WHOOP Podcast - Understanding stress: How it affects sleep performance and cognitive functioning

Episode Date: July 14, 2021

This week we’re sharing some groundbreaking WHOOP research about the importance of stress, rest, and recovery — and how they are key ingredients to improving performance and giving you a competitive advantage. One of the best ways you can improve your performance is being more aware of the mental and physical factors at play. This research showed that, for every 45 minutes of sleep debt a person accrued, they had a 5 to 10 percent decrease in mental control the following day — and for every 30 minutes of slow wave sleep gained, that person saw a 5 to 10 percent increase in mental control the next day. Vice President of Performance Kristen Holmes sits down with the researchers, Dr. Jemma King and Nadia Fox, to discuss the goal of the study (3:33), why WHOOP was chosen to measure stress (5:15), the study findings (14:18), major takeaways (16:46), sleep and performance (22:49), light exposure at night (26:55), stress and sleep (30:56), phone light before bed (37:06), proper breathing (38:40), and nutrition's impact on performance (43:56). Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

What's up, folks? Welcome back to the WOOP podcast. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of WOOP, where we are on a mission to unlock human performance. That's right. We've got a groundbreaking research study on today's podcast. But first, a reminder, you can get 15% off a WOOP membership. If you use the code, Will Ahmed, that's W-I-L-H-M-E-D, W-WP membership comes with hardware, software,

analytics and it's designed to help you improve your health. Now this week we're sharing some groundbreaking research done with McKinsey and company. That's right, some of the best consultants in the world about the importance of stress, rest, and recovery. And how are they our key ingredients to improving performance and giving you a competitive advantage. As the WOOP members listening to this know, WOOP has a metric called sleep debt, which is our calculation of how much sleep has accrued that you need. Now, one of the best ways you can improve your performance is being more aware of the mental and physical factors at play. And so this research was really designed to look at that relationship between sleep debt and mental control. 72 individuals wore

whoop during this research study and collected their sleep data every single night. And then the following day underwent a mental control test. What we found was pretty revolutionary. This research showed that for every 45 minutes of sleep debt, a person accrued, they had a five to 10 percent decrease in mental control the following day. That's right. They did five to 10 percent worse on this test the following day. Now, for every 30 minutes of slow-wave sleep that these individuals gained, that person saw a 5 to 10% increase in mental control the next day. So this study is really hitting at that relationship between sleep and mental control. Vice President of Performance, Kristen Holmes, sits down with the researchers Dr. Gemma King and Nadia

Fox to discuss everything this study revealed and everything you need to learn from it. They discuss how our brains react to stress, how proper breathing can reduce. your stress, what sleep debt is, how whoop tracks it, and why it's important to keep your debt low, the role light exposure has on your sleep, and how nutrition plays a role in high performance. This is a fascinating study, and I encourage you to listen to Kristen and Dr. Gemma King and Nadia Fox right now. Hello, Wook crew.

This is Kristen Holmes, Vice President of Performance Science. It is truly my pleasure to have the opportunity to chat with two scientists whom I have so much respect and admiration for, Dr. Gemma King and Nadia Fox, soon to be Dr. Nadia Fox. Welcome. Thanks, Kristen. Thanks for having us. Thanks so much, Kristen. It's lovely to be here. I'll allow them to introduce themselves in a moment so you can match the voice with the name, but first I wanted to share why I'm so excited for this conversation. First of all, I'm really proud of the research. The team of Dr. King, Nadia, and Dr. William von Hippel from the University of Queensland is truly first class. And we had just this extraordinary opportunity to integrate biopsychological

information that helped us better understand how leaders make decisions in the presence of high levels of stress and then how that stress manifests in whoop data. So this is truly novel research that we're engaging in. And this is really just part one of a study. And we have another study that's coming up and we'll be able to give you a little insight into where that goes. But really excited to talk about this research. I think secondly, another kind of important piece of this conversation is that we really get to debunk the myth that whoop is just for professional athletes. It's more than that. And I think there is just this broader opportunity to really understand your body and understand how the stresses of day-to-day life influence your

cognitive ability. When you understand your body, you have this incredible opportunity to really take control of the behaviors that are going to influence your energy, both kind of physical, emotional and cognitive energy to really put toward the things that you care about in your life. So really excited to have these truly extraordinary scientists dig into this research and talk about some of these concepts. So Dr. King, I would love for you to talk a little bit about just your background and kind of how you came to discover whoop and why you decided you wanted to use it in the various types of research that you're engaged in. Yeah, thanks, Kristen. So I'm a research fellow at the University of Queensland and also

a founder of Biasyc Analytics and I am the supervisor of Nadia on this project but you know I've really been working with WOOP for many years now and um it might be interesting if I go back and talk about the origins of how I came to use Woot for research yeah definitely it's really interesting story and like most good ideas it originated from a pain point and you know I was really interested in doing stress research for a long time and probably primarily because my life was fairly stressful at the time, you know, kids and study and relationships and I thought, you know, there's got to be a better way of dealing with stress. So I spend many years learning about physiology and psychological behavior, all with the aim to work out how to

better manage stress. And I was really interested in using like emotional intelligence principles as like a preemptive, predictive moderator of stress. And I knew that typically in stress research, self-report bias is a. massive problem. You know, and you know that a lot of people, they'll tell porcupies, they'll either underreport stress or they'll even catastrophize us for whatever reason. And so this leaves, you know, the data very vulnerable to substantial error. And porcupis is a decidedly Aussie term. So you might have to just define that for our American audience. It's bullshit, basically. And so I got really interested in measuring stress with, you know,

objective measures. So I got into salivary cortisol and immune function, IGA. And now for anyone who's done extensive lab research, I'll understand that having to, you know, trall through hundreds of thousands of slobbery spit tubes a day is really disheartening. It's especially in a hot Australian summer, you know, I actually had a lab assistant pass out. It's like downright nauseating. So I was always on a lookout for another objective measure of stress. And cortisol is expensive and, you know, you've got this one-shot pop and you can really miss critical responses. And so after doing some large-scale studies at UQ, back in 2015, I was granted the Australian Army Research Scheme Award to Research Stress

at the Australian Special Forces. And during this time, I was assisted by the lead of the Human Performance Optimization Program called Matt. And he's got a really interesting story because he's one of Australia's longest-serving commanders And he actually got blown up in Kandahar province in Afghanistan by a Russian anti-tech mine. And so this really sparked his interest in the advancement of, you know, human factors in the special forces, you know, kind of like the nexus between cognitive and physiological factors. And so he helped raise this unit and sort of pioneered the development of human performance

optimization Australia. And he was the guy who introduced us to whoop. So he was talking to one of the special operation guys in the U.S. And he put Matt in contact with WOOP. And, you know, we'd just been on this massive fact-finding mission to the U.S. We went to MIT, the Remy Research Institute to DARPA. And we were really looking for a biometric capture device and nothing hit the mark. And so when Matt found Woop, we were like, wow, this is it.

You know, we were super excited because finally, we had a device that could conduct like 24-7 continuous physiological monitoring, had a long battery life, didn't have to get taken off to charge, could go subsurface, it was dust rated, it was durable, had this really cool dashboard. And for us doing stress research, it was an absolute game changer. And so we, you know, we put it on the guys and what we found was the wute was like this incredible behavior modifying device.

So just by wearing it, the guys were, any sort of interventions, the guy started sleeping more, drinking less, managing their strain. And they even started to stop overtraining and, you know, we're gaining more bulk. And we put them on the dexacan, dexascan, we can see this. So it was fantastic. And so from then, elite sport sort of took up interest in our program. And then so I started working with the Olympic swim team, the Australian Institute of Sport. And then my work started to get the attention of elite business people.

So people like management consultants and C-Swit executives. And I think that they knew that as elite knowledge workers, they needed to pay attention to their cognitive fitness, just like an elite athlete needs to pay attention to their physical fitness. And so it just, you know, it's just from there, it's just gone off. I love that this concept that has traditionally been very much reserved for, you know, elite tactical athlete, the elite professional athlete is now kind of making its way into mainstream. You know, when you look at a LeBron James, for example, or, you know, a Bryce Harper or,

you know, some of these professional athletes who are just operating at the very tip or, you know, a commander, you know, inside special operations. And so I guess for me, it's the, it stands the reason that the opportunity for the rest of us is it actually, because of we haven't necessarily been operating at these margins and kind of accounting for and calibrating our lives around these data points that, you know, the delta for the rest of us trying to get better is actually astronomically life-changing, you know, and perhaps this is kind of a good segue into just some of the research that we're doing here, you know, because I think that's what we're trying to unlock for people with this research is to help them actually see what the

opportunity is. And it's it's really hard. If you're not quantifying aspects of your life that actually have a direct linear relationship to performance, you're probably leaving something on the table. And I think that's what we're starting to uncover with a lot of the research that we're doing. So maybe Nadia, why don't you give us, you know, did an overview of this research that we've done, you know, that we, this kind of the 1.0 with this executive leadership program and we can kind of dig into some of the elements. The research team and I last year had the opportunity to survey participants from an executive leadership program with a consulting firm. And what we did was we wanted to investigate exactly what we've been speaking about, trying to understand

this relationship between optimum performance, but taking it away from the athletes. athletic populations and taking it more to business executive population, because as we've been discussing, just as athletes need to prepare for optimum performance within their specialty, so does the everyday person. So we were really, in particular, interested in the cognitive flexibility and problem-solving abilities of these leaders. And their ability to be able to generate multiple possible solutions to ambiguous, dynamic and complex problems because these are actually some of their greatest assets. And these are the abilities that they need to have on point for those really sticky situations that they can sometimes get into. But

unfortunately, in their complex work environments, stress can often undermine these really core cognitive abilities. So in our research, we really wanted to understand this relationship for how workplace stresses were impacting these key cognitive abilities that leaders essentially need in order to be good leaders and excel in their workplace. What we did in our research was we had regular sampling of our participants. We would hit them up with surveys over three to six month period and we'd ask them about their experiences during the day, how much stress they experience, what their goals were and how successful they were achieving those goals. And we also measured key cognitive abilities such as mental control and inhibitory control.

So while this was all going on, we of course had whoops on all our participants. And that allowed us to take their physiological metrics, such as sleep, recovery, how their heart was functioning, specifically heart rate variability, to be able to correlate that with their subjective experience in the workplace. So we could really sort of look at how does physiological recovery of a leader impact their cognitive abilities as a leader? And what is the role of stress within that? Nadi, that's perfect.

Thank you for that overview. We've got these performance data for the lack of better term that we're able to then correlate to the physiological markers. So what did we see there? What was the relationship? Yeah. So the outcomes of our study was that for every 45 minutes of sleep debt that the executives accrued, that led to around a 5 to 10% decrease in mental control the following day. So if we break that down and look at what sleep debt actually is, that's the amount of sleep that you might need tonight as a result of how much sleep you might have missed out on the previous night. As we spoke about before, there's always general guidelines around how much sleep an individual might require.

They might recommend the average adult might need around eight hours of sleep. And while this guide might be helpful, it's not actually always specific to the individual and what they need. For example, I could have spent the day sitting at my computer doing work all day. Well, Gemma might have gone out and run a marathon. So am I going to still need eight hours of sleep that night as well as Gemma? maybe not because her output might have been substantially more than mine. So the really unique thing about the RUP algorithm for sleep debt is it takes all these

individual differences into account. So it's not just saying you needed eight hours sleep the night before. So therefore, you only got seven. So you need an extra hour the night after. It's taking into account how much you exerted yourself the day before as well as how much sleep you got the night before, which is actually really valuable because it, personalises this data. So when our results show that every 45 minutes of sleep debt, the executives recruit led to 5 to 10% decrease in mental control the following day.

That's really specific to them as well. And the second finding that we found was that every 30 minutes of slow wave sleep gained by our executives led to about the same. So looking at about five to 10% increase in mental control the next day. So we're really seeing the benefit of sleep come through where the higher amounts of slow way of sleep you're getting the night before, that's having a positive impact on your ability to present as a leader to have these cognitive abilities that you need functioning optimally. Meanwhile, when you're not getting the right amount of sleep you need, those same cognitive abilities are impaired with consequences potentially for leadership. Yeah, and I definitely want to highlight a couple things that you

pointed out, Nadia, and that was a sensational overview. Thank you. This, I think the concept, you know, the idea that, you know, just 45 minutes left to right is going to have a massive influence on your ability to make decisions the next day. Like to me, that is, it's hard to believe that, but it's true, right? We were able to prove that in, in this research. And so I think when we consider that every single night, you get delivered. on your phone exactly how much time you need to spend in bed. So by understanding the relationship between sleep debt, which as Nadia pointed out, is the amount of time that who said you needed versus what you actually got,

and to understand that sleep debt correlates to working memory and executive functioning, that basically validates the sleep need metric that we are feeding you every night. So when WOOC tells you you need to spend X amount of time in bed, and if you listen to it, you have a greater chance of waking up the next day and being essentially a better leader, better decision maker, probably you're going to be a bit more patient, a bit more tolerant. You know, that might be a stretch. But the research definitely tells us that you're going to have better executive functioning, better working memory.

Yeah, 100% Kristen. And I mean, 45 minutes of sleep dead or 30 minutes of slow wave sleep, they might seem like really small amounts and it's so easy maybe to sit in bed for an extra 30 minutes playing on your phone or reading but I think it's really important for listeners and everyone to know data like this in order to be like no actually squeezing in an extra 30 minutes of leisure time before going to sleep can actually have consequences the next day if you're not meeting your recommendations. We call this bedtime revenge procrastination and I think that You know, all of us would be vulnerable to this, especially with, you know, Netflix and it's easy to just stay up.

But, you know, if you are an elite knowledge worker and you want to have an edge and you're into mastery and excellence, I mean, there it is. It's just 30, 45 minutes where you can go into that negotiation the next morning and be better and really have that cognitive or psychological edge over other people or just be better than you were yesterday. I think this is such a great formula. It's just so easy just to achieve it. Jam, I'd love for you, you know, you have the opportunity just in your work to be interacting with very large corporations, you know, military units, professional sports. So, I mean, you really are working at the cross-section of high performance. But I'd love for you to spend just a few minutes talking about just the importance

for organizations to understand this mind-body connection and how that influences culture. And, you know, because I think what's very much overlooked in a lot of kind of corporate structures is, you know, this concept of knowing your body, right? And being able to really drive performance outcomes by making better decisions. And I don't fault folks, because generally speaking, they don't know how to apply their effort, right? They don't know what it is they need to be thinking about or spending time on. Well, we just gave you one very specific thing that you can focus on folks who are listening. You can listen to whoop sleep need recommendations because that is going to give you an edge.

So there's that. But if you can, Jim, just talk more broadly about, you know, the barriers that you see in corporate culture and or how things might be shifting or, you know, where you kind of see the kind of enterprise going. Yeah, I think, you know, as an organisation, more and more people are understanding that not only do organisations have a moral obligation for the health and wellness of their employees, but it's actually pretty expensive. And, you know, when you think about, you know, what do organisations care about? They really do care about the bottom line. And, you know, more and more data's coming through to say that if you don't pay attention to the health and well-being and the sleep, you know, the sleep performance, obviously. your employees, it's going to cost you. There's no doubt about it. Sick leave, stress leave, or, you know, poor retention, having to retrain. These are very, very expensive propositions for

an organisation. And I think also, you know, there has been that culture of, it's like a badge of honour, like, oh, I only got three hours sleep last night and look how, you know, amazing I am. And I think slowly people are starting to wake up and say, that's just plain stupid. not only are you a risk in these dangerous occupations you're a risk to your colleagues but you're actually going to be costing the organisation a lot of money if you keep up this behaviour and I saw it a little bit with the guys at the special forces that they started to have competitions on who could get the most REM sleep or the most slow-wave sleep because they knew the benefits of slow-wave sleep more testosterone and they knew the benefits of REM sleep

skill acquisition was better learning a language or learning how to operate some, you know, specialist technology. And so I think that very, very slowly it is starting to happen where organizations are setting up almost like friendly team competition between groups on sleep performance. So, for instance, I've just been working with a finance property company and we've got all of the team on whoops. And we're going to be looking at a metric, which is sleep consistency. And the team that gets the highest rating sleep consistency metric is going to get a prize at the end of the month. Now, sleep consistency is about going to bed within the same, you know, say 15 minute window every night. And we know, and Kristen, you can probably talk to this.

We know just how important that that data is that metric is for getting into deep, so I sleep, getting enough room sleep is because when you go to sleep at the same time every bed, when you go to bed at the same time every night, your body knows to start to gear down all of the stress hormones and it starts to gear up all of the sleep hormones. And so you're more efficient at getting into those deeper stages of sleep and you have to spend less time getting there. So your sleep becomes so much more efficient. And so, you know, if you're in an organisation, you're in an organisation, you're

the leadership position and you are thinking, what can I do for my employees? What is one thing I can do that's really relatively cheap, easy and effective? I would strongly suggest that you set up a sleep consistency competition between your subgroups and to see how that goes. And, you know, Kristen, we know from the data, really successful way to change behavior and change performance within your organization. Yeah, I mean, there's no question that, you know, it just keeps submerging in all of the research that we're doing, that sleep consistency is really the most important sleep behavior. And as Jenna, Jim pointed out, you know, it's going to bed and waking up at the most consistent time as you possibly can, as often as you can. And it doesn't mean

you have to be perfect, you know, every day. But it's definitely, again, if you're interested in optimizing, you know, your health and longevity and kind of being the best version of yourself, that actually is one of the most important behaviors. It predicts all sorts of health outcomes and definitely worth investing time to figure out how you can kind of structure your life to really go to bed and wake up at more consistent times. I think it's also going to change that culture

within organizations around the badge of honor of no sleep, which I think is a really antiquated, you know, last century type of way of thinking around, you know, performance. I think that you're going to be a high performer. if you're not sleeping, you're kidding yourself because something is going to snap. There's going to be some circuit breaker and it's typically, you know, your physiology, you get sick, you get cancer, you get syndrome X or you get depressed and anxious. And I think what's really interesting with the elite knowledge workers that I've been working with

is they're really starting to pair their emotional state with their sleep performance. and they can understand that when they wake up in the morning, they're feeling super anxious, they'll post-rationalise, they'll say, oh, it's because of, you know, I've got a board meeting or because of my wife or my employees are not doing what they're supposed to. When you actually point out, show me your slow wave sleep, show me your REM sleep for the last three days,

and you can see it's really poor. And you can say, well, actually, you're feeling terrible, you're feeling anxious, you've got this impending sense of doom because you haven't hit slow wave sleep, you haven't hit REM sleep. And we know within these stages of sleep, that you will wash out some metabolic byproducts of thinking, a product called adenosine,

and we know that's a product from, it's a byproduct of energy usage in the brain. And if you don't flush that away in slow wave slick, you will feel anxious. And so I think this tool is really demystifying people's thoughts around why they're anxious, and you can make it, you know, you can go back to the basics, and say, just go and have a really good sleep and then see how you feel. Maybe, you know, hold off going and getting on some, you know, antidepressants or, you know,

making huge changes in your relationship or your organization before you have a good sleep. Yeah, I think it's probably worth noting. Just you kind of brought up the mental health aspect. And you're starting to, you know, kind of dig into some of the behaviors, which I think is really important for our listeners. One of the behaviors I thought was really interesting. And, Jim, your background in kind of neuroscience would go to talk about the mechanisms. But, you know, if you're viewing light between the hours of 11 p.m. and 4 a.m., you will actually

block the release of serotonin the next day. Yes. I think that's a really interesting finding. Yeah, I love this. So this is from Andrew Hooveman. And so what happens is that if light hits the bottom of your retinal cells, you know, between 11 and 4. AM, from a hunter-gatherer perspective, you know, because our brain still think we're on the savannas of East Africa, we haven't, you know, our primitive brain hasn't developed that much. So if your

brain detects light from above, it thinks, well, you're up out of your cave, you're probably having to hunt or protect yourself. So what it does, it sends a message to the herbenula, which then sends a message to your pancreas, which then changes your blood, glucose, sugar, regulating hormones and also makes you slightly pro-aggressive the next day because your primitive brain thinks, I'm probably going to have to hunt something or fight something. And so this is fascinating. So if you're, you know, on your phone late at night or you're up late at night and then the next day you're feeling hungry, you're craving sugar and you're feeling a little bit cranky,

you know why. It's because you've had light hit those retinal cells. Yeah. And I think that's oftentimes like we, you know, we wake up in the middle of the night because we have, you know, accumulated a lot of stress during the day. We didn't manage it. And invariably it kind of rears its head while we're trying to sleep during the night. And to kind of just pass the time as we're awake, we grab our phones. And that is for all the reasons Gemma just outlined is one of the worst things that we could do for us for ourselves. So it's you want to replace that habit with some deep breathing. And we'll be talking about a study that we did with Stanford University and Dr. Andrew Huberin was the principal investigator on the study. But, you know, one of the breathing techniques that you can deploy to get yourself kind of calm down and in a state where you can actually feel sleepy again is called the physiological sigh. And that is two inhales and a long exhale. And you want to do that for about 90 seconds to a couple minutes. And sure enough, you should start to feel sleepy.

It's that breathing protocol activates the parasympathetic branch of the nervous system, which is going to tell your heart rate to reduce, to calm down. And it's going to really, you know, produce these feelings of calmness, which can hopefully lull you back to sleep. But the last thing you want to do is grab your phone because you won't be releasing that serotonin next day, which is obviously the feel good. So a lot of the mental health and the anxiety and the depression that we, that sometimes we can, you know, fall into, you know, a lot of it does stem from our sleep. So we really want to try to take stock in our behaviors over the course of

the day and make sure that they're helping put us in a position where we enable ourselves to get the consolidated sleep so we can spend the time in the REM and the slowive sleep and really wake up, regenerated and refresh the next day. I think that's a really important message, Kristen, particularly because we know from previous research that the effects of stress don't necessarily stop when you finish work for the day. And then they don't always stop when you fall asleep for the night because our modern day stresses aren't like those faced by our predecessors

where we experience an immediate threat and our options are to club that threat or to run away from it. And then the stress is resolved within a small. amount of time. Instead, our modern day stresses, we can take them home with us. They can be on our mobile while we're going to bed. We can get a last minute email and things like that. So I think these techniques that you're talking about are really important, especially when we're looking at the importance of our sleep architecture for next day performance, because we can see that stress can impact how our sleep architecture looks during the night. Yeah. Pre-pre-sleep stress has been shown

to suppress our body's ability to achieve parasympathetic dominance through the night and reduce our slow wave sleep. So any techniques that we can do even before bed to try and regulate that stress before going to sleep is going to have huge benefits for not only the sleep phases that you have during the night, but also your cognitive performance the next day. Yeah, we talk a lot, you know, Gemma and Natty and I are all, I guess, neck deep at this point in this kind of idea around circadian alignment. And what are the behaviors that we can engage in during the day that set our system up to feel sleepy when it needs to feel sleepy? And I think that, you know, it's kind of what Nadi is getting at is that, you know, it's actually not just the half an hour before you put

your head to the pillow that is going, you know, and thinking of, you know, doing, taking the hot shower and getting your room cold, dark and quiet, all of that is very, very important. And it's going to help you, you know, definitely help you get some consolidated sleep. But what Natty is referring to is the stress, the stress that accrues over the course of the day. And if it goes unmanaged, it will end up fragmenting your sleep and give a less than desirable kind of sleep architecture. And then there's, you know, the kind of second part of that is, yes, is the stress management. And then just kind of queuing our system to the light and the environment is another piece that's really important. And Jim, do you want to talk a little bit about some of the mechanisms involved with light

and how that sets us up for a sweet sleep at night? I love, I think you told me this quote by LeBron James that a good night's sleep starts the minute you wake up. Yes. And I use that all the time now because it's a good one. Because like, you know, our human brains are so tightly connected to the sun and the moon. and you know as you always say is the first photon exposure that you have in the morning so the first time that light hits your retinal cells will set you up to get natural sleep pressure

around 16 hours later so you know if you want to have your go-go hormones activated for the day it's really important that you get out into the sun and get that photon exposure into your eyeballs and then your cortisol will naturally rise and so 30 minutes after waking is when your highest cortisol levels are expressed and this is a good thing because you actually need cortisol to you know have the energy to you know smash through your day but then that will signal for your for your stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol to start to decrease by the end of the day and then that will also signal for your melatonin to start getting produced and so to make you sleeping. And so I think I think it's Andrew Hooverman also talks about this is

photon bathing in the evening. So watching the colors of the sunset go through, you know, the blues, the purples and the reds. And that's a very potent signal for your body to start to shut down all of your little clocks in every cell in your body to start gear down for sleep. And I think, you know, as modern humans, we really miss out on those sunrises. and sunsets because we're stuck in offices or we're, you know, we're leaving late and coming home late. We're not getting to see those beautiful colours and transitions of the sky, which for our ancestors were potent signalers for us to, you know, gear up or go to sleep. And we know that if you're pushing through these natural sleep pressures for your primitive

brain, it means that there's something serious going on. So if you're, you know, we've got artificial light in your eyes and you're running around, you know, late in the evening, you're going to be producing cortisol and adrenaline and because you're probably going to have to fight something or hunt something. And so this will make your ability to go to sleep so much harder. And I think, you know, there is this epidemic across the world around poor sleep behaviors. And it's because we're just really not set up like our ancestors were. Yeah. So just to reiterate, because I think we probably can't say this enough. Because these are behaviors, I think it's important to point out that are democratically available, right?

Like this, you know, breathing, you have access to your breath all the time. So the double inhale, the long exhale, you know, that is available for us at any point, right? So we should be using that protocol throughout the day to mitigate this negative stress accumulation. We should be, you know, within 20 minutes of waking up, we should get outside, view the light, as Jim said, at a low solar angle, you know, obviously do it as safely as you can. But, you know, you want to have about, you know, five to ten minutes of, of that photon energy to, again, set your system on a path to be alert and to do all the things that you need to do. And again, to set that sleep pressure. So, 60 hours later, you start to feel sleepy.

And then viewing the light, you know, as it's the sun is setting, getting your eyes again outside. So your body is getting that cue from the natural light that, oh, it's time to wind down. And then in your home environment, to the degree that you can, keep your lights dim. You don't want to be exposed to a lot of artificial light, because again, that's going to be signaling to the brain that it's time to be alert and it's going to make it more difficult to fall asleep. The other piece of that that I think is worth noting is that you might actually fall asleep because you just might be exhausted, but it will end up fragmenting your sleep. And it kind of, it's so sneaky in that way and that we don't necessarily realize that the artificial light, especially, you know, high, like really, you know, high locks, like, you know, a lot of light close to bedtime will end up fragmenting our sleep. So you really want to try to be as intentional as you can about, about your light exposure. Especially with phones, Kristen, like, you know, your phones can emit like, you know, 8,000, like sunlight's 10,000.

So, you know, you have to be super careful. even if you've got a blue light filter on your phone, we don't know what the other wavelengths are doing to your circadian rhythm. The greens or the blues, like we have no idea. Also, we don't know what we're going to be seeing when we got onto our phone. It's kind of like leaving your bedroom door open to let anybody walk in. So when you're on your phone, you could be looking at what your neighbour's doing on their amazing holiday,

or you can see your ex or you can see, you know, something emotionally evoking. And your brain can't tell the difference between seeing, that visual imagery and actually being there. So your brain has a better be safe than sorry mechanism that will start producing stress hormones or go hormones even by looking or even by imagining things. So you have to be super disciplined about what you let into your brain,

let into your eyes of an evening because your primitive brain is this going to start activating just in case. Right, right. Another thing I always wanted to go back about the breathing, I think, you know, this is, as you said, are really democratically available and super underrated modality for managing your stress. And I think that people don't really understand. A lot of people say, just breathe, just breathe.

I don't think people really understand the mechanism of success. If you slow your breathing down, what it does, it hacks into that primitive system. And it tells your brain, you know, you're calm, you're safe. And from a hunter-gatherer perspective, there is no way you would be breathing slowly if you were getting chased by a bear. And the funny thing about our large human brains is they're very metabolically expensive. So they're only 2 to 3% of our body weight, but they take up, you know, about 20 or 30% of our energy resources. So when we're under stress, our brains will prioritize survival mechanisms or survival actions over deep thinking.

And so if you're breathing erratically, like when we're stressed, we have a tendency to have lots of short in-breaths, very little out-breaths, and we actually hold our breath when we're stressed. And again, this is another survival mechanism. it's our primitive brain trying to sample the air smelling for danger and our no out-breaths is actually stopping us giving away our scent location to a predator. So think about when you're stressed next. Are you holding your breath?

And so what happens is when your brain detects erratic breathing or holding of breath, it will send a message to your brain to prioritize energy to big muscle groups, to running to heart to lungs. And you'll get this thing we call an amygdala hijack where your brain kind of shuts down and you kind of get blank or you lose IQ points under stress. I think all of us have had this situation.

Yeah. Just in the most critical times, like you know, you're about to present or you're about to, just when you need your brain, that stress breath will just shut down your ability to think. And so what breathing does, it hacks into this system. and if you slow down, it really just sends a message saying,

no, you're fine, no need to run, nothing's chasing you, and it'll keep your big energy sapping brain online, and you'll, you know, you'll be able to do the whatever function that's making you stressed. And so it's just such an easy way. And another thing I find absolutely fascinating is that they've found in your paranasal sinuses, they've found enzymes which produce nitric oxide.

Now, nitric oxide, you know, is converted to NO2, which is nitrous oxide, which is what you get at the dentist. And I think this is... Right. It's a vasodilator, which means it helps to widen blood vessels. Yeah. And this improves oxygen circulation in your body. Yeah.

It's like kind of like Mother Nature is just, and, you know, giving us a laughing gas machine in our face. I think it's, you know, just so fantastic. So, you know, that's another little hack if you are feeling stressed. slow down your breath and breathe through your nose and it has an extra calmative effect. Yeah, it is definitely worth highlighting that. You want to primarily breathe through your nose as often as possible. Mouth breathing is, your mouth is really a feature that helps you eat, drink, and talk.

There's really no utility in using your mouth to breathe, actually. And in fact, mouth breathing is generally unnecessary. So definitely, as you're breathing, you know, prioritize through the nose. And even, you know, when you're playing, you know, when you're just in your house, I know, I know, it's going to sound crazy. But my son is really trying to work on breathing more through his nose. He tends to be a bit of a mouth breather. And he knows from sitting in my car and listening to a podcast, I think there, Patrick McEwen, who wrote The Oxygen Advantage, brilliant book, James Nestor, breathe. You know, you must run out and read those books, ASAP. But when my son is playing, you know, a video game or something, he tapes his

mouth. He actually tapes it while he sleeps. But there is actually significant kind of health benefits to, to biasing toward, you know, a nose breathing for a majority of the day. Totally agree with you. And then I suppose that brings you to the point of you've got to be careful about what you eat because I think a lot of people don't breathe through their nose because they're allergic to, you know, the foods that they're eating inflammatory foods, which will give them blocked nasal passages. So it's quite high. hard and also this also brings me back to another feature of the whoop is that within the journal items you can choose you know types of diets that you're eating and then you can see

the impact on recovery and I just love this so you can do little experiments on yourself like if that food type is good or bad for you individually totally and we're all going to respond you know, differently. But I mean, if we think about the, the anchors, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's exercise, it's sleep, wake timing, you know, these are the, and light exposure. You know, those are kind of the, the kind of the core things we need to be focused on, you know, if we're really interested in, you know, kind of optimizing for health and longevity. Yeah, I think we just look at ourselves like high performance machines, you know, you wouldn't put a can of Coke into your McLaren P1.

You'd get it oiled, you know, you'd service it. And I think, you know, we have to look at our bodies in the same way. It's just we need to move. We need to be socially connected, intellectually engaged. We need to eat well, sleep well. And if you do those things, you know, consistently, I think you're in a pretty good stead to be a high performer. Nadia, would love to kind of, what are your parting thoughts, you know,

You know, when you kind of engaged, when you started this research and you kind of thought about the protocol, you know, is there anything that surprised you over the course of this last year, you know, putting this study together and really kind of driving, you know, all of the components? Yeah, it's actually been such an incredible learning experience just personally. Doing my undergrad degree in psychology, you know, we're primarily looking at the brain and how does it work and how does it work? and how does it function and things like that. And I think I always felt like there was something missing within that. And it wasn't until I got to sport psychology that I started to, you know, see the body being integrated into the mind. And so that's what really inspired me to follow this line of research is to see everything

from a holistic perspective. It's not just your mind and what it's thinking and how it's performing. That's also reflected in your body. and an unrecovered body is an unrecovered mind and vice versa. And I think it's really intuitive for us to look at these elite athletes and say, yeah, of course they need to have a really good diet. Of course they need to get good quality sleep. This is just a given.

We know that they're these optimum performing machines. But what's really interesting is there's all these other untapped populations who should be seeing themselves as athletes and should be taking the same care of themselves. They shouldn't just be thinking, oh, tomorrow, I've got a big presentation. So I'll make sure I get that coffee in the morning. It's a much bigger picture than that. And that's what the findings of our study really accentuate is that it's not how you get out of bed in the morning and the breakfast you have and the coffee you have necessarily.

Yes, those factors might play a role in how you face the day and how you perform. But there's a bigger picture, just like without athletes. It's actually the quality of your sleep the night before, what activities you did the day before. How are you managing your stress from yesterday to then get a good quality sleep to then lead to better performance the next day? So I think to really truly understand optimum performance, particularly in these complex work environments, whether it be our CEOs and leaders, or whether it be our frontline professionals in the medical or military professions, I think. it's really important to see the body holistically and to really understand how this chain of events can improve or impair performance. That's so well sad, Nadia. I think we're all in this kind of field of psychology and I just I'm so grateful, you know, that you guys are really

pushing the boundaries of research and really incorporating the psychology and the, in the physiology or integrating the psychology and the physiology. I think it's just opening up, I think, massive channels of new understanding that, I mean, hopefully is going to impact the world in some way. You know, I think from my lens, it's about, you know, how can we, you know, just live our values with more, you know, joy and energy, you know, at the end of the day. And I think a lot of these insights that we're, you know, we're uncovering are going to help, help, you know, that end. So I just want to thank you. Completely. Completely, Kristen.

And I think there's so much value in this multidisciplinary approach to research. Us as researchers, we can always send out surveys and ask for people's subjective experience. But the work you guys are doing at WOOP and the device that you've created that enables us to see deeper into the individual is invaluable. And yeah, like I said, this multidisciplinary approach is really an innovative way to move forward in research and really understanding the whole person. This is an absolute game changer in research because typically, you know, research was you're either a physiologist or a psychologist and never did the twain meat.

And I think that this device has just been revolutionary in, you know, creating a nexus between psychophysiology. And yeah, super exciting for us. Thank you for being at the forefront of this movement with us. Thanks for coming on this journey with us for some of that you guys. So fun. Completely. Well, thank you both for your time and your expertise and your incredible bits of wisdom.

I think our listeners are going to really enjoy this. So thank you. Thank you. Thanks, Kristen. Thank you to Dr. Gemma King and Nadia Fox for this amazing research. We look forward to doing more research studies with them in the future. You'll hear more from VP of Performance, Kristen Holmes, very. soon. A reminder, you can get 15% off a W-W-M-R-M-Ship. If used the code Will Ahmed, that's W-I-L-L-A-H-M-E-D. You can find us on

social at W-W-P-A-W-A-W-A-W-A-W-A-W-A-W-A. Thank you, folks. Stay healthy. Stay in the green.