WHOOP Podcast - World-renowned sleep expert Dr. Chuck Czeisler discusses groundbreaking sleep research and a new collaboration with WHOOP for the COVID Resilience Project

Episode Date: June 24, 2020

World-renowned sleep expert Dr. Chuck Czeisler joins Will Ahmed and Emily Capodilupo to discuss everything you need to know about sleep, and to announce the launch of the COVID Resilience Project. WHOOP is collaborating with Dr. Czeisler’s team, along with researchers from Harvard’s Brigham Health, Harvard Medical School, the Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health at Monash University, the Institute for Breathing and Sleep at Austin Health, and ARCHANGELS, to learn how the COVID-19 pandemic and its mitigation have impacted our members’ physical and mental health using a comprehensive survey. Dr. Czeisler details the connection between stress and sleep (7:07), how insufficient sleep significantly lowers testosterone levels (9:01), the dangers of not getting enough sleep (11:43), the most exciting research in sleep today (14:26), his Harvard course on creating time for sleep (17:50), why we need to sleep (21:50), the COVID Resilience Project (24:52), why researchers need your help (27:32), how you can help (29:44), the role of WHOOP in the study (36:13), and how this study will affect public policy (36:47).Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

Hello, folks, welcome to the WOOP podcast. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, the founder and CEO of Woop, and we are on a mission to unlock human performance. What does that mean? It means we collect data using hardware and software and analytics to help you understand your body. We measure things like sleep and recovery and strain, the strain you put on your body. And we measure respiratory.

rate, which has turned out in the past few months to go from being the most boring statistic on WOOP to being the most fascinating. And before we get to our world-renowned sleep expert, Dr. Chuck Seisler, I just want to give everyone a quick update that Woop was found in a study on 271 people, and it found that Woop can predict COVID-19. Now, we don't say that casually. It's certainly surreal for me, even just to say that out. loud. However, our algorithm caught 20% of pre-symptomatic cases and 80% of symptomatic cases by

the third day. So that's pretty amazing because studies show that most people aren't getting tested until seven days of symptoms of COVID-19. And so this study on 271 people found that the WOOP algorithm and respiratory rate can be used to predict 20% of cases, again, before symptoms, 80% by the third day of symptoms. And if you think about non-invasive ways to stop the spread of COVID-19, that becomes pretty interesting. We just saw this last week with Nick Watney, a professional golfer on the PGA tour. And as everyone knows, PGA golf is happening right now. So he wakes up, he's a whoop user, he sees he's got a really high respiratory rate, much higher than his baseline, and all of a sudden goes to a doctor and says, hey, I need to get tested for COVID-19, gets tested and tests positive. And now as a result, he's able to quarantine without infecting anyone else on the tour or any of his loved ones. So that is a pretty powerful story. I would encourage all whoop members listening to this to pay very close attention to their respiratory rate, given the study and given some of these recent developments that we've seen with Whoop in the Wild, and you can read more about

that at The Locker. That's Whoop.com slash The Locker. If you are not on Whoop, you can use discount code Will Ahmed. That's WI-L-L-A-H-M-E-D, and that will get you 15% off a WOOP membership. Okay, now to our guest, world-renowned sleep expert, Dr. Chuck Seisler, joins us on the Woot Podcast alongside Emily Capital Lupo, our vice president of research and data science. Dr. Seisler's groundbreaking research over the last 40 years has given us a greater understanding of our circadian rhythms. He is the director of Harvard's division of sleep medicine and works with NASA and professional sports teams like the Boston Celtics and Boston Bruins to prepare these high performers to do their best at work. Now, we're excited to

to announce that Dr. Sisler and his team are collaborating with WOOP for an exciting and extremely important new study. The COVID Resilience Project, and we need your help, folks. In the coming days, eligible WOOP members will have the opportunity to participate in this study by completing a survey that will pop up in the WOOP app. The survey will help us learn how the COVID-19 pandemic and its mitigation efforts have impacted our members' physical and mental health. We have some amazing collaborators on this study. We've got scientists and researchers from Harvard's Brigham Health, Harvard Medical School, the Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health at Monash University, the Institute for Breathing and Sleep at Austin Health, and Arc Angels.

We're also thrilled that the CDC has submitted a series of questions for this project, and we'll be using this data for important policy decisions moving forward. I want to make it clear to everyone listening to this, WOOP does not maintain a copy of the survey data. We will not maintain it and will not use the survey data for any purpose other than for the study. Your privacy is absolutely critical to us. It is core to our mission here at Woop. And I just wanted to reiterate that. Some of these questions are personal. It helps unlock a lot for the collaborators in terms of making policy decisions and again, thinking about how we as humanity can be more resilient to COVID-19. And for filling out this survey, you will be given a personal report showing

how your answers compare to other people in the survey. Hope you'll take the survey. Hope you enjoy this episode. Without further ado, here is Dr. Chuck Seisler and VP of Data Science and Research, Emily Cabralupo. Dr. Chuck Seisler, welcome to the Whoop Podcast. Thank you very much. It's good to be here. And we're joined by Emily Capital Lupo, our vice president of data science and research. Emily, great to have you back as always. Thanks, Will. Great to be back.

So, Chuck, I want to start with you. I mean, you've had such an amazing, amazing career in and around sleep and have been preaching the importance of sleep for decades. What first got you interested in sleep? Well, I first became interested in sleep. I was studying circadian rhythms, and in one of the experiments that I was doing, because of an instrument malfunction, we actually had to delay the timing of when the participant went to sleep, and we were looking at a hormone that wasn't supposed to be affected by sleep. But that change in the timing of sleep had a bigger impact on the release of that hormone than anything else that I had been studying up until. that point. And so I switched the focus of my attention to the impact of sleep on physiology.

And it turned out to be to have profound impact on not only how our internal clock remains synchronized with the 24-hour day, but also on many other aspects of health, including metabolic health, heart health, and just physical well-being and mental health. It's pretty amazing. Now, how long ago was this? Well, that was when I was in my first year of medical school. So that was back in 1974 that I, and I had been working on circadian rhythms for a couple of years before that, looking at the so-called stress hormone cortisol. And that's when I, in 74, 75 is when I discovered that sleep had such a big impact on the release of cortisol.

Elaborate a little bit on that. What should our audience know about how sleep affects cortisol? So when we go to sleep at night, we actually dramatically, during deep slow wave sleep at the beginning of the night, and this is particularly in men, they release the hormone growth hormone, which has many effects as well. But during that surge of growth hormone release, the hormone cortisol, the stress hormone cortisol, is inhibited. Now, we normally aren't aware of that because the stress hormone cortisol is normally at its lowest level near the time that we go to sleep at night anyway. But this becomes particularly important in people who shift the timing of their sleeping and waking

and don't maintain a consistent schedule. Maybe they go to bed later or whatever. Or maybe they stay awake at night working on a shift and then they try to sleep during the daytime. Then the entire pattern of the release of the hormone changes. Furthermore, chronic sleep deficiency elevates cortisol levels so that they never drop to that low point in the time before we get to sleep at night. And it sort of upregulates the stress hormone. So we release more of it.

And similarly, if we are trying to sleep during the daytime, that adversely affects the release of growth hormone as well. And in fact, virtually all the hormones that are regulated by the hypothalamus are also impacted by sleep. For example, thyroid stimulating hormone, we release much more of it during the night if we stay awake all night because sleep inhibits the release of that hormone. But if we stay up all night, pull in all night and then try to sleep during the day, then we're sleeping at a time that we don't release that hormone anyway. And so overall, we have much more of that hormone release. Even testosterone, sleeping for four hours a night for just a week, decreases testosterone levels by the equivalent of 11 years of aging.

Isn't that amazing? It is amazing. Athletes are trying to do their best to remain in shape. When I told this to one of the professional basketball team members, this was the Celtics when we had sort of a little bit of an older team, and they were in a state of shock that just burning a candle at both ends would propel them and potentially foreshorten their career by making them prematurely aging. Emily, if you're a WOOP member listening to this,

what are the statistics in the app that you want to pay attention to to make sure that you don't end up on the wrong side of that equation, Chuck just described. You definitely want to make sure that you're getting enough sleep. That's for sure the biggest thing. And so Chuck, I'm curious

what your research suggests about naps because you talked both about getting enough sleep but also specifically nighttime sleep. Two aspects of naps. So there are different cultures around the world where the siesta, mid-afternoon siesta, is a consistent pattern. It happens at about the same time every day. People get a couple of hours of sleep then, and then they get another five or six hours of sleep at night. And that's kind of a consistent pattern we can adapt well to.

But too often in our current sort of 24-7 culture, the nap is happening because people are so chronically sleep-deprived that like the energizer bunny, at some point they just sort of fall over. and have some compensatory sleep during the daytime that is occurring only because they had so much sleep deficiency at night. And so naps in that context can be a sign that you're chronically sleep deprived. If it's part of a regular program where the nap is built into your day and you're getting a sufficient amount of sleep, then it can be good. Otherwise, it can be a dangerous sign. But in any case, taking a nap, if you are chronically sleep deprived, is important because it helps reduce, it helps pay back some of that sleep debt. So I'm a big fan when I'm working with sports teams and others of recommending that the players

before a major competition do take a mid-afternoon nap because that can really help boost their performance on the court or the field later that day. So fascinating. I mean, you've been studying this since the night, you know, mid-1970s, and it takes until 2019 for a book called, you know, why we sleep to be a New York Times bestseller. Like, what do you think has taken society so long to catch up with understanding just how important sleep is? In many ways, people have seen asleep as a weakness.

So the right stuff, the tough, you know, the astronauts, whatever, they should be able to function without sleep. And in fact, sleep deficiency has been one of the serious concerns of the space program, and there have been many incidents in which sleep deficiency had an actual impact during missions, both among the controllers as well as among the astronauts themselves. So NASA takes this really seriously and tries to ensure that the crew members get enough sleep, even though, you know, sort of the image is that they don't need to sleep. We lionize individuals who supposedly get by with insufficient sleep, which I think is a real shame.

We don't say, you know, isn't it great that somebody's drunk when they go on the court? You know, everybody recognizes that that's going to degrade your performance. And we know that being awake for 24 hours in a row or getting like four or five hours of sleep a night for the better part of a week, both of those things impair neurobehavioral performance, reaction time and other things, by an amount. that's equivalent to being legally drunk. And Dr. Sizer, you're being modest, but we know this because of your research. Well, we have done a lot of studies on really trying to understand the impact of sleep deficiency on both performance and the susceptibility to errors. But we're not the only ones.

There are many labs around the country and around the world who have been focusing in on that. And I think that that's that building evidence is what has, really caused sort of a sea change in our society for people to realize that actually sleep is one of the things that they can harness if they want to perform at their best. And this is what I tell team members. I say, okay, you can keep practicing, practicing, practicing. But if you don't sleep on the night after you practice, then you don't lay down the memories that are critical for enhancing your performance. You know, if you practice a new move or do it, you should be able to do it 20% faster after you get that night of sleep on the day or on the night right after doing the practice.

Whereas if you stay up that night or, you know, are flying across the country because you're going from one city to another and a game. And so you have very disturbed sleep that night, then you'll never get that enhancement of the performance from one day to the next. I mean, it's so fascinating. We say this over and over at Woot, but you don't actually get stronger in the gym or at practice. You get stronger from the recovery of the sleep. sleep from that practice or from that gym work. That's exactly right. Chuck, what is the most exciting research that you are working on right now or have been

in recent years? One of the things we're most excited about is learning the impact of light exposure on resetting our internal biological clock. And it used to be thought that humans were different than all other species and that we were not sensitive to light for resetting our internal fog. That it was conversations like this one, the social interaction. action that was more important. But it turns out that we're every bit as sensitive as a cockroach to the effect of light on resetting our circadian rhythms. Perhaps that makes us seem less

exceptional than we might want to believe. But we're very, very sensitive to light exposure. And that led to our discovery that exposure to light simply from a light emitting ebook, like an iPad, or some other device that emits light or a phone or smartphone that emits light, all those things actually are sending a resetting system, a resetting signal. All of those light-emitting devices are sending a resetting signal to the brain, to the internal clock in the brain that's actually telling the brain that it's daytime because the light-emitting diodes in those devices are powered principally, by blue LEDs.

And so when you're looking down at the screen, it's as if you're looking up at the blue sky. So the message that's coming into the brain is that it's daytime. Better shift the clock so that now this is daytime. And so if you're reading in the evening before bed from a light emitting device as opposed to from a printed book,

you're going to be sending a signal that that's the middle of the day. And that's going to shift your circadian rhythm to a later hour, making it more difficult to fall asleep, which we've demonstrated. It's going to disturb the timing of rapid eye movement sleep, which is sleep stage associated with vivid dreaming. And that's when we integrate all the new information we've learned during the day with what we knew before, gain insight and creativity.

And so we're pushing that off of the end of sleep because it normally, the peak tendency to be in REM sleep, is in the last couple of hours of sleep. So if we shift that later by exposing ourselves to bright, blue-enriched light right before bed, then that pushes that off of the cliff so that that, instead of the peak REM drive happening in the last couple of hours of sleep, it's going to happen to the first couple of hours of waking. And that's going to make us much more groggy during those early morning hours than we otherwise would have been. So understanding that impact of light on our internal clock, in the brain has been one of the most exciting findings that we've had.

It's really so amazing and it's so important. I think that now people are really starting to pay attention to all of this research and especially a lot of the research you've just touched on. Now, Chuck, to try to make some of this actionable for our audience, what do you recommend people do who are having trouble sleeping or who may even be using a device or a screen later in the night? What are some of your sort of basic personal recommendations? Well, the basic personal recommendation is, first of all, set aside enough time for sleep.

I actually teach a course at Harvard called time for sleep because it's not just setting aside the amount of sleep duration, but also the timing of when that occurs to be as consistent as possible. So the first thing is set aside enough time for sleep. The average adult needs at least seven hours of sleep per night. Teenagers and preteens, children even need more sleep. than that. But so at least seven hours, probably for the average athlete, maybe a little more than eight hours of sleep per night on a consistent basis with ideally no more than about an hour or so variation in the onset of sleep every day. So you mean consistently going to bed at the same

time? Right. And I remember somebody telling me, I'm very consistent. You know, on the weekdays, I go to bed at 10 o'clock every night. On the weekends, I go to bed at 4 o'clock. the morning. I said, well, that's not consistent. I said, it may be a recurring pattern for you, but it's a recurrent pattern of inconsistent sleep timing. And the person looked at me like I had like three heads because to them, it was a very consistent schedule. But when I say consistent, I'm talking about, you know, trying to go to bed at approximately the same time every night, including on weekends. So that's the first thing. The second thing is making sure that you have a sleep environment that is conducive to sleep. So ideally a cool, dark, and quiet place.

You know, we have so many things buzzing and turning on and banging during the night and whatnot that I often find that it's helpful to use myself of those soft earbuds that go in the ear just to help drown out the noise. I was speaking with Anwar Bose before he died. And he told me that that those soft earplugs are every bit as effective as the noise-canceling headsets for just drowning out noise in the environment. And since that conversation with him, I've been using them to great effect in terms of helping me to stay asleep at night. And the other thing that people can do at home, if they want to be able to not be

awoken by lighting that may be because of windows, there may be a street light outside or there may be car lights that come in or whatever into the environment that can't be completely shielded out by drapes if you don't have blackout shades on the windows, then some eye shades that are form fitting and that block out light can also be very effective. Being on a sleep surface that is supportive enough, a bed that is supportive enough, that it doesn't cause you sort of aches and pains and back aches and things like that is also an important feature of getting a good night's rest. And then the final thing is sleep quality, paying attention to sleep quality. What do I mean by that? So if you have a sleep disorder, such as if you can't

breathe and sleep at the same time, and so you snore loudly and you have pauses and breathing when you're asleep, or if your legs are constantly thrashing about during the night, or if you suffer from chronic insomnia where you wake up spontaneously and can't get back to sleep, those are all things that can be addressed at a sleep clinic. There are effective treatments for all three of those, which are the most common sleep disorder. And even shift work disorder, if you have an irregular schedule and you have to work at night and you can bounce back between the night and the daytime. Again, there are effective treatments for this and approaches. So instead of just trying to go it alone and get by and not really take care of yourself, getting a diagnostic evaluation by a board

certified sleep specialist, I think, is a good idea. Because it is, you know, you're spending one-third of your life doing it. It is the major time of recovery. It behooves you to sort of do your best to take advantage of all that investment that you're making in that time for sleep. And Chuck, why do we actually need to sleep? That's a great question, Emily. There are many more than one functions for why we need to sleep. And the first and most obvious one is to replace the energy stores that are depleted during the daytime. The brain uses more energy than any other organ of the body by weight. So it's only two or three percent of the weight of the body, and yet it uses 20 to 25 percent of all the oxygen that we consume and all the glucose that we burn. That's because every time a neuron

fires, that uses a lot of energy and we have billions of neurons. So a very high demand source of energy is needed to keep the brain going. So, and as we deplete that, energy during the daytime, the brain begins to function more sluggishly. And it actually releases a compound called adenosine that signals that, you know, the brain is running out of fuel. It's like your gas tank getting to the E. And so it's giving you a warning. And unfortunately, instead of heating that warning, many turn to the most widely used psychoactive drug in the world, caffeine to silence that signal. It doesn't fulfill any of the need for energy of the brain. It just silences the signal so that we don't hear the alarm going off that we're running out

of fuel. And so it allows us to continue going for a little while longer because when dynesine levels build up, the brain starts to involuntarily switch off and go into sleep, which can be hazardous if you're driving a car. So the caffeine will help you keep going for a few more miles, but eventually the brain will switch off. In fact, in fatal to the driver truck crashes that are sleep related, those caffeine levels are much higher in the bloodstream of truck drivers who died under those conditions than in non-fatigue related fatal accidents where tire blows up or something like that. And why would the caffeine levels be higher? Because those people who were those truck drivers probably knew that they were exhausted, were chugging down

caffeine to try to stay awake. But even so, at some point, the drive for sleep is so great that it overcomes those drivers and they either fall asleep at the wheel or part of their brain falls asleep at the wheel and they may head toward flashing lights instead of avoiding them and get into catastrophic accidents. So, in fact, one out of five motor vehicle crashes and crash injuries are related to drowsy driving. So I think it's really important to recognize that it's dangerous to drive when you're drowsy. You have a receptive audience for that message because whoo members care a lot about sleep. That's fantastic.

Now, I want to, I want to transition here to talk about the COVID resilience project, which we are really proud to be partnering with you on. Chuck, tell us what the purpose of the COVID Resilience Project is. Well, thank you very much. I mean, we're very, very excited about the COVID Resilience Project, and we're very grateful that WOOP has been willing to partner with us on this project. What we're really beginning to recognize is that COVID-19 and its mitigation have had myriad impacts on people and have disrupted people's lives in many different ways.

But what we are meaning to investigate in the COVID resilience project is the impact of COVID-19 and its mitigation on both physical health and mental health. And we want to evaluate this by looking at it through the lens of its impact on sleep. And that's one of the reasons we're so excited about working with whoop, given that the woup strap is a validated wearable in terms of its assessment of sleep and physical activity and recovery. So we have been since April looking at subjective reports of the impact of COVID-19, it's mitigation on sleep and on other health outcomes. But using a validated wearable, we would be able to really get at an objective recording of those measures to verify whether or not the subjective reports are accurate.

So the value of the data that we would be able to gather from whoop is extraordinary. And we think that this is a very important project because of the potential that it has to influence public policy. Already in June of this year, the CDC director highlighted the results of our research in the first press advisory that he gave for three months. And he started off citing our work on the impact of the health guidance that the CDC had issued on people's behavior in terms of both physical distancing and mask wearing and other aspects to try to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

And so we're excited that these data are helping to influence both public policy and communication related to the pandemic. We're thrilled that the CDC has added a series of questions that we have included in this survey. So we would be incredibly grateful if the members of the WOOP community would be willing to participate in this study. of course, it's voluntary, and all the data that we gather will be maintained confidential. In fact, because of the racial and ethnic disparities in the way that the COVID-19 pandemic has struck Americans, we are going to be asking WOOP members to provide some information that WOOP has never collected before on their racial and ethnic background. And that is completely voluntary. Those questions can be skipped. an individual is uncomfortable providing them. But we would be grateful to those who are willing to

share that information because we're really trying to help highlight health disparities in the impact of this pandemic on both physical and mental health. Well, look, it's, I mean, super exciting for us. I'm thrilled that Woop can be a part of this. And there's a bunch of great people that have teamed up around you, Chuck, to be a part of this. Emily, talk about some of the other partners involved as well. We are so excited to be partnering with researchers from all over the world and also from right here in our backyard. So right here in Boston, we're working with Archangels. We're working with researchers from Harvard's Brigham Health and from Harvard Medical School. And then all the way in Australia, we're working with people from the Turner Institute

for Brain and Mental Health at Monash University and the Institute for Breathing and Sleep at Austin health. Yeah, and look, for people listening to this, one of our missions at Woop is to be a thought leader around performance and around research and around physiology. And so for us to be able to partner with these leading institutions with Dr. Seisler and his amazing lab, we think it's really important. Now, this is an important survey, and it's going to ask specific questions of you. What are some things that people could expect, Emily, for filling out their survey? By filling out the survey, you would be contributing to globally important research that's going to help contribute to the understanding of how different people in different

demographics, both geographically and socioeconomically, have been impacted both by the disease and by the response to the disease. The goal of the study is to tease out the appropriateness of the response that we had sort of with this eye towards this inevitable second wave and towards potentially even future pandemics that might require social distancing. You really understanding, obviously, you know, physical distancing does tremendous things in terms of limiting the spread. But it also puts a lot of challenges on people's economic challenges, challenges from loneliness, you know, challenges from, you know, losses of child care. And there's,

or for all these new demands on your time. So understanding how the response to the disease versus the disease itself has impacted different communities, both sort of globally and abroad, is really valuable. And then on top of contributing to this globally important data set, we're also going to be creating for everyone who completes the survey, a personalized COVID resilience report. So you'll be able to understand how your data compares to people like you

and how your WOOP data, for those of you who have been on WOOP since before COVID-19 started, how it's evolved throughout the pandemic. And so if you're really curious just how you've fared compared to maybe people like you and maybe people even not like you, if you complete the survey, you'll get that personalized report as well. What types of questions is the survey asking? The survey is quite comprehensive, and we thank you in advance for taking the time to complete it. We do cover everything from your kind of basic demographic information, where you are, what types of communities you might belong to. We also cover things like how your mental health has

shifted during physical distancing. So there are questions that ask about stress and anxiety. They also ask about things like how your activity levels have changed and even have you gained weight, how your employment has been impacted. And so really, it's a pretty holistic survey designed to get from a bunch of different angles, a really complete picture on how physical distancing and sort of all of the policies sort of that spun out of the pandemic, in addition to obviously the pandemic itself have impacted you. So some of the questions that we ask in this survey might seem a little bit personal. For example, we ask, you know, what types of racial and ethnic communities you belong to. And the reason why we ask these personal questions is because early data has

suggested that different racial and ethnic groups have really experienced meaningfully different things throughout this pandemic. So Chuck, I'm curious if maybe you want to touch on what kind of differences we've seen so far. We are particularly interested in learning what has changed in your life as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. How has that affected your physical health, your mental health? And we're also particularly interested in identifying at-risk populations so that we can highlight those needs in our reports and provide resources for those populations, provide guidance to politicians to provide resources for those populations. And we realize that from just the publicly available data that some racial and ethnic groups

have been disproportionately affected, both in terms of the number of infections with COVID-19, but also in terms of deaths from COVID-19. And while that is pretty well documented, no one fully understands the impact of other consequences, such as the burden of mental health and substance use and other things that will be investigating in the survey and how those fall on different ethnic and racial groups. And that's one of the reasons we're asking some of those sensitive questions, and we're hoping that you will share with us your experiences.

so that we can better characterize this and provide information at the aggregate level in our publications that really helps government officials understand the toll that this is taking on the public. If you're listening to this and you're saying yourself, okay, do I want to do this or not, just understand that this is a very rare moment in time where you're able to have all these different collaborators come together and tie it also to a very accurate piece of wearable data, which is a data set that's also completely missing in a lot of this analysis. And, you know, from my standpoint, I hope this can make a big outcome and have a big

influence on how public policy is shaped. Is that a fair hope, Dr. Seisler? Absolutely. That's our goal as well. This is a way that WOOP members could really contribute to helping to figure out a way to control this pandemic, because what we need to understand and we need to understand, and we objective data that can be provided by the whoop strap, we need to see how our resiliency, which we know is affected in so many other conditions by the amount of sleep we get. For example,

if you've gotten an insufficient amount of sleep before you get the standard flu vaccine, you only have half the antibody response. If you are deficient of sleep and you've had disruptive sleep before you are inoculated with the rhinovirus that causes about two-thirds of the cases of the common cold and is related to the coronavirus, if you've got an insufficient amount of sleep before you're inoculated with that virus, you're twice as likely to actually catch the common cold. So we're very interested to know whether those members who are with objective documentation, getting a consistent and sufficient amount of sleep, whether they're going to be less susceptible to infection with the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

And what could you imagine would be some of the types of policy decisions to come out of a study like this? The survey empowers WOOP members to have their voice heard and to have their data incorporated into the understanding of the impact of COVID-19 and all the mitigation efforts to prevent the spread of the disease. on both mental health, physical health, and public policy. One thing that I'm so excited about with this particular group of collaborators that we were able to bring together is that we're not merely trying to understand what's going

on and then publish this information, but the CDC is actually involved because they want to use this information directly to inform policy. And so it becomes this really unique opportunity for WOOP members to have their voices heard and to shape the way that these policies evolve in a time where it feels like so much is just happening to us and we're being told what to do and there are so many restrictions on what we can and can or shouldn't, shouldn't do. It's a really exciting opportunity for our members to help shape the decisions that get made and take some of that control back. Chuck and Emily, where can people find this survey if they're excited to take this and participate, how do they do so?

For all eligible WOOP members, the survey will be sent to you via email and will also be available as a pop-up in your app. If you don't see these and you believe that you are eligible for the survey, which again is everybody over 18 residing in the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, and Ireland, please reach out to membership services

by emailing support at Woop.com and we'll be sure to get you a link. Awesome. Well, look, I just want to reiterate, I'm super proud that Whoop's part of this. I know Emily's super proud that Whoop's part of this. Dr. Seisler, we're very proud to be partners with you and Mark and the whole team on this and all your other partners that you've pulled together on it. And hopefully we can give back to the scientific community and help shape public policy

because this is a virus the whole world needs to beat and be smart about. We're grateful to Whoop for collaborating with us and for providing the opportunity to WOOP members to respond to the survey questions. Well, I'm sure this won't be the last thing that we do together. Dr. Saisley, thank you so much for coming on today. And we'll have you back to talk about the findings. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to the WOOP podcast. Please take the survey. Please like and subscribe the podcast. We appreciate all feedback. You can email us at the Locker at Whoop.com. And you can find us on social at Whoop at Will Ahmed. Don't forget about that

discount code. Will Ahmed, 15% off a Whoop membership. Stay green, stay healthy.