The Science of Stress with Dr. Kristen Holmes and Dr. Greg Grosicki

0:00 I just think that the narrative around stress could not be more confusing. Your body can't really tell the difference between good and bad stress in the moment. It looks the same from a body perspective.

0:12 If something, there is some sort of negative event or some sort of stressful event in life, being fit has a protective effect over our physiological regulation, but also our psychological regulation.

0:22 It creates a buffer mentally, physically, emotionally, you know, and allows you to tolerate those stressors with, you know, more grace.

0:30 Woop does a really good job of encouraging folks to do this end-of-day windown, but ways that we can manage our stress during the day, some actionable steps so that we can set ourselves up to recover.

0:45 Dr. Greg Rasicki, welcome back to the Woop Podcast.

0:48 Pleasure to be back. How are you? How's your stress monitor looking, Kristen?

0:51 Uh stress is moderate to high today. I've been on the go, went for a really big run today. We've been doing a lot of recording today. So I have been definitely kind of more sympathetically driven, I would say, for majority of the day, which is yielding a higher score on my stress monitor. That is what we're going to talk about today.

1:13 Seems like some good stress to have.

1:14 It is good stress. Yeah. We could talk about the difference between, you know, what constitutes good stress versus bad stress. Um stress in general has it just is I just think that the narrative around stress today could not be more confusing. So hopefully we can uh reduce some of that noise and help people understand what are the actual signals that we need to be paying attention to.

1:38 And you know, when when when stress is um not working for us, how do we get ourselves back into a better situation? And and most importantly, how to think about stress on the Whoop platform. So maybe to start, Greg, just what's the difference between stress and strain on the Whoop platform?

1:58 I think first and foremost, when we're talking about stress, realizing that stress can be physical and that it can also be mental. And the strain on the Whoop platform is showing up from the activities that we're doing.

2:21 But it can also be mental though.

2:23 Yeah.

2:23 You know, if I'm just sitting here and having a really engaged conversation, my heart rate is probably higher. I mean, that is gonna be factored into strain. It's gonna become in strain as well.

2:35 Yeah.

2:35 So stress monitor on the Whoop platform. Uh, what exactly is it measuring? And just talk about the scale. Just give us like the kind of the overarching kind of framework of of stress monitor.

2:48 Yeah. So stress monitor is picking up, and I think a lot of people, or at least me, when I first started thinking about it, it's like, oh, it's picking up how you know you hear the word stressed. And I think most people hear the word stress and they assume bad and they assume psychological. We all know what that feels like before you take a test, before you maybe do public speaking, before you I don't know, something much more stressful.

3:12 Big trap job interview or something like that. That when we I think we hear stress, that's immediately what we assume is stress. Stress monitor reveals to us that stress can come in many forms, that it can come from physical things as well as from mental things. And we see that if you uh go out for a run, your stress is high.

3:34 If you do public speaking, your stress is high. Uh, if you maybe have a fight with someone, your stress is high. And so stress monitor picks up on all of that. And I think that that's a really important point about stress in helping to distinguish that stress can be good, like going for a run, and it can be bad, like if you're anxious about uh uh test coming up or a review at work or something like that, and your stress is always active.

4:05 So maybe where you could come in, Kristen, would be explaining maybe the difference or how you would differentiate between what's good stress and what's what is bad stress.

4:14 Yeah. So you stress is known, you know, in the world of psychology as as being good stress, right? And I think the important, you know, what we see on our platform, uh, and you know, a lot of these uh experiments have not really been done, but uh, and that's why I think some of our data is really interesting in that we don't really see a cardiovascular difference.

4:37 Um so if we were to look at stress that is appraised as threatening versus stress that's appraised as, or um uh if you're if you were to look at your day and you appraised your day as threatening versus challenging, your your stress score during the day isn't gonna really look that different in the face of a threat appraisal versus a challenge appraisal.

4:59 A threat being you're perceiving your day as threatening, that is, you know, um more of a negative lens, right? And you would kind of think about that as bad stress. And good stress would be you feel prepared, you're excited about your day. Um, that's a challenging kind of appraisal. So what we see in the data, threat and challenge actually look have the same signature on stress monitor.

5:27 And so what it makes us, I think, realize is that you know, your body can't really tell the difference between good and bad stress in the moment. It looks the same from a body perspective. Okay. Now, what I would say is most important to recognize is that because we're not going to see these really egregious differences in how it shows up in stress monitor, is you need to pay attention to, wow, okay, I actually am in a state of threat, right?

5:57 And understand that you probably need to reframe uh that situation as soon as possible so it doesn't take you down a spiral, right? And where that spiral occurs is not necessarily during the day, but during your sleep. And I think this is one of the big revelations in a study that we published in Emotion last year, where we looked at, I think roughly 39,000 folks who were who were basically giving us information about how they perceived their day and then and whether they perceived it as threatening versus challenging, then look back on their day.

6:35 Was the day threatening versus challenging? Um, and we had you know loads of this data and we're able to see very clearly that there's no real cardiovascular changes. So we don't really see heart availability, heart rate, blood pressure. There weren't really big differences in when you're appraising the day as threatening versus challenging, but we actually see that a threat appraisal impacts your sleep at night.

7:00 You get into less restorative sleep when you are appraising your day as threatening. So I think that's an important source of insight in that, you know, a lot of what we're able to, you know, monitor and some of the data that we're able to monitor can help you ask better questions about your state. And I think the extent to which you can reframe your day from threatening to challenging will really help you in the moment, certainly, you know, be able to attack your day like, you know, in a healthier way, I guess, and in a in a more proactive way.

7:40 Um, but I think most importantly, you'll have a more restorative sleep at night. So I think that was I think a really beautiful kind of study that we did linking your psychology and your physiology.

7:51 Yeah.

7:51 The other important thing to, I think, note about stress is that um stress is very different than worry. And worry is really a manifestation of anxiety, right? Or I think better said, anxiety is different than stress. Anxiety is essentially chronic worry. And chronic worry can put us in a situation where, again, it might not change what our stress signature looks like over the course of the day, but it absolutely manifests in our sleep.

8:19 And there's lots of, you know, there's a body of evidence that that indicate that is that indicate that that's the case. So I think when when we think about stress, it's really about, I think the it's the onus is really on the individual to identify the source of stress. And and, you know, and I don't think it's bad to label that stress as as feeling like it's functional and positive versus maybe dysfunctional and not positive, right?

8:43 Because when you've identified it and you've been able to decide whether it's working for you or not, then you can take corrective action, right? And and when you take corrective action, you are increasing your sense of agency, which um is going to probably help you sleep at night, right? And and also uh kind of convert that, you know, what maybe was a negative stress into a more positive stress, right?

9:08 Which again, we know will help your sleep at at night. Yeah. So, you know, I I think that's some interesting, I think, nuggets about stress and what we see in our data, how it manifests. I think for folks who maybe aren't, you know, familiar with stress monitor, it's it's essentially on a scale of zero to three.

9:28 Um, three being, you know, really high stress. And as you mentioned, that can be physical stress, mental stress, emotional stress, right? Um and it's basically looking at heart rate variability and heart rate continuously. Yep.

9:40 Relative to your own.

9:41 Relative to your own. Your typical day. So what else do people need to know about the scale?

9:46 Yeah, so uh zero to three, and we label them as like low, moderate, and then high stress zones, right? Um, if you go out and do some sort of exercise or physical activity, you're almost always going to be in the high stress zone. I think that's the perfect example of you gave it through the perspective of the psychological lens, in that you could be uh have this psychological stress in the form of a threat or a challenge, and both of them are showing up comparably in the physiology.

10:16 Your resting heart rate are so high.

10:18 Yeah.

10:18 Exactly. And your and your heart rate variability is going down. Physical stress similarly can have that effect on stress monitor. And that could be something like you go out and do a particular activity. Your stress would also be high physically from if you're working a job where you're on your feet all day.

10:38 I was uh talking to my father-in-law actually uh recently when he came to visit, and he was he just retired and he was like, oh, like this is the best. Like when I was teaching, I was in like a high stress zone all day, and he's like, now it's super low. And and he's like, now you know I can finally pursue my professional athletic dreams.

10:55 And I think that's actually he was actually touching on a really important point, right? That most of us, if we either exercise in the morning or exercise in the afternoon, it doesn't really matter, but let's just say me, I like to exercise in the morning. I go out and I accumulate good physiological stress, and that shows up in my stress monitor, it also shows up in my strain score.

11:18 And that strain score is reflecting the cardiovascular load that has come from doing that particular activity. But then, say uh we have a lot of meetings at work, maybe I'm working really intensely on paper revisions, and I stay in that two, maybe two and a half bouncing around stress zone all day. That's a totally different form of stress.

11:46 But it's still But not trivial. It's not trivial. And it is load that is being put on my body, and that's also showing up in strain score. If I'm going on a podcast or giving uh a talk in front of, you know, the the all teams talk, then that's also going to show up both on my stress monitor as well as my strain.

12:05 And I think from uh an applied perspective or an actionable perspective, I think considering the impact of both activity and then non-activity stress, if members are reviewing their day and thinking about, oh, you know, I I did some activity and and then I I was I moderate or high stress zone for the rest of the day, what is going to be the functional impact of that, like you were talking about, overnight during my sleep?

12:34 And one of the things that we see very clearly in the data when we look at uh recovery impacts among members is days in which members spend a greater portion of time in the high stress zone is associated with lower recovery the next day. Being in the high stress zone is generally associated with a lower recovery the next day.

12:53 Now, that could be for a variety of reasons. Could be because we did more activity, but it also could be just that we had a more stressful day at work. And that could be physically, it could be mentally, but all of those are gonna be additive to having an impact on our sleep that night and then our readiness for load, be it physical or mental, the next day.

13:16 And so I think if we're thinking about stress from the context of how is our body handling the uh allostatic or homeostatic load that it's being given in a given day, that's what I really think we need to think about in the context of this our body exists in this state or tries to exist in the state of homeostasis.

13:35 And it doesn't really matter, I think, if that stress is coming um from something physical or something psychological. We know stress is good. We know that if the body uh doesn't receive a stressor in form of like exercise, for instance, it won't adapt. The body doesn't receive the stressor of having to go up and speak in front of that all hands, it's not gonna get better at it.

13:57 Um, and but how does that show up on stress monitor? And then how does that impact the decisions we make going forward in the future? Are we gonna do things to potentially lower our stress um before the end of the day? And I think Woop does a really good job of encouraging folks to do this end-of-day wind down, and I'll let you talk a little bit more about this because this is a little bit more your specialty than mine.

14:20 But ways that we can manage our stress during the day, some actionable steps, maybe during the day or before we go to bed at night, so that we can set ourselves up to recover. Because that's the the yin and yang of stress, is that stress is good in appropriate doses. Right.

14:40 And it's really good when we're perceiving it as good. Yeah. And I think our perception of stress really, really matters. And I and I think, you know, we we don't necessarily talk a lot about from, we don't talk about stress from this uh lens necessarily, but I think it's really important. You know, there's a the very large body of evidence in in kind of the field of psychology whereby we have shown that if you perceive your stress as good, that's gonna have positive physiological benefits, right?

15:12 Um and we saw that very clearly in our in our study as well. So I think it's just worth calling out that you know, reframing your stress as positive to the best that you can. And I'm not talking, you know, about being Pollyanna. She, you know, sometimes stress is actually bad, right? And and um, but I think noting that, okay, this is isn't great, but how do I get myself back into control?

15:33 Right.

15:33 How do I get myself back into a you know kind of a place of agency around that opportunity, right?

15:41 Yeah, and and I just that that constant reframing, I think, is really uh such an important hallmark of positive psychological functioning, right? And in in a in a um a hallmark of just kind of uh being a healthy adult, right? Um, is being able to kind of reframe stress so it can serve us. And and I and you make a great point, you know, like stress generally isn't really bad, right?

16:05 It's it's usually an opportunity, you know, for us to to grow or evolve or learn something new. And, you know, a lot of that is just getting curious about that stress potentially or that stress sore. So yeah, so that's just a little bit on the psychology, psychological side in terms of how we can think about it.

16:21 And I think just um, you know, this idea that um we we want, you know, stress, whether it's good or bad, is going to accumulate over the course of the day. And and this is reflected in our data and that, you know, high stress is going to basically require more recovery, whether it's good or bad. And I would probably argue the the perception of bad stress, you probably need to build in more recovery time.

16:48 That's just because it's it's just been more mentally, physically, emotionally taxing on you. So it stands to reason that you would want to take more time to recover from that stressor. If if you're perceived that as really positive, you probably are gonna be able to get away with maybe less recovery, right?

17:03 Because it it's all the points about maintaining homeostasis, you know, in the face of positive stress, like you can imagine your cells operating more efficiently, like the physio, like your temperature regulation, your blood pressure, all that is happening more efficiently, right? In the in the face of a positive perceived stress versus negative, right?

17:21 You know, that wear and tear, that that allesthetic load looks different, right? So that's why I think this reframing becomes really, really important, right? To get yourself back on a good track and and get your body to a place where it's operating more efficiently.

17:33 Yeah. Yeah. I think the reframing thing is one from like a physiology standpoint, I think that I had never really thought of, but from like the perspective of an athlete. And uh, you know, in college I had no problem going out and like having like a day of speed work.

17:48 Yeah.

17:49 And now it's like, oh, the like the desire to go put myself through like some zone four, zone five, and it's like, well, and then and then you know, like learning from like the field is like, well, maybe it's not like I have to go do speed work, it's like I get to do speed work. Like and you think about reframe it from the perspective of, well, like two weeks ago I was traveling or injured or you know, had something to do where I couldn't do it.

18:17 And so is it like something that you have to do or is it like an opportunity? And that does totally change the change the game, I would say.

18:24 It does, you know, and I think it's it's always, you know, just connecting your behaviors back to your why, you know, or you know, especially when things are tough, you know, and it's like not something that you you know you want it, it's something you value it, you know, you know that it's it's something you care about.

18:38 It it gets you closer to the person you aspire to be, but it that's painful, right? Zone four or five is painful, right? So you kind of have to like yeah, talk yourself into it and and just remind yourself of of why. And also, too, you bring up a good point, like this negative visualization can also be, you know, what is it gonna feel like if I don't do it, you know?

18:56 And and I I always imagine myself like looking at myself at the end of the day in the mirror and like who do I want to see? You know, and and um and I think ultimately like that's how you build self-esteem, you know, is is is really that reputation you have with yourself and and you you develop that reputation through just moving through these hard moments and and kind of talking about it.

19:16 Diamonds are made under pressure, right? And so if you're not if you're not feeling stressed and you're not like uh you know, I love Sahil Bloom's work and he always talks about this all the time. And it's like if you're not pushing yourself, then you're not living up to your full potential. And so if you're not feeling this stress, then you're leaving you're leaving something on the table.

19:32 And at the end of the day, you know, you think about what it is you did during the day in your life. I feel like if you're not experiencing that stress, yeah, then what have you left?

19:41 Yeah, and and we know inherently stress is good, you know, back to the original thesis. Yeah, and I and I think we I think having um a a visual of of how you're building stress over the course of the day and and how much um and and and maybe how much recovery you need to build in to account for that stress is really the source of insight.

20:03 Yeah, and that's something I love about the stress monitor. For me, I love how it does it by the day of the week. And I always notice, I'm sure everyone else does as well, that on weekends I accumulate more stress, and it totally makes sense. Despite the fact that I'm not working, which working is only moderate stress.

20:20 You are taking care of a three-year-old.

20:24 Six years old at home, and then you know, you're gardening and you're mowing the lawn and trimming the hedges and running errands, and it's like that's very different than sitting in front of the computer for eight hours a day. And so I think one of the like, yeah, unique things about the stress monitor is realizing that I think it really provides you with a lens into what does that stress look like in your life 24-7, and then what impact is that having on your sleep and recovery?

20:52 And everyone wants to sleep more. We know that one of the things that is most possibly associated with good sleep performance is having low stress before the end of the night. So, what are the things putting you in high stress before the end of the night? And uh caffeine, alcohol, eating a large meal, and so learning intense conversations, right?

21:13 Yeah, yeah, learning from the stress monitor, maybe even a movie that you're like totally wrapped up in. Using the stress monitor as this index of your window period, and you know, and maybe even taking proactive things, working on some of the breathing and meditation uh guides that we have in the app to set yourself up for the most restful uh sleep possible.

21:37 You bring up such a good point. I used to do this more often. I might need to get back to it, but but just getting my stress monitor, my stress down to under one before I even try to go to sleep. Yeah. Um, is probably a pretty good, you know, like you know how sometimes you can feel like you're too wired to like settle into sleep?

21:55unknown Yeah.

21:56 No reading papers before going to sleep.

21:58 No, no, no, no, definitely.

22:02 I know exciting and non-restful night.

22:04 I definitely have like I know what I can read and yeah uh before bed. I I would say like journaling pretty much is a neutral, like it's just like a really good, yeah. And I would say in terms of like one of the best wind-down techniques and ways to reduce stress, lower anxiety, which we know is um, you know, can obviously increase feelings of stressfulness.

22:24 And um I would say we don't have the data around anxiety and stress monitor, but I would imagine um folks who are anxious are hovering at a pretty high stress, and I would say high sleep stress, right? Because we're measuring stress again 24-7. So your sleep stress score is really, I think, a pretty cool source of insight, which is also, I think, highly correlated with sleep efficiency.

22:48 I would imagine, right? It's really hard to have efficient sleep when you're high stressed, right? Yeah. But just maybe recognizing, I think, you know, if you were to drink alcohol, for example, it's almost worth like letting that alcohol run through your system and get your sleep score or your stress score low enough to to a point where you can actually, because you might fall asleep because you're sleepy, but you're not going to get into that restorative sleep.

23:12 So I don't know, it's interesting. I'm Jamie Wedo, our former chief technology officer, used to like she'd run these like experiments where she'd have like a glass of wine or whatever, basically just like run, let the the run the wine like run its course, and then once her stress gets back down to normal, then go to bed.

23:29 Yeah.

23:30 I was like, oh, that's an interesting like strategy. I'm like, I like that. Um, but you know, it that's where I think these data can be kind of helpful and playful, even, you know, like and just kind of delightful in that we can start to just see how our body is responding and reacting to stuff and how that might, you know, contribute positively in this case to, you know, lower stress during sleep, which we know is a better outcome in terms of recovery and rejuvenation and all the important physiological, you know, and biological things that are happening during sleep can help facilitate that.

23:59 So yeah, so thinking, you know, definitely the the proximity of alcohol and food prior to when you intend to sleep is definitely part of I think that window, right? Yeah, that's huge. And then um all the the laundry list of things that you mentioned, and then I think just some very simple, like slow paced breathing.

24:19 Uh to me, like when I get up and go to the bathroom and I come back, you know, I immediately get into, you know, I take two big deep breaths and just like, and then I go right into my slow-paced breathing. I shut my mouth, I breathe through my nose, and then I wake up in the morning. You know, like it's like it's just no fail, like gets me right back into that really super deep, restful sleep.

24:39 So I have I do that same technique, like when I basically turn off the light, like I just get into, you know, a couple deep breaths, you know, kind of stabilize, get my heart rate nice and low, and then just go into my slow pace breathing through the nose and pretty magical, like uh, but but I think that getting ourself into the lowest possible state of stress prior to bed is absolutely one of the most important paths to restorative night sleep.

25:04 Yeah, and to be abundantly clear, if stress score, which it is, is comprised of your resting heart rate and heart rate variability relative to yourself, and sleep in theory should be the most restful portion of the day, then if your heart rate variability isn't high and your stress score is high when you're asleep, there's some underlying issue going on.

25:24 And yeah, to make this very clear, Bill von Hippel, our colleague, you know, looked at associations between individuals who had high sleep during stress. And one of the things that that was actually associating with was hypertension or high blood pressure, which is a leading cause of the story.

25:39 High stress score during sleep is associated with high blood pressure. Yeah. Exactly.

25:42 Yeah. And so with the knowledge that our stress should be quite low when we're sleeping, I think looking at our, like I talked to earlier about how one of the things I loved about the stress monitor in in particular was looking at how the activities I'm doing throughout the day or differences between weekday and weekend might be affecting my recovery.

26:03 But also looking at what are the behaviors that are impacting our stress during sleep. Because to be abundantly clear, your stress should be basically flatline when you're in sleep. And if it's not, then below one. Time to take time, yeah, time to course correct, right? One of the things that I think all WOOP members notice, and we've talked about this in in the HRV podcast, um, is alcohol.

26:24 And if I have alcohol before bed, it's wild to see myself go to sleep in the twos and then it goes up to the two and a half, and like very oddly, I like wake up right when it starts plummeting down, just probably leaving my system, which is very strange. Yeah. But like that's not supposed to happen. That's not s signifying any sort of like restful state during sleep.

26:42 And so, like you were talking about avoiding the whatever it is, late night eating or uh having alcohol before bed, and then doing things like journaling or slow pace breathing before we go to sleep and putting ourselves in that one state.

26:58 I can actually see obviously dimming lights huge, right? In the in the hour, so leading into you know, whenever it is you intend to sleep, huge.

27:06 Yeah, I can generally look at where my stress monitor is before I go to sleep and predict my recovery the next day. Like it's it's like, oh, tomorrow is gonna be a good one because you know you're like very wound down, so you're gonna have a really restful night of sleep.

27:18 And I would say, you know, just back on the light piece, you know, like right now, just looking into the light that increases my heart rate, um, suppresses yeah, HRV, um, which it should be, right? Like I'm supposed to be in this sympathetically driven state during the day. Like my body is alert, it's activated, it's ready to go.

27:32 You know, all of that is a positive impact of just being awake and alert, right? But it the opposite is true after the sun goes down. You know, we want to make sure that we're limiting or eliminating, you know, the bright overhead light. You know, we want to allow our heart rate variability to rise, we want our heart rate, our heart rate to decrease, and and light modulates that in really powerful ways.

27:56 So light is another lever that we need to leverage as it relates to stress.

28:00 Yeah. And if we think about the clinical implications of that, I recently saw a paper that was looking at REM sleep in particular as a predictor of, I think it was maybe either Alzheimer's or Parkinson's later in life. And so if we're thinking about the importance, you know, it's easy to think, oh, here I'm, you know, 38 years old.

28:19 It's like if I'm stressed during sleep or my sleep quality isn't great, it doesn't matter. But as a matter of fact, this paper would very much argue with that, that my sleep quality now and taking action to make sure the quality of sleep I'm getting by lowering my stress before I go to bed could put me a uh lower risk for developing some of these, you know, uh disorders of aging like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's down the road, which are things that we clearly want to avoid.

28:44 I mean, we know at this point, I think from the data that um, you know, Alzheimer's does not start when you're 70. It it starts in your 20s and 30s. So it is a slow roll. Um, and your behaviors today matter, you know, and that's just the reality of the situation. And I don't think it's anything to get stressed about, but it's now you know, right?

29:04 And you can be doing some. I know, exactly. Um I think, you know, one of the the things to maybe pay attention to too that we we see in the data. So um, so high stress during the day, but you perceive it as challenging, like you're like, you know, moving through your day, like you're busy, you value what you're doing, you know, you have high motivation, um, but then you also have really high stress during sleep.

29:30 I think both of those things could be true, right? I would say that in in those scenarios, um maybe implementing, well, number one, I I I wonder if high stress during the day, and it's it's not threatening, it's you know, on on average, we're perceiving that that that stress during the day is challenging, but we have high stress during during the night.

29:56 Would you think that would be a profile of an unfit person?

30:00 I would say it would be an undesirable profile.

30:03 Okay. If if folks find themselves in a situation where they're like, no, I feel really good about my day, but gosh, I I definitely have this high stress profile. I guess I'm wondering, you know, what do we what would we tell that person? Yeah. You know, if if there's anything that we we can tell them.

30:18 Yeah, I'm a physiologist, right? So I'm gonna take it back to and I'm an exercise physiologist at heart, so I'm gonna take it back to that. And it would be aching to, yes, it's good to exercise for an hour during the day. But what you shouldn't be doing is going for a walk for 24 hours, right? Like that is not gonna be right the same thing.

30:36 And so that kind of like we spoke to a little bit earlier, that stress is good in appropriate doses. And so even if you're perceiving that stress as a good thing, maybe you know, quit the exercise you're doing during a day, uh, the stress without appropriate recovery will eventually wear you down. So it's good that you had activities during the day that were filling your cup and that you enjoyed and that you felt you had the capacity to attend to.

31:12 But that in order for us to our bodies to rest and adapt and to learn from those experiences, that we need to implement appropriate wind-down procedures before going to bed so that we're not having that stress, because we know that that tonic stress effect or tonically activated stress system is a volt ultimate ultimately going to lead to dysregulation and the compressed autonomic response.

31:42 And that's exactly what we see in aging, and we talked about that in the episode on H in HRV, is that as we get older, and so I guess to answer your question, I would say that it's probably reflective of someone who's less healthy. I would probably say that as we get older or overtraining, or overtraining, exactly.

32:00 It's something less healthy. So that's why I didn't want to use the word on it. Yeah, yeah, I think less healthy. It's it's someone who is constantly in this stress activated kind of state, yeah. Exactly. And so finding, you know, ways to dissipate that stress before we go to sleep would seem pertinent in in situations like that.

32:21 And I would say even breaking up that stress during the day could potentially be a really powerful intervention. You know, using, we have inside the app, we have basically a breathing technique that allows you to activate your system. I call it super oxygenated breathing, which is you know, big inhale, short exhale, and you're repeating that for cycles.

32:41 You have a breath hold and then a release, and you repeat that, you know, a few cycles. And then we have also a a deactivation breath work called the physiological psi, which has proven to be the most efficacious breathing protocol to in the moment deactivate or reduce, reduce your heart rate, increase heart rate variability, and basically, you know, just um bring the autonomic nervous system kind of back into balance, I suppose.

33:07 And and that technique is basically just a deep inhale. You know, once you get to the top of that inhale, you take in one more, you know, kind of inhale and then a long, slow exhale um through the mouth. And you just basically repeat that, you know, for a few cycles, and that will bring your heart rate down.

33:22 And and those are, I think, really worthwhile to basically build into your day. Yeah. So I'll go back to my office after like this, you know, kind of marathon three-hour recording session and I'll do some physiological sigh. You know, just kind of bring myself back. I'll do some and I'll probably do some slow based breathing just to kind of bring my heart rate down, knowing that I incurred this stressor.

33:41 Yeah.

33:42 Even though I perceive it as wonderful and challenging, I know that if I don't break up stress, good or bad, throughout the day with many moments of rest, I just don't sleep as well. Yeah. My my my stress score during sleep is going to be higher. I just like know that, you know, after, you know, I guess four or five years of having this kind of stress monitor data, I know that there's like this very strong relationship.

34:04 So I preempt that by making sure that I'm building in these mini moments of rest, I call it.

34:09 Yeah. And the data are also clear that if you are just, you know, having that chronic stress during the day, you're not going to be as effective at whatever it is you're trying to do. Totally.

34:20 You have it just a diminished like you you adapt to a lower level of functioning mentally, physically, emotionally over the course of the day. Yeah. You know, if you're kind if you're just stress, stress, stress, stress, stress without breaking it up with rest.

34:30 Exactly. Yeah. And, you know, again, taking it back to my exercise physiology route roots, it would be kind of like trying to do intervals without taking any sort of rest. And it's really the exact same thing. Yeah. Right. If we're trying to do, and this is something I, you know, all athletes that I ever work with, particularly the ones who are like a little bit new, the I they I tell them like there's no such thing as being the hero during the rest.

34:54 If we're doing like eight hundreds, for instance, and I'm telling you to take a two-minute break between those eight hundreds, yeah. It's like, for the love of God, you don't need to jog, just walking.

35:03 You don't need to be skipping, jogging.

35:05 We just see that reflected in the pace they run. If you're it very intuitively, if you're doing six times two laps around a track, if you you are going to 100% run the fastest average pace for those six eight hundreds, if the rest in between them is actually rest. Yeah. And it's the same thing from a psychological perspective.

35:28 If I'm trying to sit there and just bang my head against a table and write a paper for eight straight hours, and we've all done this, um, although no one does it anymore, thanks to the large language model, but but we've all done this, right? Or we did at least. Yeah. The new generation will never experience the late night crane.

35:45 Yeah, exactly. When we're trying to write a paper and you just sit there for six hours trying to work at it, and you you just hit this writer's block and you can't do anything, and then you step away, maybe go do some exercise, come back, and then all of a sudden the words are just flowing. Exactly. And so I think, yeah, breaking it up as a way to be more effective in the task that you're doing throughout the day, but also to set yourself up for a more restful night of sleep.

36:09 And you know, you did ask about fit the fitness component. Is that someone who's unfit? I think one of the beautiful things, again, being a physiologist, about being fit is that we know that as a result of that, we are more adept at dealing with stress, being physical or psychological, and that we can recover from if we are fit stress better, which is I think pretty cool.

36:34 And yes, from an athletic perspective, if we're doing intervals, that's great. But also from just like a general well-being perspective, if something there is some sort of negative event or some sort of stressful event in life, being fit has a protective effect over our physiological regulation, but also our psychological regulation.

36:54 It creates a buffer mentally, physically, emotionally, you know, and allows you to tolerate those stressors with you know more grace and yeah, and uh and and clarity. And yeah. I guess behavior that we that we have.

37:18 Yeah. One one of the studies I love most uh took individuals who are higher fit and lower fit and sleep deprived them. And there's a number of studies that have done this, but one of them specifically looked at uh blood pressure the next day. And sleep deprivation has a deleterious effect and that it raises blood pressure.

37:38 But people who are more fit don't show the same uh rise in blood pressure the next day, and there's all sorts of uh metabolic stuff to confirm the protective effect of fitness. Yeah. Anyway, it's yeah, it's a resiliency, right?

37:51 Oh, for sure. Yeah, and that and that's why obviously the the the less fit you are, the more at risk you are for cardiovascular events, you know, stroke, you know, it it's um, and that's because I mean a piece of that certainly is the blood pressure piece, you know, and and um, you know, even metabolically, the glucose response and all of that, you know, blood sugar and or insulin.

38:13 Yeah.

38:14 So so Kristen, one of the things that amazes me most is I feel like you're the queen of composure being traveling all around the world, um, doing sometimes four to five podcasts a day, uh, dealing with multiple Slack messages from the team. Um tell I think people would probably appreciate what are your secret unlocks to making sure that you're able to uh preserve a state of balance, get such high quality sleep, given that you have going on all you have going on.

38:45 Well, I I think I always carve out time uh during the day to just be by myself. And it doesn't have to be long, it could be just five minutes, you know, where I just really try to be grateful, you know, for for the the the life that I have and the things that I get to pursue, you know, professionally and um and just my family, you know.

39:08 So I really, I really try daily to like sit in that gratitude in in a really intentional way. And then I think the other piece is, you know, I I I really try to carve out time to exercise as well. I think that is wildly uh stress-reducing, and I just feel like a better human. I can just live my values, you know, just way more intentionally when I feel like, you know, I'm I'm building my my capacity physically and I would argue mentally as well.

39:36 And and then I I think the the final and maybe biggest unlock over the course of the last four years is is is is being more mindful. You know, I I've been become acutely aware of my attention and how I'm directing my thoughts and and my attention. And one of the techniques that I I've taken from Dr. Ellen Langer, who's a uh social psychologist from Harvard and has done tons of work on in the area of mind mindfulness and being less uh mindless, um, is is just this art of noticing.

40:12 And I I really uh am acutely aware of when I am noticing and when I am not. And noticing for me is just literally having my head up and taking in the environment around me. And we know that just literally creating separation from our chest to our chin immediately brings our heart rate down. Yeah, we reduce our stress.

40:40 Yeah. And so where we went or on our phone, yeah, our our head is down. Do we have the capacity to notice the things around us? No. So I think for me, noticing is about connecting to the people, things around me, and feeling like I'm a part of the world, you know, and um as it's happening now, right?

41:03 I think for me, like that has been one of the most important shifts in just how I approach being in the world. And um, and and I think has had a meaningful impact in terms of my ability to uh live my values with with more joy, more peace, and more energy.

41:24 Yeah, yeah, that's really good. I love that, especially the world we live in where everything is competing for our attention all the time.

41:30 I know. And our ability to discern, you know, what's important and what isn't important, like we need to kind of carve out that time to remind ourselves well, what is actually important, you know, and and are my behaviors supportive of who I want to be in the world, right?

41:45 Or are they not, you know, and and I think if we don't sound familiar with a book that uh that maybe one of us just wrote.

41:50 Yeah, yeah. It's very aligned with that. Yeah, that's the the thesis, um, for sure. But but you know, it's it's yeah, this is definitely, you know, something I've been thinking about for decades, you know, honestly. And I it's not uh not perfect, but but I definitely I think that that self examining examination and that awareness is um is the best that we can do, you know, and then and then just trying to, you know, align our behaviors, you know, with um with with the version of ourselves that we we aspire to as often as possible.

42:20 Yeah, no, I appreciate that. I think other people will too. Thank you.