WHOOP Podcast - The Sleep Episode: WHOOP Director of Analytics Emily Capodilupo answers everything you want to know about sleep.

Episode Date: March 13, 2019

Sleep expert and WHOOP Director of Analytics Emily Capodilupo talks about her background and why she joined WHOOP (3:46), habits of our top 100 sleepers (15:30), bedtime routines (20:01), new WHOOP sleep features including Sleep Consistency (20:48), Sleep Efficiency and Respiratory Rate (24:18), how long one bad night of sleep affects you (36:30), improving REM & slow-wave sleep and what that means (43:29), tips for staying asleep (44:54), exercise's effect on sleep (52:58), tracking HRV during sleep (1:00:03), the reason why we try to sleep 8 straight hours (1:08:45), the dangers of Ambien (1:15:25), what sleep data looks like when you're drunk (1:21:53), and the numbers behind how much better people sleep after they start using WHOOP (1:28:55).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 today. 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. Sleep consistency is obviously really closely related to your circadian

rhythm and so if you have high sleep consistency your body is able to anticipate sleep which is why we're seeing sleep consistency explains as much as like a 3% difference in sleep efficiency it explains this difference in slow wave sleep and REM sleep and we think that that's because when your body's anticipating sleep it knows what to do what's up folks in honor of world sleep day that's right Did you even know World Sleep Day is coming up? World Sleep Day on March 15th. This week's podcast is all about sleep. My guest is Woop Director of Analytics.

Emily Capitilupo. Actually, our first employee at Woop, our first hire. Emily's part of the founding team. I've had the pleasure of working with her for six years. She's totally brilliant. She's a published author who specialized in sleep for nearly a decade. and at Harvard, she was one of the top researchers around sleep. Emily and I discuss her background and roll at whoop,

how we became an industry leader in sleep monitoring, as well as several new features we've released this month to help you better understand and optimize your sleep. We crowdsourced questions from all different whoop users, people of different backgrounds. This includes how to make your bedroom optimal, why Romans didn't sleep for eight hours, hours, how you can improve your sleep stages and get more REM and slow wave, how do you

fall asleep faster, what products Emily uses to improve her sleep, and the truth about exercise before bed, the optimal strain to maximize your sleep. That's just some of what we talk about. This is an amazing, amazing podcast. I think you guys are going to get a lot of value out of it. Without further ado, here's Emily. Emily, thanks for coming on. Thanks for having you. So we are going to talk about all things sleep. I am very excited about this. I think our listeners are very excited about this. Now, you and I met in 2013, I believe, and we've been building this business together since then. It's been quite a journey. Why not for our audience, you just give a little bit of background on how, well, you and I met and also how you got so

interested in sleep and physiology? Sure. So when I was in high school, I was actually lucky enough to get an internship working for Andrew Newberg at the University of Pennsylvania. And he was studying neurodegenerative diseases, so like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. And at that point, I sort of already knew that I was interested in neurobiology. And at the time, I thought, sort of medicine. You know, I absolutely loved working for him. I think he's doing really cool work. But what I realized was that I really hated working with sick people. Like, I found it depressing. And so I kind of had this, like, weird thing where, like, I found human physiology fascinating, but sick people made me stressed. And so when I went to college, I got a job working with yeast. So I figured, you know,

we were studying infectious disease. And I was pre-med at the time. And I thought, oh, I'll work on diseases, but I don't have to see sick people. You know, we were just working on growing these proteins and yeast. And yeast smell bad. And they're, like, really unpleasant to work with. And it just made me hate the smell of beer and bread and all these things. And so I was kind of like, I actually liked working with people, didn't like working with yeast, and I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do. And I realized I just loved sleeping, and I think it's fascinating. And it was like, oh, I wonder, do people study sleep? And so I Googled it, and actually, like, one of the world's sort of leading sleep labs is at Harvard, where I was an undergrad at the time.

And I was like, oh, that's kind of cool. And I started looking into what they were doing. And I just sent like a cold email and I was like I love sleeping can I work for you and Elizabeth Claremont was sort of nice enough to to let me in even though I was like a freshman and didn't really know too much this is when you're a freshman at Harvard yeah so I'd been working in this infectious disease lab for a couple months and then I was just kind of you know this isn't for me and so then I started working for her and actually ended up working for her through all four years of school I wrote my undergraduate thesis in her lab and we published papers together And so, you know, I really discovered that, like, you know, sleep is this really cool kind of fields where humans spend about a third of their lives asleep and the sort of only universally agreed upon answer to, like, what the purpose of sleep is, is that otherwise we get sleepy.

And I kind of thought that was so exciting and, like, interesting that, like, there's nothing else that you spend even close to that much time doing that you don't know the purpose of. and all these leaders in the field they're just like, yeah, otherwise you get sleepy and we know that after, you know, a week or so and the record's like 11 days, you die. So clearly something really important is happening when we sleep and we know that we feel like crap if we don't. But sort of what its purpose is, you know,

despite obviously, you know, hundreds of years of research and, you know, so much has been written on it, there's really, we don't know anything. And I thought that that was really exciting. I like that, you know, sleep research is predominantly working with healthy people, and so none of our subjects depressed me. So that was really good. And I thought it was super interesting, and, you know, it's really cool to do research on

something that you experience. When you're working with sleep, you just sort of, you know, every night you're like, what am I doing? And so there's something kind of cool there. Well, I think that's a great, it's a great background. And for me, I had a lot of the same feelings, although. admittedly, I wasn't spending nearly as much time in the weeds as you were on sleep specifically. But just as a college athlete, I felt like, okay, there should be, you should know so much more about

this recovery period in order to understand how well you're training. And so those were like the very early days of whoop. And you and I met at the Harvard Innovation Lab. And I remember you had like all these interesting job offers. And I was thinking to myself, like, wow, this woman knows so much about. physiology and sleep and recovery you know how can we get her to be a part of the team and so what got you excited at that point to join whoop I mean I think what got me excited about whoop was really like the same thing that got me excited about sleep it was this idea that like your pitch to me was

we all work out and we have no idea like if we're working out too hard and you know we want to train as hard as it's safe too and I know you would like overtrained which is you're the worst right you work like too hard at that point you know I completed all the pre-med requirements, but I really wasn't excited about med school, and I wanted some way to kind of marry that physiological background, all the academic research I had done, but to sort of do it in a setting where we could have really high impact. The summer, before I joined WOOP, I had worked at a healthcare consulting company, you know, and I spent like all summer working on this, what I thought was a brilliant proposal for

how we were going to increase follow-up appointment compliance for people who visited emergency rooms, which in the south side of Chicago happens to be, like, pathetically low. And, you know, it came up with this recommendation. They were like, great, in six months, we'll review it, and, you know, maybe we'll try some of these things. It just felt like you work so hard and there's no impact. And what I really loved about WOOP was that ability to, like, have, you know, really high impact and to sort of help people train now and to kind of, you know, unlock for them.

A lot of this information that's just sort of there for the taking and that no other product was helping bring forward to people's attention. So, like, you know, there are all these things. Like, athletes have no idea how much sleep they need. And, you know, it's not that hard to kind of help educate them. And it just seemed like there is so much low-hanging fruit, and so there is so much opportunity to make a really big difference. Yeah, and your point about the process in academic research to get things done is a good one.

I mean, it's like I found it really slow. I found that the sense of urgency around. academia was lacking. Yeah, and I did it for four years, and I loved it. And, I mean, I did in high school, too, but I'm not counting that. But it's really interesting, but it's like I wrote this paper, and I was so proud of it, and I worked really hard, you know, and it went through the peer review process, and it got published, and, you know, it's been cited, and, you know, all this other stuff's been

built on it, but I can't really tell you, like, what's come of it. Obviously, not trying to hate on academic research, I think, you know, it's so important, and, like, I love reading all those papers. But for me personally, I kind of liked, you know, with the industry that stuff actually sort of gets out there much faster and that there's like a little bit more of like a tolerance for trying things and just moving quickly. Yeah, I think within weeks of, you know, working at WOOP, we were creating algorithms and scores. In those early days, we knew we wanted to have pillars around strain and recovery and sleep. for those who are less familiar with whoop strains like the intensity of a workout

recover is how prepared your body is for strain sleep is measuring things like the quality of sleep and how much sleep you need and all of these things tie together in an ongoing coach for you like you know you read this paper that I put together I was like okay this is these are the things I want to be able to talk to users about how do you go from taking physiology which is a science to creating scores, which is part science, part art, really, because there's no recovery metric out there

that we're comparing our recovery metric to. We're trying to base it off of all the science that's out there. Yeah, so it's a little bit of a case-by-case basis, but I think like our big sort of what we're looking out for is not necessarily something like our recovery score, right? Because like you said, it's like, you know, I can't go to the doctor to a blood test and say, like, oh, this is your recovery.

There's no objective standard, but what we can do is we can show that we're putting together metrics that are useful. And so, for example, we did this big study with the Corey Stringer Institute at the University of Connecticut, where we had 80 athletes wear a whoop for an entire year, and we looked at their recovery score every single morning, and then half the athletes were on the women's track and field team, the other half were on the men's soccer team, and we looked at, you know, every time they competed, you know, for, obviously for a track. So we were looking at their pace for soccer.

We were looking at things like shooting accuracy and turnovers and stuff like that. And what we found was that the recovery score predicted how they would perform that day better than sort of what other people were using at the time. So things like morning resting heart rate, even morning heart rate variability, how much sleep they had self-reported to get the night before, and also how much sleep whoop had measured. And so what we were able to show is that our recovery score is a more useful predictor of how you will perform that day than anything else that was sort of commonly being used. Now that doesn't necessarily mean that it can't be improved upon in the future.

It doesn't mean that like there maybe aren't like other things that could also be better than, you know, resting heart rate HRV or sleep alone. But we were able to kind of combine them in a unique way than never been done before that created something more useful. So what we're always kind of looking for is that can we create something more useful than what people already have? And like that's our metric for something being, you know, sort of worth putting out there. Yeah, and I think you gave a great background there. What we've always tried to do at Whoop is marry physiology with actionable insight, right? Yeah. So one of the things that was kind of cool about their recovery score is that we wrote it

before we'd ever collected any data. And so, you know, it's not, you know, a traditional data science approach in that way. So we took all of the literature that we could get our hands on, a lot of stuff from Dr. Daniel Ploos in New Zealand and Martin Bouchet and sort of their labs. And we looked at, you know, what is known

about how resting heart rate in the morning correlates with performance later that day. What's known about HRV? How reliable are these as predictors? and what are the sort of pitfalls where maybe, you know, they can be misleading. And we tried to integrate them into a combined model that gave weight to, like, what the literature said we could rely on. And then we sort of, you know, came to the Corey Stringer Institute with, like,

the literature seems to suggest that this model is useful. And, you know, at this point, we'd all been, you know, kind of, whoop employees internally, had been looking at their recovery scores every day. And so we had a sense that it sort of felt good, but we didn't know. And so sort of by doing this study, we were able to show that, you know, it in fact is combining these metrics in a useful way and that, you know, we were getting something that was a better predictor than what was available. As opposed, I'd say, like, traditional data science approach would be to, like, collect all the data first and then retroactively fit a model. We didn't have the luxury of doing that because we needed to create a score in order to sell a product that people would put on and collect data on.

So there's a little bit of like a chicken and egg thing there. Well, I've just been amazed by all that you've done to build these algorithms and it's been so much fun building it with you, Emily. So congratulations on what you've built as a foundation for WOOP today. Thank you. All right. Well, now we are going to get into questions from WOOP users. So we've surveyed our top 100 sleepers and learn things from them. And separately, we've crowdsourced questions from everyone who follows whoop.

This could be whoop users. This could be people generally out there who want to better understand sleep and recovery. And now you are going to answer these questions, Emily. Okay. So let's start with surveying our top 100 sleepers. So these are the top 100 sleepers on whoop. had you determined these people, first of all, Emily, and then what did we learn from their responses? Sure.

So we actually looked at a combination of their sleep performance, their sleep efficiency, and their sleep consistency over the past 90 days. And so we looked for users that had been on the system for a while and were sort of consistently, you know, hitting these top metrics. And then we broke it down a little bit. So we made sure that we got people from all different age groups. And how wide of age groups do these hundred people fall into? So I think our youngest top sleeper was 19, and then they went up to people in their 50s. Okay. And what I found the most fascinating that we learned from them is that they're actually not doing anything all that insane.

Our big kind of motivation behind surveying these guys is that sometimes people will write into support. like, oh, my sleep need is completely unrealistic. How does anyone get eight and a half hours of sleep every night? And what we wanted to show was that, you know, these people are not doing anything that you can't replicate. You know, it's not just like Whoop giving you this crazy unrealistic thing, but like our top sleepers on average were getting, you know, I think it was like 96% of their sleep need every single night.

So, you know, it is possible to do this night after night. And in a lot of cases, it really doesn't require a sort of unreasonable or, you know, all that intense or expensive change. And just to unpack what you said, sleep need is effectively the amount of hours of sleep that we calculate you need before you go to bed to be fully recovered for the next day or to be optimal for the next day. And so if you have more sleep debt or you take more strain on your body, those are the types of things. that would increase your sleep need. If you've been getting a lot of sleep, those are types of things that would decrease your sleep need. So you're saying that this population,

our top 100 sleepers, on average, was getting 96% of their sleep performance, right? Or of their sleep need. So that means the hours of sleep divided by their sleep need was 96% roughly. So that's really impressive. Now there's an element here of the rich getting richer because as you get better and better at sleeping,

your sleep debt decreases so that over time it becomes easier to meet that sleep need too, correct? Yeah, absolutely. So somebody who's chronically sleep deprived is going to have a higher sleep need every night because they have that sleep debt from previous nights. And so it's easier to stay on top than it is to sort of get on top. Some of the things that we saw that was really interesting is that, you know, they're not giving up all of like the joys of life, right? You know, they're still drinking caffeine.

They're just stopping for the most part, you know, after lunch. And they're still occasionally drinking alcohol. You know, they're still like, you know, some of them do use screen devices in bed. You know, they're just doing it less. If you look at the behavior of these top 100 sleepers, they still behave like normal people. It's just they have found routines effectively that are more stable. Yeah, they're just sort of doing it more intelligently, I guess. or more conscientious.

So they'll still drink alcohol, they just won't do it every night. Yeah. They'll still look at screen devices. They just won't do it every night. Yeah. One thing that we kind of saw come up over and over again in their survey responses is that they all have a bedtime routine. You know, and there's a lot of talk about good sleep hygiene.

So people are, you know, and it comes up in different ways. There's no, like, one right way to sleep. But, you know, we see either people are meditating or stretching or journaling or, you know, doing something to kind of mark the end of the day in the beginning of the sleep and that's really helpful so those were three of the most common you've got stretching meditating and what was the third journaling yeah what other ones did you hear of I mean we saw a lot of things like you know a lot of people were talking about like putting their phones away you know so not sleeping with a phone by the bed yeah I mean we even saw cute things like a bunch of people mentioned like you know

they take their dog for a walk and they like They put their pets to bed and that, you know, it's just, I think that there's something really healthy about, you know, creating that, like, moment of separation between, like, just day and night instead of, like, what a lot of, I think, unhealthy sleep patterns that people have. You see people, they're, like, they're working on their couch and then they bring their laptop into bed and they kind of, like, work until they fall asleep. And then, so you don't really have that, like, separation. And so your brain just gets confused because they're like, I'm trying to work, so I need to, like, you know, try and produce all these stimulating hormones, but I'm also in bed. and so then you start to, like, lose that association of, like, bed being for sleep. And so it doesn't, it almost, like, doesn't matter what you do as long as, like, you're creating that, like, moment of separation.

So, like, taking a hot shower, you know, and just kind of, like, after I shower, I put on pajamas and then I'm, you know, not doing any more work can just be really helpful. Now, did you find that these top hundred sleepers also had a high sleep consistency? Yes. So, well, that was one of the things that we sort of selected them for. Okay. But we didn't actually use those words, that language, in our survey intentionally. And we did see over and over that people were mentioning that, like,

and they also didn't know that they were selected because of sleep consistency. We just told them you're a top sleeper. Tell us about your sleep. And we should find sleep consistency quickly. Sure. So sleep consistency is what it sounds like. So it's the consistency with which you're, like, bedtime and wake time night after night. So it's like if I went to bed at 9 o'clock yesterday,

How close to 9 o'clock did I go to bed today? If I woke up at, you know, 6 o'clock this morning, how close to 6 o'clock did I wake up yesterday? And so we're looking at not just for sleep, but also things like naps and whatnot. But it's basically like, do you have a stable sleep-wake pattern? And it's a really good predictor of, like, the health of your circadian rhythm. And there was a big study on this recently, correct? Yeah. So in the summer of 2017, Dr. Andrew Phillips published a paper in Nature, which came out of

Harvard in which he looked at, he called it sleep regularity, but basically the consistency of bedtime, wake time in Harvard undergraduates and their GPA. And he found that while the, he had a consistent group and an inconsistent group, and then he had this like middle group, which he threw out. And he found that the consistent sleepers did not actually average more sleep over the semester than the inconsistent sleepers did, but they did have higher GPAs. And what was really cool about that was that it showed sort of for the first time that this other dimension so like not just sleep duration which sort of is obviously going to be associated with a higher GPA but sleep consistency was able to predict

academic performance and we got really excited about that because what we found over and over again like every study we've done is that like you know the things that predict performance of one type seem to predict performance of another type. And so we were like, well, I wonder if this holds up in athletic performance. And so, you know, the Phillips study used 60 athletes. We used 20,000 and we were able to validate in our own data. Then, in fact, we did see that same relationship. When we ran the sleep regularity calculation that Phillips proposed in his paper on whoop data, we saw that people who had higher sleep regularity also had improved performance.

And then we ended up modifying the metric quite a bit. His looked at, you know, today versus yesterday. And we sort of extended that to look at four-day periods and made a couple of other changes. But sort of building off of that, we're able to create a new score. Well, this goes back to my original pitch to you of why to join whoop. Like, you're – instead of, you know, looking at data on 80 people, you're able to do it on tens of thousands. and millions of data sets and, you know, as a result, I think the implications can be a lot more powerful.

And that's what you and your team did a phenomenal job, updating the whoop sleep coach, to now give you feedback. I wanted to go to bed and wanted to wake up based on optimizing for sleep consistency as well. Okay. I want to transition to talk about some new sleep features that we're releasing as part of World Sleep Day and World Sleep Month. We're really thinking of March as the World Sleep Month. What is sleep efficiency?

So sleep efficiency is the percentage of the time in bed that you're actually asleep. Okay. And I understand this is now in the WOOP app and on the WOOP dashboard online. Yeah. So you can see your sleep efficiency in the one-day view on the web and also in the mobile apps. and you can also on the web look at sort of trends in sleep efficiency over weeks or months and on the team view for those of you who are on a team you can sort your team by sleep efficiency as well and look at aggregates by athletes and this is on the web dashboard yeah now what is a good sleep efficiency

so the average whoop user actually is a sleep efficiency of 94% which when I saw I was pretty impressed What the sort of the most interesting thing about sleep efficiency is that by looking at total wake time sleep efficiency and sort of sleep latency, you can start to get a sense of like if you're having trouble sleeping, sort of where that trouble is coming from. So like people who have long sleep latencies, that's the time it takes you from when you sort of say, I'm going to sleep now until you're actually asleep, have a very different problem than somebody who like once they fall asleep has trouble staying asleep. And so by breaking down, like, that relationship between when you're in bed and when you're sleeping into these different components, you can better target sort of what the appropriate intervention to improve it would be. So we're just trying to kind of break down. It's really information our users already have because we show them total time awake. But by breaking it down, it makes it like a little bit more actionable and easier to track. Okay, well, I want to come back to that because I've got a couple follow-up questions of what you just said.

respiratory rate that's also now something we're introducing explain respiratory rate so respiratory rate is the number of breaths per minute and we measure it only during sleep and we actually sort of behind the scenes without surfacing it to the user have been calculating respiratory rate for a long time now and we do that because it helps us in our sleep staging algorithm but the reason why we've decided now to surface that information to the user is that that we've found that it's actually a really useful metric, and it's a very stable metric. So in a lot of ways, it's telling you something very similar to what your resting heart rate is, which is why we didn't initially surface it.

It's sort of a measure of fitness. But it's very stable today. So, like, over the last month, my respiratory rate has ranged from, like, 14.4 to 14.7, which is, like, a really small band. So 14.4 breaths per what? Per minute. Okay. And the only time that it, like, sort of really deviated from that really tight band was when I was on a red eye flight to Iceland, and then it went up to, like, 17.9.

And so any kind of deviation from normal is really easy to see, and it tends to be significant, whereas, like, my resting heart rate and my HRV during that same month have, like, varied a lot more. So, like, my HRV is varied from, like, you know, 40 to 120. So if you see a spike in HRV, it's not always quite as obvious that something's up. That's like, wow, that was a big deal because it, like, varies just, there's a lot of just normal variability. And so having, like, that really stable metric can just make it, like, a really easy sign. And then obviously, like, kind of interpreting that alongside, like, if you see a resting heart rate spike up or an HRB spike down, you can kind of go, like, is that real? And then, like, the respiratory rate is just, like, a third way of sort of validating that, like, something's going on. So generally speaking, a lower resting heart rate, a higher heart rate variability, and a lower respiratory rate are all going to kind of follow one another.

Yeah, and sort of the lower your resting heart rate and respiratory rate and the higher your HRV, generally speaking, like, the fitter you are, and then obviously the opposite is true as well. And then the other thing to keep in mind is it's also relative, right? Some of these things are somewhat genetic. HRV is especially genetic. Yeah, so your resting heart rate, you know, is as much a function of, like, the size of your heart as it is the health. So it's not all that, like, helpful to sort of say, like, oh, your, you know, resting heart rates to be higher than mine, so I'm, you know, more fit than you. But it's a really useful metric to track internally because obviously, like, all those genetic factors are held constant over time. So if I see my own resting heart rate going down, then I know that, like, I'm getting more fit.

Don't women have slightly smaller hearts than men? Yeah, actually, it's not even that slight. They're about, like, you know, 30% smaller. I was hedging there. They're significantly smaller. And, I mean, in general, like, you know, somebody who's, like, a larger person is going to have a larger heart as well. So you can kind of look at somebody. Although, like, the brain, for example, isn't that pretty constant size across all humans?

Yeah, but, I mean, if you look at people, like, you know, our heads are pretty constant, too. Right. I'm just thinking, like, generally speaking, organs. Right, not every organ scale. Yeah, not every organ scale. organ scales to the size of the body. So as a result of that, women have, generally speaking, higher resting heart rates. And probably higher resting rate.

And then also with women, one of the other things that's really interesting about respiratory rate is that for women who are not on hormonal birth control during the luteal and menstrual phases of the menstrual cycle, respiratory rate increases. And there's a really interesting study done in 1992 at the Bangor Medical Institute and Research Center, which showed that that increase in respiratory rate that's associated with the menstrual cycle is also associated with a concurrent decrease in exercise capacity. And so what they were showing was that those changes in respiratory rate actually are significant for exercise performance. And so for the whoop audience, for those women who are not on,

oral contraceptives, which kind of, you know, make all of this cycling go away. It's not only interesting potentially for tracking things like fertility, but also for understanding how, you know, different parts of the month that your performance might change. So in terms of, like, unlocking human performance and helping people understand what's going on, having this, like, really clean, super easy-to-see cyclical pattern, it's just, like, you know, another way we can kind of keep our users better informed. Well, that's fascinating. I'm excited about respiratory rate personally. And for all our WOOP members out there, you know, hopefully you'll start to see how over time we're releasing more and more features, more and more analytics, more and more data to try to improve your body.

That's why we think of WOOP as an ongoing membership and something where it's our responsibility to keep giving you more and more value over time. Okay, I want to transition to taking some questions from whoop users. A lot of people ask why they sometimes have low recoveries despite meeting their sleep need. What would be the reason for this? So there's all kinds of things that can explain. I mean, sleep is sort of one of the things that's like the most in your control for recovery. But sometimes you actually just sort of worked out super hard and, you know, your body does in fact need more time. Sometimes it's because you're sick or you're stressed or there's other external things going on.

Like what? We had one athlete actually who's mother got diagnosed with cancer. Oh wow. And for like it was like six weeks she never had anything other than a red score. And actually like, you know, we called her coach because this is on the elite side. And so we said, like, you know, something's going on with this athlete. You might want to check in. She's getting, you know, enough sleep.

But can't recover. Yeah, can't recover. And then the coach sort of was like, hey, you know, what's up? And, you know, all of a sudden she kind of opens up. And so, you know, in that case, you know, there's this cool. Sometimes it sort of can tap into things that, you know, maybe, you know, in that case, obviously the athlete knew why she was stressed. Sometimes it can tell you that you're stressed about something you might not actually kind of be aware of. And so it can be that like good check-in moment.

We actually had one person right into support a couple months ago now. And he basically said like, you know, I just got on whoop and, you know, I haven't had a green recovery score yet. It's been a week. And I was like, well, you know, tell me about your week. And he's like, well, I moved and I started a new job, but I haven't been drinking. you know, and I'm getting enough sleep, and it's like, well, you know, that's a lot of stress. You move, like, your whole family to your city, you start a new job, and so, you know, you might not necessarily be like, oh, I'm, like, unhappy and you could be excited.

You know, sometimes excitement, you know, is also, like, a form of stress, but if your body's just, like, hyperactivated because of other things. And so, you know, what I would encourage people to do, obviously, like, sleep is a big thing. If you're not getting enough sleep, you're not going to, you know, get the recovery scores that you want. But if you are getting enough sleep and you're still not getting those good recovery, scores, it's like a really good opportunity to kind of have that check-in moment. Yeah, and in some cases, by the way, you know, it may be like actually seeing a doctor.

I mean, we've seen cases where people have been getting enough sleep and they just redlined for two weeks or something like that. Yeah, we actually had one guy, he wrote into support and he was like, your product is crap. It's been telling me that I'm red and I feel fine. And then, you know, we kind of tried to go through a normal trouble. shooting to see what was going on he wrote back like the day later still read feel fine like i'm going to return this thing third day he writes in i was just diagnosed with mono you guys are on to something you know it was this kind of like wonderfully validating moment for me personally because

i was like looking at his data and i was like i don't know like what what's going on here and you know a lot of times like our bodies know what's going on before we do and i think those are like that's such a good point the moments when like i think the recovery score you know is the most valuable like in my sort of personal experience and I've been wearing whoop for you know four years now or however long we've had a product yeah at least five five years in some form in some weird form or another um and you know I'd say like 95% of the time like I look at my recovery score and it's like I could or like without looking I could tell you what it was going to be like I just I see it and I'm like yeah and five percent of the time you're like huh and then you know you go for run anyway or

you like whatever and you're like oh wow you know you know know whoop was right like you know i feel i thought i felt good but then this run was terrible or like the opposite happens where it's like i don't feel super great but whoop's telling me i'm green and then i'll go for a run and it'll be like surprisingly good and sometimes like it just kind of helps you like you know even people who are like pretty in tune with themselves i think just your body knows more than you do yeah i think that's such an important point and for me personally i totally trust woo, way more than I trust how I feel in the morning. I think most individuals, when they're about to take on something stressful, especially

exercise or if you're competing in something, like you can feel in that moment if your body is ready. That's when feelings start to actually kick in. Like you start exerting energy and you're like, oh wow, maybe I'm a little off today or wow, I feel great. But I think it's very hard to know that well beforehand. And by the way, well beforehand is what matters because that's when you're figuring out what you should be doing that day.

So it's a really good point. Those are great anecdotes. All right, another question. How long does one poor night of sleep continue to affect recovery? How much does my Saturday affect my Monday and Tuesday? So whenever you don't get the amount of sleep that you need, you start to accrue a sleep debt, and that can kind of stick around until you pay it off

by getting that sleep back, either with napping or an extended sleep later on. What we've seen over and over again is that, you know, whoop users in general, or people in general, they try and use, like, the weekends to catch up on sleep, and that really doesn't work. They, you know, they'll get, say, average six hours of sleep during the week, and then they'll get maybe eight or nine over the weekend. But if you need eight every night, then you're sort of out ten hours, and you're making up for that with an extra two. There's this really... Yeah, that's what we're looking at. So, you know, the math actually just really doesn't work out.

And then physiologically, it doesn't work out either, even if you somehow manage to get an extra 10 hours of sleep on the weekend, because you're still functioning all week, sleep deprived. And so you have this, like, huge sleep deprivation that builds up, and it has physiological consequences in the moment. And so you can kind of, like, catch up and, like, you know, get back. It's almost like your credit score, right? Because, like, if you're in debt, right, and you get, like, your credit score starts to get, like, hit, like, you can pay. Like, you can pay off your loan, but, like, you still have a bad credit score, right? And it takes a really long time to, like, undo that damage. Our bodies kind of work like that, too.

There's this really fascinating researcher that I follow at Harvard or Fayetteau Buxton, and he studies chronic sleep deprivation and how that ties into chronic disease. And he does done a ton of work with obesity, type 2 diabetes, cancer, and just, like, all kinds of, like, cardiovascular disease, stuff like that. And he's found that, like, basically, it doesn't matter what chronic disease you're talking about. A huge predictor is not getting enough sleep. And, you know, we see that, like, when we get tired, like, we make poor decisions. And so we're more likely to reach for, like, fatty, salty snacks. And so there's a huge correlation between, like, sleep deprivation and obesity.

And then obviously all the things that, like, obesity tends to predict. And when we're better rested, we don't tend to make those, like, bad decisions. And so all the different things that we're doing to, like, compensate for being sleepy. like, you know, we're taking, like, Red Bull, which is, like, not great for our kidneys or whatever. You know, that doesn't get undone just because you, like, sleep in late on the Saturday. So, I mean, I've played this game personally before where you've got a week that you just didn't get enough sleep, and then, you know, you play catch-up on the weekend. I get that that's suboptimal.

If someone's listening right now and they're thinking to themselves, like, well, should I not sleep in on Saturday? What do you say to that? Yeah, I mean, it's kind of, obviously, it's. better to catch up on sleep than it is. To just keep depriving yourself, right? So, like, you know, if you happen to be sleep deprived, I would absolutely encourage you to pay off that sleep debt and sleep in. And, you know, we all travel.

We all have tough work weeks and stuff happens. So, you know, it's certainly not realistic to say, like, never get into sleep debt ever or you'll die. But, you know, I think what we do want to discourage is this idea that, like, I can sort of week after week after week plan on not getting enough. sleep and just like sleep in until I you know don't feel sleepy on Saturday and Sunday and not like I am breaking even that's like a dangerous mindset and the data shows that it's just not true but if you are in that moment that's way better than saying like you know than never catching up

right and one thing I always try to optimize around is on on days where I know I'm not going to be able to get 100% of my sleep need trying to make sure I get at least 70% and for For those of you on whoop listening, like you can go into the sleep coach and you can actually select whether you want to peak or perform or get by tomorrow, and that's going to change from 100% of a sleep need recommendation actually down to a 70%. And then what I've seen with especially college athletes or even some professional athletes is there's this feeling, if you can't get 100%, it doesn't really matter what you do.

And I think that's totally wrong. Yeah. Right? Like you want to try to get enough so that. you're not taking on this enormous deficit going forwards. Yeah. And you do a good job describing that. Okay.

Is there a point of diminishing returns? If nine hours is good, how much better is 10 hours, 12 hours? Yeah. So one of the things that sort of early into my sleep research days, I discovered that I thought was really interesting, or discovered I read, is that you can't stockpile sleep. So, like, we store food, right, as fat. And, like, we can store water to a certain extent. But once our bodies have reached what they call the state of being sleep replete,

so that's getting all the sleep that you need, you can't store up sleep and get extra. And so once you've met your body's need and you're no longer at all sleepy, then it's completely diminishing returns. It's just a waste of time. And there's actually, there's a little bit of research that's shown that, like, people who get, like, you know, 10, 11, 12 hours of sleep, obviously, like, sort of athletes and stuff aside who need that. actually have worse health outcomes, likely because they're just sort of rolling around in bed non-productively. So, you know, when we look at sort of how our bodies respond to different amounts of sleep,

typically the first part of sleep, so when we're actually the most sleepy, tends to be the most efficient, and the back half of sleep tends to have, like, more disturbances and to become less efficient. And so per, like, hour for hour in bed, it does, you get diminishing returns because it gets less efficient as you go on. So that goes back to the sleep efficiency analysis. If you had to look at, you know, data sets on people who spent over 10 hours in bed versus people who spent under six hours in bed, would you guess that the sleep efficiency for over 10 hours was lower than the under six hours? Yeah, and that's not even me guessing. There's a lot of research on that. We see that,

like, people who are chronically sleep deprived, they do tend to get more efficient sleep. And so in this weird way, having like really really high sleep efficiency can be an indication that you're sleep deprived it's kind of like if you're super starving and someone like lets you loose on a buffet you're gonna like eat a ton really quickly versus like if you're sort of you know have like a healthier more normal appetite you ate a few hours ago you're gonna like survey to take some time you kind of sleep works the same way that like a lot of times you'll see a hundred percent sleep efficiency can actually be a sign that that you're not getting enough makes a lot of sense

Okay, this theme is around sleep cycles and staging. Okay, and I actually get this question all the time, too, through Twitter and Instagram. What can I do to get more slow wave sleep and REM sleep? So one of the things that we actually just published last week in our sleep consistency locker post was that actually there is a relationship between sleep consistency and slow wave sleep and REM sleep. Okay. There's actually a bigger relationship between sleep consistency and REM sleep, where people who had the highest sleep consistency were adding an extra 36 minutes of REM sleep per night. Wow, that's huge.

Yeah, and sort of our current theory in this part we haven't been able to validate yet is that sleep consistency sort of is obviously really closely related to your circadian rhythm. And so if you have high sleep consistency, your body is able to anticipate sleep, which is why we're seeing sleep consistency, explains as much as like a 3% difference in sleep efficiency it explains this different in slow-wave sleep and REM sleep and we think that that's because when your body's anticipating sleep it kind of like it knows what to do it's like okay this is bedtime and it starts to get all those hormones you see melatonin rising like concentrations in the blood start to rise earlier and so when people actually are ready to go to sleep their bodies are ready for them to go to sleep

and so you see more of these like restorative phases of sleep beyond sleep consistency, which for anybody who wants more REM sleep and slow-wave sleep would be the first thing I'd recommend. It's also worth looking into things like is your environment conducive to sleep. So, you know, if you're constantly getting woken up, you're going to spend a lot more time in light sleep, which is sort of that transition phase, versus if you have an environment that's super conducive to sleep. So you want to think about things like your room being as dark as possible, as quiet as possible. You want to invest in like, you know, comfy sheets, you know, that are breathable materials that your body temperature can kind of, you know, be where you want it to be.

You shouldn't be sleeping in a 14-year-old mattress. You know, it's something you want to replace every 7 to 10 years. And you want to make sure that, like, you know, it's not too human, not too hot, different things like that. You know, obviously in the city, sometimes it can be harder to kind of get all the environmental components, sort of where you'd want them to be. so it's worth looking into things like blackout curtains and white noise machines. But a lot of times sort of when people are having troubles getting deeper stages of sleep, it's sort of more that they're sort of not sleeping well in general. So for you personally, what are some of the products that you've invested in to improve your sleep?

Or what are some of the habits that you have? Yeah, so when my husband and I moved into our current home, We put custom fit blackout shades in every bedroom. Smart. Which, you know, I absolutely love and would recommend to anybody. We, I mean. And some of this stuff we'll put in the show notes, too. So whatever kind of blackout shades you recommend in these different things.

Well, I'm not super married to any brand in particular, but, you know, we live in the city and, you know, there's streetlights outside of our window. Right. And when we first moved in, and we were there at night, it was like, I could literally read with all the lights off in the middle of the night. There's so much street light, and now it's like I can't see anything, which is...

Amazing. Yeah, our circadian rhythms are essentially set by light. And so if you have as little as, like, 80 locks of light in your bedroom, you're telling your body that it's daytime, which means don't sleep. And so you actually inhibit the production of the sleep-promoting hormone melatonin. And so sort of blackout curtains are one of the best ways to sort of stop to. telling your body that it's daytime. How do you feel about eye masks?

Yeah, so that's obviously like a really great and kind of less expensive alternative. I personally don't like wearing them, but for anybody who's traveling, obviously you're not going to bring blackout curtains with you on vacation. So it's like a kind of, if you don't kind of find them uncomfortable, it can be a really good way to get that same effect. I got into them personally because I travel all the time and when you're sleeping in hotel rooms the thing that drives me mad about hotel rooms is they have all these goofy lights in the room you've got the television red light you've got the exit sign light you've got uh these bizarre like

get out of bed safety lights you've got these alarm clocks that are all lit up and it's chaos if you're someone like us who you know really appreciates darkness so i would recommend the people who spend a lot of time in hotel rooms to get uh an eye mask yeah and that's a great point in general because even if you have blackout curtains, any light you have inside of the room isn't going to be affected by them. So things like those tiny little LEDs that are

literally everywhere these days on every clock on every TV, you can just put a little piece of like electrical tape over them. You don't really need them. Just like make them go away. Yeah, I spend like 10 minutes before I go to bed in hotels literally putting props up in front of lights. I look like a

crazy person. I have a hat over like our internet router because I'm just like walking the light. Yeah, the mounted television with like a hung jacket over the screen to block out the light. How little is 80 Lux? It's pretty little. So, you know, if you put your hand out in front of you, you'd be able to see it. But like you wouldn't necessarily be able to like read.

Okay. So really the point is 80 Lux can keep you up. And that's not a lot of light. So black out the room, folks. Yeah. Now, quiet, do you do anything of like the white noise machines and stuff like that? Yeah, so Bose came out with this great product earlier this year, these little sleep pods. So they're using their noise cancelling technology, but they specifically tuned it to snoring.

So they're not meant, I guess, for general noise, although they do help with that, but they do a really good job if your partner snores. And they don't play music or anything. They're dressed for sleeping, and so they're a lot smaller than typical. like Bluetooth ear pods would be. So they're actually like, I'm a side sleeper so I'm a little bit skeptical

about them being uncomfortable but they're super comfortable and they're really effective. And you can have them like just do their noise cancelling thing or they have a couple of like preloaded like babbling Brooke or rustling

and use kind of like generic sounds. I'm super big fan of those. Interesting. Now you mentioned you're a side sleep sleeper. Is there any like best practices in terms of whether you should sleep on your back or your chest or your side? So sleeping on your left side is supposed to be good for digestion because it puts your...

This is fascinating. Sort of like your esophagus through stomach at like a sort of good angle so that anybody who has any kind of like acid reflux or anything like that tends to be the most comfortable sleeping like that. Interesting. If you have issues with snoring or sleep athia, sort of sleeping on like a wedge pillow so on your back but propped up can be really helpful. Sleeping on your back in general is like really good for your spine, but sleeping on your back and flat can be problematic if you have any of these kind of like sleep related issues. So some of it has to do with kind of what you're optimizing for and a little bit

just kind of like what you're comfortable with. And if you're someone who snores, how can you go about, well, first of all, is that a bad sign? And then second of all, if you're sleeping with a partner and you want to reduce your snoring, how can you think about that? Yes, so one of the best indicators of snoring is weight. And so for a lot of people, something as simple as losing a little bit of weight can definitely help. There's a lot of sort of positional things, so like wedge pillows. which can actually be incredibly comfortable to to just kind of prop your back up a little bit can help with snoring

Actually if you're sleeping on your back rolling over to your side can help with snoring as well And then if those kind of basic things don't seem to do it then there's a couple of products that are Sort of worth trying so like a humidifier can help reduce snoring and then they have the back The humidifier in your bedroom in your bedroom in your bedroom yeah and it has the added benefit of the most of them create a little bit of white noise so that can help too. Right. But then there's a lot of products.

There's like mouth guards that can help kind of open your jaw in such a way that keeps your airway open. There are these like breathe right strips that you can put on your nose. And then sort of if those things aren't working. The strips, those look like what a football player would want, right? During a game. Exactly. And then if those things aren't working, you probably are at the point where you'd want to see a doctor.

There's a machine called a CPAP that is. it's like a little bit more invasive, but if you do have kind of moderate to severe sleep apnea, that's by far the best thing you could possibly be using. But like a lot of people kind of because they are a little bit more intrusive, you know, it's worth trying those other things I mentioned first. Okay. Well, we hit a few user questions there. Back to the well.

How does my day strain affect my sleep cycles? do I need more deep sleep after a day with more strain? Great question. And I would also try to tie in, like, is exercising in the morning versus the afternoon versus the evening? Do you see those things affect sleep? So everything related to exercise, strain, and sleep? All right.

So a couple different things. So in the locker post that we released on the 25th about sleep efficiency, we saw that there's a relationship between day strain and sleep efficiency. Interesting. And it's not necessarily exactly what you'd expect. So what we saw was that people who had really low day strain had worse sleep efficiency. And then it rises, peaks sort of in the mid to high teens, and then actually declines when you get up to like the highest strain. And there's a lot of literature about what might be going on sort of at that higher end where like if you produce a lot of catacolamines, which are like associated with stress, that it's just your body's kind of like too revved up to get good sleep.

and so we definitely seen that like when you're if you exercise really really hard sometimes that that can make it harder to sleep at night which is a little bit counterintuitive so it's interesting to see that so I just want to make sure I've got this phenomenon clear if I don't exercise at all I'm more likely to have less efficient sleep as I start to increase my strain up to a certain point I'm going to increase efficiency and it's almost like a linear path in that regard now once i get over what strain would you say 18 no well it's so it sort of starts to like peak at like 14 to 16 so 14 to 16 is the peak is the perfect strain to get as most the most efficient sleep yeah okay and then past 16 it starts to decay yeah so it kind of plateaus for a little bit and then you see it decay and it decays actually really dramatically like for the 19s and 20s. So if you get a 20 on whoop, you actually maybe are going to have a lower sleep efficiency than if you actually didn't work out at all.

Right. And one of the reasons why that's interesting is you're actually going to have a higher sleep need. And so there's this linear, sort of linear relationship between your sleep need and how hard you work out because basically when you are exercising, you're kind of beating your body up. You're kind of... No doubt. And so you're creating this like need to recover. and, you know, we produce 95% of human growth hormone during slow-wave sleep,

and so you need to give yourself that opportunity to sleep in order to see that. Say that again, because that's so important. So we produce 95% of the human growth hormone. I mean, isn't that fucking crazy? It's like the idea that you get stronger in the gym is actually totally false. You get stronger sleeping. Yes, you actually get a lot weaker in the gym, which I think, like, well, it sounds a little funny. Like, anybody who's ever worked out definitely feels that way, right?

I mean, I didn't realize it was 95%, I know it was a lot, but that's, I mean, that's amazing, right? Yeah, and I think that it, like, really gets to, you know, like, a lot of the information that kind of can help people with. So, like, a lot of times, like, athletes will have, like, this really, you know, hard game or really hard practice, and they go celebrate with beers. And so it's, like, the worst thing you do, because, like, you know, if you then don't allow yourself to, like, get the sleep after working out, then you don't have that opportunity to respond by producing that. growth hormone you know slow wave sleep is going to be inhibited if you're drunk and so um you know kind of you want to make sure not just that you get enough sleep before a tough workout so that you're able to do the workout but that you're getting enough sleep after your workout and that's the place where we actually see a lot of loop athletes you know kind of um the more they're on whoop the more

they start to get that and correct that behavior because if you have a really tough workout a lot of times you've a rest day the next day and so people think like oh i don't have a workout tomorrow so I can stay up later I can like go out tonight or whatever it is and like that's actually where you're like leaving the most potential gains on the table like you want to get the most sleep that night because that's when you're going to get that like return on the workout investment so if you want to maximize the like you know ROI of your workout get a lot of sleep that the night after is it better to exercise in the morning or the evening so we actually did a a research project two years ago and we looked at both sleep and sleep efficiency after working

out within four hours of bedtime which is sort of one of the common recommendations you hear thrown around like don't exercise within four hours of bed and we found that that sort of general advice was actually like not very helpful for like the average workout four hours before bed did not have an impact on sleep efficiency if you start to break that down and you look at the really intense workouts, so things that are scoring, like, in 18 and above, and you start to see that that does sort of harm sleep,

and if you look at, you know, the closer to bed, the more that relationship starts to come out. So you don't want to do something really, really intense, so, like, you know, working out above your anaerobic threshold within, say, two hours of bed. But from all the data we've looked at, like, if you want to just kind of, you know, go for, like, a light jog or anything,

like that. Our data does not show that that has an effect on sleep if it's four hours before bed. Okay. Can excessive REM sleep be bad? My sleep is consistent, but some days I get three hours of REM sleep and about 15 minutes of slow wave sleep and have no idea why. So one of the things that, because we actually get questions like that a lot, and one of the things I always tell people is that your body kind of knows how to allocate its sleep time. So REM sleep, I guess to back up, is the mentally restorative part of sleep, and deep sleep or slow-wave sleep is the physically restorative part of sleep.

And so our body's going to allocate time between slow-wave sleep and REM sleep based on what it feels the needs are. One of the things that we often see when people get a ton of REM sleep is actually that it can be a sign of acute sleep deprivation because typically slow-wave sleep happens earlier in the night and REM sleep happens later in the night.

And so if you go to bed, say, last night and you woke up earlier than your body was anticipating, you've disproportionately cut off REM sleep because that's what would have happened had you stay asleep, whereas you probably got most of your slow-wave sleep earlier in the night. And so then the next night, it's like almost as if you have a REM sleep debt and you sort of got your normal amount of slow-wave sleep, but you didn't get that normal amount of REM sleep. And so your body responds by getting like a compensatory amount of REM sleep the night after. And so if you're sort of seeing that, like, every so often, it's a sign of acute sleep death.

Interesting. But in general, sort of, as long as you're getting into the deeper stages of sleep, you can sort of trust that your body's allocating it according to what it needed. Sometimes I have nights with only two to three minutes of slow wave sleep. Can I still trust the HRV reading that morning? Yeah. So slow wave sleep and light sleep often get talked about as if they're like in two different things. when in reality there's a continuum of like, you know, the lightest light sleep to the deepest slow wave sleep.

And sort of in between you have deep-ish light sleep and light-ish slow-wave sleep. And so what Whoop's actually doing behind the scenes is we have like a sort of how deep is your sleep metric continuously. And so when you don't have true slow-wave sleep, sometimes you're in almost slow-wave sleep. And so if we see a lot of almost slow wave sleep later in the night, we can take the resting heart in H.R.V. then. Got it. Here's a theme around sleeping unusual hours. I'm a police officer who works night shifts. How can I minimize how that affects my body? That's tough. That is tough. So shift work is actually associated with all kinds of, you know, every type of cancer, obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease. It's one of the hardest things you can do to. your body. But the sort of the reality is that people have to do it. Sure. So given that it's not going anywhere, the best thing you can possibly do is to try and maintain that schedule. A lot of people will try and switch back on the weekends, you know, for social reasons, especially if they

have a family or anything like that, and that can make it a lot harder. I think embracing things like, you know, things to control your environment because you're fighting the environment even more. So like blackout curtain and stuff like that, I think taking melatonin to help your body override sort of any day time signals it might be getting. So melatonin as a supplement? Yeah, I'm a huge fan of melatonin as a supplement. How often do you take it? Whenever I travel and if I ever just don't feel sleepy. And what does melatonin, what does taking melatonin as a supplement actually do to your body? So we produce melatonin naturally and we start producing melatonin about two hours. And we start producing melatonin about two hours before we're anticipating sleep. But if our sleep cycles aren't consistent,

then our bodies don't know when to anticipate sleep. And so if you take melatonin, you sort of get that concentration up as if it was happening naturally. And then you're sort of telling your body, like, hey, I'm going into sleep mode, and it helps you, like, calm down and relax. And one of the sort of things that makes melatonin so safe is that has a really short half-life. So it actually gets out of your body within like you know a couple hours it's all gone and so what you're sort of relying on is that your natural production of melatonin like takes over at that point so unlike something like ambient which can last like eight hours or like you know these more like sedative hypnotics that are meant to keep you asleep all night melatonin's really only going to help you

fall asleep but then once you're asleep you can sort of maintain well you turned me on to melatonin and I take it, I would say, 90% of the time when I'm traveling. And probably when I'm at home and kind of normal work schedule, I'll take it once or twice a week. And now, if someone's listening to this and they're like, I just have trouble sleeping, I want to take this every night. Would you recommend that, or do you think that's riskier? To my knowledge, melatonin's not habit-forming. It's sort of been available as a supplement for a really long time. It's been pretty well studied.

I think it's really safe. The place where I, the only reason I'd be hesitant is that melatonin really is only going to help you fall asleep, you'd have to, like, redose yourself in the middle of the night for help staying asleep, because if you take it, it's just going to clear out within a few hours. We talked in the beginning about how there's two categories of challenges with sleep, right? One is the falling asleep challenge, and the other is staying asleep. So you're saying melatonin is more helpful for falling asleep. less helpful for staying asleep.

But if you haven't, you know, an environment, and I keep saying this, it's like conducive to sleep. Typically, once you're asleep, you can just stay asleep. Right. Yeah. So it's a good thing to take

if your mind's awake or, you know, you're... Yeah, it can kind of help you, like, turn off. Yeah, that's how I think about it too. Now, how about some other supplements while we're on the topic related to sleep? What are some things that come to mind? So for people who are magnesium-deprived, taking magnesium can help a ton.

My big caveat with that is if you're not magnesium deprived, it's not going to help. So you're just sort of wasting money. And you don't want to overdose on magnesium, so I wouldn't recommend going totally crazy. And when you say over it, like what are the appropriate doses for things like melatonin, magnesium? It's probably different for you. Yeah, I mean, I think it's different for everybody. The big thing with magnesium, which is why I think at whoop, we kind of bring it up a lot, is that athletes tend to be magnesium-deprived.

because we kind of consume magnesium in working out. So the more you're working out kind of the more it's something you want to like pay attention to. You'll sort of know that it's working for you, you'll notice that you're like dreaming more and stuff like that. If you sort of, that doesn't, like not dreaming and like not staying asleep isn't a problem that you have, I wouldn't necessarily recommend starting it. Zinc is another one. It's really only going to help if you're zinc deprived, which, you know, not everybody is. is but you know if you are zinc deprived you it's a great you know kind of safe place to start

now if someone's listening to this and they're like all right I'm going to buy some supplements and try stuff which by the way I recommend for anyone just go try these things and see how it affects your data what are brands that you recommend or do you think with something like melatonin it's kind of like everything's relatively the same no So supplements are not considered drugs by the FDA. They're considered food. And the reason why that matters is that all the FDA cares about is that they're safe to consume, not that they're at all potent. So like most of the calcium on the market, for example, is not what they call bioavailable.

So something that says it has like X number of milligrams of calcium, it doesn't necessarily mean that like that's what's going to get into your bloodstream. Like most of that just becomes expensive pee. And so, you know, two different products. that have the same, you know, milligrams of calcium could result in very different calcium that gets absorbed. And, you know, that's true about absolutely every supplement on the market. And so a lot of times if you're, like, in, you know, CVS or wherever you are, and you're like, why is, you know, this brand, like, 40 times more expensive than this one?

I'm just going to get the cheap one. You know, that's kind of what you want to look at, like, you know, a lot of times with supplements you see, like, they're bound with, like, carrier protein. that help with absorption, like calcium is almost always with, like, D3, which is going to help you absorb it. A lot of cheap calcium is just crushed up shells. Your body's going to do very low with that, but expensive calcium is more expensive. So generally speaking, spending a little more money on your supplements is worth it.

Well, doing the research to find out where they're from. So, you know, you don't necessarily have to spend the most money, but you want to make sure that they're a bioavailable form. Which melatonin do you use? Nature made. Nature made. I use nature made as well. We'll include that in the show notes.

I take, yeah, we use five milligrams sort of, one of the things that's, like, important with melatonin is how it's bound and how, like, it's prepared will determine how quickly we break it down. So, like, things that are, like, oil-based supplements, a lot of times we'll get into your blood system faster than things that are, like, more solid because you have to digest them, so you get almost, like, a little bit of a slow release, and because the half-life is so short once it gets into your bloodstream,

having, like, that slow-release effect can help, like, sustain the benefits. interesting yeah i mean i used to take melatonin as like a something that i would swallow and now i take the nature made ones where they dissolve and given that the reason i'm taking it is to fall asleep quickly i like the ones that dissolve yeah um and i think a lot of it has to do with like how you're using it so like if you're just sort of like trying to turn your brain off and like stop thinking about work and fall asleep and you know that you can sustain the sleep um afterwards that's great if you're trying to use it for jet lag purposes having like it lasts a little bit longer can be helpful because your jet lag can keep you up okay back to unusual hours one person writes the romans didn't

sleep eight straight hours they would break up their sleep into two chunks so where did this idea we need eight straight hours come from so it's not just the romans who did that we actually see references in the literature as late as like the 1800s. We see it in like people's diaries and Charles Dickens is writing about first sleep and second sleep in the 1840s. And so this phenomenon actually it's much more recent than the Romans that, you know, we're sleeping in one straight period. It actually seems to be correlated with the Industrial Revolution that all of a sudden like sort of work hours became more consolidated and people were sort of starting to be busier and just like a lot of things kind of there are cultural shifts that made it sort

of inconvenient to have those two sleep periods what we see from again like diaries and the literature sort of prior to that is that people would sort of sleep when it started to get dark out and then they'd wake up in the middle of the night for a few hours And that was like a really important social time. So, you know, they would eat, have sex, you know, kind of different things like that, which probably, you know, they'd get home from their day job exhausted. And so you didn't want to, like, then, you know, do something else. And so you would kind of crash for a little bit. And then in the middle of the night, you do things that you can do by candlelight and then go back to sleep until it was light enough to go out and work again.

and we actually there's a study that was done in 1992 by Thomas Weir at the National Institute for Mental Health and he took a whole bunch of people for 30 days and he gave them 14 hours to sleep so they were in a dark room they could do whatever they wanted but like they sort of had to stay in there for 14 hours and after like a few days of adjusting every single one of them adapted this bifasic sleeping pattern where they'd sleep for about four hours, and then they'd, like, roll around and kind of be awake for one to three hours, and then they'd have a second sleeping period. So there's actually, like, some pretty good evidence that that is, like, a natural way of doing things, but we just don't have 14 hours, and when it was the last time, you'd like 14 hours to hang out in bed,

and so we kind of delay that first sleeping period because we're so busy, and then, you know, we have to get up eight hours later, so we just kind of stay in bed. So I think that idea really came from sort of changing work-life balance ideas and just kind of social expectations more than any kind of like, it's not better, it's not natural. And we actually argue that it hasn't gone away. Like siesta is a big thing in a lot of the world where people are taking kind of afternoon naps. So that brings us to another question. Is napping good?

napping is a great way to reduce sleep debt but not all naps are sort of created equally there's this great kind of little napping trick called like the caffeine nap where you'd have a cup of coffee and then you fall asleep and it takes about like 20 30 minutes for the caffeine to like kind of kick in and so it happens then you wake up naturally 20 minutes later the caffeine's kicking in so you don't get, like, too groggy or anything because, like, you're kind of getting, like, drugged away, like, a little bit of, like, a perky thing, but you do get, like, a 20 minutes where you're most likely quite tired. Have you ever done this? Of good sleep? Yeah. Wow. You've got that to, like, you've got that to, like, yourself for six years, Emily. You could have shared that with me. You never asked. I could have used a caffeine nap one of these days.

So you kind of have to, like, do it right? Like, you can't, like, savor the coffee. You need to, like, kind of knock it back a little bit. Right. But one of the sort of, like, pitfalls with napping is sometimes, like, you kind of get into sleep and then you wake yourself up in, like, a deep stage of sleep, and then you feel groggy, and it's almost like you feel worse than if, than you did before the nap. And so, like, the kind of caffeine trick can help prevent that, like, groginess feeling.

The other big pitfall with naps is if you're napping within, like, six-ish-ish, hours of bedtime sometimes it can make it harder to fall asleep because you do like if you do kind of more than just like taking the edge off then all of a sudden like your sleep need isn't like high enough at bedtime so then you're like not tired and then you can almost become like the equivalent sort of like jet lagged so that's a good segue what advice do you have for people changing time zones and people traveling a lot so for anybody who's changing time zones like one or two time zones I almost, like, would advise, like, just pretend you're not. If you're only going away for, like, a few days or, like, a weekend, like, just stay on your home time zone.

It's often totally possible. Again, if your goal is to optimize for your body, stay on your own time zone. Yeah, so it's like if I'm obviously in Boston right now, if I go to Chicago, if I just stay on Boston time, then I'm not even going to notice that, like, I was in a different time zone. So sometimes that can just be the easiest way to kind of away that. Okay, now say you're flying to. Africa from Boston, right? Well, if you're going to Europe or Africa or anywhere further than a couple of time zones away, getting as much daytime light exposure as possible is going to help your circadian rhythm. In the new place. In the new place, yeah. So as much daytime light

exposure, you use caffeine, but, you know, especially if you're sort of typically a coffee drinker, it can be really powerful. Try and avoid alcohol. That can just kind of, confuse your system and you're not going to get good quality sleep and getting a little bit of exercise in your new time zone especially outdoor exercise can help a ton because if you do something to kind of help your body like get tired that's going to help a lot and say you're you're someone who's like I can't sleep on planes I've got a red eye I absolutely need to be able to get some rest like for that person would you say it's okay to take a more intense sleep drug like an ambi or something like that?

Well, I'm never going to recommend Ambien. I think that stuff's terrifying. Okay. But, I mean, I would say, like, you know, if it feels like it's a pathological thing, certainly consult your doctor. Sure. But, you know, melatonin, I think, you know, it's more powerful than a lot of people realize, especially as we were talking about earlier, if you get the good stuff.

So make sure it's bioavailable, you know, from a reputable company. But that's going to get you a lot of the way. Now, what terrifies you about Ambien? So Ambien actually is this, like, amazing case study where not all that recently, almost all medical research was done exclusively on men. And so none of the Ambien, like, dosing stuff was, research was done on women. And that was somewhat intentional. And, well, sort of women were considered, like, to have too many variables because, like, the menstrual cycle, like, sort of scared researchers. But it turns out that women respond to Ambien, like, way stronger than men do, and the recommended dose should be, like, half of what it is.

for like a equal-sized male. Oh, wow. And so women were getting, like, way, like, overdosed on Ambien, and it was making them do, like, pretty crazy stuff. Like, sometimes, one of the sort of not all that uncommon side effects with Ambien is that you get, like, you have these, like, really crazy dreams, and sometimes you'll, like, sleepwalk or sleep talk and act out these crazy dreams. And so people have committed some, like, really serious crimes,

really hurt themselves and other people, while fully thinking. they were asleep there's like a number of lawsuits you can look them up like people have killed people people have driven and crashed cars right um people have acted out their wild sex fantasies people who were not consenting um and the whole time they and then they woke up the next morning and they thought they had a wild dream and then you know got arrested and so you know it's oh wow i think i certainly would not try a drug like that for the first time on a plane you want to know how your body is going to respond to that and i would definitely do that under you know pretty close, competent medical supervision. I don't think that's just like a, you know, I have trouble

sleeping. Let me kind of take the edge off kind of a drug. That's like for people with real problems and should be sort of used carefully. Okay, so somewhat related. How do you think about nutrition, diet as it relates to sleep? So will I potentially have worse sleep if I eat the wrong things for dinner? Yeah. And probably dinner is the most relevant, you know, I don't know how much breakfast and lunch is going to affect sleep. Having really heavy, fatty foods, especially if you're trying to go to bed relatively close to the end of dinner, it can cause kind of like indigestion, acid reflux, and all those kinds of things that sort of get exacerbated by lying down.

So having, like, a lot of fat right before bed can be problematic if you set. What do you consider right before bed? Like, how many hours between dinner and going to bed do you think is, like, appropriate. You know, that depends a little bit on the individual. Like, some people have, you know, higher gastric motility, so they kind of process food faster than other people.

You know, I'd say, like, you know, a couple hours, three. You know, I think if you're eating dinner at six and going to bed at 1 a.m., then, like, you can probably eat whatever you want. But if you're, you know, dining and eating until 9 and then, you know, getting in bed 10.30, 11, you

might kind of, especially if, like, you kind of have, like, a a big piece of cake or something, you know, desserts tend to be kind of fatty so you're like backloading that stuff you might feel it and it's you know it's a little bit of self-experimentation like you know it only needs to happen to you once before you're like well it sucked I'm not going to do that again right um and by the way that's one thing I've noticed personally like I don't have that many different variables if I'm just you know in in Boston for a week different foods I've found can affect my my sleep and and my recovery considerably. Well, there's a lot of foods we can eat at dinner that can be sleep promoting. So,

you know, everybody knows that kind of like, you know, the turkey, right? So, like, the triptophan and turkey helps you sleep. What people don't know is that, like, dairy has a lot more triptophan than turkey does. And so you can sort of having dairy at night, and there's a reason why, you know. I'm lactose intolerant, Emily. Well, there's a reason why we give little kids, like, a warm bottle at night, you know? Right, right. That makes sense. That's, like, very sleep promoting. So you would actually recommend people drinking milk to fall asleep? If you're not lactose intolerant and warm glass of milk, yeah. And why warm?

So warm actually, like, so there's this interesting phenomenon where your core body temperature falling is actually sleep promoting. And so getting your core warm so that it can then cool off helps you fall asleep. It's basically the same idea as like taking a hot bath or a warm shower, why that kind of can make you feel sleepy. It's also why drinking camamil tea is super... Camamil has certain sleep-promoting properties in general, but something super comforting about that can also just help with, like, stress, it feels good. So a warm glass of milk, you're going to get the tryptophan, you get a little bit of fat, which is nice,

and then kind of that warming effect, which enables the cooling effect that promotes sleep. What are some other foods that you think help people fall asleep or sleep better? So tart cherry juice actually has melatonin, in it and so it's like a really great all-natural way of if you're not kind of a supplement or a drug person to kind of get that same effect you won't really get it from just drinking from eating cherries because you'd have to eat just an offensive amount of cherries that's why you'd recommend the juice but that that's a good one and then kind of anything anything that's going to make you feel like good and comfortable and we talked earlier about like a bedtime routine so anything that's

habitual can be really effective and then I'd say just like being aware of hidden sources of caffeine so like chocolate actually in dark chocolate can have like a decent amount of caffeine in it right and so like not having hot chocolate and thinking what that's the same thing is like right right I don't know how many of us are doing that but kind of being aware of things like how about hydration like I like to drink a lot of water before bed yeah so being hydrated will help with your sleep being dehydrated can cause all kinds of of stress responses and inefficiencies that will sort of show up in your sleep. But you need to balance that with not waking up, you know, throughout the night to pee,

which I know a lot of people sort of like cut themselves off, you know, after like 8 or 10 o'clock in order to avoid that. So I think it's a little bit of like knowing your body. Obviously you want to be as hydrated as possible without like having it caused you need to get up Do you think there's a minimum amount of time between, like, how much you drink and when you go to bed? I mean, I think it's... Well, I guess on the flip side of that, right? Let me ask a better question.

Is there a minimum amount of time for alcohol for it to not affect the way you sleep? Yes and no. I mean, like, if your blood alcohol content has returned to zero, right? Then it's going to have less of an effect on your sleep than if you are, in fact, drunk at the moment when you go to sleep. And so depending on sort of, you know, this sort of general role of thumb is that, like, we can process, like, one standard drink per hour. So if it's been, like, however many hours, like, since you've been drinking, then you should be sober when you go to bed. What does the data look like for sleep when you're drunk? Oh, it's hilarious.

So your heart rate tends to be really high, and you actually see, like, sort of exponential decay in the heart rate. you sober up, and we typically see very little of the restorative stages, if not none of the restorative stages, until you sort of reach that, like, sort of sobered up baseline, which can be three, four hours into the night if you've been drinking heavily close to that. So anyone who's been on whoop for long enough who also drinks will at some point have this experience, and I encourage you to go look at the sleep data, and you'll see the heart rate comes down dramatically. You'll see that, like, REM and slow wave don't happen during that period when the heart rate is elevated and dropping.

And then inevitably, your recovery the next day is affected. Yeah. What constitutes as a disturbance, according to Woop? So disturbances are brief periods of being awake that are typically so short that the user won't typically be aware of them the next morning. So it's like when you wake up and roll over and then fall back asleep. We actually do this on average about nine times per day. night and the idea is that like you don't you don't know that they happened if I ask you the next

morning you won't report them but they can account for a significant amount of wake time and there's something that different behavioral interventions and environmental changes can help reduce so it's something you can kind of target as like a source of loss sleep efficiency what are something that I could do to reduce my sleep disturbances so it's anything that's going to improve sleep in general. Okay. Someone writes, I go to bed early, nine-ish, and I spend plenty of time in bed, but sometimes I'll wake up at three or four a.m., two to three hours before I'd like to, and can't

get back to sleep. Any tips for this or ideas of what I'm doing wrong? So that's, like we talked about, that's the natural way for humans to sleep. One of the things that's really interesting about sort of... So this person needs to just play around and have sex. one of the things that's really interesting is that sort of in the 1800s we start to see like sort of talk in the literature and in diaries and stuff of like first sleep and second sleep starts to disappear and right around the same time we start to see the first reports in the

literature of sleep maintenance insomnia which is like people who have trouble like staying asleep and so it's sort of this new medical problem that we created by this unnatural sleep pattern of like sleeping one consolidated consolidated eight hour period so like what we're doing is a little bit unnatural it's sort of a convenience thing that most of us seem to be able to get away with but the fact that like so many people have this issue where they fall

asleep they sleep for a few hours and then they're like what the hell you know exhausted but like can't fall asleep between like in that middle of the night like that's natural so it's it's tough to sort of say that they are the ones that need to fix. It's like society sort of screwed them. How about dreaming? If someone's not dreaming, is there anything that that's a sign of? Yeah, so we predominantly have like our most intense dreams during REM sleep. There's sort of like two different kinds of dreams. There's like what they call like fantastical dreams and those are like the fun ones where you're like flying or like won the lottery or whatever. And then there's

like boring dreams where you're like in a meeting or like making breakfast or whatever. We tend to have like the boring dreams during light sleep and the fantastical dreams during REM sleep if you're like not dreaming one of two things is going on either you are dreaming and you're just waking up not during a dream and so you just don't remember it which is actually like you immediately forget

it yeah well sometimes it's not just like like sometimes you wake up and the dreams kind of like on the tip of your tongue you know that it goes away but like you're aware that you dream but if you wake up during like slow sleep a lot of times you weren't in the middle of a dream when you woke up and so then you're just like oh I didn't dream. But, like, if you actually, like, had an EEG on, there'd be evidence that you

were dreaming. So a lot of people who think they don't dream, do dream. They just forget about it. But if you're, in fact, not dreaming. It's kind of sad. Yeah. I mean, I guess the positive is that you are dreaming, but I feel like the actual memory of dreams is important for some reason. But if you're in fact not dreaming, I mean, that's sort of like the, you know, the general theme of this podcast is you sort of take that as a sign to reevaluate your sleep environment to reevaluate what's going on because that could be a sign that you're not getting enough from sleep. Okay, any products or tips for sleeping that we haven't discussed? What about socks? There's this great paper that was published in nature a while ago that showed that for like older people

that they were sleeping more efficiently if they wore socks. And the theory was that having a temperature gradient between your extremities and your core was somehow sleep promoting, and so having like warm toes helped with that. Actually, what I love about that is that's just like it's all natural. Everybody has socks. It's like, why not try that? Sure. So will you sleep with socks on? I do a lot, yeah. Wow. I just find them cozy, though. I don't want to have cold toes. Okay, well, we have covered a lot. When are we going to be able to see how our sleep is affected by all the different answers, the user input questions, on the sleep pillar. Are we ever going to give feedback to people on that? Yeah, great question. So two days ago, there's a big update to the

feedback that we give around sleep that went out. And so if you've been answering your sleep surveys, you'll now start to see that the feedback we provide is incorporating that information. Oh, that's awesome. And if you're not seeing that, start answering your sleep surveys. So, for example, you'll tell me, like, how alcohol affects my sleep. Yeah. So, like, I learned that when I drink, I get 30% less REM sleep than when I don't. Wow. So, and that's typical.

So, I mean, we're going to talk, obviously, about alcohol, which is a big thing that I know a lot of our users are curious about, but also kind of simpler things, like sharing a bed and using a screen device. what does the average whoop user get for time in bed and hours of sleep so the average whoop user is spending eight hours and 20 minutes a night in bed and that's equating to seven hours and 45 minutes of sleep which is a sleep efficiency of about 94 percent and what's super interesting about that is in 2013 there is a gallop poll that surveyed sort of Americans in general that found that 40 percent of Americans were getting less than seven hours of sleep sleep, and the average American was getting 6.8 hours of sleep. And what was so fascinating about that is they'd actually done a similar study in 1942, and they found that only 11% were getting

less than seven hours of sleep. So there's been a big decline. So it's getting worse. It's getting a lot worse. But WOOP members are like absolutely bucking that. There we go. And doing much better. And by the way, the lurking variable there may be actually how much more sleep. people get once they start using whoop because we've seen this across all kinds of populations I won't put you on the spot to figure out what the exact numbers are oh you have them all right what are the numbers for how much people increase their sleep on whoop so in the first 129 days on whoop on average whoop users are adding 41 more minutes in bed so that's like the time that they're dedicating to sleep so it's equating to slightly less than that of actual sleep what was the most

interesting about that was among those who started with fewer than 7.9 hours of sleep. So that was like the lower half at the beginning. Those guys added 52 more minutes of sleep. So the worst whoop users are adding closer to an hour. Wow. I mean, look, a lot of it just comes back to

you manage what you measure. If you're measuring sleep, you're going to manage it. And we see that in the data. Yeah, I think that the most like the most exciting thing that we see is that like a lot of times people don't even realize that they're sleep deprived and so you sort of give them like a bad grade on sleep and it's the first time anybody's told them that they're not getting enough and so all of a sudden they're sort of they're given like this new goal as opposed to like oh I always get six hours so I'm going to get six hours again tonight Emily always a pleasure to work with you in every context so thank you for coming on Many thanks to Emily for coming on the show. She will be back. We learn something every time we talk to her.

If you enjoyed this podcast, make sure to tune in to our Instagram channel this Friday, March 15th. That's at Whoop on Instagram, as Emily does a special Q&A live on World Sleep Day. If you're not already a member, you can join the Whoop community now for as low as $18 a month. We'll provide you with 24-7 access to your biometric data as well as analytics across strain, sleep, recovery, and more. The membership comes with a free Woopstrap 2.0. And for listening to this podcast, folks, if you enter the code, Will Ahmed, that's W-I-L-L-A-H-M-E-D at checkout,

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