WHOOP Podcast - The Circadian Rhythm Sleep Hack: Kristen Holmes and Emily Capodilupo discuss the benefits of Sleep Consistency.

Episode Date: April 3, 2019

How to improve your sleep by maintaining your circadian rhythm: WHOOP VP of Performance Kristen Holmes and Director of Analytics Emily Capodilupo talk about the benefits of Sleep Consistency (3:38), where the idea came from (5:49), what we've seen in WHOOP data (9:13), spending more time in deeper stages of sleep (10:31), behaviors that can help (11:32), a case study of a team that traveled west but stayed on Eastern time (14:12), and how it benefited them (17:07), Connor Jaeger's preparation for the 2016 Olympics (19:34), other methods for handling time zone changes (20:26), including a bedtime routine (21:12) and splitting the difference pre-travel (22:05), and getting better sleep despite actually spending less time in bed (23:07).Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

We discovered that there were secrets that your body was trying to tell you that could really help you optimize performance, but no one could monitor those things. And that's when we set out to build the technology that we thought could really change the world. Welcome to the WOOP podcast. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of WOOP, where we are on a mission to unlock human performance. At WOOP, we measure the body 24-7 and provide analytics to our members to help improve performance. This includes strain, recovery, and sleep. Our clients range for the best professional athletes in the world, to Navy SEALs, to fitness enthusiasts, to Fortune 500 CEOs and executives.

The common thread among WOOP members is a passion to improve. What does it take to optimize performance for athletes, for humans, really anyone? We're launching a podcast to dig deeper. We'll interview experts and industry leaders across sports, data, technology, physiology, athletic achievement, you name it. My hope is that you'll leave these conversations with some new ideas and a greater passion for performance. With that in mind, I welcome you to the Whoop Podcast.

The three biggest influencers on your circadian rhythm are when you go to bed, you wake up, the timing of your meals, and also your exposure to light. You know, as I kind of thought about their travel, I'm like, gosh, we can kind of keep these three things, you know, in line with what they did on the East Coast, we could effectively, potentially create no physiological changes during this time frame. Hello, folks. Today's podcast focuses on a way to hack your sleep without having to spend more time in bed. We call it sleep consistency.

Woop VP of Performance, Kristen Holmes, and Director of Analytics, Emily Capital Lupo, discuss the benefits of maintaining your circadian rhythm with sleep consistency. Our regular listeners will recognize Kristen and Emily from previous podcasts, and when it comes to sleep, they really know what they're talking about. I know I've learned a lot from them personally. In this episode, they explain exactly what sleep consistency is, and share tips and tricks for how to get the most out of it. They'll go deep on whoop data and talk about a case study of an NCAA team Kristen works with.

They stayed on East Coast time when traveling out west for competition and actually had great results. Without further ado, here are Kristen and Emily. We're super excited to talk with you today about one of our new favorite concepts, sleep consistency. Really excited that now it's available to our consumer population. We're going to do our best to just kind of dig into sleep consistency and identify different behaviors that you can think about that will help you achieve more consistency and also talk about just some of the reasons why it's so critical

to your overall health and well-being and performance. For the next half hour or so we're going to talk about why sleep consistency is the most important metric you never knew mattered. We're going to talk about the physiology behind the metric, sort of why we get so excited about it here at Woop, and then Kristen's going to share a really exciting case study, but one of our teams who took advantage of sleep consistency in order to completely outperform expectations when it really mattered. So, Emily, why do you tell us a little bit about sleep consistency?

So mathematically, sleep consistency is an extremely simple concept. It's just how close was your bedtime today to your bedtime yesterday and your wake time today to your wake time yesterday. But why it matters is because it's really a measure of your circadian rhythm. So a lot of times people think about their circadian rhythms as

their sleep wake cycle, but the reality is that it's a bit of an oversimplification. It's actually your body's clock, and it regulates everything from digestion to hormone production, including the hormone melatonin, which is responsible for sleep, but your digestive hormones, your stress hormones. And so

one of the things that we found, is that people who have higher sleep consistency are also going to have, you know, like fewer GI issues and they're going to have better skin and new, better mood. So it's safe to say that you're going to just, your body will work way more efficiently if you can just leverage this one behavior consistently. Yeah, so it's this really powerful metric because, of course, we're measuring it by measuring your sleep wake cycle. But it's sort of this holistic measurement of like how consistent your daytime is.

I mean, you can think about your body operating as, like, you know, any kind of factory or just, like, operation where, like, if different steps are happening at predictable times, then you can plan for them. So, like, if you're always going to bed at the same time, you start to produce melatonin about two hours before your body's anticipating bedtime. And so when you get into bed, you're sleepy and you fall asleep. So we've actually seen in our own data that sleep consistency explains up to a 3% difference in sleep efficiency. We've definitely seen that in the data that we're tracking as well. I think our operators, I think, stands out the most once we started really thinking and applying this concept of sleep consistency. And we've definitely seen improvements in time spent in slowy of sleep, time spent in REM. So just anecdotally, apart from kind of the research that's gone on, you know, we're definitely seeing that this, you know, when folks focus on consistency, we see massive improvements in their sleep efficiency.

Explain some of the inspiration. Because, you know, obviously we've been thinking about consistency for a while, but there was a kind of a really clear forcing function this summer that kind of brought about, um, helped us realize, well, this is something that we need to, to think about more, more, you know, more regularly. Yeah. So one of the things that I think most of our users don't know is that while sleep consistency sort of made it into the sleep analysis on March 4th and, you know, has been in the weekly performance assessment that Monday report, um, since the summer. and actually in Sleep Coach for a few months before that, we've actually been sort of more directly giving this information to our elite clients for a little over a year now. A little insider whoop knowledge,

that's generally kind of how we develop features. So we want to kind of make sure that when we put something out there that we really know how it's going to be useful and that we're ready for our users to action and that we're sort of prepared to say, like, here's this thing and this is why you should care. So, you know, we want to always make sure that, like, we're not just giving you metrics because somebody else is giving you that metric or because it's just a number that's there, but that, you know, really is something that you should care about. And so we actually got excited about sleep consistency back in the summer of 2017.

There's a paper published in Nature by Andrew Phillips in which he looked at the sleep timing. He actually called the sleep regularity of undergrads. And he showed that he had basically two groups of undergrads, those who had high sleep consistency or sleep regularity, as he called it, and those that had lower sleep regularity. And what he found that was really interesting, is actually on average, like over the course of a semester, they had very similar, like, total amounts of sleep.

But the ones with high sleep regularity had higher GPAs. And so he made up this metric. It was on a scale of zero to 100, and a 10-point difference in his sleep regularity index. corresponded to a 0.1 on the 4.0 GPA scale increase in GPA. And so we got... It's really huge, right? You know, if you could tell me that there was something completely not related to studying,

that would increase my GPA by 0.1, like, I would have been all over that. And so we got really excited about this because we've so many NC2A athletes and just like collegiate users in general on the platform. And one thing that we found over and over and over again is that, you know, performance is performance. We're like, so if it's helping these athletes with their academic performance, because I think that's important to mention that this Phillips paper was not a sport, yeah, athletic performance paper. They were not athletes. They were just, some of them might have been, but he was only looking for undergrads. We wanted to see if, like, the same phenomenon

existed in our data. And I think this is really kind of speaks to the power of Woop in general. So, like, he had 60 people in his study, which for a physiology study, especially sleep, is huge, right? That's impressive. It was published in nature. It's a big deal. You know, we had, I think, 20,000 that we looked at. So, you know, we're able to kind of reproduce with our data at just a much larger scale. So we looked at about 3 million sleeps.

I think 20,000 of them were collegiate athletes, like users. And then, you know, however many years of data we had on them. And we saw not only did sort of sleep consistency correlate with the performance data that we had, But that we also were able to come up with sort of a physiological explanation. So the Phillips paper is an observational study. He didn't propose a causative relationship, although he did suggest that it might be related to circadian rhythm effects. But what we saw was that in our data, the student athletes who had higher sleep consistency were getting more slow-wave sleep than getting more REM sleep, and then they were having higher HRVs and lower resting heart rates as a result.

And so, you know, that explains why, you know, maybe they're performing better academically because REM sleep, of course, is when we convert short-term memory to long-term memory. And so if we're seeing more REM sleep, therefore more, you know, memory consolidation at night, obviously you're going to do better in school. In 2017, when that paper came out and we started thinking were deeply about sleep consistency, which is a really exciting moment because I think we'd been, you know, in the teams that we've been working with, we, you know, been leveraging or thinking about sleep duration. in a very intentional way, and then all of a sudden we had this other metric that we could kind of

focus in on. And what we saw in the data is that it was really game-changing, because it's not just about how much time you're spending in bed, but it's the quality of your sleep and that, you know, now we kind of know in the data that if you can be consistent with your sleep wait times, you are just going to spend more time in these deeper stages of sleep, and therefore get better quality and spend less time in bed. To your point in the beginning, like it's this awesome kind of thing that no one really thinks a whole lot about. But if you can leverage it, it's so powerful. Well, that's what we kind of love about it because it's a behavior, right? Yeah, it's like we know it. Yeah, we know that people have more efficient sleep are going to

perform better athletically. You know, people that get more slow wave sleep are going to perform better athletically. But, you know, you can't really give someone as advice, like, hey, gets more slow wave sleep tonight, right? Like, how? And so sleep consistency is the answer to that how. Right. You know, we know that like, it explains about a 15 minute difference and how much always sleep you get. We know it's only about a 36-minute difference in how much where I'm sleeping. And our operators, we've seen, like, up to 6 to 12 percent, like, improvement or more time spent in sleep, which is just, it's, like, massive. Yeah, so those stats that I just quoted were, you know, from everybody, including, like, probably, like, older and less fit people.

Right, right. We've definitely seen even stronger effects and sort of younger. So maybe let's dig in. We talked about behaviors, like, what other types of behaviors, you know, can our listeners focus in on that will help them achieve this consistent kind of sleep wake at time? Yeah, so, you know, there's all the behavior surrounding sleep. It's not just, you know, the consistency of, like, literally, did I get into bed and wake up at the same minute? But all the things that you can be doing, like, so we talk a lot about, like, sleep hygiene or, like, your nighttime routine that sort of sets your body up for, you know, that moment when, like, head hits the pillow and, like, goes out. So, you know, a lot of people like to kind of take some time to meditate, people like, you know, whatever it is, it almost doesn't matter. You know, it can be a hot bath.

It can be, you know, just stretching. I think block and blue light. black wool is such a monster yes but it's crazy like how like it takes so much

discipline like I even as much as I know about sleep and as much as I know how much glue it affects me I still have to be like

put on your glasses glue lights everywhere right so it does it does take I think some discipline but I think if like that's one habit that just you have to

figure out how to make that happen because that will creep in and affect your sleep and it will affect you your policy obviously because it's associated with melatonin you're not going to produce melatonin

Blue light actually directly affects our circadian rhythms because it's the specific frequency of light that the cells in your eyes that control, you know, is at daytime or nighttime that go directly to the super chasmatic nucleus, which is sort of the home of your circadian rhythm are sensitive to blue light. And so if you, if you're looking at any kind of blue light, you're telling your brain it's daytime, which shuts off melatonin production. So you could be doing all of this like great work to like have a consistent bedtime and wait time. but you're sort of messing with your hormones leading up to bed, and so you kind of don't get that full benefit. So if you want to get the full benefit of making this behavior change, you know, that's like a way to protect it and kind of to almost like sort of bolster that effect.

Right. And then the 100 sleep tips, our 100's best sleepers, sleep tips, people can dig into that too just to find other behaviors that I think are really like ideal, right? Yeah. So. Because that goes deep, right? Yeah.

Your podcast, I think also. And your podcast. Yeah, we kind of hit, we hit a lot. A lot of the behavioral stuff, but yeah. But I think it's a really good point that, like, you know, there's sort of their sleep consistency, and we keep literally talking about, like, almost the math of it. There are ways to, you know, get the most out of it and to sort of, like, support that behavior. So it's, like, not doing things that are going to further mess with your circadian rhythm.

So, you know, don't, you know, get really consistent with your sleep, but then, like, start drinking coffee at night. Yeah, exactly. You know, you're sort of fighting with those same receptors that melatonin binds to. Caffein blocks them. So we've been talking a lot about. sort of the science behind it, but I think it'd be really cool to talk about, you know, some of the ways that sort of using, leveraging this information, we've been able to help

our clients. And I know that you have one particularly great story here. Yeah, we did an awesome case study with Florida State Women's Soccer Team. Gosh, I guess it was the 2017 season, and they had an awesome regular season, and we had this, they were traveling out to the West Coast for the second and third round of NC2As and you know I was kind of digging into their itinerary a little bit or we were kind of thinking about what that trip looked like and so I was starting to put together the itinerary and notice the game times were at 1 o'clock and 4 o'clock I was like shoot this is like they could I think they could actually stay on east coast time and get away with that given where you know the time the the game the time for the game and as we

know one of the most important things if you traveling out west is it's really tough on the system right they're whoever they're playing if it's a west coast team and both teams one was mountain and one was west coast um they would have just an advantage right because they're not having to adjust physiologically to this new time zone so this concept of maintaining their time zone kind of you know came into play and uh you know we had a couple discussions on it and we're like all right i'm just going to propose this to them so really principally what it centered around was keeping their um well the third three biggest influencers on your circadian rhythm are when you go to bed, when you wake up,

which we're talking a lot about, the timing of your meals, and also your exposure to light. So I guess that, you know, as I kind of thought about their travel, I'm like, gosh, if we can kind of keep these three things, you know, in line with what they do on the East Coast, we could effectively, you know, potentially create no physiological changes, you know, during this time frame. And so, you know, talk to the team, the coaches. everyone was bought in, the young women were super disciplined. Because it takes, they have to buy into it, right? They have to believe like, okay, yeah, this is going to give me a competitive advantage.

Right, because it's a little ridiculous, right? They have to wake up. You have three o'clock in the afternoon. Yeah, so it's, you know, so you had to get the folks that are organizing meals, and, you know, they had to basically kind of shut themselves off from sunlight. And, you know, they had to do a lot of little things to kind of make sure that this desecronization didn't happen. So this protocol, they had to be really disciplined, right, because you're talking about, you know, just even on the airplane and in the airport, making sure that you're not napping at a time that could disrupt, you know, when you actually need to fall asleep on West Coast time, which is East Coast time. You know, it's kind of complicated.

But the young women did a phenomenal job, you know, staying disciplined and, you know, really just following the it itinerary and making sure that, you know, they're staying as synchronized to East Coast time as possible. And did it pay off? It really did. Like, not only were the results incredible, so they won their first round game, which was great. And they ended up losing on the Sunday in the third round, but they played phenomenally. And just physiologically, when you look at our core metrics across resting heart rate, you know, sleep performance, efficiency, you know, HRV, recovery. There was positive changes. Right, because they were very outranked on both games, right?

They were, they were, I think they were very similar to their second round opponent. but their third round opponent was a higher ranking team, and they, you know, they went all the way to the end, and they ended up losing, but the coach who's, you know, kind of world-renowned, he's really, he's just super successful, felt that this was the right thing to do and would do it again in a heartbeat if they were in the same situation. So, and also this team ended up actually winning the national championship this past season. So there's just a really classy FSU soccer, really classy program all around,

and, yeah, it was just really fun to be able to kind of go on that journey, and being willing to kind of take a chance, you know, because this isn't kind of standard operating procedure for NC2A teams, right? I think most teams would be nervous about, you know, deploying that type of protocol, you know, with their team. And the fact that they kind of trusted the data and trusted their athletes, you know, to be able to be disciplined enough to follow the protocol,

I think, says a lot about the program. And one thing that was kind of so incredible about this particular case study was that when they came back, they actually had another game, right? Well, they did not actually, but I think the idea, though, is when you come back home and you've, now at this point, at that point, you would have assimilated it to kind of West Coast, you come back in your face with midterm exams and, you know, just having to get back into the life, you know, on the East Coast, they were able to come home and they suffered, you know,

no ill effects, you're able to hit the ground running. So, yeah, it was, yeah. Brutal about, like, these three-day or two-day, you know, by coastal trips where it's, like, you get jet lights, and by the time you're sort of over it, you come home and you're, like, jetlights again. And so by basically, like, refusing to acknowledge that, you know, they ever change time zones, they just get to skit. And, yeah, I mean, there's still, like, you know, people get dehydrated on planes and, you know, travels exhausting. So there's still, you know, it's not completely neutral, but you get rid of, like, a huge piece of that kind of physiological hit. So true.

And so, yeah, they kind of come back and, like you said, they're sort of more ready to take on midterms and stuff. And what I think is kind of so powerful about this whole story is that for the 2016 Olympics, we were working with Connor Yeager, who sort of like knew about himself that he was bad at dealing with jet lag. And so, you know, we kind of looked at his data and we were like, oh, you have, you know, Olympic trials in Omaha, you should go, you know, four days before the rest of your team. So that, like, you know, if you do that based on your data, you'll have adapted to Omaha time, you know, by the trials. And, you know, kind of the rest of history, he goes on. when medals in Rio and so that went really well for him but not everybody can travel you know

five days six days in advance and obviously when he comes back he has to kind of deal with that on the flip side and so this sort of new learning that we can just refuse to acknowledge times um it's really powerful yeah so if you can't acknowledge the new time zone you know what are some things that people can do to kind of mitigate the effects of you know transition and adjusting to a new time zone. Yeah, so the biggest thing for me that I've seen is getting sunlight exposure in your new time zone. So making sure you get outside, not just like, you know, indoor room light. Getting some exercise can help, you know, avoiding too much like alcohol, caffeine,

do things that are just going to confuse your circadian rhythm, but rather getting things like sunlight that sort of tell your body like, oh, this is noon light. And that kind of starts to shift your body during the day, not just sleep. Mealtimes. Yeah, thinking about your meal times, thinking about not being afraid of using melatonin, not being afraid of, you know, trying to, like, reproduce your bedtime routine as much as possible. So, like, if you're in your new time zone. Place, because that starts to tell your body, you know, in advance of getting into bed that you're sort of getting into sleeping mode.

So you can start to do things like, you know, putting on your pajamas and, you know, trying to, like, kind of get into. It's those cues, right? Yeah, how I tell your brain, okay, I'm lining down now. it's bedtime. Yeah, I think you can kind of like trick your body more than people realize. You start to go through your bedtime routine. Your body's like, oh, okay, that's what this is. And, you know, it starts to produce those. Especially if you're doing, it's the same thing that you've done in your home time zone. And so that's, yeah, that's going to be another way that, like, having those, that, like, really strong routine at home can really help you when you travel because you've created this, like, really strong marker for yourself. Whereas if every night is something completely random, your body has no cue. And then you, like, travel and you have no cue. And then it's hard. but you know that that only kind of gets you so far another thing that you can do is you can start to like split the difference before you travel so it's like you can start to go to bed um earlier and earlier later and later depending on whether or not you're going east or west yeah um it's gonna take you about one full day yeah it's about a day per time zone right yeah um and then that's like you know

it's a very handway to measure but there's some truth to that um and so you can you know if you're you're traveling and you know you can't travel early or you know if it's practical to start trying to go to bed earlier or start trying to sleep later you can almost like get you know do some of those you know one hour per days yeah before you travel yeah so then you know if you're going on vacation and you're an important meeting or something you know you're sort of more ready for that so I mean travel is obviously like a somewhat extreme application of like sort of adherence to sleep consistency but I'm wondering if maybe you can talk about like you know more examples of this helping for your sort of everyday users just at home.

Yeah, well, I can speak to my own, my own situation. Yeah, I mean, I really started, you know, unfortunately not soon enough, but really this summer I started doubling down on sleep consistency, and I've seen a huge, huge improvement in the time that I'm spending in deeper stages of sleep. So, you know, I'm really, you know, REM has honestly like almost doubled, which is, which is crazy, right and slowly sleep is remained about the same but um but yeah i think the most significant change i've seen is is in my rem and actually like i'm spending less time in bed uh so it's consistent

with the other cases the other cases that we've seen across the lead athlete population i've been able to see that my own data which has been exciting uh and and i think just too like just my base you know the improvements off my baseline just with HRV and uh with heart variability and rest in heart rate um i've made substantial improvements so yeah have you noticed that this is sort of translating to how you're feeling or like getting more REM sleep what is that equated to for you? I mean there's no question I think you know once you start to be aware once you're aware of your body right and you and you kind of have these these objective metrics that you're dialed in on a daily basis you do start to notice that wow okay when I spend more time in deeper

stages of sleep I just I feel so much better you know just today versus yesterday it's like a good example. Like yesterday, I spent more time in deeper stages and, you know, I woke up, I felt clear and I could almost like predict what my recovery was going to be. And today, sure enough, I kind of didn't feel quite as clear when I woke up. And sure enough, you know, I didn't actually spend as much time in deeper stages. I had a couple more disturbances. And, you know, I knew when I went to bed, I was like, I'm dressed too warmly. Like I had a long sleeve on. I'm like, what are I doing? But yeah, it's, it's funny. that, you know, you start to, like, really dial in on some of these nuances.

But I think the end result, though, is, you know, you just want to be able to perform consistently well, you know, not just for, you know, it's not just about being good for a week. It's about performing consistently well across the weeks and the months and the years. And so that's really kind of, I think, what we're all really after. And kind of understanding, you know, these principles, I think, are really important. and it's been fun to kind of get inside this concept of soup consistency and start to understand it better and be able to leverage it, you know. Well, this has been super fun.

Emily, I love listening to you talk about sleep. I've learned so much from you. And you actually, your podcast is sensational. People absolutely have to listen to that. And I know there's a lot of resources, obviously, on our website. People can go to. So, yeah, this has been really fun. Yeah, so if anybody is now,

curious about sleep consistency and the time zone maintenance protocol we've got much lengthier write-ups available at whoop.com slash validation and there's if you go search in the locker which is our blog you can find probably at this point six or seven different articles about sleep consistency there's sort of a pretty big deep dive that came out when we added the features that would have been March 4th so you know go go check that out and of course, you can always reach out to us with any questions you have about this feature or any feature at support at whoop.com. A big thanks to Kristen and Emily for sharing all their insight. You can look forward to more

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enjoy whoop. For our European customers, the code is Will Ahmed E.U. Just tack EU on the end of my name. And that'll get you 30 euros off when you join. Check out whoop.com slash the locker for show notes and more, including links to relevant topics from our conversation. You can subscribe, rate and review the WOOP podcast on iTunes, Google, Spotify, or wherever you've found this podcast. We'd love to hear your feedback. You can find me online at Will Ahmed and follow at Whoop on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. You can also email The Locker at Whoop.com with any thoughts, ideas, or suggestions. For our current members, we've got a lot of new gear in the Whoop store.

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