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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.

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It is nothing.

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It's a completely different conversation.

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Yeah.

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What is it like growing up with a mother who you observe at a very young age?

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You were how old?

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I mean, my whole life.

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Your whole life?

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Yeah.

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Like, shoot.

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As a child, when you see a parent, someone you love, that is sort of gripped by addiction, what is that like?

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Yeah, I mean, I think at a fundamental level, you just feel deprioritized, I think, generally.

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You know, I think you feel, you know, you're unsupervised, number one.

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there isn't a lot of supervision, you know?

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So you end up like really having to fend for yourself.

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My dad worked a lot.

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You know, he was definitely a workaholic, such a good man, so much integrity.

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But I think that was his form of escape.

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But it kind of leads, you know, you got to figure out how to eat.

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You got to figure out how to do a lot of the basic stuff on your own.

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So you develop...

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a lot of independence, I think, but it, it's hard to, um, you know, form emotional attachments.

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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.

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What did you come to understand about your mother's addiction and what she was struggling with, if anything at all?

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Yeah.

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I mean, I think what was so sad about that time period is, you know, I think it was well understood.

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You know, I think a lot of those behaviors, I think, to a degree are normalized.

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And I don't know that the connection between depression—you know, she was—

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It's no question.

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She had massive seasonal affect disorder, which is one of the reasons why I'm so interested in, you know, kind of everything related to light and just the opportunity there for health.

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But, you know, she had major depressive disorder and, you know, was not diagnosed properly.

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I don't even remember.

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I have no idea if she ever even went to the doctor to, you know, to try to get treated.

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Yeah.

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So, I think the biggest thing that I learned is that we can actually make choices.

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And I know that there are, 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 actually control to reduce our vulnerability to some of these diseases.

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How has that experience defined and shaped you when you look back and connect dots?

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Yeah, I mean, I just, I always, you know, I was very competitive, high-level athlete representing the US.

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And so there's definitely trying to understand my own body and my psychology so I could perform my potential.

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But there's no question that like this whole, everything that like underpins the work that I do is trying to understand, you know, how we can,

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improve our own situation so we can, self-actualize and live our potential.

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And so that was, I always felt so bad for my mom.

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Why?

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You know, she wasn't able to become the version.

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of herself.

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Like I wasn't able to relax her potential.

47
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And she had so much.

48
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I can't believe you did this to me.

49
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Would you like a tissue?

50
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Thanks.

51
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You're a very special person and it all makes sense why you've got such an incredible drive and mission to you.

52
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I didn't know any of what you just said, but...

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I've never talked about that publicly, so I'm just, yeah.

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What a wonderful way to have channeled such an 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.

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Yeah, I... And I never want to like project my values onto other folks, but...

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But I think that's always been at the core of why I do what I do.

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And the reason why I coached for so long is I just love seeing people realize their potential or understand their potential, knowing that we're always, of course, a work in progress.

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But I just want everyone to be able to wake up and feel...

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you know, be energetic and be able to like really, really live the things that you care about, you know, and just in understanding, I think the path to that.

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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.

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And I think sometimes it takes folks time to connect those dots.

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And there's a lot of wonderful learning that comes with that.

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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.

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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 addiction or are currently enthralled by such an addiction.

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And the work that you're doing, the message you're spreading is going to prevent and lift some of those people out of that situation, which has

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has a wonderful karmic effect on the world.

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And I think if there's anything that we can convert our pain into, it is exactly that.

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I want to talk about alcohol.

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I've recently quit drinking alcohol.

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I think it was about three to four months ago now.

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It was so interesting.

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I had a conversation with some of my best friends.

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I said this on a podcast a couple of months ago.

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And one of my friends was an alcoholic.

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So he...

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managed to quit alcohol and he's writing a book about it.

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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.

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And we were sat there together around this table having dinner.

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And he was telling us about this book he's writing about quitting alcohol.

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And I was sat there thinking,

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That book that he's writing doesn't necessarily resonate with me because I've never had, I've never felt like I've had an addiction or really, to be honest, any problem with it.

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I'm such, I was such a casual drinker.

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I would have maybe one glass of wine a week, if that.

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There's probably months I've gone without any alcohol at all.

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So I couldn't think of a reason to quit.

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So really I was saying, Tim, 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.

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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.

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Alcohol, health, circadian rhythms.

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What's your perspective on all of this?

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Well, I like to think about it.

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I love the principle of non-neutrality, right?

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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 sleep and physiological things, and you've got the psychological things.

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And

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They're either going to support your values, kind of who you want to be in this world, or they're not.

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And I think that's the lens with which I look at alcohol.

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In what way is this supporting my values of growth and impact and presence and compassion and tolerance, the things that are core to who I want to be in this world?

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And I think when you look at it through that lens, the choices become really clear to me.

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If you're honest with yourself and you have some degree of self-awareness,

99
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understand what you care about, I think choices become a lot clearer.

100
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There's way, way more clarity about how to live your life in the micro, which is really what we're talking about.

101
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There's just many choices throughout the day.

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Does it support who you want to be in the world or does it not?

103
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And there's very little gray, actually.

104
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And the gray are excuses, in my view.

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And we can rationalize and make stuff up.

106
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you know, all day long, right?

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To make ourselves feel better.

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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, you know, I think a choice like alcohol becomes very clear.

109
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But it helps me to socialize, Kristen.

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Yeah, if you need alcohol to bond or to...

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you know, form a connection, there's probably something else going on that is unaddressed from my perspective.

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Is there such a thing as such a small dose of alcohol that it doesn't matter in your opinion?

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Yeah, I mean, I think it depends on who you are.

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And I think there's a lot of individual variability there as well.

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I know resveratrol is something that's talked about a lot, and there's...

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suppose in wine and grapes, there's resveratrol, and that's been linked to enhanced health and well-being.

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But I think you'd have to drink like 10 bottles or something to get the amount of resveratrol to actually make a dent.

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I don't think that's the argument.

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So yeah, I don't know that really any amount of alcohol is going to be helpful.

120
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And we know from the literature that just one to two drinks per week

121
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can have negative implications on health.

122
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So it's actually, I don't know that any, like even a moderate amount of alcohol is good for you.

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What's the implications for our circadian rhythms that we've been talking about?

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Yeah, it's mainly because it impacts sleep.

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It's going to impact when you go to bed and when you wake up.

126
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So I think that's the biggest impact.

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And I think, again, when we go back to melatonin, when you're disrupting that sleep onset offset, that's going to –

128
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obviously have all the downstream negative effects that we've already spoken about.

129
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So I suppose if we're drinking, we're staying out later, so we're exposing ourselves to light.

130
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So yeah, there's lots of, we're going to be eating later.

131
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There's other behaviors that accompany drinking that kind of pile on the negative effects.

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I was reading some research from the Sleep Foundation and it says that a 2007 study with 29 young adults found that moderate doses of alcohol up to one hour before bedtime reduced melatonin production by nearly 20%.

133
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That's the study on alcohol and melatonin in young adults.

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A 2018 study of 4,908 Finnish participants found that sleep quality was reduced by 9.3% after one glass of wine and by 24% after two glasses of wine and by almost 40%, 39.2% after three or more glasses of wine or an equivalent amount of alcohol.

135
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Yeah.

136
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Which is...

137
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Really, really staggering that your sleep quality could dip 40% after three glasses of wine.

138
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Oh, yeah.

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I mean, we just finished this analysis actually looking at alcohol and markers of recovery.

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So heart rate variability and heart rate.

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And literally with every drink, there's a linear relationship in the decline.

142
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And it is significant.

143
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So, I mean, yeah, we're talking...

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even one drink will produce clinically significant reductions in heart rate and heart rate variability.

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This was maybe the most compelling motivator for me to quit alcohol was when I got my whoop the first time, and then I think it was someone's birthday or something, so we went out and I had a glass of wine or something.

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But...

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I woke up the next day, looked at my heart rate variability, which is a measure of how well I'm going to be able to deal with stress and load and all those things the next day, how well my body's going to be able to deal with life.

148
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And it was flashing red, which is like a warning.

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And it says on there, when I clicked on the flashing red thing, it was like...

150
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did you have a really stressful day?

151
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Are you sick?

152
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Or did you drink alcohol last night?

153
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And I felt so targeted.

154
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I was like, how does this thing know that I had one glass of wine last night with my friends?

155
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Why is something flashing red inside of me?

156
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People keep diaries on Whoop, don't they?

157
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They keep like the Whoop journal, I think it's called.

158
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They do, yeah.

159
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It's a goldmine of information, actually.

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Really?

161
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Yeah.

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What have you learned from that in terms of alcohol?

163
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I imagine that's where a lot of the conclusions derive from.

164
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Yeah, I mean, we see a 6% reduction in next day recovery after alcohol on average.

165
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So this is, you know, one drink to 10 drink.

166
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You know, it's just basically looking at the average is 6%.

167
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Okay, so the average of, okay.

168
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So if someone was binge drinking, they could have a 30 or 40% reduction.

169
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Yeah, but it kind of, and we might, and that specific data point, we might have controlled for the 30 drinks.

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It's probably somewhere in the range of five drinks per night, and the average recovery reduction is 6%.

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And that's relying on self-reporting, right?

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So I wonder if there's biases in what people that had 10 drinks think they had four.

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Yeah, exactly.

174
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I don't really remember how many drinks I had.

175
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So yeah, how many drinks I had.

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Interesting.

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Super interesting.

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The other thing we obviously drink is coffee.

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Yes.

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Caffeine.

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Surely there's a correlation between circadian disruption and caffeine.

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Yeah, so that's definitely one of the circadian, it definitely can disrupt circadian rhythms if we're having caffeine within...

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eight to 12 hours, I would say, of when we intend to sleep.

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It's going to impact our sleep onset, of course.

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And even if we're tired enough where we're sleep deprived, we might fall asleep, but it will invariably end up disrupting or fragmenting our sleep.

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So we're not kind of getting into that deeper stages of sleep.

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We're not achieving the sleep quality that is going to allow us to wake up feeling restored and refreshed.

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So timing of caffeine is really important.

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All of this conversation makes me have a huge amount of empathy for shift workers.

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And when I say shift workers, I don't mean people working in warehouses.

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I mean doctors, nurses, firefighters, the police, truck drivers, people that are baking stuff.

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Yeah, anyone who's up between the hours of, you know, for more than two hours, between the hours of 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. is considered a shift worker.

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So it's, yes, there's a lot of individuals walking around who are shift workers.

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But people who are, you know, literally up during the biological night, you know, it's a huge sacrifice.

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We know those folks.

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on average, are going to die 15 years sooner.

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It is, you know, shift work is considered a carcinogen by the World Health Organization.

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It's, you know, shift work is, those folks make an enormous sacrifice.

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They're going to die 15 years sooner?

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On average.

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I mean, that's terrifying.

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I know.

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Is anybody trying to solve for that?

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Yeah, I mean, that's a lot of the work that I do is looking at shift work and trying to understand what other levers can we deploy to offset some of the impact of being awake during the biological night.

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And time-restricted eating as a lever, really thinking about when we're eating protein, when we're viewing light, and then,

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you know, what's the cadence of, you know, on, off?

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So we minimize the disruption to circadian rhythms.

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I mean, the fact is like the roster size at these hospitals are just simply not big enough to be able to, I think, deploy schedules that mitigate some of the risk associated with this disrupted circadian rhythm.

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But it is frightening.

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And, you know, there is a lot of work to try to understand how we can mitigate some of the negative effects.

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But it's a tough problem to solve.

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It's not just, I guess it's not just that those individuals will die, you know, on average 15 years earlier, but their quality of life, I imagine, won't be as good because if they're not sleeping consistently.

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Yeah, mood, depression, suicide.

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I mean, it's higher.

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you know, for folks in these professions, you know, who are having to operate counter to the naturally dark cycle.

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So let's talk about that in mental health, depression, suicidality.

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What's the correlation there between?

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Yeah, so there's a lot of interesting research.

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I mean, you know, one is just, you know, we talk about just the layperson.

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So getting outside of shift work, we come back to shift work.

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You know, if you look at this, most folks experience social jet lag, right?

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Which is basically characterized as...

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you know, a big difference between our weekday sleep schedule and our weekend's sleep schedule, right?

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So pretty much anyone, you know, between 20 to 30 probably is, you know, kind of falls into this bucket of having social jet lag.

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But one of the things that we, one of a research study we saw looking at specifically a social jet lag in college students, they saw that for every hour of variability between week, day, and weekend schedules, they saw a 17% increase in non-suicidal ideation.

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So these folks aren't committing suicide, but...

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They're fantasizing about committing suicide.

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And that increases 17%.

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And this was more pronounced in individuals who were already vulnerable.

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So kind of coming back to circadian disruption being present in 100% of mental health issues, we can see where shift workers would be extremely vulnerable to mental health issues, given that their variability, and we look at the WHOOP data, it's basically random in terms of looking at their sleep-wake time.

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It's so variable that it's like, we can't even see a pad, it's random, which is frightening.

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Why is that frightening?

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Because the more variability you have, like the more psychological and physiological, you know, negative consequences there'll be.

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Is there a correlation here between how we deal with stressful events in our lives as well?

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Because I'm assuming there must be.

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Absolutely.

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Managing stress throughout the day and the degree or even during the night can definitely increase your tolerance for stress.

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So deploying breathwork, for example, as an on-demand self-regulation tool to pay down stress

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in the moment stress can be, and to activate the paracentric branch of the nervous system can be really powerful.

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So, you know, I kind of call these mini moments of deactivation.

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So doing that proactively for folks who are in these high stakes, high stress environments is an amazing strategy.

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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,

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kind of a stress level that is above what would be normal, right?

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Like 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.

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So all of the kind of biological preferences are being bypassed, right?

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When you're up during the biological night.

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So to pay down some of that stress,

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these many moments of deactivation are absolutely critical for that population.

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So that means just literally taking 30 seconds where you're doing the physiological sigh, for example, which we know has emerged as being the most efficacious breathwork technique in the moment to reduce, not only in the moment, anxiety and stress, but actually your perception of anxiety and stress like in the future.

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What does that sign?

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the physiological side, it's basically a double inhale followed by an extended exhale.

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Perfect.

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It's exactly right.

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So basically like when you're crying, you know, you kind of do that double, double inhale followed by an extended exhale, but that like reduces stress in the moment and really powerful way.

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And if you do that, you know,

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five, 10 times, you end up activating the parasympathetic branch.

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So you're reducing your heart rate.

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And, you know, kind of doing that throughout the day is a great way to mitigate negative stress accumulation.

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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.

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Firing on all cylinders.

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Exactly.

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Yeah.

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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.

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Yeah, I mean, there's a relationship.

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We know that with every 45 minutes of sleep deprivation accrued on the Woot platform, we see a 5% to 10% next day decrease in mental control.

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Mental control.

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Executive function.

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So we measure this with an MBAC and a Stroop.

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So these kind of performance tests to measure executive function.

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And we see for every 45 minutes of sleep debt accrued, we see up to 10% decrease

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or decline in next-day executive function.

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And what does executive function mean for people that are?

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Our ability to make decisions.

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Okay.

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Use the word there, sleep debt.

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What is sleep debt?

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So that's basically what you need versus what you actually got.

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And that's highly individual, right?

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And that's one of the kind of beautiful things on the Woo platform is that we learn your body.

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We learn how efficient sleeper you are.

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We learn what your optimal sleep wake time should be.

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And we basically tell you how much time you need to spend in bed.

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So a lot of the work that 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?

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That tell us a story about someone's ability to kind of function in their environment.

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And one of the studies that we did was looking specifically at business executives, so CEO types.

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And we basically looked at, this one was a six-month study, looking at two different cohorts, I think equal distribution between men and women.

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And what we saw was for every 45 minutes of sleep debt accrued in these business leaders, we saw a...

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5% to 10% decrease in next day executive function.

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So the leader's ability to make decisions in the presence of sleep debt, you know, gets worse the more sleep debt you accrue.

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We did a follow-up study, and this one was wild.

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So we basically looked at, it was roughly, it was about 70 business executive CEO types, and we looked at all of their objective markers, sleep debt being one of them, and we look at the psychological safety of their direct reports during team meetings.

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And define psychological safety.

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How...

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how safe you feel to show up in your environment as your true, most authentic self.

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And what we saw is again, for every 45 minutes of sleep that the leader had,

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there was a significant decrease in psychological safety of the direct reports.

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So they felt less safe in their environment to show up as their true self when their leader had 45 minutes of sleep debt accrued.

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And some of these folks were carrying a couple hours of sleep debt.

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And there was a linear relationship between the amount of psychological safety and the amount of sleep that the leader had.

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So what was so interesting, and I think compelling about this research,

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They couldn't perceive their own cognitive, physical, and emotional declines, right?

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But that's what's so insidious about sleep deprivation is that you can't really tell when you're operating at a lower level.

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You just adapt to that lower level of functioning.

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but everyone around you can feel it, right?

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Just with how you hold your face, how you emote, the kind of eye contact you make, how tolerant you are.

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And you think about how,

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Sleep deprivation, and I think this is really what this research surfaces, is just, it's not just, sleep deprivation just doesn't impact me, right?

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It's gonna impact every single person I come in contact with.

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And from a business perspective, just from a sheer numbers perspective,

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Google did a study called Aristotle and they looked at a bunch of different metrics related to team performance.

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And what emerged in that study as 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 true self.

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And they brought in to the tune of $4.5 million more than teams who are lacking psychological safety.

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So this is like a really important concept that I don't think a lot of people talk about.

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But when we go back to this concept of the principle of non-neutrality, right?

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And what are behaviors that promote, enable you to live your values and kind of show up as your best self as consistently as possible?

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Minimizing sleep debt is right there at the top of the list.

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It's fascinating.

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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?

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Correlation between that and sleep debt?

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It's very well established that the more sleep debt you're carrying, you know, the more accident prone you are, you know, the more risk you're going to take.

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And yeah, we see this in the medical field.

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We see this, you know, in, in,

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you know, just car accidents.

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And yeah, the list goes on and on.

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Car accidents.

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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.

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Yeah, I know.

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It's, yeah, I mean, when we think about,

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you know, sleep, it's, we're not getting better at it as a society.

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And I think we're kind of coming at this conversation from the wrong lens.

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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.

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To me, that's the conversation.

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And it's not about spending more time in bed.

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And yeah, that might be what needs to happen, but it's about you're not going to get there.

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For folks who are not thinking about all the circadian things that we're talking about and some of the environmental stuff, the cold, dark, the quiet, yes, that matters.

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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.

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Yeah.

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The other study that I found that was super interesting was that a 2021 study found that less than seven hours of sleep is associated with increased risk of injury.

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And if this is sustained for at least 14 days, the risk of muscle and bone injury is 1.7 times, almost two times higher.

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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.

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That's right.

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Which is crazy.

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Yeah, it is.

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Yeah.

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And 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.

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Yeah.

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And that is certainly super evident in all the research that we're doing.

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What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode.

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If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below.

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Check the description.

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Thank you.