Track Your Sleep to Optimize Your Life | Harpreet Rai on Health Theory

there's more people that we can meet through social media write follow and learn from sounds amazing but i think also in those two things right we we are getting a little bit pulled away and it in fact is hurting our sleep which eventually actually hurts our productivity in the long run you don't get stronger in the gym you get stronger actually out of the gym in the gym you're actually getting weaker right you're breaking that muscle down right it's that recovery process right that actually happens it allows the muscle to grow stronger and take a more continued load if i could give you a pill and this pill would improve your memory right help you live longer and fight off cancer reduce your blood pressure increase the quality of your skin in your hair and how you look um you know also your testosterone production or your muscle repair who wouldn't want to take that pill everyone would right and that pill is sleep right yet 45 of us get less than six hours a night hey everybody welcome to health theory today's guest is harpreet ry he's a former investment banker turned entrepreneur who is the ceo of aura ring a sleep tracking company that is doing its best to help us all live our best lives and harpreet what i want to know about is why exactly does sleep matter it's a loaded question a great way to start um i think sleep matters for a bunch of different reasons i think sean stevenson said it really really well you know to your overall well-being and your health and your performance sleep probably does have a greater impact than both diet and activity combined um you know but the reality of it we all know it when we get a bad night of sleep we feel like crap right we're not productive we're sort of grouchy to the people around us can't perform well in the gym right and oftentimes just have low energy so there's a whole host of reasons on the health side but also just literally how you feel and how you know how you feel about life and your mood a lot of that has to actually come comes back to comes back to sleep if you had to push beyond what we know because i know people are super tense about what i'm about to ask you if you had to push beyond what you know and went into um hypothesis or what you suspect what is it exactly that you think is happening when we sleep like sure so we know that the brain is like cleaning out things but what what else is going on i think if you and one way i like to think about it is you know your body actually is operating you know mainly because of the release of certain hormones at certain periods of time and a lot of that is governed by something called like a central clock right um to your body right so we call that that kind of science circadian biology and it's a relatively new science so as you pointed out there's not a lot we know but if you want to think about actually hey what time do i get tired and then when i get tired and i go to bed what's actually happening why are certain fluids moving through my brain and removing toxins right why are actually memories throughout the day being sped up at three times the speed during rem sleep to help you learn why is certain hormones being released to actually bring your heart rate and your blood pressure down you know probably for you to recover a bit right and why is more testosterone and growth hormone released all these things are happening because of this master clock right and sleep is actually one of the governing factors that sets the time for all those things to happen and for the next day as well so you know i think if i were to theorize that having disrupted sleep or starting this clock or your engine you know if you want to think about that at different times or fragmented times doesn't allow your body and your mind to recover and function the way it should to lead you know a normal life or you know a great life where you can achieve your potential yeah so one thing like in today's society where and i'm certainly somebody who talks a lot about this like working your ass off grinding hard like really pushing um part of the reason that i'm so into talking about sleep and i want people to really understand how powerful it is is i worry that people think when i say that that i'm saying sleep doesn't matter and when in fact i'll say that it's probably from an experiential standpoint is one of the most important things from a cognitive optimization standpoint yeah um what drew you to sleep and like what's the background with the investment banking and all that stuff i think it's pretty interesting yeah i mean i would say i was always interested in technology that was probably like a passion of mine along with performance so i did study electrical engineering in college and worked on actually a lot of the sensors that go in these type of devices i got distracted as most people do in life and i decided to go into finance really because i had a lot of debt and i thought it was a cool thing to do right and um i guess what i just experienced firsthand was in my first year of investment banking i came in weighing about 140 pounds and i'm like five five on a good day maybe five six with my turbine but like you know i went from 140 pounds to about 185 and about yeah and about 50 weeks so almost a pound a week and i actually even back in college was probably like more health conscious than what i ate right didn't really drink that much you know was actually eating a lot of plants my parents were vegetarian grew up vegetarian and my diet didn't really change a lot and so i'm sitting there thinking well i'm basically eating the same in fact i'm eating less right i'm not moving around much so yeah i'm not working out but i'm eating less why am i gaining a pound every week and that's actually when i started to realize like well okay i'm gaining a lot of weight i'm actually losing hair you know you can't see it which is great but um i'm losing hair right and you know my skin is actually starting to look grayish like i literally had friends who i hadn't seen from college see them after the year and they're like like dude we know you've got a great job at you know on wall street but like looks like you've gained 40 50 pounds and like you look like crap so um that's when i started actually just researching a lot and learning about sleep i just started to like remember forgetting things and that never happened to me um so i just the more and more i learned about you know the issues you know the correlations with lack of sleep and weight gain and you know same thing with skin and how you look and also how you feel um it became obvious to me how how important sleep was just from experiencing it right so what what is some of the the biological disruption that happens when we don't get sleep like i know that there's um some pretty crazy um like if you're just looking at somebody's data and they had a bad night's sleep in terms of them looking like a pre-diabetic from their insulin response levels um what else is going on at a biological level that that sleep affects so um you know there's tons of studies out there not just one but literally probably close to 100 showing that the lack of sleep is associated with elevated glucose levels i think that happens for a series of reasons there's two hormones that you know we know today are pretty popular in controlling your appetite and also how full you feel after you eat those are ghrelin you know controlling your hunger hormone right like how hungry do you get how hungry do you feel and then leptin right how satiated are you after you eat how full do you feel and so i think one of the studies that was done showed that basically um a four hour versus eight hour night and you know it was almost like your your leptin levels right went down by 50 so even after you eat you still feel hungry and then your greenland levels right are actually you know shooting up so you feel hungrier you eat and you feel you know less full and um you know i think probably the reasons that's happened in the past is if you if you think about the times maybe you know historically in a paleo-era paleolithic area where we were probably operating in very little sleep they were probably under extreme conditions maybe we were being hunted maybe we were hunting right um and so i think some of that was designed and this is designed for your body to happen that hey under periods of stress like you're looking for food more you're trying to eat more store more right but in today's world and society right those those same conditions of less sleep you know aren't aren't applied right in the same way so it might have been designed for a good reason but but in fact now is probably hurting us going back to that first year in investment banking and thinking about the modern context when we're not getting sleep um i know that while i'm a huge proponent of sleep there have been times where my aura ring has told me off for not getting enough sleep sure um and i'll say that 20 of the time i'm knowingly reducing my amount of sleep and how do you think about that as as the ceo of a you know sleep betterment company yeah are there times where you'll intentionally not get sleep because there's a bigger priority of course like goals versus sleep where do you fall on that i think there's definitely periods that we all will have to go without getting enough sleep right i think that's inevitable um the question is how do we make people more aware of it and more conscious of it right and how do we also then once that awareness and consciousness happens choose to act on it even while on wall street um i ended up going from an investment you know i was at morgan stanley for a year an investment banking group i ended up going to hedge fund for nine years and i still worked really hard there got more sleep luckily but there it used to be hey i want to work out i want to get fit so i'd wake up at you know 4 45 to be in the gym by 5 15. so i often battled okay you know getting enough sleep to work out right and that probably actually led to a lot of injuries for me over the years i also think it's about you know social activities with friends you know it's natural to want to spend time with people and oftentimes you know everyone's sort of sacrificing their schedule a little bit to do it i think if you have families or loved ones that can be another area where like hey you got to take the kids to an event or you got to take them out to a party and they may throw your schedule off but the big one i do think is work um i think it's there's a lot of people you know probably a lot of your audience right even even me like we want to kick butt right we want to get in we want to work hard as the ceo of a company a sleep company i'm like do i want those guys sleeping an hour less and working on this to get it out on time or you know there's always a balance and i think you know we're not going to be able to i would say change people's lives and you know not say prioritize those projects or not but we want to make people more aware of it and that they can see the impact when they are choosing to do it and then frankly come back and recover i'll have people now that tell me hey man i still go on those business trips where i am back to back to back meeting right nine to nine right and then like maybe i brush my teeth and maybe i don't because i'm that busy that night right but then when i get back i see hey it takes me a week or two to get back and recover and then i take it a little bit easier i book less meetings then right i tend to try to actually get that extra hour of sleep and i'm not saying that kind of behavior is great but at least you become a little bit more conscious and don't try burning the candle you know on both ends forever right um so i think it's um there's a lot of things that have happened that we have abundance information right you know look at look at google's mission statement right organize the world's information and provide access to it sign me up right i wanna i wanna always be learning i want access to information you know facebook right like bring communities together bring people together right there's more people that we can meet through social media write follow and learn from sounds amazing but i think also in those two things right we we are getting a little bit pulled away and it in fact is hurting our sleep um which eventually actually hurts our productivity in the long run and what ways do you think that that kind of stuff is hurting our sleep is it just that we're allocating time to it or is there a whole another host of problems i think it's a much deeper than just time let's take facebook as an example all right let's say you know when we were all in high school and hung out in one friend's basement right or you have a couple friends over all right we're hanging out we're shooting the [ __ ] right we're talking about whatever we're catching up on you know some cute girl in math class or sports or you know some the new york knicks game that just happened but think about it this way um every 10 minutes the doorbell's ringing you're hosting you're going up and letting that person in making sure they're comfortable making sure that they have a drink right making sure that they have a place to sit and hang out with friends introducing other people what if that happens every 10 minutes not just for the first hour but for the next 12 hours right right what happens to you right what happens to everyone else in the room right like it's just think about that as a human i'd be like man you never you never even get a chance to see how you feel you never get a chance to really spend time with your friends right you're constantly being bombarded so i think i think that's part of it i think the same could go true for google like i love learning right i would say that's like one thing i've always been passionate about and why i like doing different things but if every 10 minutes something new pops up where like hey i was learning about this i didn't get to go that deep and understand it and something else comes in like you're just getting distracted and so i i literally look at the numbers i'm a numbers guy you know there's you touch your phone the average person does about 150 times a day right so if you're awake for 16 hours that's about 10 times every hour that's you know once every six minutes right so i think there's a deeper level of hey there's some satisfaction just like the buzz you get the party when you say hello to someone that you haven't seen in a while and you're excited but that constant bombardment right is is actually you know increasing anxiety right it's i don't think it's you know we have abundant access to information in people and i think that's great but also let's you know look at some of the other numbers depression all-time high suicide rates all-time high lack of sleep all-time high right obesity all-time high and so i think it's not just that you're spending the time doing it i do think it's a little bit in the way we were designed as humans that's distracted us um and and i think it's ultimately you know taking us away from our being conscious and being focused what do you mean really fast what do you mean that the way that we're designed as humans is part of what distracts us so i mean i don't i don't think as humans you know when they look at some of the network theories out there on the brain and how it compartalize information you know really more than 50 people in your immediate circle like that you interact with tends to be overloading but like you know you have these different groups right it might be immediate group family and really close friends then maybe one degree of separation and it may be another host of work right but now that that has 5x 10x 20x right and i think like it becomes harder for the human mind right and even just from a social anxiety perspective whether you have it or not to manage that as all these networks grow so much yeah when i think about what really plays on people sleep lifestyle definitely comes up one thing that i think a lot about and partly because i guess i am so like it doesn't work for me is how many people now smoke weed yeah and its effect on rem sleep yeah so i've looked at the oral ring stats of people that i know smoke weed dude it's [ __ ] crazy yeah like their rem sleep is next to nothing yeah um walk me through some like what are the phases of sleep sure and what are some like known lifestyle stuff that people may not be thinking about that have like that big impact like weed does on our rem sleep sure yeah i mean um sleep scientists aren't that imaginative so they numbered the stages of sleep um but i guess you know aside from the numbers the way most people now know them as sort of light sleep you know rem sleep and deep sleep and then the fourth stage you know let's or one of the other stages being awake so i'll focus on rem and deep um i think there's been more research done there and actually what happens so in in deep sleep what we know is that this period happens in the earlier part of the night um it tends to be when more things are related to your physical body right like your testosterone and growth hormone are mainly released during deep sleep your muscle repair even your skin and collagen repair is happening in deep sleep rem sleep from what we know and a lot of this is a very new science right a lot more about memory consolidation right um that that's actually when your brain is playing things you know at 3x to speed to help you remember them you know by repetition how do we know what's happening at 3x uh so that's by looking at just fmris and various other eeg type equipment there's even some new work being done and one of the things that they're showing is if you can actually implant a thought during the early phases of sleep um you know actually you can almost potentially trick your brain to work on it during rem sleep go on tell me more what do you mean how do you implant the idea there this is very very experimental so i think the idea is hey can you actually bring a thought either through a visualization either through an audio or you go to bed yeah or you're saying in those immediate minutes while you're falling asleep yeah sort of like inception it's starting to get pretty nuts out there okay so finish that because this is so interesting so what have they done in the studies like what matters is putting your headphones on is it someone saying something to you yeah this is super experimental like nothing's been published yet they just had a conference all about this like basically helping people dream and have certain thoughts during rhyme sleep that can help them solve problems in in their lives um so some really cool work but um yeah i wish i wish i knew more but it's literally happening as we speak um but getting back to sort of like why these things are happening and what you know so you know deep sleep your physical body being restored right rem sleep think about your mind and your memories and your consolidation now we also know deep sleep has some other some other things are happening there that are also related to your brain so um i think actually matthew walker talked about this he runs berkeley sleep lab that there's certain proteins and you know inflammation that's actually cleared away um at certain periods during deep sleep high prevalence of that plaque has been shown to correlate with alzheimer's and early alzheimer's so during deep sleep it turns out that actually certain types of these fluids right are actually clearing your clearing your your brain which is pretty cool so there's a lot we're still learning about the different stages of sleep there's certain things that help or hurt the different stages i would say excess use of of you know cannabis or alcohol definitely hurt sleep across all stages um i have seen actually though on the other side specifically with cannabis that certain types whether it's cbd and actually cbn that actually have been shown in small amounts to actually help improve sleep um so i think you know there is different stages or it improves one stage it looks like it helps people hey just fall asleep and stay asleep so some people that may have you know trouble falling asleep which is almost greater than 15 of the population now whoa yeah and then also helps with specifically deep sleep from you know but this is early research again hard to do just because of the rules with cannabis today and you know doing academic or medical research um you know some of the things we see though from our data is being consistent in time helps your body gets used to that clock that circadian clock and you know that master clock that's governing everything so then you start if you go to bed at a certain time you end up waking up at the same time even without an alarm like yourself um that's one big thing i think timing of food happens to be another dude i will tell you from my wife's experience who has had massive microbiome issues yeah i totally discounted food timing i was like my entire life i'll eat then go right to bed and never once thought about it so when people first started saying that i was like yeah yeah whatever like there's no way it's that impactful it's impactful i mean your vagus nervous connection to your brain and your stomach and so if you think about those first few hours of digestion that happen in your uh happen you know when you eat it's sort of hard for your vagus nerve to relax right right during those first few hours so if you just eat an hour or two before you go to bed like your brain is actually not going to be really relaxing and so hard to get actually a lot of deep sleep so we that's one of the biggest hacks we've seen sort of people uh change right and see an immediate impact in their data i would say also you know timing of caffeine so trying to get your caffeine in you know almost like more than 12 hours before you go to bed um so i think that's another big one just given the half-life of caffeine and now not everyone's sensitive caffeine but i would say 80 of the population is um and then also getting enough sunlight you know we sit a lot indoors like right like we're and and that affects us at certain points at night if we're looking at our screens looking at a blue screen right that that doesn't help us produce melatonin the way we used to but also the opposite's true just getting light exposure during the day right lets your brain know hey it's daytime and you're alive right and you should start releasing these hormones um and so i think that's that's another big thing that probably would help a lot of people it's really interesting what do you think about blue blockers i think blue blockers are excellent um i think all day or just at night uh so if you look at sort of the reason as to what happens you know when sun goes down there's no longer any blue light out there and so that's actually signal to your brain to start producing melatonin which helps you feel drowsy which helps you go to bed and so if you have exposure to that blue light at night your brain doesn't get the same reaction to release that melatonin and so i as a result i would say hey when the sun goes down you know put on those blue light blockers some people i think if you're under certain light conditions like you know which most people unfortunately are with certain types of fluorescent light or really close work into a screen you may want to try a blue blocker during the day as well but we've seen that have a huge impact on our users data so if we were going to optimize the [ __ ] out of our sleep and we were going to become like olympic level sleepers get the most recovery which is something that we should definitely talk more about yeah um what what's like that optimal forget that i have a job forget i have a life outside of sleeping just like yeah my job in life your job is to optimize sleep yeah what would i do um so start me i wake up now uh you wake up and let's get the consistent time of waking up okay right so get that exposure to sun and light in the morning immediately and within the first hour what if i wake up like i wake up typically two to three hours before the sun comes up is that actually bad should i be trying to change my sleep cycle no there's probably still ambient light out there from the sun even though you can't directly see it interesting so just so go outside even if it's dark i would say especially as the sun starts to rise okay it'll be more so at sunrise i'm going outside get some sun exposure stand there lay there walk run doesn't matter just any exposure your skin's gonna like whether you walk whether you sit what if i'm clothed do i need to am i standing out naked no matter what i mean i would say the less clothes the science would say the better but at the same time i think a lot of it is you know built into sort of your face and specifically right your glands behind the eyes so i think just getting exposure to your eyes is really important as well okay so get some sunlight how much sunlight should i get so the sun is rising i sat for an hour uh i would say at least this is my job this is your job as much as you can if this is your job so i should be outside literally i'm assuming in the shade to not burn but out in the sun as much as i can on the sun as much as you can okay um i would say second if you're gonna have caffeine um have it within those first do my job should i avoid caffeine um i'm not going to tell people to avoid caffeine because i think most people won't i also think coffee tastes phenomenal and there's also antioxidants in coffee so i'm actually you know a believer of everything in moderation but have that first cup or second cup you know greater than if i can if it's your job you know 14 hours before you go to sleep okay so within those first two hours of waking um i would say next after that getting exercise specifically getting exercise earlier in the day um and you know not in the late afternoon will help seven days a week this is an exercise that's an exercise conversation not a sleep conversation i think um there are certain days you want to go hard and certain days are going to want to go light okay i think the problem is most people go hard all the time right which doesn't help either light activity especially can help improve sleep and not to complicate this and i don't want to get distracted from our optimization conversation but so knowing when to work out i know is one of the things you guys talk about in the app so the heart rate variability is that going to be my ideal thing to look at to know whether i should be working out or is there something else i should pay attention to um i would say in terms of like when to work out you know the best way we tell people to do is try different things and then see what happens to your data like i used to play a lot of soccer growing up whenever we had away games i never knew why the next day i was so tired so normally because the game was later and i got home later and i slept later and even if i got seven or eight hours of sleep i still felt like [ __ ] because of the timing because the timing was thrown off right and also most likely because like your body gets all jacked up playing under the lights right right before you go to bed um so that yeah that would affect that that definitely affected it a lot so i think ideally what we've seen is some people have rhythms where they want to work out you know early in the morning which is fine other people tends to be sort of right after that afternoon lull so you know not seven i would say generally not seven or eight that's typically too late but if you want to think about from like four to six that might be more ideal but better yet what we've seen from our data as people who work out earlier tend to sleep better so even in those first call it you know five hours to six hours of waking up if you can fit into your schedule right but just really fast on the the data point so what do i look at that would tell me whether today is like a day to go hard in the gym or a day to take it easy or even not work out what actual data what data so we we actually have come up with a score called a readiness score and that's based on that's based on actually your rolling two-week average of both your sleep and your activity so if your heart rate is really elevated at night that'll actually impact your readiness score the next day interesting so there's a bunch of different factors in the app and you can click on each one and actually see it um so the time of your resting heart rate like how when that happened that lowest curve happened and the absolute value is something that'll affect it and that's impacted by when you work out and when you eat you know we also look at respiration rate as well throughout the night as another indicator but i would say it's a combination of like your rolling sleep average right plus some of your heart rate and physiological data and your general activity balance that will tell you to like work out hard or not so if you're pretty sedentary and all of a sudden you go work out quite a bit right that one day like you're gonna feel tired the next day and you should take it easy because your body's not used to that load and you'll see that reflected in the readiness score okay um so that's what we've used and we've created to help people sort of figure out what day they should work out and what day they should push hard i would say generally some other things like data within the data like that people look at are the amount of deep sleep to see like hey you know do i feel physically really good right to actually work out hard today and then also heart rate variability what impacts deep sleep so if weed is one of the things that can really it is so pronounced and that's why i keep harving on this in terms of like you could compare my rem to somebody who smokes weed yeah and it is night and day the amount of rem that they're getting right um so what's something that impacts deep sleep um i would say all these things we've talked about they they impact both stages so eating late will impact both your deep and your rem smoking too much marijuana will impact both your deep and your ram right shifting off the timing um of when you go to bed and you know how punctual and regular that is will impact your deepen ram so um i don't know if there are certain things specific to certain stages i do tend from what we see people that have late meals tend to impact the deep sleep more than rem but i don't think there's been a lot of studies done yet with certain phases of sleep and certain activities so if you tend to be extremely athletic and work out a lot we have seen those people actually have more deep sleep so when we we had some tour de france riders who were willing to share their data you know without revealing their names and the teams and stuff like that and it was phenomenal the amount of deep sleep they got even in their like you know mid 30s some of them even later i mean these guys were getting two hours a night and we'll often see that even in some of the pro athletes as well and so i think you know if you think about what's happening during deep sleep all that muscle reconstruction and repair growth hormone release testosterone release your brain is adjusting to what you need right um on the other hand if you're super creative you are focusing a lot on you know maybe concepts type of work artistic type work um you know maybe even just you know guys thinking with numbers all the time sitting behind a desk trade in stocks um you know you might see lower deep sleep and a higher rem sleep so you know your brain because of the lack of physical activity um and also probably the more the more mental load as well interesting yeah okay so your brain is realizing that you probably need to consolidate those memories more right there's more to remember there's more things you were trying to learn during the day so you know your brain your brain's pretty smart [Laughter] yes okay so um we got through exercise what are some other things type of diet do we see that there's any influence on sleep with that i generally do think that heavy sugars and carbs late too much in access to bed can really hurt you carb wise specifically sugar-wise specifically interesting so um and what data do you have like that feels right to me but it just feels right is there any data that backs that up there's been a lot more studies on food timing and sleep as far as the actual particular macro contents of that meal you know carbs protein fat haven't seen that proteins and fats do take longer to digest so you know in that sense like as we talked about with the vagus nerve in your digestion maybe that's probably not helpful if it's within a short amount of window so if you were to eat something closer to bedtime you might be better off with like a lighter carbohydrate meal but not too much sugars but you know not too much fat um or you know or protein interesting um but what makes you think and then that it sugar plays a role in disrupting sleep well i would say most people tend to eat desserts and when they eat desserts they eat them late right and so the other thing we know also about sugar is there tends to be a pretty big correlation with sugar consumption and heart rate variability it lowers heart rate variability yes that's so interesting why do we want heart rate variability like i i get it and i've heard it a million times but i don't actually understand why that's good so first of all i guess explain to people what heart rate variability is sure and then um giving some numbers i think would be helpful i know you guys are a little cagey about telling people exactly what their numbers should be sure but generally with heart rate variability the higher the better the higher the better okay so what is heart rate variability your first question um like the name says it's the variability within your heartbeats so what does that mean you and i are sitting here you know let's say we're at 60 beats per minute um every single beat on every second is slightly different so maybe one beat there is one second between the two beats maybe the next one there's 1.1 maybe the next one there's 0.9 seconds but over a minute it'll average to this 60 beats per minute right so high variation tends to actually be a sign it's counterintuitive of low stress right so yeah it is it is counter-intuitive right versus if each beat is super succinct tends to be you know individuals tend to have like a lower hrv score which means you're more of a sympathetic state within your autonomic nervous system meaning you you react quickly to your surroundings [Music] yeah right exactly so you might you might actually freeze um so versus if you're if you're in a very fluid movement if you think about it all of a sudden you know uh i don't know a tiger jumps out there right i think it would be weird it would be weird right we'd be freaking out right but someone who probably has higher heart rate variability that's more of a parasympathetic state controlling himself right would be like okay i'm going to push tom away and run that way right the tiger's there cool right like but i'm gonna you know i might think on my feet a little bit quicker i'll grab this mug when i'm running away so i can chuck it at the tiger's face not that that will help um i would appreciate that more than throwing me in front of it but thank you but um you know someone in a fluid state if you think about it when you're fluid like something happens and you're just able to shift around it right but if you're if your heart rate is like in that very in a mechanical beat you almost you're like stressed you're frozen so that comes and you just like like you're you're stiff right you're not able to shift and so um that's the best way i can sort of describe it it's super interesting um okay so how how does one drive their heart rate variability higher sure um i think you know a lot of the things we talked about sleep tend to also help sleeping itself will change your heart rate variability most people will have higher hrv during when they sleep versus during the day there tends to be lots of micro stresses during the day you know whether you have two cups of coffee you have to go to the bathroom it's a stressor you're in traffic it's a stressor and actually it's how you you know sort of your body and your mind like accumulates all that stress and reacts to it over the course of the night so um sleep definitely like you'll tend to see your hrv dip in the early part of the night and go up towards the morning so meaning like you're recovering throughout the night so most people i would say what we do know there's been a lot more research done on meditation so in the beginning actually bad meditators are stressing out so their hrv tends to go down but more experienced meditation uh meditators um tend to actually raise their hiv people stressing out if they're bad at meditation i mean it's like you want to focus on certain you know not you want to focus on not you know having all these thoughts come to your head right so you tend to like try to focus and think too hard almost and you're like wait i shouldn't be having that thought i shouldn't be having that and it tends to be stressful um so i think that's like what we've seen so we we have a meditation mode coming out soon that we have and i'm stoked on that yeah so what are you guys looking for in that in the meditation yeah like heart rate variability we're looking at heart rate variability we're looking at heart rate we're also looking at actually peripheral body temperature your core and your periphery tends to be pretty correlated at night so we look at that you know change every single night in in the aura ring but actually even during meditating um very good meditators and this has been documented even with some like tibetan monks are able to actually like um increase the circulation and the blood flow and and actually have a positive impact on their on their temperature it's another metric that we will report to people where you'll be able to track uh your meditation you get bio feedback in real time so that i could see what i'm doing we're trying to do it after the session um i think you know one of those things you don't want to be distracted during it but we're going to play around with it and we'll see what people want and how they feel um but i do you know one of the things we're looking at is doing different types of modes of meditation seeing if that has an impact on different types of people you know whether it's you know tm or vedic or whatever it might be so maybe mindfulness sessions right just having self-gratitude and breathing right over trying to focus on a specific meditation type might be pretty interesting so no we're excited to release it we should have it out you know i would say before the end of april whoa yeah one thing i will say that i was um i was i was sad by is that if i take a nap you can't tell me if i like what my things were it just shows up as rest yeah so without the breakdown most people during naps first of all you don't tend to go into rem and deep sleep really yeah just light just light that's that would say that's the first reason um the second reason is um whenever we you know when we created the aura ring right and we what we actually did is you know like all these other devices do you go in a sleep lab you get the full eeg equipment and you put some your devices on them and you calibrate the algorithms and so trying to do sleep studies for naps is actually a lot harder and there isn't a lot of like good data on that versus overnight sleep labs um so that's that's another reason we are trying to make it more apparent in the app that you are having an app versus just that rest feature but we're working on it and maybe even for certain people maybe getting back to your your question of hey if we want to be professional sleepers don't nap late right if you nap late later in the day you know i would say like after four or five you actually end up hurting your sleep most often um that night as well so i think if you do look at some of the older cultures who would nap you know they tended to actually nap even some of them in the in the early like in the call it mid morning like before noon um and then i think also that's more in some in africa um if you look at some of the old cultural you know just sort of how you know anthropologic type stuff um but then also i would say in the latin culture you know tends not to go too late right so like you want to hit that siesta time period not at five or six but you know maybe a two or three right what are some things you can't track right now that you think would be super meaningful if you could oh it's a great question um i do think there's a lot of work being done on emotional like tracking motions emotions there's some work being done in st louis i forget which university that shows using hr and hrv mainly hrv data being able to with some self-input be able to track emotions i think that's pretty cool so one one of the things that's super interesting about aura ring and wearables in general quite frankly is the amount of data you must have is is really incredible sure so would you start associating and saying okay these like three or four metrics and this pattern equal anger frustration sadness like that kind of thing so the way you would have to typically do that right is you again you'd have to do it with the gold standard first right so you would have to get a certain amount of participants or subjects right set up a study where you have 50 of them and you know get them to report certain emotions and see if there's changes in that physiological data that you can now create an algorithm against and then and then you go and you predict it on another cohort let's say another 25 people and see if it's true like you know hey show certain screens you know videos and you know or audio like are you is this causing anger right and if we see anger on the algorithm wow man i really think that would be pretty extraordinary so going back to what you were saying earlier we've got all this data coming in and but uh we didn't we didn't even dive deep on this and you mentioned like the um suicide rates are like the highest i've ever been and all this stuff and yeah and you know we touch our devices 150 times a day which is once every six minutes which is really really terrifying and when i think about some recent changes that i've made in my life for for a different reason but i'm seeing the impact that it has on my well-being which is really really interesting is to shut off all alerts so that no one can ring the doorbell when i'm trying to have the party with my friends yeah in the basement nice analogy and that like being able to give people feedback on their emotions like i'm even thinking okay as a ceo one of the things i think about or are my is my team thriving totally like are is this the right place for them yeah and because i'm well aware that this is not going to be the right place for every human being knowing that they're able to like yo you've been 70 of your day has been spent in frustration or anger or sadness like that would be so usable and i think people get so blind to where they really are like when i think about that my phone constantly like pinging me it it didn't dawn on me how um corrosive that was to my productivity for years years so to think that i could have had or or am currently having the same kind of blindness to an emotion or that my teammates are having the same kind of blindness to their emotions yeah like wow that would be really really powerful i guess we think about this internally right and so one of the things we think about is you know our mission statement right so you know our our mission statement right is to empower people to own their potential ownership meaning like you know what you need to do to actually be in a peak state right and and or you know have high potential and what does high potential mean right it can be you know sort of mental productivity it can be emotional right it can be physical right um it can also be dietary as well and so if we think about those states of sort of potential or even health right these four pillars of health mental health physical health sleep right and and diet um you know we want to help people achieve and figure out what actually works for them in those different states right in those different areas of health and well-being and so um i think what's interesting is you know there's been a lot done in activity and a lot in diet i think the reality is only about 10 percent of people in the u.s work out every week 99.9 percent of people sleep every night wait wait go back what percentage work out every week 10 every week every week whoa yeah now ironically it actually is those who work out like it ends up being they end up working out like three times plus a week so the ones that are working out or were actually working out pretty consistently i didn't realize it was that bad yeah and then um and then if you you know but just thinking about those four things on sort of health and well-being so there's activity there's diet sleep and let's call cognitive mental right um but 99.9 percent of people sleep every night and 99.9 of people have some type of emotion or cognitive performance as well every day right and i would say you know trying to get people to eat a certain way is is pretty hard from a product um you know and i think we're going to get there in the future that will have better ar and vr to like make it easier to ingest like at what you're eating passively without typing everything in my fitness pal um and then you know working out too i think there's been a lot done that was the first side of wearables so i think like as to where like i would love or things i would love to be able to help measure you know sleep because that's sort of how you start your day how you wake up how you feel right is a lot built on sort of like that 30 seconds you spend with yourself in the morning when you're in bed deciding to get up or not um i think that that sort of sets the day and then also you know your feelings whether most of us realize it or don't anymore because every six minutes we're distracted um right also have an impact on sort of how you feel and perform throughout the day right and so i think you know if we think about what can go into a wearable that has an impact on your daily life like those two areas to us as a company are extraordinarily interesting um i think i think emotions is hard and it's also scary if you start to think about if you had that information if you were an advertiser think of you could design the perfect ad for the perfect person to have them feel seduction or arousal right right so that gets a little scary but now i think there'll be a ground truth of like hey actually no this is how i feel you know the ben and jerry's carton of ice cream was designed for me to finish the whole thing in that pine right right the sour patch kids had you know hundreds of engineers you know figuring out exactly how to make it feel great no matter sort of who you are and what your taste buds are right and so um i i think at the same time like if you do have this type of this type of technology there are going to be parties that are using it for their own profit but i also think at the same time this technology is needed so people understand that hey this is what's happening to me wearing a continuous glucose monitor is awesome because when you eat that pint of ben and jerry's you see that data and you're like holy cow i am beyond diabetic when i eat this you know eat that whole pint so i think data's empowering and so can we be a platform that helps you connect with yourself and the like lifestyle choices that you're making during the day that have an ultimate impact on how you know what your potential is yeah what do you think about blood monitoring have you worn a continuous glucose yeah it's dope right um what should people be doing now to go out of their way to find that stuff or should they or maybe it's lifestyle like what what do you you wore a continuous glucose monitor so i'm assuming that you put some value personally in yeah blood measurements sure um what else do you track in your own life man in my own life um i there's definitely been periods in my life when i do track what i eat my body composition my weight just as someone who gained a lot of weight and then wanted to lose it i found that extremely helpful for me to learn what was working with my body and what wasn't um and so like i did you know i probably tracked everything in a spreadsheet for three years every single meal at one point you know and because after banging i got up to 185 almost 190 and then i got i got back i got down to 135. how did you what was your protocol for losing the fat whoo oh man a lot of experimentation with spreadsheets um you know did you do it all through diet or were you working and working out um and uh still wasn't focused on sleep i wish i'd known more about it because that helps a lot too um so yeah i tried first i did keto i probably did keto for a period of two years straight straight straight always increase yeah and again something i just didn't know at the time right that hey it might be actually beneficial to cycle um i probably lost the first 20 pounds doing keto and working out but then plateaued i actually shifted to then just like carb cycling um so you know more or less trying to be keto most of the time but the days i work out really hard have more carbs and just moderation and caloric you know having caloric deficit so someone just tracking like if you don't know and you struggle with weight um you know like the peter diamond is saying that he has on on your rules right like if you don't have a target you're guaranteed to miss it right right so i think that that helps blood work i think is interesting i think as we age you know especially like there can be early indicators there that of long-term health that are interesting to look at i think sleep is like the leading indicator um you know from everything we know about sleep and the impact on your hormonal stasis and mental cognition you know as an individual like that to me became like this is actually one of the easiest things to track that can actually end up not just impacting how you sleep but your whole day the next day so that's that's why i was super fascinated by it and you do it every night right and it's it's i think it's it's harder to think of because it's not most people don't thinking think of it as something that it's an active state because it's a passive state dieting you got to make a food decision when you walk in that salad bar right or do you grab the burger and fries and the soda right so it's an active decision working out do i do you know high intensity workout crossfit do i do aerobic again an active decision i think the sleep one of the reasons why it is now becoming popular but has taken some time to focus on it is because most people just don't get a just go to bed i don't think about it i just i turn off the lights and i lay in bed and you know but now as more people are struggling with it um i think now attention is coming to how can i improve it and how can i sleep better but i do think sleep is a really good leading indicator to track and one of the easiest ones less painful than writing spreadsheets you don't even have to work out you know you can just wear a device like ours and and start to get you know figure out some small changes that might lead to big changes in how you feel and perform do different types of exercise have different effects on sleep so if i'm just like for instance i lift i almost never do cardio yeah is that going to have one sort of sleep pattern versus if i do just cardio but i don't lift or um so you know what the best exercise in the world is right you tell the one you're not doing interesting why just because variation matters i think well i think in terms of just like mechanical structures and you know whether you're flexible or strength right changing it up helps a lot um i i think what we see from our data that i can speak about is that um later in the evening or or even just in general having light types of workouts mixed with heavy hard workouts again that variation do actually help you recover so we've even seen it with some pro sports teams we're working with they'll end up actually seeing that hey you know and let's take pro football their hrv and their sleep may be totally terrible come come sunday night and so when they look at on monday what we're seeing some of the teams start to do is alter the actual exercise protocol so what they'll start to do is actually let's not go super heavy on the weights let's do some light cardio maybe 30 minutes of cardio with like some intervals in there right and and do a lot of stretching and mobility work right to help open up recover and that actually then improves their sleep which means they can hit it harder on tuesday or wednesday and so i think we've seen that in our data that these light workouts um and specifically probably more cardio and and you know sort of call it you know mobility or flexibility you know yoga or even just foam rolling stretching do can actually really improve your sleep quite a bit because it gets back into that same recovery state that you're in yeah so recovery that's really interesting and i've heard you talk about how um god it was brady and somebody else you were talking about clocking lebron maybe i think like 10 hours or something crazy yeah something crazy and and using the hyperbaric chamber i mean he does interesting now that i didn't hear so tell people what hyperbaric oxygen is and then tell me why yeah it's helping me experimented much with hyperbaric so i can't speak to that one i've seen it being used by a couple different people athletes um also other certain types of individuals that are just super high performers super quantified cell for biohackers where they use it for periods of time to almost cause that stress which then causes you to sleep better and recover better but yeah i think it's it's really really interesting i think you know if you think about it you don't get stronger in the gym you get stronger actually out of the gym in the gym you're actually getting weaker right you're breaking that muscle down right it's that recovery process right that actually happens it allows the muscle to grow stronger and take a more continued load and so i think people are sort of messing around with different types of stressors that might cause then greater recovery um so i think that's why hyperbaric chambers like as you put from a science perspective are are really interesting wow super interesting yeah all right speaking of more interesting stuff where can these guys find you online oh uh website is auraring.com uh just www dot uh o u r a ring rng.com nice yeah if people could only change one thing to have the biggest impact on their health what would you want them to change um well i would say sleep but in order to change your sleep i think it's you know a couple different things that we talked about um i do think when you just look at the science like i think there's a great analogy that matthew walker had if i could give you a pill and this pill would improve your memory right help you live longer and fight off cancer reduce your blood pressure increase the quality of your skin and your hair and how you look um you know also your testosterone production or your muscle repair who wouldn't want to take that pill everyone would right and and that pill is sleep right yet 45 of us get less than six hours a night and yeah and so it's it's it's sort of crazy what's what's been happening you know i think with modern technology and and the change in our lifestyle as humans that you know now we're using technology to help bring some of that lifestyle and consciousness back awesome well guys sleep i i obviously cannot recommend this one enough you can find more information on harpreet and everything they're doing aura ring dive in check it out it's so powerful like you said it's the biggest change that you could make i really believe that if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care thank you so much for coming on man thank you guys so much for watching and being a part of this community if you haven't already be sure to subscribe you're going to get weekly videos on building a growth mindset cultivating grit and unlocking your full potential

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 80,403

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, oura ring, harpreet rai, sleep, why we sleep, why do we sleep, track your sleep, optimize your life, hrv, heart rate variability, ceo, weight loss, health theory, health show, entrepreneur, rem, rem sleep, deep sleep

Id: i55ib4nczso

Length: 52min 10sec (3130 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 21 2019