WHOOP Podcast - Year In Review: The Top Trends, Behaviors, and Activities from 2022

Episode Date: December 14, 2022

On this week’s episode, Emily Capodilupo SVP of Data Science and Research at WHOOP joins the show to take a deep dive into the year that was 2022. Will and Emily will unpack 2022’s top trends, behaviors, and activities across the WHOOP Community. They’ll discuss sleep trends throughout the WHOOP community (2:05), the cities that slept the most and the least (8:10), nap statistics within the WHOOP community (9:50), the recovery trends from 2022 (10:45), the top positive and negative behaviors affecting recovery (15:35), joining the 1% Club (28:25), how supplements impact your recovery (30:07), the top mental health behaviors and diets related to recovery (31:12), circadian health and sleep behaviors (32:45), strain and activity trends throughout the year (35:58), the WHOOP Geographical Superlatives (41:20), and the top journal behaviors recorded during 2022 (45:40).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, where we are recapping 2022. That's right, year in review via WOOP data. As a reminder, I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of Woop, and we're on a mission to unlock human performance. Today, I am joined by Emily Capital Lupo, SVP of Data Science and Research here at Woop, because she is going to be the best to help me, unpack the top trends and data from 2022. That's right. It is time for the 2022 year in review. Emily and I discuss the top trends in the Whoop community around sleep, recovery, and strain, the behaviors that had the biggest impact on sleep recovery and strain, top activities logged by the Whoop community in 2022, geographical superlatives, cities who sleep,

the most, hydrate the most, drink the most alcohol, have the most sex and more. The journal behaviors that have increased and decreased throughout 2022, and we even hit lowest recovery of the year, highest recovery of the year, and some other fun stats. A reminder, if you want to see your own year-in-review data and how you stacked up to the rest of the WOOP community, go to the coaching tab in the WOOP app. You will find your year-in-the-review in the Woop app. You can also take advantage of our best offer of the year, 20% off WOOP memberships. That's right.

Available now through December 18th. It's the season of giving. So what better gift to give than the gift of good health to yourself and others? So that's at Woop.com. If you have a question you want to see answered on the podcast, email us, podcast at Woop.com. Call us 508-443-4952. And without further ado, here is Emily Capital Lupo and myself. Okay, Emily, welcome back to the WOOP podcast.

And I am excited to recap 2022. Thanks, Will. Excited to be here. So the first area we're going to hit is sleep. And if I'm looking at this data correctly, sleep really peaked at the start of the year. So if you look at our whole member base, Woop members were getting their most sleep starting in January. And then it actually hits its lowest average in June when many WOOP members probably experience longer days, more sunlight. What are you seeing in just the general sleep trends for our members?

Yeah, the sleep trends make complete sense. So if you look at what's going on in January, I think you get this dual effect of New Year's resolutions. I'm going to get my stuff together, you know, fix my sleep habits. And we see that increase in addition to the fact that it's cold, you know, for most of the world. It's, you know, you have fewer hours of sunlight. And, you know, people get kind of that winter coziness. I'm just going to snuggle in and go to bed type effect. So the sort of combination of New Year's resolutions with less sunlight, less good weather,

I think has a lot of people, especially in places like Boston, where we are optimizing for sleep. And then you see exactly the opposite in June, right? You know, New Year's resolutions have long since worn off. The weather is finally really exciting and warm, and there's all those great outdoor sports to do. you also have people doing, you know, a good amount of travel, a good amount of, you know, different things and, you know, all of that adds up to meaningfully less sleep. The weekly data is interesting, too, where we see that Sunday is the top day of the week for sleep performance. Yeah. And this is where the word performance and like for people who aren't Woot members, our sleep performance score is how much sleep you got divided by how much sleep you needed. And so it's accounting for things like, like if you had any sleep debt.

So actual amount of sleep that people are getting on Saturday and Sunday are somewhat similar, but by Sunday you have less sleep debt going into that night. So you tend to have that like slightly higher sleep performance score. And so we see that you have the benefit of being, you know, the second day of the weekend for most people who are working Monday to Friday and off Saturday, Sunday, that big benefit. And, you know, I think that largely this is the effect of something called social, jet lag where we get less sleep Monday to Friday and then we do this big sleep compensation thing

over the weekend where we typically go to bed later but then also sleep much later and so our sleep schedules over the weekend and that's the jet lag part of this they're shifted but they're also just meaningfully different than our sleep schedules Monday to Friday and we published a paper about this about two years ago as part of the COVID resilience project and we were looking at the effect of social jet lag and you know if you can avoid this and keep your sleep consistent throughout the week. You do benefit from it, but it's much easier said than done. And the vast majority of people, and that's why we're seeing it pop out, you know, at these like aggregate trends across the member base are getting not enough sleep during the

week and then making up for that on the weekend. And so are the most caught up on Sundays. And just, I guess, another who hoop clarification for those who aren't familiar. When we talk about sleep on Sundays, we're talking about Saturday night's sleep into Sunday, not Sunday night. Great point. Okay, doubling down on sleep performance for a second. So we really divide up the world of sleep performance. And for what members, you'll think of this in terms of the sleep coach, in terms of peaking. So that means you got 100% of your sleep need, performing 85%, getting by 70% and then not enough to go as under 70% of your sleep need. So it's interesting looking at the percentage of the year in each category. And I see that, average, 16.5% of folks were in peaking, 25% in performing, 30% in getting by, and 28% in not enough. How do you feel about that general distribution? Yeah. If you look at data from the National Sleep Foundation, we are doing better than average. Okay. So what members are doing better than average? That's good. Yeah. And I think, you know, the really impressive number there is that 16

and a half percent of sleeps on loop are perfect sleep scores. Because in order to get that peaking, you have to get 100 percent. It's not close to 100 percent. It's 100 percent. And then another, you know, quarter of all nights on sleep are in that performance at 85 to just under 100 percent range. So most people, most of the time, are getting good sleep. And that's really, really good because everything, every element of our health and well-being begins and with sleep. It's the most important thing you can be doing. This is a wild stat, which I love. Members average longest night of sleep. So if we took every member and then we took their longest night of the year, how much sleep do you think that was? 10 hours and 23 minutes. So members like to get that

binge in at least once a year. And, you know, I think that that's to be expected, right? Because that That number is higher than I was expecting. That's a pretty high number. I mean, I feel like I know people who have never spent 10 hours in bed. So it's interesting that maybe everyone has had that one time. That's funny. So I would have guessed something maybe even higher because you're talking about everybody's outlier sleep. Like there are one out of 365 that was just absurd, right?

Well, averages of outliers are funny, but yes, still. Yeah. And, you know, of course, like you said, this is an inherently silly stat. But, you know, it's pretty normal, like, if you get sick at some point in the year to just have that day that you kind of don't even really get out of bed. And so I think, you know, we are picking up on truly outlier, funky behavior. And I imagine that it's not even higher because there probably are quite a lot of people who never got sick, never got completely wasted, never got super jet lagged. Because, you know, this is not normal behavior by any means. Like, nobody's averaging up there.

Okay, here's a fun one. So this is looking at sleep by geography. Let's start with cities that slept the most in 2022. We'll work in reverse order here. Amsterdam, coming in at number six, Greenville, Denver, Knoxville, number two, Portland, and number one, Minneapolis. What's the takeaway from this list? You know, I'm not really sure what these cities have in common.

Yeah, I was trying to pay that out too. I couldn't figure it out. I haven't been to half of them, so... The cities that slept the least, I feel like we can draw more conclusion from. Yeah, well, that list surprised me a lot less. I mean, you have Las Vegas up there. Yeah. So in six, San Antonio, five, Las Vegas, four, San Jose, three, Miami, not that surprising.

Two, Abu Dhabi, and number one, Dubai. So our friends in the UAE maybe need to improve their sleep a little. bit. Honorable mention, shout out Brooklyn number seven. Yeah, and it was funny that New York City only got that honorable mention because their reputation is the city that never sleeps. But definitely seeing Vegas, seeing Miami, you know, seeing these like vacation destinations where people are going to do not to sleep. Didn't surprise me at all. And maybe that's, although Amsterdam was sort of interesting on the other list, but maybe that's what, you know, the big difference between in these lists if, you know, Minneapolis, Portland, Knoxville aren't vacation destinations you're

seeing. I was surprised that we didn't see New York, New York on low sleep. Okay, well, that's the rundown on sleep. One other one sleep component are naps. This would have been another great statistic to have almost like polled people. But what percentage of Woot members do you think took a nap, and the answer is 96.8% of our members took a nap this year, average nap lasting 101 minutes, which by the way, that's a nice nap. That's probably two and a half hours, two hours in bed. Yeah, definitely could be. And again, you know, these stats are funny because it's like in order to qualify in that number, you have to have done it once in the whole year. So it definitely doesn't mean that that many people are sort of nappers. And kind of like that really long sleep

stat, I wonder how much of that was, you know, when you got sick or when you were traveling or something that really threw you off as opposed to sort of people who are regular numbers. Okay. We're rolling into the second theme, which is recovery. So Woop members spent more of 2022 actually in the green than 2021. So that's exciting and maybe also a little bit, I don't know, dare I say unexpected, given that 2021, folks were maybe more at home, 2022, we start to get into this idea of the post-pandemic. But when we look at some of the mental health behaviors that people were logging, feeling purpose, feeling control, those were new things added to the journal. And we saw people really taking control, it seems like, of their mental health more in

2022 than prior years. Yeah, and all the research we've ever done on mental health definitely suggest that, you know, that's a recovery killer. So, you know, I think that if you look at 2021, it was a more stressful year. We were, you know, more in the pandemic than we have been this year, not that it's over, but it's more over. And I think that what we're seeing is recovery, right? Like global recovery and it's showing up an individual recovery scores. And then I also think, you know, a lot of things that are healthy kind of came back this year as compared to last year, more socializing, more vacationing. Maybe a sense of control.

I mean, back to this mental health theme, you know, in some ways, COVID was interesting in that we saw people actually spending more time sleeping because they didn't necessarily have commutes as often, right? It's a lockdown stuff, more work from home. But also it was a period of time where people were under enormous stress. So I think you summarized this well. Average overall recovery score, 60%. Pretty interesting.

If we look at the distribution of what people were looking at for recovery, on average, we had 12.7% of folks in the red on a daily basis, 43.6% yellow, and 43.7% green. So actually, you know, on the balance, you members are spending the most of your time in the green, or if you were to guess, that would be the most likely. Yeah, marginally more, pretty similar between the yellows and greens. I think one thing that's always important to keep in mind is that that balance is actually a good thing. It's not really the goal to be green every single day. You know, when we were talking about sleep earlier, like, it is better to be fully rested every single morning. But it's not necessarily better to be fully recovered every day because part of the way that we, you know, elicit a improvement in our body is the way that we get stronger and more resilient is by challenging ourselves. And so you want to make sure that, like, if you have a tough workout, it's like actually a good sign.

to be yellow the next day. It sort of means that that workout created a physiological stressor on your body. And then what you want to see is if you rest on that day, that you're sort of green the next day. And so not being green is only a bad thing if you can't get there. But if you did something on purpose to make yourself yellow or red and your body responds that way, that's a totally healthy and actually important response. So, you know, to me it's like a very good thing to see this nice mix. This isn't like, oh, wow, we need to, you know, help people never be red or never be yellow. The lowest recovery score day. So folks listening to us, what day of the year do you think had the lowest recovery score, take the whole population, take an average, what's the hardest day

for recovery? Boom. It is January 1st, 2022. So we start with the absolute low of the year. And actually, this is the same as 2021, Emily. Yeah. And I think nobody should be surprised by that, Right. New Year's is one of the most universally celebrated holidays globally, every culture, race, religion, whatever. We see a huge spike in alcohol consumption. Huge spike in alcohol consumption. Huge spike in staying up late to, you know, watch the ball drop or whatever you do. And so if you're at a party, drinking, not sleeping, you know, it's almost surprising that it's this high, you know, with an average recovery score of just under 50%. All right. Looking at recovery by the days of the week. So Monday has the highest average average average. recovery score at 64% on average. That seems to make sense consistent with what we talked about with sleep. It seems like people getting more sleep on Sunday nights. Maybe they want to be more prepped for the week. Does that make sense to you? Yeah. I mean, you're getting all of the benefit of having caught up on sleep over the weekend. A lot of people have opportunities to do

things that they enjoy, which is really good for recovery to de-stress. So if you just spent like two days with friends, with family, you know, less pressure, less stressed. That's going to show up. Again, when we're talking about Monday morning's recovery, it's following if you're sleep Sunday night. So it's, that's really manifesting like all the good that happened over the weekend. And so I think that makes complete sense. Okay. We're looking at now top positive and top negative behaviors. So what are the things that folks reported in their Woop Journal that gave them positive effects on recovery or negative effects. Let's start with the positive.

And coming in at number five and number four, we have feeling control and feeling purpose. So these are two of the newer mental health categories that we've added to the journal. And not that surprisingly, when people feel control, feel purpose, that also correlates with a higher recovery. Coming in at three, shared bet.

I might be mistaken, Emily, but I think this is one of those ones. that actually varies quite widely. Like some people, this is a very personalized one, whereas in general we can say things like alcohol is almost always bad, hydration is almost always good. It's not to say that shared bed is always good, but on the average, it appears this is very positive.

Yeah, and the reason why there's sort of mixed results here is because, like, well, what's happening when you're sharing a bed? For the people who get these big benefits, it's that feeling of safety, that feeling of, like, being in your place probably at home, right? There's also a couple of things that it often excludes, right? You're probably not traveling for work, you know, which is all the stress of travel, all the stress of like being out of your environment, all that kind of stuff. New bed, new environment.

All that's bad for sleep. So kind of that, yeah, benefit of being with your person in your space, not traveling. All of those things are very conducive to good sleep, you know, to good mental well-being, low anxiety, low stress, going to manifest in great recovery. The people who really lose here are, you know, the people whose partners are snoring. The people who are irregular bedsharer. So maybe it's like, you know, you're not with your partner. You're with someone you met today. So you're not in your element. And so what we see is called a bimodal distribution, right? You see this like kind of cluster of people who get these big benefits, these cluster of people who it actually seems to

hurt. What we're reporting on here is that overall, when you aggregate all of that together, it is net positive because most of the people are benefiting the ways we just described, but definitely more of a mixed result. And that's why the journal feature is so powerful. Because while we're talking today only about aggregated data, the whole population globally, all ages, genders, situations, sort of why you're sharing a bed, right? All mushed together. when you look at your own journal data, it's saying, okay, Will, you know, this is for you and how your body responds to this stuff. And so even for things like alcohol, which I can, you know, pretty confidently say is, you know, net bad for recovery, there are a lot of people

who are more sensitive or less sensitive or somewhere in between. And so using the journal feature to understand how do these things show up for you, how sensitive are you to these things. And therefore, how much should you work on adding or subtracting them from your life, you know, is going to be so much more powerful and more. insightful than this kind of just fun report of what happens globally. That makes sense. It would be interesting to split that analysis on shared bed by marital status. That might single in on positive versus negative. Okay. Coming in at number two, not that surprising, universally good. I'm a big believer. Hydration. Kind of goes like would have been surprised if that wasn't on the list.

Now, number one, I actually am surprised by. So coming in at number one is caffeine. Caffeine correlating the most positively of all whoop journal inputs for recovery. Why is this? Caffeine gets a bad rap because caffeine close to bedtime disrupt sleep. Correct. But caffeine has actually been repeatedly shown to be good for you. And actually specifically, caffeine from coffee has been shown to be good for you.

There's a lot of research that still needs to be done, but caffeinated coffee consumption has been associated with, you know, decreased risks of colon cancer, positively correlated with things like blood pressure. Positively correlated muscle growth. Muscle growth, yeah. You know, I think that it's one of those sort of drugs, and it is a drug that is, can definitely be abused, can definitely be used incorrectly. I don't recommend caffeine within seven hours of bedtime because it has a long half-life. It stays in your system for quite a while. But if you take caffeine in the morning, if you're using it intelligently, like, as a pre-workout, you really do see meaningfully improved workout performance, meaningfully improved cognitive performance,

and then these sort of long-term, really interesting health outcomes, like decreased rates of pollen cancer. And so there's a lot of research still to be done. I think some people, a lot of people are going to be surprised to see that up there because it does get this sort of bad rap as the sleep disruptor. but it doesn't disrupt your sleep if you're drinking it, you know, in the morning. And it does have all these other benefits. So definitely something that's worth playing around with. Now, it could be that the people who are recording caffeine are also people who don't do it every single day.

And so it actually creates more of an A-B test for those individuals, which is why we see such a boost. All right, let's talk about negative behaviors. Ranking fifth in negative is marijuana. I mean, I've gotten a lot of messages from people asking. asking about marijuana. And I think one obvious footnote here is I would think the way that you ingest marijuana, smoking it versus an edible versus various other forms of drops and whatnot. I imagine there's a spectrum there of maybe good versus bad. Yeah. Well, smoking anything is bad for you, right? You're going to get all this junk in your lungs and now you have to go and

deal with that. Your body is to do with that. Yeah. And so you're going to see if you're smoking anything, including marijuana, that you're going to have an elevated respiratory rate because your lungs are going to be less effective, a higher heart rate, and all of the signs of clearing out those toxins, smoking is terrible for you. And until somewhat recently, you know, marijuana and smoking marijuana weren't separable. But now, like you mentioned, you know, there's all these. Yeah, there's quite an industry now. There's even drinks that have THC now that I know some people take before bed. Yeah. And it's somewhat complicated product, right? Because, you know, marijuana, has THD, it has CBD, different strains, wherever you're getting it from, has different mixes

of those two things. And a lot of the stuff that you can get now is, you know, extremely powerful and, you know, been selected for that. So, you know, I think it's not only going to vary from person to person, but it's going to vary a ton based on how you are consuming this. In general, you know, CBD, one of the two active components of marijuana is an anti-inflammatory. It helps you relax. it helps you sleep. You know, THC is the part that makes you high. What we tend to see with marijuana and specifically with CBD is that it helps reduce sleep onset latency, so the time that it takes you to fall asleep.

And then it actually helps you stay asleep, but it reduces REM sleep. And so you get this kind of funky mix of things where it does help you sleep. That's a fact. And a lot of people can become almost dependent on it to sleep, but you don't get as much restorative sleep. So it's a lower quality sleep that you're getting. So you are a little bit making that trade off. And so it doesn't surprise me to see it coming up on this negative list because I think a lot of people trick themselves into thinking that I get this amazing sleep because I fall asleep quickly and I don't wake up. And that's sort of the piece that we're very consciously aware of. But then

they don't understand why they maybe don't feel super refreshed the next day. And by the way, the same is true of many like hardcore sleep drugs, right? Like Ambien products like that knock you out, but if you look at the quality of the sleep, REM, slow wave, you're not actually getting a great level of quality. Yeah, a lot of those sedatives, I think, kind of almost trick people into thinking that they're getting good sleep because they don't wake up. And when you're having trouble sleeping, it's so frustrating and you feel so crappy that I totally understand why people turn to all these things. But you're not getting like normal, healthy sleep on the other side of these.

Okay. Coming in and forth for negatively affecting your recovery is the late meal. This is, I think, a really good public service announcement. Late meals are bad for your recovery. Emily, tell us why. It's pretty simple. Like, when we're trying to sleep, our bodies want to put, like, all of our attention behind sleeping.

And when we need to digest food, that's an activating process. us. And so we start to divert these resources towards processing this food. And it's just totally counterproductive to sleep. It also disrupts our circadian rhythm. You know, we think a lot about our circadian rhythms as being our sleep wake cycle, but it's all of our physiological cycles. And so when we say like, oh, it's dinner time, we're telling our body that it's earlier than it is. And so it, you know, does things like suppress melatonin production make it harder to then wind down and fall asleep. And so it's just like, you're basically sending your body mixed messages when you eat late. The one caveat here is that going to sleep very hungry is also not

good for sleep. And so there are cases where it actually will be very beneficial to eat late. So if you, for whatever reason, life got in the way, travel, whatever, are super duper hungry, having a high calorie snack before bed will help you sleep. But I think what's really kind of bad about late eating is when you're just sort of eating dinner at 10 o'clock and then going to bed as a regular habit. And I would avoid that if you can. But don't get so strict about this that you're going to bed super hungry because that's not great for sleep either. Number three for negative is sick. I don't know if there's a ton to really reflect on there. But I guess what's interesting is sick is not number one, right? So sick is the third worst thing. So these two

behaviors are worse than being sick on your recovery. Number two, sleep at altitude. I can just tell you from my own whoop data. That is actually number one for me. When I'm at altitude, I have no hope. Like when I go from being in Boston to, I don't know, aspirin or something, the first two nights, three nights, there's nothing I can do to have a green recovery. It is what it is. The importance of oxygen And our bodies are incredible. Like you said, you know, it's one or two nights, and then we do pretty quickly bounce back and adjust to that and then we're fine. But that is a brutal adjustment.

And people get really sick. I mean, a lot of older people won't go to altitude and, you know, they find that they're throwing up and nauseous and all that stuff. Altitude sickness is no joke. Now, to put number one in perspective versus 2 through 5, number two, you know, had a negative 3.7% on your recovery, being sick has a negative 3.6%. Marijuana, which is the, you know, in the top five, which is a minus 1.9%. The number one, we've done podcasts on it. You know it well. Alcohol, negative 12% in terms of how negative it is on your recovery. Yeah. And I think like some

of these percent, you have to understand what's going on, right? Like alcohol is going to be so much worse if you're binge drinking. Sure. And this is the averages of averages. Averages of averages are messy. I also think with things like sleeping at altitude, you know, that first night up in the mountains, you're definitely going to have, you know, much bigger negative effect. And then, you know, by the fifth day of your vacation, it's not really affecting your recovery anymore. And so all of this, you know, I think, again, you know, this is the importance of using the journal feature and understanding your own data and how this changes for you and, you know, as a dose response, right? like, can I have one drink with no effects?

Can I, well, what happens at two drinks? That negative 12, that you're really drinking probably at that point. But that's the average for everyone when they take it. So it just shows for some people, they're probably going from otherwise being in the green to deepen the red. And for folks that have never used the Whoop Journal or have used it and are kind of, you know, haven't used it in a while, I'd encourage you at the start of the year, go in, customize it in your app. You can make it one or two things maybe that you're interested in or you can make it

a whole bunch of things, but it's super customizable. There's about 80 different behaviors, lifestyle decisions in there. So you can really make it your own. This is a very fun one. We got to hit this. What percent of people on Woop had a 1% recovery in 2022? The 1% club, it is a somewhat famous and notorious club on Woop. The answer, is 45% of our members had a 1% this year. 45% of our members joined the 1% club this year. Emily, what does it take to get a 1%? So we really saw membership skyrocket in the 1% club with the COVID pandemic.

Kind of getting COVID is almost guaranteed single digit recovery score at least one or two nights. We also see it with intense binge drinking, a lot of, you know, red-eye flights where you're in the middle seat and coach and don't quite get comfortable, never really fall asleep. We're seeing it again now with flu season. They're spiking up again. But it's hard to get to the 1%. Like you, I've never seen anybody at 1% who, you know, makes it to work. That's, you're taking a sick day. You're not feeling good. Well, I have a confession. I have the longest data streak on WOOP, which I'm quite proud of. So that means I've collected a lot of whoop data.

I've had a lot of chances. And yet I am not a member of the 1% club. Oh, no way. I've never had a 1% recovery. I've gotten COVID a few times, the flu. I've had my hungover days. But somehow I've just never been inducted. What's your lowest recovery score?

My lowest recovery score is a 2%. Okay. So you're close. I'm close, but I just haven't hit the magic one. All right. So a New Year's resolution. All right. Continuing the trend of,

of behaviors that affect recovery. We're going to look here quickly at supplements. So number three, probiotic, number two, magnesium, number one, melatonin. I'll personally vouch for all three. I take all three. I find that magnesium and melatonin are great before bed. What's your reaction to these three supplements having the most positive influence on recovery? This list makes total sense to me. Melatonin's a sleep aid, so if you sleep better, you're going to recover better. magnesium helps with exercise recovery. So kind of same deal. And then probiotics help maintain your gut health, which is going to help everything from your mental health, you know, that kind of feeling of overall well-being. It's interesting what's not on this list, right? You know, I think a lot of people

think the stronger sleep drugs would be on this list. They're not. And so it's just, again, it's a bit of a public service announcement. Those drugs may not be having the effect on your physiology that you think they are. Again, I'll make a plug for the whoop journal. You can record the stuff in the book journal and see how it's affecting you. Yeah, and it's great to see these three show up as this little trio because there's a lot of research that's been done specifically about these three things being like our core mental health needs or core psychological needs. And if these are met, you know, our mental health falls into place.

And so no surprises here. These things, if you're feeling them, everything's going well. Okay, the winning diets. Number three, keto diet. number two, dairy-free diet and number one, vegetarian diet, each of these showing a positive response to recovery. I don't know, diets, it's a loaded space, but what do you make of this, Emily? Yeah, also super interesting list. I was surprised to see the keto diet up there. I was too, because that can go sideways for people. Yeah, and, you know, keep in mind,

a lot of people who are tracking these things are doing them intermittently, and that's why they're tracking it. They're trying to do like an A-B test on themselves. And getting into the keto diet, like when you're going from not being in ketosis to being in ketosis, actually like people get something called like the keto flu. It's very hard on your body to make that adjustment to, you know, use fats instead of sugars. And so I was surprised to see it showing up here. Dairy free makes sense. A lot of people have inflammatory responses to dairy. You know, lactose intolerance is super underdiagnosed. And then, you know, the vegetarian diet, a lot of people find meat to be inflammatory. I think, you know, associated with eating clean. So I think, you know, this list

generally makes sense to me. Here's some interesting ones under the category of circadian health. Number three, bright lights, positive recovery booster. Number two, morning sunlight. If you've listened to our podcast with Dr. Andrew Humberbin, he's a big believer in morning sunlight research showing that morning sunlight boosts everything about your recovery, even actually affecting sleep some 12 hours later. And number one, daylight eating. That's quite interesting. What is daylight eating? It's just a form of intermittent fasting where you only eat when it's light out. And this list makes total sense to me because these are behaviors that have been shown to help strengthen your circadian rhythm. And our bodies are really good at, you know, regulating everything

and, you know, staying as long as we don't fight against them. And a lot of times with artificial lights and with the, you know, staying up on our laptop in bed until midnight, you know, we fight and we, like, suppress our circadian rhythm. And so this is just a list of three things that enhance your circadian rhythm. And if you let your circadian rhythm do its thing, you know, you fall asleep easily, you stay asleep and you're going to recover. Top sleep behaviors. We've talked a lot about sleep. Sleeping in your own bed and reading in bed. Those were tied for number three. Number two, sound machine. I've never used one. But that's that's interesting. And then number one, shared bed. So this is funny. Shared bed number one,

sleep in own bed number three. Those aren't mutually exclusive, by the way. You can share your bed and be in your own bed. What do you make in this list? Also makes total sense to me. I think that we talked about shared bed because it was a top behavior overall. Sleeping in your own bed was actually one of the reasons why I thought shared bed does so well. When you're in a familiar your environment and you feel safer, you're going to be more able to sort of let yourself go and go to sleep and sleep soundly. Reading in bed was one we talked about last year too. And while we haven't proven this, my theory there is that a lot of it is, well, one, it's nice and relaxing. Two, it kind of helps your body like separate daytime from nighttime, especially if you ritualize

that. But I think also it's a bit of a sign that you have some leisure time. Like if I'm getting into bed at, you know, 1 a.m. after a big night out, I'm not going to read for an hour. If I get in bed at 9 o'clock, because I've had a relaxing day and there's no pressure, I'm going to read for an hour. And so I think, you know, it's confounded by some of the other things that are like, what was the situation that lets you get into bed early and have this time before you have to fall asleep? And so that's going to be a recovery booster. I think sound machine is the most interesting and unexpected one on this list. You know, a lot of times noise is stimulating and so it's counterproductive to sleep and sound machines can add white noise that

help you kind of ignore those other sounds and go to bed. But oftentimes I find that like I am interested in using them when I'm in a noisy environment and I don't use one when I'm home because you know we have triple pained windows and I don't eat it because my bedroom's quiet. So that one I thought was a little bit interesting and I wonder sort of what's going on because the decision to use a sound machine is not a random decision but they're definitely effective if you're bedroom environment is noisy, and if the B in this A-B test is just having a noisy room, then it makes total sense because noise is so stimulating and counterproductive to sleep. Okay, we're going to transition here to strain, talking about exercise, activities, day strain.

On average, folks had a 12.2 strain in 2022, and that was slightly down from 12.4 in 2021. highest month of strain was August and members strained the most on average on Saturdays. What do we think? All of that makes total sense. I think the decrease in strain from year to year, it's tiny. It could also be ineffective people getting a little bit healthier, which will bring your strain down or just having more things competing with time. One of the things we saw at the beginning of the pandemic was that strain and time spent exercising went up a ton. because it was sort of the only thing we could do. You can go for a run safely social distance all by

yourself. And, you know, now we're competing with brunch plans and stuff like that. The Saturday highest strain we saw last year also, it's, you know, it's finally the weekend. You've got time to yourself. And you can go and do that long run, long bike ride, pick a basketball with your friends, whatever your thing is, you just have more time to do it. You know, I think August being the highest strain month is a function of, you know, at least in the northern hemisphere, that's a great weather month. lots of sunlight, lots of summer vacations going on, people prioritizing health and leisure generally more in the summer than we see during the winter. So this is pretty interesting. The biggest changes in activities logged this year. So these are the rising activities.

We saw medical operations up 36%. So that's number five. We saw walking up 41%, rock climbing up 42%, hit up 54 And then number one, commuting is back, folks, 57% increase over 2021. Yeah. So to me, the commuting spike was purely ineffective post-pandemic return to work. That made a lot of sense to me. And then I thought, you know, what was going on maybe with hit and rock climbing was the return to working out in gyms and workout classes as opposed to whatever you can do in your basement or outside. And thought walking was interesting.

I think that, you know, people are increasingly realizing how important walking is and how good that can be for your health, even if you're not kind of otherwise up for a big workout. And then the operations medical, I think, was a lot about who's joined whoop in 2022. Seeing a lot of doctors and healthcare professionals starting to really embrace wearable technology and experimenting with it themselves. And I think one of the really exciting outcomes of the pandemic is the health care industry being interested in telemedicine and the role that wearables potentially play in the. Yeah, that's exciting to see that.

That probably reflects a change in our member base. We got to give a shout out here to pickleball, which is sweeping across the U.S. And admittedly, we did not have pickleball in the WOOP app in 2021. So we can really just look at it this year. But it has risen nine spots in WOOP activity popularity since only being introduced just this spring in the app and August 2022 had the most pickable activities logged ever. All right, we're going to look at most decreased activities. I'm just going to run through these. Number five in decreased jumping rope. Number four, caddying down 31%. Australian football down 34%. Gaming down 34%. And the biggest decrease,

skateboarding, down 42%. I don't exactly know what to make of that list. I mean, I think some of that might be a movement from outdoor activities to indoor with skateboarding. But then you also have gaming being down. So perhaps people are getting out of their homes. All right. We're going to look at the most popular activities just on whoop. Number six, golf.

Number five, cycling. Number four, walking. Number three, weightlifting. Number two, functional fitness. What do you think is the number one activity on whoop? it is running. Now, in terms of how these changed, walking really grew in popularity, so that moved up. And we did see a decrease in golf. I think 2021 was such an outlier golf year. It's not that surprising to see that decrease. And if you look at this by gender, we saw walking was

significantly more popular with our female members this year. Any quick impressions of that list? You know, I think we're seeing, you know, a lot of the sports that got their sort of nice heyday with the pandemic, very social distance friendly outdoors that maybe weren't people's first choice, but sort of filled a moment, are becoming less popular. You know, we're seeing things like spin and hit, you know, huge rise in popularity and that's coming at the cost of golf, which if you think about it is one of the most social distance friendly sports while still being quite social. And so it made sense that it had such a moment during the pandemic. And so I think what largely I think we're seeing is a return to normalcy. And I bet we'll see less dramatic differences when we compare next year to this year. All right. We're going to look at the community broadly.

These are really fun lists. Okay. What are the top states for consuming alcohol? Here we go. Number five, Colorado. Number four, Oregon. number three main number two vermont and what is the number one place for consuming alcohol on whoop it is washington d c all right shout out to the government for throwing drinks back now it's

also interesting to compare this to top hydration so coming in at number five is florida for being hydrated number four, Pennsylvania, number three, Vermont, number two, Arizona, number one, Nevada, actually. So, Vermont is the only state that both drinks a lot of alcohol and stays hydrated. Shout out to Vermont for, I guess, drinking responsibly. I don't know how would you frame that? You know, what I thought was interesting about this list is with the exception of D.C., the alcohol drinkers are cold states, and then the hydrators are, for the most part, hot states, which makes a lot of sense. I've been to Arizona and Florida. You know, you do need to drink more

water. And then, you know, Vermont kind of is the outlier of that hydration list, but maybe that makes sense if they're drinking so much alcohol. Well, it's also interesting to look at this versus the top sex states. So these are the states having the most sex on whoop and no overlaps with alcohol or hydration. So they really are just focused on sex here. All right, we're going to Nebraska at number five. Wyoming coming in at number four, Oklahoma number three, South Dakota number two for top sex on whoop. And what is the number one state reporting sex on whoop? Shout out to Utah coming in at number one. Yeah. And I don't know what these five states have in common other than none of them show up on the top stress list, which makes sense. There's no overlap

between the states that are having the most sex and the states that are the most stressed. Let's go to the stress states. Maybe they need to be having more sex. Number five, New Hampshire. Number four, Delaware. Number three, Iowa. Number two, Alaska. And then number one, the most stressed state on is New Mexico. So, I mean, Alaska, that's an intense environment. Obviously in the winter, it's quite depressing, right? Because it's very dark. I don't know what to make of that list. I wasn't sure either. Top caffeine state is Oregon. Most folks are consuming caffeine in Oregon. Not a lot of overlap between caffeine and hydration either. Just Vermont. Just Vermont. Yeah, Vermont. A lot of drinking in general in Vermont. A lot of alcohol, a lot of hydration, and a lot of caffeine. So good from Vermont. Okay. If we look at behavior facts by country, this is fun. So U.S. has the most sex and alcohol and stress and marijuana globally on WUK. What do you make of that, Emily? It's hard to tell. Well, I just, I guess

that's that. We'll leave that as is. Australia has the most caffeine and they share their bed the most often. I've been to Australia. They have amazing coffee. So good for them. Ireland has the most late meals. Interesting that Ireland, by the way, didn't have the most alcohol. We beat Ireland. I mean, that's kind of, that's kind of staggering, actually. Yeah, I don't think we should be proud of that one. No, I mean, late meals are cultural, right? There are certain countries where just eating dinner before 10 isn't a thing. Other countries that I wouldn't have been surprised to see up there are countries like Spain, but I think that's just cultural. Italy is the best hydrated country on Woop. Good job, Italy. Mexico logs the most journal behaviors. All right. So Mexico doing a lot

A-B testing on their bodies. And Brazil does the most activities per person. I have to say, watching Brazil play soccer or football, I should say, during the World Cup, it kind of feels like that's a very active society. Yeah, I think that's also cultural. You know, they're pretty outdoorsy, pretty active. Okay. What members are logging the most often? So this is just taking the journal entries from the past year and what's increased in journal entries from 2021 and what we're seeing this year. So big increase in meat. This was the number one most increased behavior that's been tracked is meat. Yeah. And I think the most interesting thing about that is the most decreased behavior is the vegetarian diet. So there's this perfect inversion. I think that what's

happening there is that vegetarianism and veganism have become really, really popular. There's a lot of stuff, you know, we're in about it, you know, why we should be thinking about going meatless. There's also better meat-free alternatives than there's ever been on the market. And so what we're seeing, I think, is the default switching, right? If people's default is sort of meat-free, then it makes sense that meat is the outlier that you track versus if your default is to have meat every day, then like the days when you don't have meat and follow the vegetarian diet becomes the thing that you track. So if you kind of balance these two things, it's not. not that crazy switchover, but I think it's interesting to see that like the framing has totally shifted from am I tracking days when I'm meatless or am I tracking days with meat, which are similar, but I think there's that important difference. We're seeing a big jump in people recording information related to emotional and mental state. So that's the fifth most increased query. Now that doesn't speak to positive or negative. That just means people are recording emotional and mental state. We're seeing a decrease in people

being single down 18%. That's pretty interesting. And on the flip side, we're seeing an increase in pregnancy and nursing infants. So pregnant is up 82%. Nursing infant, up 71%. Some of you may also have followed all of the new pregnancy coaching that we have in the WOOP app. So obviously this has been a push for whoop. So it's possible there's a little bit of a selection bias there and that more people are joining who to use some of our pregnancy features. Increase in fruits and vegetables, 60%. Less People are tracking a device in bed, less people are tracking CBD. Yeah, and I think that has a lot to do with, you know, CBD was like the hot craze of the last couple years.

So people did their A-B test, reached their conclusions, and then kind of graduated from needing to track it because either you tried it and you liked it, so now you're doing it, you don't need the research anymore, or you tried and you didn't like it, so you took it off. I think device in bed is something we've been rallying against for the 10 years we've been working together, it's so bad for sleep. And I think we've, you know, as people start to learn that, they stop tracking it because it's just a behavior that they stop doing. So there's no need to track it anymore. Bad news for the tobacco industry. Members are consuming tobacco less.

Average instances of tobacco decreased 30% from 6.3 instances to 4.4 instances on average. What do you make of that? I mean, smoking is terrible for you. It's one of the worst things you can do for your recovery. And I think that, you know, this is a promising trend. Good feedback. Okay. Also, we're seeing less drinks consumed when people do drink. So members are drinking less than 2022. We see average drinks of alcohol decreased from three drinks on average to 2.8 drinks on average. Yeah, and I think that has a lot to do with the improvements in mental health. Like, the pandemic was boring for a lot of people and alcohol consumption was up. Liquor stores were classed as essential businesses. It was sort of one of

a few things that you could go do. And drinking was up. And I think, you know, like I said earlier, we're seeing a bit of a return to normalcy. And then I think also not that this is new, but, you know, the more people drink on whoop, the more they realize what a recovery killer it is. And we see that people on whoop over time drink less and less because they realize how bad it truly is for their health. Any other reflections on 22 versus 21, Emily? Yeah, I think, you know, biggest trends are, and we're seeing a lot of indications that, you know, there is a post-COVID that things do get better. You know, we saw really scary hits to mental health. I think one of the things that was a little bit underappreciated was that throughout the COVID global pandemic,

there really was a mental health global pandemic as well. I mean, like being unable to spend time with your family, being nervous about, you know, are my parents okay and all those kinds of things, really took a big toll. And so seeing that people are not only, you know, really, really engaging in mental health and you were seeing huge increases in things like therapy, things like tracking your stress levels, the importance of feeling purpose, efficacy, and control, right? Control was something that was so badly taken away from us in the pandemic. And so to see those things improving makes me feel like, you know, globally and as a society, things are moving in a really good direction. So I'm really excited about 2020. Amazing. Well, for folks listening to this,

You can find all of these statistics on our social media pages, on whoop.com slash locker. You can also check out your own year-in review in the WOOP app if you're a WOOP member. And that's a wrap. Thanks so much, Emily. Thanks for having me. Big thanks to Emily for joining us today to take a deep dive into the WOOP community and year-in-review. Reminder, you can check that out in the Woop app. Definitely encourage you to do it.

We've got a whole new format for Year in Review this year-in-review. If you enjoyed this episode of the WOOP podcast, please leave a rating or review. Subscribe to the WOOP podcast. You can check us out on social at Woop at Will Ahmed. If you have a question you want to see answered on the podcast, email us, podcast at WOOP.com. Call us 508-443-4952. Check out the year in review and head to Woop.com if you want to get 20% off a WOOP membership. That's now until December 18th.

Okay, have a great week, folks. We'll be back next week. and stay in the green.