Most Replayed Moment: Better Sleep Doesn't Always Mean Longer Sleep! Fix These Habits Today

When I talk about being able to change your behavior and break a habit, it is nothing in the context of someone who is ensnared by an addiction of sorts. It's a completely different conversation. What is it like growing up with a mother who you observe at a very young age? You were how old? I'm in my whole life. Your whole life? Yeah. As a child, when you see a parent, someone you love, that is sort of gripped by addiction, what is that like? Yeah, I mean, I think at a fundamental level, you just feel deprioritized, I think, generally. You know, like you, you know, I think you feel depressed. Um, you know, you're, you're, you're unsupervised, number one. There isn't a lot of supervision, you know, so you end up like really having to defend for yourself. Um, my dad worked a lot, you know, he was definitely a workaholic, um, such a good man, um, so much integrity and, and, but I think that was his form of escape, but it kind of leads, you know, you got to figure out how to eat, you got to, you know, you got to figure out how to do a lot of things. So you develop a lot of independence, I think, but it, it's hard to, um, you know, form emotional attachments, I think, um, as an adult, unless you really work through that, you know, because you're, you're afraid that you're not going to be taken care of. What did you come to understand about your mother's addiction and what she was struggling with, if anything at all? Yeah. I mean, I think what was so sad about that time period is, is, you know, I think it was well understood, you know, I, I think, um, a lot of those behaviors, I think to a degree are normalized and I don't know that they're the connection between depression, you know, she was, it's no question she, she had massive seasonal effect disorder, which is one of the reasons why I'm so interested in, you know, um, kind of everything related to, to light and, and just the opportunity. There for, for, for health, but, um, you know, she had major depressive disorder and, you know, it was not diagnosed properly. I don't even remember. I have no idea if she ever even went to the doctor to, you know, to try to get treated. Um, so, you know, I, I think the, the biggest thing that I learned is that we can actually make choices. Um, and I, and I know that there are, you know, when you look at regions of the brain, we understand that people are predisposed, but I think there's a lot of things that we can, we can actually control to reduce our vulnerability to, um, to some of these diseases. How has that experience defined and shaped you when you look back and connect dots? Yeah. I mean, I just, I always, you know, I was very competitive, high level athlete representing, um, the U S and, and so there's definitely trying to understand my own body and my psychology, so I could perform my potential, but there's no question that like this whole, everything that like underpins the work that I do is, is trying to, to understand, you know, how we can improve our own situation so we can, um, you know, self actualize and live our potential. And, um, so that was, I always, you know, felt, um, so bad. You know, for my mom. Why? You know, that she wasn't able to become the version of herself. Like I wasn't able to relax her potential and she had so much, I can't believe you did this to me. You're like a tissue. Thanks. You're very, um, you're a very special person and it all makes, makes a ton of sense. Why you've got such an incredible, incredible drive and mission to you. I didn't, I didn't know any of those, what you've just said, but I've never talked about that publicly, so I'm just, yeah. What a, what a wonderful way to have channeled such a unimaginable pain to then sort of fix, you know, hundreds of thousands of people's other lives and help them get closer towards their own potential. Yeah. I, and I, I never want to like project my values onto other folks, but, but I think that's always been like at the core of like why I do what I do is, and the reason why I coached for so long is I just love seeing people like realize their potential or on a daily basis, you know, understand their potential, knowing that we're always, of course, a work in progress. But I just, like, I want like everyone to be able to wake up and feel, you know, be energetic and be able to like really, really live the things that you, you care about, you know, and, and just in understanding, I think the path to that, you know, requires some work, you know, in terms of making sure that you're attending to some of these non-negotiables that we're talking about. And I think sometimes it takes folks time to connect those dots and there's a lot of wonderful learning that comes with that. But I think if I can kind of help accelerate some of that wisdom and keep people from experiencing, I think some of the pain that I felt, you know, it's worth it to me. It's the most incredible, incredible thing that you've committed your life to because me and you are both aware that there's going to be a ton of people who are either on a path towards such an achievement. Or are currently enthralled by such an addiction and the work that you were doing, the message you're spreading is going to prevent and lift some of those people out of that situation, which has, has a wonderful karmic effect on the world. And I think if there's anything that we can convert our pain into, it is, it is exactly that. I want to talk about alcohol. I've recently quit drinking alcohol. I think it was about three to four months ago now. It was so interesting. I had a conversation with some of my best friends. I said this on a podcast. I said this on a podcast a couple of, couple of months ago. And one of my friends was an alcoholic. So he managed to quit alcohol and he's writing a book about it. And then as I look across the group of my other friends, none of them are alcoholics, but they're all sort of casual drinkers. And we were sat there together around this table having dinner. And he was telling us about this book he's writing about quitting alcohol. And I was sat there thinking, that book that he's writing doesn't necessarily resonate with me because I've never had it. I've never felt like I've had an addiction or really, to be honest, any problem with it. I'm such, I was such a casual drinker. I would have maybe one glass of wine a week, if that. There's probably months I've gone without any alcohol at all. So I couldn't think of a reason to quit. So really, I was saying to him, is there another book that someone else could write for me that just takes those people that are, those casual drinkers that are right on the fence and just gives us a reason to nudge over the other side. And because I have this podcast, I thought, you know, I'll just try and quit. And see if, see what the implications are for my life. Alcohol, health, circadian rhythms. What's your perspective on all of this? Well, I like to think about it. I love this, the principle of non-neutrality, right? And this is how I like to think about behaviors and how I've kind of always thought about it is if you've got a series of behaviors. We talked a lot about behaviors. We talked a lot about sleep and, you know, physiological things and you've got the psychological things and they're either going to support your values, kind of who you want to be in this world or they're not. And I think that's the lens with which I look at alcohol, you know, in what way is this supporting my values of growth and impact and presence and compassion and tolerance, you know, the things that are like core to who I want to be in this world. And I think when you look at it through the lens of alcohol, you know, you're going to look at it through that lens. The choices become really clear to me. If you're honest with yourself and you have some degree of self-awareness, understand what you care about, I think choices become a lot clearer. Like there's way, way more clarity about how to live your life in the micro, which is really what we're talking about. There's just many choices throughout the day. Does it support who you want to be in the world or does it not? And there's very little gray. And the gray are excuses in my view, and we can rationalize and make stuff up, you know, all day long, right. To, to, to make ourselves feel better. But when you can step back from all of that and look at it really, you know, taking yourself kind of out of the equation and look at it from a very objective standpoint, um, you know, I think a choice like alcohol becomes very clear. But it helps. helps me to socialize, Kristen. Yeah, if you need it, alcohol to bond or to you know form a connection there's probably something else going on that is unaddressed and from my perspective is there such a thing as such a small dose of alcohol that it doesn't matter in your opinion yeah i mean i think it depends on who you are um and i think there's a lot of individual variability there as as well i know respiratory resveratrol is is something that's talked about a lot and there's uh you know suppose there's in wine and grapes there's resveratrol and that's been linked to um enhanced uh health and well-being but i think you'd have to drink like 10 bottles or something to get the amount of respiratory resveratrol to actually make a um uh to get the amount of resveratrol to actually make a resveratrol to actually make a resveratrol. to get the amount of resveratrol to actually make a resveratrol. wake time it's so variable that it's like we can't even see a pad it's random which is frightening why is that frightening because you know the more variability you have like the more psychological and physiological uh you know negative consequences there'll be is there a correlation here between how we deal with stressful events in our lives as well because i'm assuming yes absolutely managing stress throughout the the day uh and and the degree or even during the night um can uh definitely increase your tolerance for stress so you know deploying breath work for example um as you know on-demand self-regulation tool to pay down in the moment stress can be and to activate the parasympathetic branch of the nervous system can be really powerful so you know i kind of call it the parasympathetic branch of the nervous system and i kind of call it the parasympathetic branch of the nervous system and i kind of call it the parasympathetic branch of the nervous system and i kind of call it the parasympathetic branch of the many moments of deactivation so doing that proactively for folks who are in these high stacks stakes high stress environments is an amazing strategy um because lots of those folks again if you think about just baseline when you are engaging in shift work and you're awake during the night your system is humming at a uh a kind of a stress level that is above what would be normal right like your your system is having to work so much harder to maintain homeostasis because you're doing exactly the opposite of what your body wants to do so all the kind of biological preferences are being um bypassed right when you're up during the biological night so to pay down some of that stress you know these many moments of deactivation are absolutely critical for that population so that means uh just literally taking 30 seconds where you're doing the physiological sigh for example which we know has emerged as being the moment to reduce not only in the moment anxiety and stress but actually you know your perception of anxiety and stress like in the future what is that the physiological sigh it's basically a double inhale followed by an extended exhale perfect that's exactly right so basically like when you're crying um it's it you know you kind of do that double double inhale followed by an extended exhale but that like reduces stress in the moment in a really powerful way and if you do that you know five ten times um you end up activating the parasympathetic branch so you're reducing your heart rate um and uh and and you know kind of doing that throughout the day is is a great way to um mitigate negative stress accumulation there's a pretty unfortunate paradox a pretty tragic paradox in the fact that our shift workers some of them like doctors especially are the people that we need to be most focused firing on all cylinders exactly yeah but those are the people that are from what i've learned today about the circadian rhythm most likely to suffer with things like focus and sleep and all of those things that are imperative to showing up well yeah i mean there's a relationship you know we know that with every 45 minutes of sleep deprivation accrued on the platform we see a five to ten percent next day decrease in mental control mental control executive function so we measure this um with an mbac and a stroop so these kind of uh performance tests to measure executive function and we see for every 45 minutes of sleep debt accrued we see up to 10 decrease or decline in next day executive function and what does executive function mean for people that are our ability to make decisions okay use the word sleep debt what is sleep debt so that's basically what you need versus what you actually got and that's highly individual right and and that's one of the kind of beautiful things on the platform is that we learn your your body we learn how efficient sleeper you are we learn what your optimal sleep wake time should be and we basically tell you how much time you need to spend in bed so a lot of the work that my my team has done specifically at whoop is to try to understand you know what is this relationship of sleep debt to other performance metrics that we care about right that tell us a story about someone's ability to kind of function in their in environment and one of the studies that we did um was looking specifically at business executives so ceo types um and we we basically looked at um it was a this one was a six-month study um looking at two different cohorts uh but you know i think equal distribution between men and men and women and and what we saw was for every 45 minutes of sleep debt accrued in these business leaders we saw a five to ten percent decrease in next day executive function and that's what we call a executive function so the leader's ability to make decisions in the presence of sleep debt um you know gets gets worse the more sleep that you accrue we did a follow-up study and this one was wild so we basically looked at um it was roughly it was about 70 uh business executive ceo types and we looked at um all of their objective markers of sleep debt being one of them and we look at the psychological safety of their direct reports during team meetings and define psychological safety you're how um how safe you feel to show up in your environment as your true most authentic self and what we saw is again for every 45 minutes of sleep that the leader had there was a significant decrease in psychological safety of the direct reports so they felt less safe in their environment to show up in their as their true self when their leader had 45 minutes of sleep debt accrued and and some of these folks were carrying a couple hours of sleep debt so and there was a linear relationship between the amount of psychological safety and the amount of sleep that the leader had so and what was so interesting and i think compelling about this research is that the leader had no idea they couldn't perceive their own cognitive physical and emotional declines right but that's what's so insidious about sleep you can't really tell when you're operating at a lower level you just adapt to that lower level of functioning but everyone around you can feel it right just with how you hold you hold your face how you emote um the kind of eye contact you make how tolerant you are um and you and you think about how sleep deprivation you know it and i think this is really what this research surfaces it's just it's not just sleep deprivation just doesn't impact me right it's going to impact every single person i come in contact with and from a business perspective just from a sheer like numbers perspective google um did a study called aristotle and they looked at cycle they looked at a bunch of different metrics related to team performance and what emerged in that study is being most predictive of team performance was the degree to which the team had psychological safety felt safe in their environment to kind of show up as their as a leader in their environment and so i think that's a really good example of that and so i think that's a really good example of that and they brought in to the tune of 4.5 million dollars more than teams who are lacking psychological safety so this is like a really important concept that i don't think a lot of people talk about but when we go back to this concept of the principle of non-neutrality right and what are behaviors that promote enable you to live your values and and kind of show up as as your your best self as consistently as possible minimizing sleep debt is right there at the top of the list it's fascinating and as it relates to sort of accident and injury is there a correlation between sort of injury of oneself and accidents you commit on others yeah correlation between that and sleep debt it's very well established that um the more sleep debt you're you're carrying you know the more accident prone you are um you know the the the more risk you're gonna take um and uh yeah we see this in in the medical field we see this um in in you know just car accidents and yeah it the list goes on and on car accidents a 2016 study by the foundation for traffic safety found that drivers who reported that they usually sleep four to five hours per day had 5.4 times the crash rate of drivers who usually sleep for seven hours or more a day which is horrifying yeah i know it's it's uh yeah i mean we look when we think about you know sleep it's it's we're not getting better at it as a society and i and i think we're we're kind of coming at this conversation from the lawn the wrong lens you know we're telling folks just to spend more time in bed without addressing the behaviors that are actually enable us to fall asleep and stay asleep you know that's to me that's that's the conversation and and it's not about spending more time in bed and yeah that might be what needs to happen but it's it's about you're not going to get there for a long time you're not going to get there for a long time for folks who who are not thinking about all the circadian things that we're talking about and um you know some of the environmental stuff the cold dark the quiet yes that matters but um but at a foundational level i think folks are not engaging in the behaviors that are going to enable us to pay down the sleep deprivation the other study that i found that was super interesting um was that a 2021 study found that less than seven hours of sleep is associated with increased risk of injury and if this is sustained for at least 14 days, the risk of muscle and bone injury is 1%. point seven times almost two times higher yeah so as someone that goes to the gym a lot and likes to work out if i have a high sleep debt then i'm much more likely to get an injury almost two times more likely to get an injury if that's sustained that's right which is crazy yeah it is yeah and you know i'm so grateful that i think folks are finally realizing that sleep is the greatest natural performance enhancer that we have on this planet um yeah it's and that is certainly super evident in all the research that we're doing what you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode if you want to listen to that full episode i've linked it down below check the description thank you