[MUSIC] Powerful insights often occur when you least expect them. On transformative leadership conversations, they're at the heart of every episode. Hi, I'm your host, Winnie the Silva. And together, we're exploring a spectrum of leadership themes through the compelling stories and insights of season leaders and prominent experts. In each episode, you'll walk away with inspiration, strategies, and tools to enhance your leadership, build effective teams, and lead thriving organizations. [MUSIC] So this month, we're exploring a theme every leader can relate to, stress, and how it shapes who we are and how we lead. So we all want to perform at a high level, make an impact, build something meaningful. But there's a fine line between drive and depletion, between ambition and exhaustion. And when that line gets crossed again and again, the effects go deeper than fatigue. They can show up as chronic stress, illness, and the slow erosion of our energy and joy. So in this series, Excellence Without Exhaustion is about learning to walk that line more wisely. To pursue excellence in a way that sustains both our performance and our well-being. So last week, we heard from Martin Regulio, who shared his personal relationship with stress and how it's evolved throughout his career. Today, we continue the conversation with Jan Philip Martini, the founder and CEO of Sapiens, a company dedicated to helping leaders understand stress on a biological level so they can perform at their best. And in the next episode, next week, you'll hear from both Martin and Jan Philip as the three of us explore what happened when Martin completed the Sapiens diagnostic, what the data revealed and what it taught him about stress, leadership, and performance. So before we dive into my conversation with Jan Philip, I want to take a moment to tell you, if you didn't remember from last week, about a really special and generous offer from Sapiens. The company Jan Philip founded, which we'll be talking about in this episode. So what I love about Sapiens is how it brings the science of stress to life, helping leaders see what's really happening in their bodies so they can take action before stress literally runs them over. Sapiens gives leaders a way to see and understand what's really happening beneath the surface and to make small data informed changes that they'll long term performance and well-being. And listeners of this podcast transformative leadership conversations Sapiens is offering 20% off their stress and resilience diagnostic and habit changing program. Just use the podcast code TLC when you sign up. The offer is valid through the end of 2025. So the way that it works is that it's a four month journey that begins with an at home diagnostic, including stress hormone and cortisol analysis. So you can see G monitoring and recovery analytics followed by three months of expert guided habit coaching and a monthly progress tracking. So if you're curious or still deciding or you're not sure if it's right for you, you can book a free 15 minute consultation with someone from the Sapiens team. They'll walk you through what to expect and help you figure out, you know, if it's right for you. There's a direct link in the show notes to make scheduling really quick and easy or you can visit www.b-sapiens.com for all the details. And you'll hear much more about Sapiens, how it started, how it works, etc. Today in this episode and in next week's episode. By the way, excellence without exhaustion is also the tagline of Sapiens, which I thought perfectly captures what this month's leadership series is all about learning to sustain excellence without sacrificing our well being. Okay, so let's get to Jan Philip before founding Sapiens, Jan Philip spent years in the high pressure world of management consulting at BCG leading large projects and coaching teams around the globe. And then afterwards becoming an entrepreneur, but all that success, it came with a cost after facing a serious health crisis brought on by chronic stress. He began to study the science of human performance, diving into neuroscience, medicine and the biology of resilience out of all that and that whole journey came Sapiens, a company that combines cutting edge diagnostics and coaching to help people in intense jobs. Measure, understand and transform their stress into sustainable performance. So in our conversation, Jan Philip shares what he's learned about the real cost of high performance, how leaders can recognize the early signs of overload and what it takes to build habits that truly restore rather than to drain. I think that you're going to find this conversation both fascinating and really grounding here's my conversation with Jan Philip Martini on what happens when ambition collides with biology and how we can lead with both excellence and endurance. Hi, Jan Philip, thank you so much for being on the show. I'm so excited for you to be here. I have gotten introduced to you through Martin who is, who's also is going to be on the show has been on the show. And, but before I even knew that or maybe I knew that you guys were connected, I was following you on LinkedIn and watching some of your posts and really loving them because you really do such a good job of articulating what it is that you've experienced and what Sapiens does and such like a terms and understanding that people can really grasp and that people I think really are hungry to learn about. So anyway, I'm really excited that you're here to talk to everyone about what you do. Good to speak with you and thank you for the nice words. Yeah, so could we start with you and talk a little bit about your own kind of story, your own leadership story and what led you to start Sapiens? Can we start there? Yeah, I there's really three sources of inspiration that led to founding Sapiens and Sapiens for everybody who's listening in as a stress diagnostics and humans performance company. The first inspiration was I was spending basically since school many months in monasteries and silent retreats. So I was very curious about the human mind and how it functions under pressure. And then I started a job after my studies at Boston Consulting Group. It was an intense work environment and it's the people we work with today. And straight after I had left BCG, I got an unusual gift which was I was leaving BCG in order to find a company in a health tech space and four or five weeks in I get a type one diabetes diagnosis. And I realized how stress had been creeping into my body, which I didn't really know before at gut health issues. I was more impacted by stress and I had realized at the time. And essentially that health tech company idea was then merging into a company that helps people was recognizing early signs of stress from a neurological level. And that also led me for starting a second career in a way by starting prevent to study preventative medicine. So yeah, really the intense job, the time of silent meditation and the own preventative medicine studies all came together with this stress experience to found Sapiens. Wow. That was that you told that story so neatly and organized. I feel like at the time it was probably messy in terms of you maybe going through those experiences and and and coming out to where you are now. I'm kind of curious when you were going through that stress, I mean you you come across as very like calm and you know maybe because either I don't know the chicken or the egg which came first but you know having those mon monastery experiences and then you know working at a high stress environment. You know when you got that diagnosis was that like a total shock to you and and did you realize like was it only until you look back that you realized how much stress you were in or did you did you feel it at the moment happening and you kind of ignored it like you know what I mean. Yeah, I ignored it and I was not seeing it coming. Initially I think I went through many stages of of grief opposition to the diagnosis in the first days I was not really understanding what was going on. I remember I was in the hospital and the doctor that I first spoke to told me, I don't worry, there will be artificial punk reassures in 20 years and you will be fine. And that was absolutely not where my mind was so I was absolutely in shock and I had only heard about diabetes as a lifestyle disease. I didn't know about time one diabetes so much. So that disease was a total shock for me as a person who considered himself.
self very healthy, being very health focused already, doing a lot of stress management techniques in a way, but still I think there were some areas that I was overlooking. And even though I, I, I, P, are very calm, oddly, I think they, they were still a way of internalizing stress as, as tension and as nervous system activation that wasn't visible to the outside at the time. Yeah. Well, because even when you were saying you had got health issues, I, you know, I was kind of thinking, you know, probably for you, your, your stress went internal, rather than any external, maybe indications. I don't know. Yeah. That's a good way of putting in. I would look to hear just a little bit about, so you, you left BCG because you wanted to start this health tech company. That wasn't sapiens. That was something else. I wasn't really coming from the industry. I was coming from the mission and the mission was to help people with better self regulating their nervous systems. I had been doing work in that together with BCG for many years. I had been guiding people in mind training and self regulating their nervous system. You think they're brass body tension, their vision. And I had done that in form of workshops or one-on-one work. And I wanted to bring it into a company. And the exact shape wasn't clear when I started. It only turned out to be sapiens over years essentially. I see. I see. Got it. And did it become sapiens partly because of, I assume, because of your experience. And you, you were able, I mean, because it almost sounds like there was like, I don't know how to describe it, but like an external like, oh, this is what I've been doing. And this is great. But then it's like, behind the scenes, you were doing it. And you were, you were still experiencing stress to such an extreme degree that you got diagnosed with this. So tell me how those maybe came together. Yeah. Sapiens is an idea, first of all, that we can perform at a high level and at the same time work in harmony with our biology. So sapiens by itself means identifying your own rhythm and then working according to it. And our philosophy initially and by now data shows that there's actually a path to performance to impact as a leader, which is much greater than pushing through, which is noticing body signals and then working in tune with them. So usually to, to high performance kind of to the mountain of it, there's almost two paths, the one part is pushing yourself through going through the root of pure discipline and shutting down your own emotions and body signals. And the other way is the one that we want to embody and that we want to build a company around, which is getting in harmony with those signals that our body sends us and then leveraging them for optimal performance. Right. Right. I love that, which, you know, your tagline is excellence without exhaustion. Right. And so that whole idea that it's not like you have to give up excellence to take care of your body and to have you be and to be healthy and to be, you know, okay. But it's like we can, you can have both. But there is a science and a technique or a process or an approach where that works. Otherwise, like you've just described, which I think is really important to underline is that you can push your body to an extreme point, but then there's a price to pay. Exactly. And that's not even just a philosophy, but this is a very data driven idea, which is the body is functioning in a rhythm. One rhythm that we all have is a 24 hour rhythm, right? Where cortisol rises after waking, it goes down before sleep. And if we're working against that rhythm that will cause harm and lower performance over time, versus if we're working in line with that rhythm, that will actually increase our performance. What does it mean to work in line with that rhythm as an example? It means to do the most intense things of our day in the morning, which is when we're primed for stress. The morning cortisol is basically getting you ready for getting stuff done. And that's great. But then the evening, you also want to downregulate with the downregulation of cortisol by itself. So that's just one example of the body that you want to synchronize with versus working against it. So I want to take it out of a philosophy or a spiritual idea into a very data driven idea. I love it. Yeah. No, that's great. And I think that's what's so I think really compelling about sapiens and what you do is that you are looking at the physiology, the neuroscience and the some of the psychology as well. So it's like really an integration of mind, body, you know, and maybe spirit. I don't know. So you've given us a little bit of a taste. Can you go a little bit deeper to talk about like maybe the whole philosophy behind sapiens and like, what are the, what are you offering? Like, what is it? What do you do? Yeah, we, first of all, offers stress diagnostics. That means that our clients as a first step get a diagnostics kids and home. And that diagnostics kid essentially contains all tests so that we measure seven body systems, the state of seven body systems that starts with the hormonal system. It's a particular stress hormones. We measure them from here and from saliva. That contains an ECG monitor in order to do a recovery analytics to measure the state of your nervous system. How well do you shut down after work? How well do you regulate between meetings? What's the sleep quality? And then that optionally contains tests like microbiome tests for your gut health, blood tests for inflammation markers or cardiometabolic markers like blood glucose, which is very related to stress. And then that also includes the comprehensive self-assessment in order to understand context factors as well as the state of your immune system and your mental health with scientifically validated questionnaires. So that's kind of step one. Sounds very complicated, but basically you just take one work week and you measure these tests in a total of one hour. We organize, we take all the friction out for you basically, and then a week to two weeks later, you get a personal report and have a debrief with one of our experts, can be a sleep scientist, a neuroscientist, a medical doctor depending on your core challenge. And then in that debrief, we basically create a personalized resilience plan. So long story short, we offer stress diagnostics and then personal expert support on the neurobiology of stress. And then also helping you to implement those little changes into your lifestyle. So, sustainably, it was a tool that we call a "havocange coach," which is a little nutting system that helps you get the habits right. Okay, okay, that's awesome. And so what I love about what you just said too is that depending on what your, what your, what the data shows, the data that you've collected, you will put some, you will, the coach that you work with will have expertise in the area that you have the most challenge. Exactly, yeah. And maybe to make that a little bit more concrete, we look at stress first of all as a neurobiological phenomenon. And stress is a very good thing, because it activates your body's energy first of all, right? The body does not have any bad intentions in producing stress. And the master syndrome of stress that we can measure in cortisol and other hormones is either a certain amount of restlessness that's showing up. That is a high cortisol. That is the lower DHEA. That is a higher dopamine. That's a higher adrenaline. That's a lack of downregulation. And that shows up as a racing mind. You're feeling wired but tired in the evening. You're kind of more irritable than you were a few years ago. You're more impatient. It's really hard to be present with your kids or your family or your friends. That's kind of the master syndrome of restlessness. But it's not just a feeling in your mind. It's actually a neurobiological signature that shows up and elevated evening cortisol levels first of all and then in other hormonal changes afterwards. And oftentimes when that persists, there's a second master symptom which comes out under stress, which is fatigue. And that fatigue is kind of a giving up of the body. First, it tried to fight the root cause of the stressor with that restlessness, right? It was doing more. And now the second step is, oh, actually, I'm not getting through. The envelope isn't realizing. So my cortisol system tells the envelope. He's not realizing that he should change. So I rather shut down all the systems. I blunt the morning cortisol. The evening cortisol now gets into the level of exhaustion. It's incredibly low. And I compensate with fatigue during the day. My sleep patterns often dysregulated by now. And that's kind of the other master symptom. So first stress shows up as a whole body restlessness or fatigue. And then on top of that, oftentimes what we feel is individual organ systems are getting dysregulated. And depending on the propensity for stress of different people, for some people, that is the neuropsychological system, stress showing up anxiety or depression, right? For other people, it's a musculoskeletal system. Stress showing up as first tension in the neck and lower back, then into more severe issues. It can show up as an immune system dysregulation, which it did for me was type 1 diabetes, which is essentially an immune system over regulation. And it can also show up as gut health issues. Many people develop diarrhea.
or inability to basically take up micronutrients from their food, and that then causes long-term issues. So long story short, the way we see stress showing up in your neurobiology is first fatigue or restlessness, and then organ-specific issues. But what's interesting is that what you're describing, because even as we were talking, as I was talking to Martin earlier, like stress shows up for everybody differently, but in the same person, you could have someone who first starts out, like you described with the restlessness, and then like you said, the body's like, "We tried that. It's not working. We're going to then go to fatigue." Or is it like, you know, for one person, it could be, it's primarily restlessness or primarily one. - Both. - It is both. - Both. It's both a personally different response. What the nervous system has learned to deal with stress most when we were kids, teenagers, and younger adults, right? The nervous system will attempt again today. For example, if in the past restlessness has been the solution, meaning speeding up everything in the body, has been the solution to get out of stress, your body will try that potentially first. Versus if a shutdown or the retrieval or the isolation of fatigue had been successful in the past, your body might use that strategy again, because your body's very smart. At the same time, oftentimes an increase of cortisol is not causal, but oftentimes the sequence of events has said first cortisol rises in particular in the evening, showing up as restlessness. And then if that strategy did not succeed, then fatigue is kind of the second option. - Got it. So it's almost like you're primed to try one or the other depending on what you were kind of prime, what you tried in the past in your earlier life or when you were growing up, what worked, so your body goes to that first to try that first and if it doesn't work, then it goes to the other. - That is this subconscious process that's happening there. - Yeah. The other thing that I thought was interesting is that you said just a few minutes ago that stress is like a whole body experience. But yet you also described how it might show up one place more strongly than another place, but then eventually it will impact the other part. So I guess maybe this is a two technical question, but is it showing up in all ways, but it's in one area that you notice at the most, or is it primarily kind of in one area, and then almost like what you just described in this fatigue versus restlessness, if it's not producing a change, it's another part of your body ends up flaring up or whatever. - Yeah, I think in order to answer that question and for the listener to understand better, we have to de-average stress a bit. So let's de-average it into three things. First, there's acute stress, which is governed by the lymphroesthetic and nervous system as it's called, and that is essentially the proverbial tiger running into your office, and there's physiological changes in your body happening. What does that mean? That means your heart rate goes up, your blood pressure goes up, your body tension goes up. You're getting ready for fighting, right? And that proverbial tiger can be a difficult email, something where there is an identifiable stressor that goes away. And your boss walking into the office and then walking out again, and then the physiological changes go down after the stressor is gone. This is healthy stress. That's great. What it does, it activates your immune system, it drives focus, it makes you be more alert. It's really useful for getting things done and for productivity in particular. That's where the deadline makes you work faster. If there's however, the stressor is persistent, so the stressor is not the boss walking in and out of the office, but it's worry in your mind that's coming on top of it. It is continuous time pressure, for example, in your job or your life. Then the second stress system is activated, which is called the HPA axis, which is to simplify the cortisol system. And cortisol essentially is released whenever we need to up-regulate the body's energy. So the first stress system was just increasing the speed of everything, but now we don't have enough energy anymore in the body in order to sustain that. So there's a second stress system, but it's again very smart, which changes the way you seek and produce energy. Suddenly you get these late-night sugar cravings, you drink the coffee at the time when you shouldn't drink it, and all these things happen seemingly automatically so that you have more energy available. And that also an healthy thing. However, if this is persisting over a long, long time, then a surreach step is happening, which is the body is compensating by taking energy away from non-life necessary interventions. For example, the immune system is shut down. Why do we need the immune system for short-term survival? We can also shut it down. Digestion is slow down. Body tension is staying up, and there's no need for investing the energy to reducing the body tension at the moment, because we're busy with surviving or we're seeking energy. So the third way is in the science and the scientific advisors that we work with, like Professor Robert Paul Euster, is called the allostatic load model, which basically means one system has been stretched for a long time, systems which are the least resilient start to compensate first. For me, that got health. For other people, let's say, immune system, and for a third part, that's the way their brain metabolizes energy, and that shows my show up as mental health issues, for example. A long-winded way of answering the question, there's three or two stress systems, the sympathetic nervous system, immediate changes in the cortisol system, and the dysregulation of the cortisol system then leads to compensations in organ systems or in body systems. And I assume that there's some relationship, well, I don't know, is there some relationship to this restlessness and fatigue? Because it sounds like there might be with restlessness being connected to the cortisol, that third section, right? But anyway, those are all probably working together somehow. Yeah, the restlessness and fatigue is, if we want to put it simple and want to find a reductionist answer here, the restlessness and fatigue, the restlessness is an chronically overactivated cortisol system, with the purpose of providing sustained energy to the body for stressful ongoing situations, and the fatigue situation is a deactivated cortisol system. And there's also obviously other hormones and neurotransmitters, which are deregulated, like adrenaline is lower, dopamine is lower, serotonin is probably lower. But here, overall, the dysregulated hormonal system leads to fatigue or restlessness, and then that causes changes in energy provisioning of different body systems. Like the immune system doesn't get such a big share of the energy anymore, so that they become compensated and get issues. Yeah, okay, awesome. Really interesting. So there is another kind of part, which I think would be really helpful for people to understand to, which really helps what you're describing become accessible, which are the three archetypes of stress profiles. Could you talk a little bit about those three stress profiles and the profile in terms of maybe the person, but also maybe the data? Yeah, what I just shared is basically the neurobiology of stress, and these are concepts that are very well known as the scientific literature. The three archetypes is more experiential based on the people we work with. And in order to simplify it, we usually call people green yellow or orange, or rather the current state, green yellow and orange. And the green people are those who actually feel very vibrant, very energetic, they're their personal best at this moment, and their immune system is completely well regulated. They're responding to stress well. They get out of stress very fast. They sleep well. They don't have any issues with any of the body systems that I just mentioned. The yellow is the person or the situation in your life we have all been there. I've been there for sure is I don't feel I'm as sharp anymore as I was two years ago. My gut health right now is an optimal. I'm getting the flu or the cold a little bit more often. So immune system doesn't work perfectly right now in the winter season. So something as a little bit dysregulated at this moment. And then the orange type would be, oh, now we have to look out. We are not in the burnout yet. But we have multiple body systems which show signals that something is off. And we also have that fatigue stage already reached. We are no longer only in the restlessness state anymore for most people. So essentially this is a good way of looking. First, am I in a restlessness or for tick mold right now? That would be a good question, right? Is my world going faster or significantly slower than when I'm in a green state? That might be first indicator I'm in yellow or orange. And then the second question would be, how many of my body systems are no longer working?
us they are supposed to be. I have a lot of lower back pain right now, right? Maybe that's just because I sit wrongly on my chair. Yeah, it might be, but let's look into it a little bit closer. I also noticed that I have more diarrhea than I had three months ago. That's usually a sign of stress or constipation. And the third thing I noticed that my level of fatigue is very low, and also my doctor told me my inflammation levels are a little bit higher. So now I have three body systems. They got the muscular skeletal system and the immune system where all have indicators that they're off. And that's a clear sign if it comes together with fatigue or restlessness that I'm in the orange zone. So it's essentially about noticing body systems, signals, and the more of systems are impacted right now, the more likely it is something is going on in my life that's stress-related. Yeah, I mean, you know, without getting into the state of our medical systems, I mean, certainly here in the US, but anywhere, maybe in Europe or anywhere else. I feel like the first thing we do when we're in a situation like you're just describing is think about what medicine we should be taking, right? Or micro focusing in on the back pain. I have to do something about the back pain rather than holistically thinking about what's going on in my life that's maybe causing or just honestly just looking at stress, just saying where am I experiencing stress or how am I dealing with stress that is not optimal or that's causing me to have these problems. And this is what I think is so awesome about what you're doing is because it's shining a light on that aspect of it rather than only micro focusing on these other things. I don't know, would you agree? Yeah, I think those people who manage stress really well, those superstar clients that we work with. They are actually really good in detecting the weak signals. They notice, oh, whenever this is happening, I'm getting this little ulcer in my mouth, not relevant for any doctor in the world, but it's one signal. And that comes together with heightened neck tension. And I'm also noticing in that meeting, I've been a little bit more irritable than I was last time. So now I have three signals here. What am I making out of this? So the best executives in terms of resilience that we work with are able to notice those weak signals before they become serious signals. And our correlating them with their own experience of stress, energy levels, and fatigue. And once you are becoming really good at that, like a good data analyst, you are much better able to steer yourself. And that is way before you have a reason to go to the doctor. That's, I mean, that's like so amazing. I mean, that's just like, I don't know, I feel like this is like so radical in terms of like helping us understand and be tuned into our own signals. But it is so customized, right? Because we can't rely on what other people might experience that's different from us, right? So it really does have to be customized. You know, in a perfect world, people work with you and go through the diagnostic and understand very deeply just at a very topical level, understanding those early warning signs. What can you do to detect those? And like you said, like a data scientist sort of like notice, understand or, or yeah, pay attention. What can you? Look, a good framework is the seven body systems that we look at is basically going through it for your own self assessment. The first body system we look at is this stress hormone system. How do you know it's dysregulated? First thing is you feel wide and tired at night. Basically, it takes a long while for you to fall asleep. That's probably an elevated cortisol level, right? Then you are not able to get out of bed in the morning and it takes you one hour or so to really be in your own energy. That is probably a blunted cortisol response. So that's that self detection of how restless am I today? Zero to 10 and how fatigued am I today? Zero to 10, particularly in the morning. Okay, so that's an easy one to determine. You can track that every day, right? We don't need a cortisol test for that. The second thing is your nervous system. That's how fast are you switching between stress and recovery? Acute stress and recovery? All that colleague annoyed me before two weeks ago, it took me two minutes to get out of that reactivity. Now it takes me the entire day. So in a way, the half-life time of your own reactivity is a good tracker for the nervous system. How long are you in order to have to be triggered? Which is interesting. Can I just say that it's not like how often you get triggered? It's how much or how long you respond to it? Yeah, exactly. How often you get triggered depends a lot on your environment, right? That's out of your control. But how long you're staying in that emotion that depends mostly on you. I love that. The next, so these are kind of the two leading indicators of stress, your nervous system, the amount of reactivity you carry with you and how fast you downregulate from it. And the first one is a fatigue versus restlessness. And then the other five systems we look into is your gut. An easy way of tracking that is frankly the most effective way of tracking gut health is tracking your stool. There's a Bristol stool scale, which you can all Google. And you just see where's my stool quality in the last week on average versus the next day's on average, right? If it goes towards constipation or diarrhea, that's a good sign. Something is off. Another system is your immune system. Your immune system is all about, am I having little infections? Do I develop herpes right now? Is there some ulster coming up? Is there some joint pain because of inflammation going on? These are good markers. The next system would be mental health. How is my level of depression? How do I know my level of depression that depends on how much am I looking forward to the future? How much hope do I have? How much joy do I feel? How much percentage of the day do I feel joy versus hopelessness? That's a good sign of it. And then anxiety is all about the level of irritability and uncontrolled worry that I have. Is it easy for me that comes back to the nervous system? Is it easy for me to shut down worry? Worry, it's very normal. We all have it, but the question is how long does it stay? And then the musculoskeletal system is the next thing that I can track. What's the level of body tension? Right? Do I have little aches and pains everywhere in my lower back and neck in particular? I'm not so much. How freely can I breathe? Can I breathe into my diaphragm or is my breathing stuck in my upper body? Are my shoulders moving up while I'm breathing? That's usually a sign of shoulder breathing, usually a sign of stress, belly breathing, the belly moves out, this usually sign of relaxation. Let me see if I'm missing a system. I think we have most of them. Yes. So I think, and the last one, oh yeah, is the cardiometabolic system. That's all about how much sugar cravings do I have? Am I overly focused on sugar and it's impossible to control myself walking towards a fridge? That's probably a sign cortisol is driving that energy demand up. So in summary, you have seven bodily systems and just mention them and you can basically explore what's the state of each of them is. And the more are dysregulated or the more show signs, the more likely there's a chronic stress issue. Right. Wow. So helpful. I mean, this is incredible, because I think that you really laid out, I mean, you know, there's a bunch of them, but you really laid out very simply, I think, and very excessively, how I can pay attention to any one of those pretty pretty easily throughout like, and if you know, like you do with your diagnostic, like take a week out of your out of your month or right or whatever, he's going to show something on the screen for those of you who are on YouTube. Yeah. So can you describe what's here for people who are listening and seeing? Yeah. For everybody who's watching on YouTube, we are showing our own stress diagnostics, which not just on felt senses or in symptoms assessment that I just guided you through, but based on biomarkers shows the state of each system for an example client. But in a way, you don't need to measure all of these biomarkers that we measure for each of the systems. As I just guided you through a simple framework of noticing the state of each of them as well. Yeah. What's awesome about what you're showing right now is you're showing numbers, right? You know, in terms of where you land on each one of these systems. And then what's kind of interesting too is that it shows here on the report, your stress age is two years younger versus your actual age. And so that's an interesting. So that's, can you tell, so when you say stress age, what does that mean? Can you describe that a little bit? Yeah. We measure for the sapiens diagnostics around 350 different markers of resilient stress and health and many of them are biomarkers. And what we do in order
to calculate your stress ages. In the scientific literature, there's something that's called the hazard ratio. That basically means how much greater are the risk, is my risk of dying if a certain biomarker is elevated. For example, if my blood glucose in the last three months is elevated by, instead of a 5.0, it's a 7.0, then my increased risk of dying is, I'm making an up because I don't have the number right now in my head, but it's an odds ratio and increased risk of dying of 50% for example. We go through each and every individual biomarker where their scientific reference range is around the hazard ratio, and then we summarize all of them and we tell you basically how all your body is instead of how all your chronological ages right now. That's where the stress age comes from. It kind of makes sense because if you are under especially severe stress in any one of these categories, for a long time, that is going to impact your potentially your longevity of your life because what you're doing is you're projecting into the future of if that continues therefore versus if you can fix this now or figure out how to regulate this better, then you're going to add time potentially to your life. Exactly, I think the empowering message here is not that you are potentially older than you are, but that you can change your age as well. An easy way of changing your ages, getting your blood pressure down, getting your average glucose down, getting the evening cortisol level down so that it helps your sleep, one of the markers we measure sleep duration and sleep quality for example here into this model. These are all things that are in your control and that literally reduce your biological age. Yeah, that's awesome. I just feel like we could talk for a lot longer because this is so interesting and I think really, really helpful. I guess I'm curious, what has sort of, I mean, I know that you went into developing sapiens and over time it evolved into what it is now, but for you just personally, what's the biggest thing that stands out to you that's like, I'm so glad I learned this or this is a game changer or you know, I mean, for you personally, what sort of stands out now that you look back from where you're going? Well, what touches me most emotionally is all the stories we worked with around 7,000 executives by now in the last four years and some of them was absolutely fascinating companies that I'm such a big fan of, the big investment banks for strategy consultancies for example. And the stories of the individuals that goes through our programs are really touching, showing that I was completely restless, was incapable of concentrating on reading a page in a book and now I'm feeling so much more in my own power and so much more calm, which is validated by data. I think that's a big point that brings me joy and people showing that they are much more able to be present with their kids for example. Sometimes we get these pre-possed data from big groups which do our diagnostics like a top 200 group of a big FMCG company for example does it and we see the average results pre versus six months after our programs with expert interventions workshops on nutrition, exercise etc. And the recent cohort for example had a 50% absolute reduction even in cortisol level which is just a number but imagine how that translates into the amount of present minutes at the dinner table of your family, right. So this is really what inspires me. And then another way of answering a question of what I have learned, I think I went to demonizing stress after my Taiwan diabetes diagnosis into really celebrating the power of it as stress is just energy mobilization. It shows the power of the body to shift just on the recent weekend I was running an ultramarathon of 70 kilometers which put massive stress on my body, right. Yet it also helps the body to adapt. So really all biological systems are designed to adapt and to grow by stress and that's why we believe that stress is nothing bad but it's rather something that's really powerful if you know how to dose it right. It almost sounds like and you've been kind of saying this along the way throughout our conversation I feel like you have a like I don't know if this is the right word but like a reverence for the for the body in mind like it's like you know it's powerful it's smart it knows something and it's almost like can we just tap into that knowledge and power so that we can live a better life and and live a great life that is both enjoying it enjoying our personal lives and also still not sacrificing ambition and having you know work that we love and that we're working hard at. Yeah yeah I strongly believe that when my body tells me a signal I'm getting sick there's a disease even my own Taiwan diabetes that I live until every day that reminds me every five minutes that I'm having an high or low blood sugar that is still a really smart signal because it's always trying to bring your body back to balance and sometimes it's really hard sometimes a signal has to be a little bit more intense short term but that does not mean your body is broken there's no bad hormone cortisol is not bad right it's rather an energy molecule it's really smart yet we usually live against those signal which is easy so I don't think the issue is stressed the issue is not what the body does the issue is not as it does it disease but the issues that we are actually neglecting these signals the bodies as ours sending us and that includes myself and how I live that many years of my life. Yeah it's the listening paying attention yeah which which again goes back to I think the powerful work that you're doing right because what you're doing is you're bringing that data to be able to pay attention and understand our own bodies in our unique ways and in our unique situations so that we can do all the things that you're describing which is to you know pay attention do different things understand make adjustments depending on kind of who we are and what's happening in our bodies. I know that we're going to have you back when we talk with Martin which I'm really excited about before we end our conversation just us anything else that like I didn't ask you that I should have or anything that you want to say to people who are listening right now about you know I mean either sapiens or about understanding stress or the body anything else that we missed. We didn't go into the nerdy side of the deep data that we measure so much so if anybody is curious about it feel free to reach out we have a conversation and we see how to measure those data for yourself that can be the cortisol the DHA the testosterone the progesterone the parasympathetic sympathetic dominance all these words that are not understandable I think at sapiens together with our scientific advisor was professor clemen's kishbam who is a leading expert in the biology of stress it's basically the one who has helped us to build the company I think we can help you getting really into the specific of how to stress your up for your body and I want to make people very very curious about what their body is telling them or what your body is telling you both through the signal that you can measure today right you get health etc but also through the not noticeable signals like the biomarkers so bringing all of that together usually empowers people a lot to yeah be better versions of themselves and getting out of difficult periods in life around stress as well yeah no I love that yes so so getting into those details and those numbers they can reach out to you directly to get some more of that information anytime yeah good very good good well thank you so much Jan Philip this was really interesting I learned so much and it was it was really good to hear as there's a lot of hope I feel like in what you're doing in the work you're doing with people it's really exciting so thank you for sharing it thank you Vinnie so one of the things that I loved about my conversation with Jan Philip is how personal his work is for him his story is so powerful and it's a great reminder that stress isn't just a leadership challenge right it's a human one that we all face many of us face really every day he's turned his own experience and hitting the limits of high performance into something that helps others understand and manage theirs in a deeply practical science based way so next week we'll bring this whole series full circle as both Jan Philip and Martin join me together the three of us will talk about what happened when Martin went through the Sapiens diagnostic himself what the data revealed what surprised him and how those insights are shaping the way he leads today and don't forget as a listener of transformative leadership conversations you can receive 20% off the Sapiens stress and resilience diagnostic
and Habit Change program. Plus, if you're on the fence and want more information, a free 15-minute consultation to learn more. Just use the code TLC or visit www.b-sapiens.com for details. You can also find more details on sapiens and this offer in the show notes. [MUSIC] If you're ready to take your leadership to the next level or empower your teams for success, I am here to help. Reach out to me directly at
[email protected] or check out my website at www.WinnieToSilva.com to learn more about my work in coaching executives and developing critical leadership skills and working with clients to build effective teams. You can find me on Substack, LinkedIn, and YouTube. I'd love to hear your reflections or suggestions for future topics. Because you are always welcome to take a seat at the table where every conversation has the potential for transformative change. [MUSIC]
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