WHOOP Podcast - Year in Review: The Data Behind 2024's Wellness Trends

Episode Date: December 11, 2024

On this week’s episode, WHOOP Founder and CEO Will Ahmed is joined by WHOOP SVP, Research Algorithms and Data, Emily Capodilupo for the 2024 Year In Review Episode. As we approach the new year, we want to take some time to look back on our top stats of the last 12 months. Will and Emily discuss the newest WHOOP feature (1:41), the top journal habits (3:35), activities (11:56), parenting activities logged (15:08), and some niche activities logged in cities around the world (16:47). Will and Emily also cover the best and worst Recovery factors of the year (21:33), which day had the top Strain, Sleep, and Recovery statistics (21:33), Recovery boosts and detractors (22:21), which city sleeps the best (35:51), what the top sleep consistency behaviors are (38:40), and a look at some of the WHOOP Athlete’s top activities (40:32).Follow WHOOPwww.whoop.comTrial WHOOP for FreeInstagramTikTokXFacebookLinkedInFollow Will AhmedInstagramXLinkedInSupport 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

Do you know which generation is the most stressed? How about which city gets the most sleep? Those are some of the questions and many more we answer right now on the Whoop podcast. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of Whoop. I'm about to be joined by Emily Capulupo, our head of research, algorithms, and data. and we are doing 2024 year in review. Now, if you're a WOOP member, you can check out your 2024 year review in the WOOP app. And if you're a new member thinking about joining WOOP, you can get 10% off now until

December 20th. That is at Woop.com. All right. We're about to dive in on 2024 year in review. All things, sleep, recovery, strain, most popular activities, most popular journal entries, what's going to improve your health and performance. That is right now. Okay, Emily, we are back for the year in review podcast. I'm excited to be here for what's kind of turning into an annual tradition. It is an annual tradition. So we're going to go through all things 24. There's

been some very interesting changes in sleep and recovery, what activities people are doing, some diet trends we're seeing. Of course, everyone's favorite in terms of what days people drink the most, which countries are doing certain things more than other countries. So we're going to get into all of that. Why don't we start with our latest feature steps? We're looking at steps for the last few months. Which gender do you think men or women? Who's doing more steps, Emily? Well, I cheated Will because my team pulled the data for this. So I do know the answer, but it actually makes a ton of sense. So when we look at men versus women, we see that the women are taking about four and a half percent more steps than the men are. And that's actually super logical because if you imagine for a second that maybe they travel similar distances because they're equally exercising and equally needing to go places, because women tend to be a little bit shorter in order to go the same distance, they're actually taking more steps. And so you and It's a height thing. It's a height thing. Yeah. And so like if you and I both go for a walk together to go get the same lunch two blocks away and then we walk back, I probably took more steps than you did because you're whatever a couple inches taller than me. And so when you compound that over the day, you get this slight difference. And so I don't know that women are covering more distance, although we don't have the data to answer that, but they are taking statistically significantly a few more steps than men. So on average, women are doing 13,900 steps a day and men are doing 13,000. 300 steps a day. And we have a member, if I'm not mistaken, who's taken over one and a half

million steps. Yeah. So we launched in early October. So it's been about nine weeks since the launch. And so if you do the math, this person who's taken about one and a half million steps, it's about 25,000 a day or, you know, somewhere between 12 and 14 miles. You know, when I look at data like that, I imagine this is somebody who just has a really active job, you know, somebody who's working, an emergency department or a caddy or a golfer that member is based in london so shout out to you one one and a half million steps all right let's take a look at the whole community broadly what were some of the leaps that we've seen in popularity for journal behaviors so i'm looking at a list here let's start in reverse order so the number sixth biggest increase was ice bath i mean that's

to me just feels like it's been super popular in culture generally. Like I feel like I hear more about ice baths than ever before. And I think that it's one of the things that there's a lot of really good research around it. And you don't need to have a ton of specialized equipment. There certainly is a lot of equipment available. But if you have a bathtub, you know, you can fill it with cold water and throw some ice in there. So it's one of the things that's more easily accessed and highly effective, reduces inflammation, boosts recovery. And I think that you get that tight feedback loop of like, you will sleep better tonight. Your recovery score will be higher. And so even though it's not super pleasant in the moment, you know, you get that positive like ROI right away. Number five leap

is compression therapy. So that's up 35% year over year. I think again, like just something that there's a ton of positive data around and more and more products coming out to support it. Number four, red light therapy, up 38%. Again, it feels like it's under that umbrella of recovery stuff. People are talking more about these things. Yeah, definitely a theme between like compression and red light, nice bath. Daylight eating up 38%. That's the number three. Yeah. Can I skip ahead to number one because I think they're wonderful. So number one was morning sunlight. And I think like what you're seeing between daylight eating and viewing morning sunlight is increased attention and appreciation for the importance of circadian health and like respecting your body's rhythm. And actually I give Kristen Holmes a ton of credit for driving this. I think this is something that she's very rightly been kind of beating the drum on being important. And again, it's one of those things where, you know, if you listen to Kristen, you give. it a try, you're going to see the benefit in like, if not one day, like two or three days of doing this. And so it's super, it's, you know, free. It's easy to try, relatively easy to adapt into your life. And so it's like, give it a try. You're going to see it's amazing. And it doesn't surprise me that it's resonating with people. And then the morning sunlight one. I mean, to me, you've touched on it,

but that's like, you know, Kristen Holmes, Andrew Schumerman effect. Like, I think that's just gotten very popular in sort of the biohacking health and fitness space to get morning sunlight. And I think it works for what it's worth. It certainly helped me when I travel, especially like getting on the right circadian rhythm. Yeah. And it's super effective. The research is really powerful. And it doesn't take a lot of sunlight to get the benefits of morning sunlight. So, you know, it's the difference between actually like opening the blinds in your hotel room and like, you know, letting the sun hit your face versus like just, you know, going right about your day and not bothering to open them. So, yeah. So number three, daylight eating. Number two, protein, which is up 80%, and number one,

morning sunlight, up 98%. What do we have to say about protein? It makes me angry to see it on that list. Protein is so overhyped. You think? I think it's super overhyped. So the like number of Americans that are protein deprived is like way less than one percent. And it's all people who are otherwise like generally malnourished. There's this really toxic trend in general of like breaking everything down into its components, right? And like just talking about like, did you get enough protein? Did you get enough whatever? And like nutrition just doesn't actually fit into these like neat little boxes. And if you look at your body, right, like you have almost unlimited capacity to store fat, right? You can just get fatter and fatter and fatter and fatter. And you have tremendous capacity

to store up to like a thousand grams of sugar, right? You can pull it into your muscles. We store it in our liver, we store sugar in our blood. And so, you know, if you have carbs, we have a place to put it. Fat, you can place put it. If you consume protein and your body isn't sort of immediately ready to use it, you break it down and your kidneys will break it down into mostly sugar. And so all these people think they're being like so fitnessy by like super overdosing and protein. But really what that protein shake turns into is sugar. And so you might as well just be like chugging 56, which would be kinder to your kidneys that work really hard to break that protein down. All of the leading nutritionists right now are saying, like, even like,

you know, athletes that think they need more protein, you do need more, but they're probably getting like two, three times what they need and be so much better off replacing that with something that has fiber because 97% of Americans are fiber deficient. And when you have like a weight protein shake, it's pure proteins. You're getting nothing else good. You know, if you think The food is a little bit of a zero-sum game, right? You get the calories from protein. You're not getting them from a sweet potato or at least that sweet potato or the avocado. It's going to like come with fiber and other things that you might be deficient in.

And so I think seeing this increased, 80% increased obsession with protein to me feels like a trend on loop that's actually against what the trend in health and good nutritional research is. And I would love to see that come back down and people reallocate. their calories are coming from. From a diet standpoint, 2024 sees a dramatic drop-off in keto diet. So in 2022, roughly 30% of people reporting the keto diet in 23, 22%. Now in 2024, we're down to 17%. I think that, like, I love seeing that because I think the keto diet is one where it has really interesting applications where it's extremely powerful. Like, it's actually been shown for epileptic. to reduce seizures. There's some super interesting research there. And it's been shown to be effective just for weight loss in obese men preparing for bariatric surgery. But there really hasn't been

as much research as you might think in sort of your typical person trying to lose 30 pounds or maintain that kind of weight loss. And I think it just got really overhyped and glad to see people going less extreme in place that's really not supported by the research yet. This is our top journal behaviors logged by generation. And it's funny how if you were to try to guess what these might be or how they might differ, how kind of on the nose it is. So boomers, that's our oldest group, they report blood pressure meds 5.5 times more than the other generations.

CPAT machine 4.3x, chemotherapy, 3.1x. Calcium supplement 2.5x. Tumric 2.1x. What's turmeric going to do for us? It's anti-inflammatory. So it's that yummy orange spice you see in a lot of Indian cooking. It's super anti-inflammatory, especially interestingly if you mix it with black pepper. It's always been really popular in like Ayurvedaic medicine, but has become popular in general.

There's this delicious beverage called a golden milk latte where it's like milk, turmeric, a little bit of honey do recommend. But really powerful anti-inflammatory and with no side effects. so so gen x are 44 to 59 year olds somewhat similar to boomers we're seeing blood pressure we're seeing CPAT machine ketogenic diet and paleo diet though that's unique to gen x so it seems like people in that kind of 40 to 60 range spending a little bit more time thinking about diet millennials number one nursing infant so that's 1.7 times more likely than the other generations we've got parenting sick child, parenting, pregnancy, and conception, all in the top five. So millennials are really focused

on kids. Yeah. I mean, this is a group that currently is in their late 20s, like very late 20s to early 40s. And so typically that's who's doing the parent. 28 to 43 year olds. Gen Z relationship status, creatine, masturbation, mouth tape, and cupping. That's the Gen Z roll up. Yeah, it's funny. By generation, I mean, it does kind of track. I think this all tracks. Yeah. Okay, let's look at the activities that have taken big jumps. So these are the activities that have increased in popularity pretty dramatically. Number five, hiking or rucking. Number four, walking. Number three, gymnastics.

Number two, field hockey. Number one, kayaking up 191 percent. When you look at this list, what do you think? You know, I think there's the increase in walking. I think we're seeing a lot of increased tracking walking as people have become a bit more focused on steps since our release in October. I don't really know what to make of the increase elsewhere. I love to see the increase in rocking though. Like weight-bearing exercise is so important. And a lot of people for whom walking is their primary form of exercise, like don't realize how easy it is to turn walking into strength training by throwing some weight in your back. One of the things that I read a while ago and have been like pushing all the like older people in my life to do is if you don't like have time to

work out or don't like to go to the gym, you know, rucking with like something like 10 to 15 percent of your body weight is so, so good for maintaining muscle mass as you age because if you aren't intentional about it, you lose about like 1% of your muscle mass per year after 30. And so you really want to intentionally counteract that. Rucking is a great way to do that. So love to see that one. No idea why kayaking is so popular, but it's a, I think, really fun, low-impact sport. So maybe there's something there. Why don't we look at just the most popular activities for a second in reverse order? So these are just what people do on WOOP most frequently. All right, we're going to start with number 10, hiking, rocking, which we just talked about, nine spinning, eight hit, seven is

golf, six is cycling, five is functional fitness, four is running, three is weightlifting, two is general activity, and number one, walking. What do we make of this top ten? Similar to previous years for the most part, so largely to be expected. Yeah, if you look at the ones that are mostly fitness related, weightlifting, functional fitness, running, cycling, those are your kind of sweet spot. Most popular sport, just to say, is golf. And then you've got your hit and your spin. If we look outside the top 10, then you start to see yoga at 11, weightlifting, and swimming. Yeah. And I think, you know, those are sports that tend to be, you know, super available to people. They're practice worldwide. A big trend for WOOP this year was increased internationalization and globalization.

And so we're going to see some increase in sports that, you know, are purely really. related to geographical differences in who's using whoop this year versus in previous years. And so it's fun to see some of those things. I know last year we talked about, I think, the number one increased sport was hurling kamoji, which I hadn't even heard of before that. You know, that's what globalization gets for you. And it's fun to see some of those things pop up. We have, you know, the huge flip cart launch in India and are seeing a lot of growth there.

And so it wouldn't surprise me if we see things like cricket in the top 10 next year. we've got some new parenting activities dedicated parenting baby wearing stroller jogging let's see baby wearing is four times more likely in katar dedicated parenting 1.7x more likely in portugal stroller jogging 2.6x more likely in india toddler wearing i like all the differentiation here uh 4.7x more likely in spain yeah i think you know it's great to see wu adding all of those things and just helping toddler parents feel more seen and understand that the physically demanding things that they're doing are very real. There's not much difference between rocking and baby wearing, except that when you're baby wearing, your weights are

wiggling and potentially screaming at you. So there's that added stress sometimes. But, you know, as a mom to a toddler that I baby wore a ton, like you really do need a lot of muscles and It's a form of strength training. And we added those, I think, on Mother's Day as a way to honor all of the work that goes into raising young humans. And in general, women are reporting a lot of these activities more frequently than men. So baby wearing, women are logging 12% more than men, dedicated parenting, 6% more than men, stroller jogging only 2% more than men.

So that looks like one that both men and women are doing almost equally. My toddler loves going for a run in the stroller. She thinks it's a roller coaster ride. So definitely a fun way for parents that are finding it tough to exercise while watching kids to just bring them along for the ride. Let's do a quick rundown on cities and activities that are outliers. So these are activities that are way more likely to happen in a certain city. Berlin reports commuting 5.8 times as much as any other city. that's pretty fascinating most people who are using commuting they're talking about bike commuting so like cycling to work and that's why they log it as an activity people who like sit on the train aren't logging it and so i think what you're seeing reflected there is the culture around biking to work boston has a remarkably high bar rate this is like a pilates type workout 2.3 times more likely than other cities Dubai number one for paddle tennis 10x other cities. I mean, that's a sign that it's growing fast there. In general, we do see a big uptick in paddle and Padel, both of which are seeing huge growth. London also has the commuting, 3.4x. Los Angeles has diving, 5.5x. New York, squash. Shout out to our squash players in New York,

2.2x more likely than other cities. Riyadh, again, Padell, super popular in the Middle East, 12.3x more likely than other cities. Sydney's got netball, 14.2x. I don't know much about netball. And Australian football, also 4.8X. Shout out to our member from Drumkin, Ireland, who had 80 unique activities logged. Yeah, it's fun.

Every so often, we'll get somebody who writes into support saying, like, you know, they've set some goal of doing every activity on Woo. It's getting harder and harder to do that because we keep adding more. But fun to see people playing with. things like that. What's up, folks, if you are enjoying this podcast or if you care about health, performance, fitness, you may really enjoy getting a whoop. That's right.

You can check out whoop at whoop.com. It measures everything around sleep, recovery, strain, and you can now sign up for free for 30 days. So you'll literally get the high performance wearable in the mail for free. You get to try it for 30 days, see whether you want to be a member. and that is just at whoop.com. Back to the guests. All right, let's look at highest and lowest recovery days for the year.

Let's start with the lowest. So number three on the lowest was December 9th, 2023. So we're doing a 12-month period, including December. That was a Saturday. So my take is people went out drinking pretty hard that Friday. Yeah. That's a big holiday party time. Yeah.

And then it's similar because number two, Two is December 2nd, which was also a Saturday. So again, maybe a Friday night holiday party theme. And then number one, which has been number one for quite some time, is January 1st. Yeah. New Year's is the killer. Yeah. I think what you're seeing is like that period between Thanksgiving and, say, mid-December,

you get a lot of holiday parties. And people are kind of like as soon as Thanksgiving hits, they're in like year-end holiday mode. You certainly can't escape the Christmas music anywhere. And so I think like you're seeing a lot of that December party and happening and then obviously peaking with New Year's. And again, like on the globalization theme, right, New Year's is I think the only holiday that's celebrated in every single country worldwide. And so. Yeah, it's interesting to see this data with a global population because, you know, obviously a lot of people in December aren't celebrating Christmas. But we're still seeing those low recoveries around the world.

Our top three highest recovery days, number three, February 5th, which was a Monday, on average, 65% recovery that day. Okay, January 15th, 2024, that was also a Monday. It's not surprising that these are Mondays because that means that you had like the two weekend days to recover. And so then you're waking up Monday morning with the benefit of whatever good things you did Saturday, Sunday. So I would absolutely expect the best days to be on a Monday.

Because overall, if you just look at, you know, all Mondays on average, those are your best recovery day. And number one, same as last year. Highest recovery day of the year is January 2nd. That's right. Worst days January 1st, the best days January 2nd. Seems like a lot of people are getting their acts together after New Year's. Right. And that's just because, you know, everybody goes out, you know, the night of the 31st for New Year's Eve.

And then, you know, the world is just totally shut down. on the first and so people get the chance to recover and that's back. I thought this was interesting. Most common best day ever. So this is defined as having a great sleep performance score, a very high recovery score, and then meeting the strain target. Best day of the year, September 2nd, 2024, close to 1% of members had their best day ever on this day. Is that Labor Day weekend? I think that was, right? Yeah, September 2nd Labor Day weekend. You got the recovery benefit of Saturday and Sunday and likely the opportunity to sleep later, given that you would have had that day off of work. So the typical Monday boost and then on top of that, it ends to be one where people spend time, you know, weekend that people spend a lot of time outside soaking in the last bits of summer.

So not that's surprising to see that. Let's look at the top overall recovery boosting and hurting behaviors. We're going to start with the behaviors that seem to have the most positive impact on your recovery. Number one, not surprisingly, is sleep, which on average is adding about 10% to people's recovery. And it could be as high as 14% when you're getting good sleep performance. So that's a big impact. I don't think we have to explain that. People probably get it.

The second one's interesting to me, caffeine. And just to show the delta here, caffeine has an on average 4% increase, and that can be as high as 7%. Why caffeine at number two? There's a tremendous amount of research that caffeine, and particularly coffee is good for you. Decaf coffee is also good for you, which is interesting. So there's benefits to coffee and benefits to caffeine. I don't know why it's boosting recovery so much. Generally, we think of caffeine as being a performance enhancing drug.

you're going to get the sort of most benefit without the negatives from caffeine if you stop about seven hours before bedtime. And so generally want to think about, you know, after lunch, you shouldn't be drinking any more caffeine, but it is a performance aid in the morning or before exercise. Number three and number four, closely related. These will give you three percent boosts, maybe as high as five percent boosts your recovery. Consistent wake time, consistent bedtime. Yeah, and those tend to go hand in hand. When you do one, you typically will do the other. So you can totally mush those together. But that's just your circadian rhythm, essentially. And our bodies work best when they're allowed to anticipate what's going to happen. And so if you're sleeping at a consistent time, the particular benefit is around bedtime and the wake time tends to just be a follow-on effect. But if you go to bed when your body's anticipating it, it means that it can start to build up melatonin, which is the sleep-promoting hormone about two hours before. And so then when you get into bed, your body's like, okay, I was ready for this. This happened when I wanted it to happen and you tend to fall asleep pretty quickly. If you try and

initiate sleep earlier than what your body, for whatever reason, is anticipating, and this can happen because of like Transmeridian travel. That's what we call jet lag. But it can also happen because, you know, you stayed up a lot later on the weekend and now it's Sunday night and you're trying to get, you know, back onto your work schedule. All of a sudden now, you're sort of saying like, okay, I'm trying to go to bed. And your body's like, oh, wow, I'm like two hours behind the melatonin production and you tend to have a much less smooth transition into sleep. And so what we see is that when you sleep at a consistent time, you fall asleep faster and your body was hormonally prepared for sleep. And so it's just a lot more efficient. And you tend to get into the deeper

stages of sleep faster. You wake up less. You like sleep deeper, sleep better. Okay. Some other positives daylight eating. We've talked about that. Reading in bed. That's not that surprising. No, I mean. Kind of a wind down. A relaxing. Yeah, it's like allowing your body to understand, it's these cues that, hey, bedtime's coming and staring at your phone and geeking out over slack. Melatonin's on this list. Yeah, and it's actually, it's the cheat code to not having a consistent bedtime, right? Because the whole idea is allowing your body to naturally produce melatonin. But you can take it, you know, in pill form and sort of fake those hormone levels.

I will say I think that the key with melatonin is not taking it every night. That's my own personal opinion, but, you know, finding a moment when your mind's active and you need to fall asleep quickly or if you're trying to get on the right time zone, that's when I think it's most effective. I think it's a little less effective if it becomes your daily crutch. Yeah, I think it's a hugely powerful drug and generally considered quite safe for things like adapting to jet lag. And if you find that you need it every day, that could be assigned to you that there's some reason why, like, in your normal day-to-day life, you're not winding down naturally. And so that could be a really erratic schedule, but it could also just be that you're like too stressed. So too much screen time, too much stimulation in the evening, exercise and close to bedtime, eating close to bedtime. And so if you're using it to counteract what's like otherwise bad circadian behavior, it's less effective. Okay. Shared bed, hydration, and blue light blocking glasses are our final three in the top 10. I mean, shared bed, to me, that's your, you know, serotonin production from being next to a loved one or, you know, someone you're, you're intimate with.

There's also plenty of evidence to show that sex improves your sleeve. hydration. I think that's pretty self-explanatory. The more hydrated you are, the better. The only catch there is if you drink too much water close to bed, you might have to wake up in the middle of night to go to the bathroom. And then blue light blocking glasses, for me, this has been one of the biggest unlocks, especially if you're someone who looks at your phone all the way into the evening. You know, wearing these glasses essentially cuts off that blue light and tells your mind that it's time to go to bed. You'll find that you get naturally sleepier from wearing them. I think it's one of the easiest things you can actually do.

And Whoop now makes blue light blocking glasses. So shout out to our accessories team for developing some great glasses. Let's do the top 10 recovery harming behaviors. And this is always like, I think, amazing just to look at the numbers. But number one is alcohol, which on average has a 12% negative effect can be as high as 17% on average. And just to put that in perspective, the most popular. positive thing you can possibly do has a 10% benefit. And that's just great sleep. The most negative thing, alcohol, negative 12%. The next worst thing on this list is having a fever, which is a negative

5%. So alcohol, negative 12%, being sick, negative 5%. It's a pretty unbelievable negative impact on your body. Yeah. And I think there's a little caveat here in that, you know, this is like drinking in any amount versus like fever to any degree so like obviously like really bad fevers will far outperform that statistic but yeah i mean drinking we talk about this on the podcast a lot it's terrible for you terrible for recovery it's voluntarily poisoning yourself so not surprising to see this okay we talked about the fevers sleep at altitude is number three i'll tell you what for me that actually is hugely damaging. Like my recovery gets crushed when I'm at altitude. Yeah. And that's just the, there's less oxygen available to you. And so you have to actually like work harder. You see your

respiratory rate goes up, your heart rate goes up. And that's just to bring in the same amount of oxygen. And so your body at rest is working so much harder. And that extra effort just to bring oxygen in becomes like effort that's unavailable to all the other things your body's use. to having the ability to do. And so it's a recovery killer until you adapt, which can take depending on how much altitude a few days. High stress zone coming in at number four in terms of negatively impacting recovery. I think that probably speaks to either being very stressed or also having worked out really hard.

Yeah. And your body needs to recover. That's not necessarily bad, but it is just a flag that that will affect your recovery the next day. sick number five that's self-explanatory number six night shift this list is very consistent with the boosting list right night shift is the opposite of consistent bedtime and wake time number seven late meal the opposite of daylight eating yeah late meal for me is i think number two on my list yeah it's alcohol and then late meal yeah and like late meal can mean a lot of things right It could mean that your day was really intense and stressful.

So, like, why was it that you didn't get to eat until 10 o'clock at night? So there's a lot of things that go with that. But it's also that, you know, you're spiking your blood sugar at night and giving your body this chore to digest and handle all the, you know, the blood sugar spike and all of that when it's trying to wind down. And so sort of like a competing pressure. Air travel, number eight. I think that's also kind of a proxy for circadian rhythm or time zone management, sleep conditions. consistency. Those are all things that get disrupted by air. And then on top of that, like the air on planes is dehydrating. So you get that bundled in there. Marijuana, number nine, negative, on average, negative 2%. You know, I've heard people say, oh, marijuana helps me sleep. What do you say to that, Emily? It does help you fall asleep. But when you look at the sleep data, and we've done this on loop, it's crappy sleep. You don't get REM sleep when you're high. And so you typically will see, you've get low wake events and so it looks like you're sleeping but you don't wake up restored in the same way

and so hence the bad recovery hence the bad recovery yeah and then late workout coming in at number 10 I think that that's pretty self-explanatory probably also ties to high stress zone if you've got an elevated heart rate going into sleep that's going to affect you all right we're going to look at stress now what is the most stressed generation It is Gen Z, our youngsters, only 30% of the time in the low stress zone. I mean, I will say that matches with what we're hearing in general pop culture about, you know, this young generation being as stressed as any generation before it. It's fascinating because I think sometimes you listen to the news and you're like, yeah, yeah. But it's definitely manifesting in our data.

So look out for the disease in your life. They're having a tough time. And objectively, they have the least responsibility. So it's sort of an interesting question of stress management, I think, as well. I don't think they have, you know, the skills for that. Yeah. I think we've failed a lot of them in that regard. But I also think that, and you could argue that maybe millennials are in the same boat,

but, you know, they're going to be hit harder by things like inflation because they're making less money. They've got less saved. And so I think they're stress. And then I think some of the stress, not all of it's bad, right? They're also just active because they're young. Sure. And so some of the increased what looks like. mixed activity, too.

Our least stress generation is Gen X. So that's your 44 to 60 year olds, 40% of the time in the low stress zone. Yeah, and that's just consistent with that age group in general, right? Like, you know, you own your house. Your kids are older, if not, you know, launched in a good spot career-wise, typically. Are most stressed countries? Number three, Czech Republic. Number two, Indonesia and number one, India.

Definitely an interesting trend to watch. The least stress countries based on percent of time in low stress zone. Number three, U.S., number two, South Africa, number one, Brazil. Shout it to the Brazilians. Good food. Sunlight. Yeah. Let's look at alcohol.

Everyone enjoys this part. The countries that drank the most alcohol this year. Ooh, number six, changed. Ireland, 17%. I feel like they used to be at the top of the list. Number five, Germany, 20%. Number four, Australia, 21%. Number three, UK, 23%, number two, Canada, 23%.

And number one, reporting alcohol, 26% of days, is the United States of America. Yeah, that's not the one to be proud of topping, but... That feels like election year. What do you think? I mean, I'm trying to think what's the biggest difference between 24 and 23? Because we weren't, the U.S. wasn't top five. Yeah, no. I don't know.

I hope that's not an election year. year. It feels like election year. Yeah. If it recovers next year. Okay, within the U.S., here are the cities that drank the most. Again, these percentages are the rate at which people say yes to drinking. Number five, Cincinnati at 31%. Number four, Charlotte, North Carolina. Number three, Atlanta. Number two, Denver, Colorado. That's not going to go super well with the altitude. And number one, by the way, this supports my theory. Washington, D.C., 33% of the time. reporting alcohol consumption. I think we have to, I think we have to flag there's an election factor here. Yeah, I like your theory. Well, uh. Okay, men or women who drank more. That's the

trivia question for our audience. Going once, going twice. Okay. It's the men. It's the men. Men drank 23% of the time, women, 21%. It's interesting to see, like, I feel like you hear a lot about people drinking less, and we're not super seeing that in the data. This is about the average rate of drinking that we've seen over the past couple years. Yeah, that's a good point. Like, we haven't, we haven't seen a material decline across the whole population for drinking. I will say that there's a general decline on an individual basis from being on whoop, which makes you drink less. But at a population level, yeah, I wouldn't say we see people. and sort of quitting alcohol left and right.

All right, let's do some sleep rankings. This is always fun. All right, let's do the best sleeping cities. Number three, Munich, Germany, just over seven hours a night. Shout out to our Germans. Number two, Stockholm, Sweden, just edging out Germany by a minute. And number one, Bristol, UK, seven hours and six minutes a night. Shout out to the Brits.

Okay, least sleep rank. There's a theme here. If we take the top six cities, they are coming from three countries all in the same region. Number six, Dubai, number five, Riyadh, number four, Abu Dhabi, number three, Jedda, number two, Doha, and number one, Sharjah. Our friends in the GCC might need a little bit more sleep. It's interesting to see, though, if you look at the difference between, like, Dubai, which gets the absolute least and the Bristol, UK, that's getting the most. It's only about a half hour difference. Yeah, it's a pretty tight bound.

It's like six and a half to a little over seven hours of sleep from the lowest city to the biggest city. I thought this was pretty interesting, Emily. So this is looking at sleep by generation. And it goes directly in order of age. Your group that's sleeping the most is Gen Z, followed by millennials, followed by Gen X, and followed by Boomers. Yeah, and that's not surprising at all. all because your physiological need for sleep declines as you get older. And so if you actually look at the way Woop is coaching and the sleep need function, we're also telling you that you need less

sleep. So if everybody was doing exactly what Woop recommended, we would see this trend. So again, this is, you know, it's a difference of 17 minutes from your average boomer getting released sleep to the average Gen Z getting the most, but super consistent with what the literature says happens to your need for sleep as you get older. Funny enough, then in terms of bedtime, it actually is the flip. So the people who are getting the least amount of sleep are going to bed the earliest. So the boomers are going to bed on average at 1048 p.m. Then Gen X, then millennials. And our Gen Z, who's getting the most sleep, is actually going to bed the latest at 1221 a.m. Also very consistent with what you would expect. That, like,

tendency to be a night owl turns into the tendency to be like the morning lark as you get older, right, your preference, they call it like a circadian preference for what time you go to bed moves earlier. And then the other thing that happens is boomers are going to sleep less efficiently. So they're getting a little bit less sleep, but they might not be spending meaningfully less time in bed to get that sleep. They're much more likely to wake up in the middle of the night to go pee. They're much more likely to sort of deal with insomnia. And so they might have to go to bed a lot earlier in order to kind of wake up at the same time. I've got one interesting section here just to hit quickly. These are some of the behaviors that we saw most dramatically improve sleep consistency.

People always ask how they can improve their sleep. Number one was dim lights after sunset. Number two, blue light blocking glasses, three sound machine, four read and bed, five weighted blankets, six daylight evening, seven melatonin, and eight morning sunlight. Those are all things that are going to improve sleep consistency. Again, the top ones being dim lights and blue. And blue, light blocking glasses. Interestingly, they both have a lot to do with light, right? And then in terms of improving overall sleep duration or sleep anxiety, we saw dim lights after sunset, daylight eating, weighted blanket, melatonin in order, those being the most successful. A lot of that data came from the sleep and stress study that we did over the summer. And just really interesting to see

things like, you know, sleep anxiety, having a causal relationship with blood pressure. And we've published now, I think, half a dozen different studies on sleep consistency and how it's an even more powerful, a stronger predictor of things like mental health disruptions than even things like sleep duration. And so it's one of the most important metrics. And what this bubbles up to is this importance of circadian health and a strong and robust circadian rhythm. And the more you are making behavioral decisions, especially in the evening, say from, you know, five o'clock to bedtime that are, you know, promoting sleep, you get just tons and tons of benefits. And you get this really great positive reinforcement loop where, you know, you do it for a couple

days. You're going to feel a lot better. And then we see people like building on that momentum and maintaining positive behavior change. Okay. Let's do a little athlete trivia here. This is looking at whoop athletes are phenomenal. of superstars. And I'm going to read a little description here and then we're going to let our audience try to guess who these people may be. So up first you have an athlete that's ensuring their body's always ready to perform. They logged sauna 222 times, ice bath 31 times. They're in the top 12% of all members when it comes to sleep, 90% sleep performance for the year. Who is this superstar? Hint, football.

Waller. Second hit, Red Jersey. Virgil Van Dyke, the centerback star from Liverpool. Where to go, Virgil? Those are good data points. Okay, our next athlete had a phenomenal year, finished world number one. They were in the top. 0.07%. That's pretty good. For logging tennis. Okay, there's a big hint.

Total of 411 times. This person logged tennis more than once a day. it is none other than Arena Sabalanka. This is a bit harder. Our next athlete is a retired professional athlete, and you know who this person is. They logged golf 97 times, weightlifting 86 times,

sunlight morning 11% of the time, morning sunlight 11% of the time. Who could this be? I'll give you another hint. It's interesting that I didn't list swimming. It's Michael Phelps, working on his golf game. I've seen Michael swing. It's actually quite good.

Up next we have someone who takes the recovery about as seriously as anyone I've ever met in my life. Sona 354 times. Ice bath 355 times. So they're literally doing sauna and ice bath every day. Logged increased relaxation breathwork 70 times. They've logged weightlifting 105 times, paddle 18 times. Who could this be, Emily?

None other than Cristiano Ronaldo. Ronaldo. We didn't even list football there. Our next athlete is in the top 0.6% for HRV and the top 0.2% for RHR. They hit an average strain of 18.3 during the months of June and July. What was happening during June and July? this is matthew van derpool best cyclist in the world good strain matthew wow and our final athlete performs at their peak in the biggest moments and in the biggest game that's a big hint

they had a 20.6 strain on february 11th this year what was february 11th emily the super ball it was the super ball patrick mahomes you stud that concludes our athlete roundup one One of the things that I think is so fun to appreciate with athlete ambassadors on loop is just how seriously they take recovery. They're spending six plus hours a day on recovery activities, and that's how you get to be that good. And that's not including the sleep that they're doing. Yeah, which they also tend to be total outliers out and just take really seriously. Well, 2024 in the rear view, Emily, as always, pleasure going through this with you all. And then if you're listening to this and you want to learn more about some of these findings,

we're publishing all of it on whoop.com. So check that out. Happy new year, everybody. Happy New Year. Thank you. Thanks, Emily. Big thank you to Emily for helping me break down all the trends of 2024. A reminder for you, WOOP, members. Go check out your 2024 year-in review in the WOOP app. If you want to join WOOP, you get 10% off until December 20th. That's at Woop.com. You can check us out on social at Whoop, at Will Ahmed.

And that's a wrap, folks. Wishing you an amazing holiday season and a happy new year. We'll catch you next week on the Whoop podcast. Stay healthy and stay in the green.