

It's a state that probably is optimal if you want to be in an alert state, right? If you want to be giving a speech or if you want to be very focused on a task, one to two is a degree of alertness. That's right. And two to three is where you're starting to be in a very activated state, in a very stressed state. Which can be great if you're walking into a boardroom and you want to be very activated and you want to be on. It's like being caffeinated almost, right? Your body is very,

very on top of things. But you don't want to be in that state for a long time. You want it, especially if you want to be more present and you want to be more in the moment, then I think being in that one to two zone is right. And then as you're trying to kind of relax, do more calming activities, then you want to be in that zero to one state. So all three are great for different reasons. And I think the cool thing about this feature is that it allows you to know, where you are and then how to help you get where you want to be. And in practice, people are now able to go into the WOOP app and in any given moment actually see a live reading of their stress.

So if you're thinking about how you're going to prepare for something or whether you're in the right head space for something, let's take sleep as an example. We know that you want to have a lower stress before falling asleep and that in fact will help you fall asleep faster, and it'll probably increase the quality of your sleep. So if you look at your stress monitor shortly before bed, you can actually get a quick read on as my body in the right state. That's right. That's right. I've started to really come to love about an hour before bed, putting my blue light blocking glasses on, and then doing that increased relaxation breathwork

to drop my body down into that 0.5 to 0.7 range as I'm coming down and gliding into the night. And what I've noticed is that my stress during sleep will be flatter and my restorative sleep will be higher when I do that. So it's kind of cool. It's actually really fascinating. And you mentioned the intervention. So let's talk about those. I think whenever you are telling someone they're stressed or they're not stressed, there's always a question I think of as, well, what can someone do about it? And that's why it was really important to us at Whoop to launch the stress monitor with intervention.

And these interventions are designed to give you autonomic control. Talk a little bit about that. Yeah, I mean, there's lots of things you can do to increase your alertness or decrease your alertness. One of the most powerful ones that is backed by science is just the breath. And it's something that all of us have on us 24-7. And so we love that that's a way that we can help anybody who's using the product have more control over their stress state in the moment. And so we've got two different applications.

that you can use. There's an intervention to increase relaxation, and that's one where you do a deep breath in to about, you can control it how many seconds you want to do it, but the ratio's about two to one. So you inhale for one second, and then you exhale for two seconds, and then that grows depending on how long you want your inhale and your exhale to be. The point being your exhale is about twice as long as your inhale. And when you do that, it really starts to drop your heart rate, and it starts to give you more control and relax you in the moment. And you only need five breaths, but you have the ability to go up to five minutes. And so whether you want a moment or you want, you know, a little bit longer, you can do all of that on the

WOOP product. So increased relaxation for everyone who's listening to this, that essentially allows you to go from a state where maybe you're at a 1.5 or a 2 on the stress monitor. And you're feeling activated and you want to be in a lower state, we now have these interventions in the WOOP app where you can decide how long you want to do it for. Could be 60 seconds, could be up to 10 minutes, you decide. And then depending on how much breathing you've done before, there's different settings that allow you to choose how long these breath holds are, how long you're exhaling for, but ultimately it's going to give you the technique to control what your stress is and what you're feeling. That's right. And I think that's a very powerful phenomenon. It's not just what state

are you in, but what can you do about it? Yeah, that's exactly right. There's also another intervention, or category of intervention, which is around increasing alertness. What does that look like? This one's my favorite one. I've been doing this breathwork for several months now, and that one is a hyperventilation almost. You're breathing very rapidly, in through your nose, out through your mouth quickly for 25 to 45 reps. And then you breathe deep in and then deep out and you hold. And you hold for as long as you can. And some people can go for 10 seconds and some people can go for 10 minutes. But it's that just holding your breath for as long as you possibly can while doing it safely. And that will also increase your relaxation in some sense, but will also

increase your alertness. And so it's a really cool one because you feel calm. but your stress alertness is gone higher and so you've got this clarity of mind that comes with it that I really love. Yeah, I think it's a really fascinating breathing technique. Folks listening to this who are a little unsure of what we're talking about, you may have heard of the Wim Hof breathing technique, which is very similar. There's other things in yoga that are very similar, but you're doing a breathing technique that is driving a lot of sympathetic dominance. That's right. So much of your heart rate variability is this relationship between sympathetic and parasympathetic. And you get to see this really play out in the stress monitor and particularly the interventions.

Because increasing alertness is really driving sympathetic and decreasing stress or increasing relaxation, as we call it. That's really driving parasympathetic. And so it's powerful to just see how much control you have over your body when you really lean into these breathing techniques. Now, we've also worked very closely with Dr. Andrew Huberman on these interventions. And you'll find videos within the WOOP app that actually clearly detail how you can use these features. Dr. Andrew Huberman is one of the leading neuroscientists out of Stanford. He's got a very popular podcast. And he helped us really think about what exactly those interventions should be,

what the breathing techniques should include. And he explains it directly in the app. So for folks listening to this, I encourage you to watch those videos in the WOOP app and get a sense for what we're talking about. That's right. And the other cool thing is it's not only Dr. Huberman's opinion, but with WOOP, he took data for several days with people doing different breathing exercises, and he actually picked the top two that the science and the data showed were the most effective. And those are the two that we put into the app. Yeah, it's worth saying he's used whoop for research that shows that these are the techniques most useful to driving the stress monitor. That's right.

Now, the powerful thing also is if you are someone who's already doing meditation, you're doing breath work, maybe even you're doing these different recovery modalities, you use a sauna, you use an ice bath, you measure these things in the whoop app, you're now going to be able to see how these events affect your stress. Talk a little bit about the views that people can see to review their data. Yeah, this is honestly my favorite part of the app itself is the recovery details. And so you can actually now go in and you can see how much time were you breathing in, how much time were you breathing out, how long did you hold your breath, what did your stress do over that duration of the activity, and then what was your max breath hold over time, which is my favorite

because I'm currently the whoop leader. That's right. At 89 seconds, I've got a ways to go. But, yeah. So just to double down on that, you can now see how your stress has evolved for any of these different recovery modalities. And what's powerful is, like, maybe you're someone who's doing stretching, and the goal of stretching is to lower your stress.

Maybe you're someone who's getting in the sauna or the steam, and, you know, you're going to see a sympathetic response to that, so you're going to see how it increases your stress. If you're someone who's new to cold therapy, you may find that it causes an enormous spike in your stress. However, if you're someone who's really adapting to it or getting used to it, you may actually find that you can have a sort of a neutral response to it. So it's really powerful to understand what's this thing that you're doing to your body and then how is your body able to respond. And I think I'm fascinated to see how members are going to actually use this feature.

Yeah, I'm excited to learn more about how people use it. One of the things that I really like the most is doing the intervention in the morning. So I do increased alertness almost every morning. I wake up, I meditate, and then I do increased alertness. And what I notice is, then what does my stress look like through the day? And one of the cool things that Whoop does is at 5 o'clock every day, it will tell you how many minutes your stress was above two during the day. And I notice that on days when I do that increased alertness,

while I'm much more alert, I'm in that one to two zone for more of the day, I don't go over two very much. And so that's a pretty interesting thing that I've noticed that making that intervention part of my daily routine has really put me in a spot where my stress stays in a very narrow band throughout the day. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of really powerful anecdotes that we've heard just around the office. I mean, obviously we've been using this feature for a long time. I'm excited for Whoop Nation to get to play with it. What are some other interesting observations you've had in your data, just looking at the stress monitor?

Totally. One that makes me probably not very cool with my kids, but I was getting ready to fly for a work trip, and I was dropping my 9-year-old off at school. And I looked back during the day, and I was looking at my stress, and I was like, wow, I peaked at exactly 8.15. And that was literally the moment that he got out of the car.

And I was saying goodbye to him to go on this work trip. And what I realized in that moment was that that sadness of saying goodbye to my little guy, even though I'm only gone for four days, like really piqued my stress and went to three for, you know, probably two minutes. And then it dropped back down to like 1.4. Thank you for sharing that. And I want to underscore the sensitivity of what you just described. Yeah.

It's something that I've observed with my body as well, where you can have just all of a sudden this huge spike and drop. And it could have been a thought you had. It could have been something someone said. It could have been a way you've reacted to meeting someone for the first time. But it'll happen and it's a powerful thing to be able to observe. And one of the things that the UI team did a nice job of for this feature and our design team did a nice job of for this feature is you can actually go back and look at your day and scan your finger over the course of the day and actually see at any given moment, how did your body respond? So it's like, oh, I had a call with Carl at 845 p.m. I think I was stressed during that. He goes,

oh yeah, it was actually. And you can actually zero in on it exactly. Totally. Which is one of the most powerful things. We talked a little bit about the stress monitor before bed. What are some things you've observed have helped lower it before bed. You know, I find that a cup of tea, just a cup of tea before bed brings it down. I put my blue light blocking glasses on. Oh my goodness, the blue light blocking glasses are amazing. And so I'll read my book with my blue light blockers on with a cup of tea and just I'll watch it drop half a point in probably 20 minutes. That's a good recipe that you just gave the audience. I have to double down on the blue light blockers. I'm obsessed with them. And of course, part of the reason

that we launched them. But putting those on is so validating for the product. Because you put those glasses on and all of a sudden you just watch your stress monitor take a huge dive. Yeah. And for folks you don't know, blue light blockers block blue light, blue light stimulates your mind, tells you to kind of stay awake or stay alert. So it makes perfect sense that that would happen. But it's just really powerful when you feel it and then can see it in the data. And you truly feel it. Like the blue light blockers, you start to feel a little more drowsy and you're like, whoa, what's happening? Because you're not used to it when you first start wearing it. And so then to pull up the stress monitor and be like, okay, what's going on here? And see that decline in

your data. And it's like it all matches what I perceive and what the data is showing me. The other thing I've seen is around eating. And for me, particularly, if I eat earlier in evening versus later, it has a meaningful effect on my stress level going into bed. And I guess that makes sense, too, because I also see in the Whoop Journal, the time that I eat. If I eat too close to bed, it will affect my recovery the next day. I've also found personally that if I eat too fast, I'll see a spike on my stress level. You know, you're like running around in the office some days. You're like racing to eat lunch. But you'll actually see a spike from eating too fast. And so I don't know. I found that.

very fascinating. Alcohol. Oh, it's a mess. Spoiler alert for folks to drink alcohol. It's I mean, it's unbelievable the number of ways that whoop is critical of alcohol. But the data for drinking alcohol in the evening, you know, it doesn't just screw up your recovery. The thing that you notice is that your stress is all of a sudden very elevated at the onset of sleep. Yes. And this can even even just be from one or two drinks. And so, And so even though your body kind of gets it out of its system over the course of the night, it's just fascinating to see how one or two glasses of alcohol can all of a sudden take you from normally being at like a point four while you're sleeping to like a one and a half

on this three-point scale. And spiky versus very flat. Totally. I was looking at your data the other day because we were talking about something. And you were showing that the first half of your night was really spiky. And then the second half was flat. And I was like, hey, what did you do before sleep that makes that first half of the night spiky?

Totally. And it's like those things, you start to realize, like, what did I put in my body, that my body was processing and doing work even while I was sleeping? Because it works itself out of your system, but you lost about half of your night to that truly restorative sleep. It's such a good point. And I think folks who have certain medications that they take or supplements, like I would just ask you as a WOOP member, pay attention to when you took something and how it affects

the stress monitor. Because I think you might notice certain things are positive or negative as it pertains to stress or as it pertains to sleep. I'm also someone who loves to work out in the evening and also hit the steam room in the evening. And I've noticed if I do those things too late, I'll have an elevated stress level going into bed. And it's also powerful. Woop will even tell you this, if you have a really hard workout, you'll notice that your stress monitor's elevated hours even after the workout, which is a sign that you really put a lot of stress on your body and your body's still recovering. Yeah, and it can be totally fine, right? Totally fine. It's just interesting. It's interesting data that your body is responding.

Like you put that load onto your body and now your body is responding and it's cool to have the data in the moment that's showing you that that worked. Yeah, I imagine one, sign of fitness will be someone who can crush a workout or do a very hard workout. And then they see that their stress monitor shortly after the workout comes very... How fast can you get back down? Pretty low. Yeah. 100%. Morning stress is an interesting thing. So I've noticed that waking up from the whoop alarm, which is the one that vibrates on your whoop strap, versus the iPhone alarm. Oh, nice day. Alarm, by the way, it's like one of the worst things I have on my stress mod. It just shoots me up to the moon. Like I go from like zero to three, you know, just in a matter of seconds. Have you noticed anything like that? You know, one of the things I notice is I was noticing that at about 7.15 every morning, my stress would spike a little bit. And I was like, hey, I wonder what that is. And what I realized is that there's a routine in my house where,

At about 7.15, the dog's got to get where it's going. My husband's leaving. The kids are leaving for school. And it's just getting all of that out the door. Everybody's got to eat. They've got to have backpacks, la, la, la, right? And so I realized that that's actually a very stressful part of my day. Yeah.

And so it was cool to be like, okay, that's a thing that I'm seeing a pattern. What is it? Oh, I now understand that that pattern is caused by this leaving routine. How do I make that leaving routine in the morning more? calm for the whole house, because if it's affecting me, it's probably affecting the other humans in my house. And so we've made some changes to our morning routine to just kind of make it an easier transition out the door. That's nice. What a great use case. I've found that the cold shower I take in the morning gives it a big spike. And again, sometimes if you're intentionally doing

something to spike it, that can be totally fine. Yeah. Right? Because what I observe is I have this huge spike and then the second I come out, it's almost like I'm lower than I was before I entered. Exactly. Which is a cool phenomenon. And just learning, like, what can elevate it, what can de-elevate it, and, like, having that control dial at your fingertips is really fun. And for folks listening to this who are like, well, can I see all of that with heart rate? It's important to note that the stress monitor is, in fact, measuring something different than just

your pure heart rate. Why did you talk a little bit about how that score is calculated from zero to three? Yeah, I mean, it's a combination of your real-time HRV and your heart rate in the moment. Those come together to create the stress score, that zero to three with the three different zones that we talk about inside it. And one thing to think about, like, for example, is weightlifting. I've noticed that there are times where I'm doing weightlifting, and my heart rate might be actually pretty low. But when I look at the stress monitor, it's like two and a half to three. Yeah.

And so that to me is probably the simplest way to explain how heart rate is not alone encapsulating the sensitivity of this stress score. And I think people will find that pretty interesting. Yeah, one of the ways we developed this was also looking at cognitive load. So we would have people do mental math, which can be very stressful for people. Your heart rate is still potentially very low. Totally. You're not doing a lot to your heart rate.

But we can see in the data through your blood, we were using a blood pressure cuff to help us correlate the data. And so a blood pressure cuff, your HRV, your heart rate, and we could see in the data that your body was very stressed because of this cognitive load having to do mental math on the fly. But yet, you know, your heart rate is not actually elevated at all from any kind of physical activity. And what we're really driving at is this sort of fascinating balance between physical stress and psychological stress. Like there have been times I've been able to do workouts or exercise, and it's had a lower stress on my body than certain meetings I've been in. Exactly. And that's such a powerful phenomenon to start to understand. Now, you, the WOOP member, you're going to figure out how to use this for yourself.

But I think what you'll find is like a really interesting level of introspection that comes from that data set. Yeah. Another thing I was, and a lot of people have told me this that have used it so far, is when you're sick, looking at your stress while you're sick, you stay in that two to three zone and you're just spiking and bouncing all around through there. That's because your body is under so much stress. And mentally, you're like trying to, you don't feel very good and you're just trying to figure out like, what do I need to do to feel better? And it's just this big load on you. And the stress monitor is showing you all of that as well. Yeah, I think it's also, it's helpful to look at the stress monitor at times or even for a day

where stereotypically you'd expect to be stressed, right? Like, oh, this is going to be a stressful day or a stressful event. And then to see how your body actually reacted to it. And so there was an example, you know, only a week and a half. half ago where a bank that we work with, you know, essentially collapsed. This is Silicon Valley Banks. I'm not, it shouldn't be surprised. But we had a long banking relationship with them. And so I was expecting that maybe I would have had a lot, like a high stress during that day. But I actually, in looking at my stress monitor, I realized I was, you know, reasonably alert but calm during it.

And so there's an interesting, I think, there's an interesting way for you to be able to check yourself on, were you the appropriate level of stress relative to the situation, were you able to manage it? Something I think about as an executive is can you have a steady hand during a chaotic time? Exactly. And so there's something really fun about the stress monitor and bringing that to light. I think on the flip side, you'll find these things that are sort of random that trigger stress that you weren't expecting. Like I was giving a toast at a birthday party and all of a I realized, like, I had like a spike in my stress monitor or playing in a golf tournament. These things that you otherwise would think your body or you should be able to handle somewhat with ease,

you realize there's something going on. Totally. Well, Jamie, you're no stranger to innovation. I want to take a second to highlight just your remarkable career and, of course, how excited we are to have you at Woop. Talk a little bit about what you've done in your career and some of the amazing places you've worked. You know, I've had, I grew up in Montana where I think I just didn't understand what a magical career can be and what, you know, my dreams could actually unlock. And so I went to engineering school at a time when I wanted to go work on robots to go to Mars.

And there wasn't really a Mars program when I decided that. And by the time I got out of college, I went to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory down in the L.A. area. And worked there for over a decade working on robots that go to Mars and got to be their chief engineer of one of the Curiosity rover, which is one of the big SUV-sized rovers. And so that was, you know, totally a highlight. And I remember looking around and being like, oh, my God, have I peaked? Is my career like only downhill from there? And then I moved to Silicon Valley and worked at a couple of late and early stage startups

in healthcare robotics, building robots to do heart surgery. And then I went to Google and worked on their self-driving car program where I was their lead engineer for all of the driverless launches that we did in Texas and in Arizona. Very, very proud. I had an amazing time there. And then went to Apple and did secret stuff that I can't talk about because we don't talk about the things that happened at Apple, but I got to spend about three years there working on some pretty amazing technologies.

And then started my own company, did that for a bit, and then took some time off and came here to Whoop. Well, we feel very grateful and excited to have you as our chief technology officer and really overseeing so much of our hardware and software and analytics and really the insights that we're delivering to members and the innovation we're providing for members. Thank you. It's a pleasure. I get to work with all the builders at Woop, and that's just an amazing, amazing time. And I know the team's very excited about this feature, perhaps speak a little bit to some of the things behind the scenes that it took to get this out the door, some of the

true innovation behind the scenes. You know, I think it was born out of looking at what does daytime HRV tell you? And if you had a continuous measure of HRV, what would that tell you? And the research started telling us that if you combine HRV and heart rate, then you started to get an insight into what happens from a physiological point of view in terms of stress. And so then we started doing studies in the WOOP lab around, like I said, that mental math exercise. We would also have people put their feet in ice baths and start to put them under physiological stress and see what would happen to the data and just starting to do experiments,

which is one of the most fun things about WOOP is you have an idea, you can start to look at data and see what the data tells you and do that research. And then you can start to run experiments to test your hypothesis. And so it's like a true science laboratory for builders who like to innovate. And so that was all what was happening behind the scenes. And then the designers started coming in and saying like, well, what would it look like? And if you wanted a score that's in real time, what would that look like? And how would that be a clear display? So you get that dial at the top of the feature. And then if you wanted to see that over time, what would that look like? And you start to get that, you know, 12-hour graph. And then if you want to interact with it,

what would that experience be like the drag of the, which is the most playful thing, I think, on the Woop app, but drag your finger along it and it traces and it tells you exactly what's happening in the moment. And then the engineers get involved and they get so excited about building it. And they started actually telling us, like, no, we can do more. We can do more. like let us put more into this feature and just really building it. And then we started partnering with Andrew Huberman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and really talking about like, okay, so now we have stress, so what? What do we tell people to do with it?

And I got really excited when it's about, you know, let's bring breathwork into the conversation because I'm a huge breathwork advocate, but also because it's a thing that everybody has. You don't have to go buy special equipment. You don't have to go to a certain location. It's with you always. And so I loved that we were giving people a tool in the toolbox that is free and it is with you in the moment, every moment, all day. And so, you know, then even now if you walk over to where the engineers are building and they're putting the final touches on it as it's going out the door today as we record this, there's so much energy in the air and they're so excited. And like you went over there the other day and you asked them if they could change the granularity.

of a plot. And I was expecting that they were going to come to me and be like, Jamie, like, how do we fit this in? And instead, what they did is they came back to me and they're like, well, yes, asked for this. We're going to do it like that. And it's already in the build. And it was within like two hours. And this is just the amazing people that we have at the company and that are so passionate about the work they do and about building something that's truly going to help people with that mind-body connection in a way that we've never has. And so they just want to do more and they want to ship as much as they can. Well, it was a really beautiful explanation of your team

and all the great builders that we have at Whoop. And for people listening to this, Jamie's team is hiring. So whoop.com slash careers, you can join the team. And I want to underscore the Woop Labs piece of this because one of my favorite elements of the company is Woop Labs where we do all these wild tests on folks. But, you know, you walk by Woop Labs. and you see people hooked up to a bunch of different sensors.

And then, you know, all of a sudden, they take their shoes off and they're putting their feet into, like, ice-cold water just so we can see the physiological response and make sure that the stress monitor is, in fact, observing a stress response. 100%. And so it's a really, it's a very fun and deeply scientific process for developing these scores and these monitors.

And I've had the pleasure of getting to build this company, for over a decade, but I can truly say I think the stress monitor is one of the most innovative features that we've ever launched. And I think it also touches everyone on whoop. You know, there's some features that maybe lean a little bit more if you're into fitness or not. And there's some features that are more into if you want to be recording more data sets or not. But the stress monitor is something that literally every human can interact with and play with immediately and have an immediate reaction to. Because the second you open it, it's giving you a number for you in this moment,

there's a connection that you make to the data. And you're immediately asking yourself, well, what can I do to make that number go up? What can I do to make that number go down? Why did it go up? Why did it go down? And so it's an incredibly personal and fun score. Well, and another thing is it's custom to you. Totally.

And so, you know, one of the things that's so special about whoop is because it's your data, the models are trained for you. And so your stress score, if I started using your app, would not work for me because everybody's is different and everybody's as custom. Well, I'm glad you brought that up. The stress monitor is baseline to you. So it's looking at this rolling average of your heart rate and your heart rate variability and then understanding in a given moment how that reading compares to this rolling

baseline. That's right. And so what that allows for is you could be sitting next to a friend watching a scary movie, and it gives each of you very different stress results. Yeah. Maybe for one person and they find it relaxing to watch that kind of movie. The other person's freaking out. I'm a freak out person, by the way.

I don't watch scary movies. I think fan stress is going to be really funny. Yeah. I've had so many people send me screenshots of their whoop data, like watching an athletic event. But you're not going to see it like... Well, and it's an activity that people log, right? Totally. I remember watching the World Cup in that epic game between Argentina and France.

And my stress spike, just like feeling the intensity of that moment. Yeah. It's really exciting. And this is also a new platform for WOOP to continue building on, right? The same way the sleep and sleep coach was a platform that we continue to innovate on. the strain coach is a platform we innovate on, health monitor is something we're continuing to add new sensing to and capabilities to. We now have stress monitor. That's right. And so it's part of this family of coaches and monitors that are within the WOOP app. And you're going to continue to

see us innovate on it. What are some ways that we may be evolving this feature? What can we tease for folks of what may be to come? One of the things I think is most exciting that we're working on next is what do different activities overlaid on top of that data start to tell you. And so, you know, if you do meditation, put the meditation on the graph and start to really understand, like you were doing meditation in this window, and your stress went from a 2.5 to a 1.2 in a 10-minute meditation. And so we'll start to do that overlay. And so you can see what your activities are doing that increase activation and that decrease activation. Another thing that we're doing is you're going to start to be able to see trends over time.

So you'll start to be able to see like how does my stress today compare to yesterday compared to last week or like I had a board meeting last quarter. I was a 1.2. What am I for the board meeting this quarter? And so I think those kind of trends and different analyses that we're turning on will be amazing. So more to come for sure. Yeah, I'm very excited about.

the notion of some form of calendar integration, some notion of being able to overlay my stress data with lots of different things that happened in my life, this idea that I could potentially start to understand what moments of the day or what types of things in the day, what specific meetings or people have certain effects to me and how I can sort of learn to manage that. And then also using the stress monitor alongside these other features within the app, right, how stressed you are before exercise or before something competitive, how stressed you are before sleep and how to get that lower. Like there's going to be a lot of really interesting use cases.

One of the things we talk about at Woop a lot right now is how do we weave this part of the app into the other parts of the app? And I think Stress Monitor is a really beautiful example that you'll watch us over the next several months, weave into the other pieces of the app. How does stress tie into sleep? How does it tie into recovery? How does it tie into some of the different activities that you're doing? And how does that look over time? Well, look, I think you and I are both excited about this. If you're listening to this, all we can say is go play with it. Check it out. The stress monitor is now in the WOOP app. Make sure you're on the latest version. You can

can find it on the home page. You can find it in the coaching tab. You can interact with it in real time. The interventions are in there. So go in, watch Huberman's videos on how to do the interventions, start playing with them. It's really a feature that you should be interacting with them and engaging with. And hopefully it's a fun feature that I like the word you used to play. Yeah. Because that's what it's been to me. It's like this joyful experience while you're using the app. Well, Jamie, thank you for all the work that you've done. getting this out the door. Folks listening, we're going to be coming out with more updates to the stress monitor.

And, of course, we're going to have Jamie back on the WOOP podcast. Amazing. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks again to Jamie Wado for coming on the WOOP podcast and for all the work that her and her team have done to launch the Stress Monitor. If you're on Woop, you got to go check it out in the WOOP app. If you enjoyed this WOOP podcast, please leave a rating or review.

Subscribe to the WOOP podcast. You can check us out on social at Woop or at Will Ahmed. If you have a question you want to see answered on the podcast, email us, podcast at whoop.com. Call us 508-443-4952. New members can use the code Will, W-I-L, and get a $60 credit on Loop Accessories.

And that's a wrap, folks. Thank you for listening. We'll catch you next week on the Wooop podcast. Go play with the Stress Monitor. And as always, stay healthy and stay in the green. Thank you.