Aaron Hartman, MDFunctional Medicine Specialist | Clinical Researcher

Pushing Limits_ 'I'll Sleep When I'm Dead' | Is Your Exhaustion Actually Stress?

1 Mar 2025 · 0 min

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ER doctor Aaron Hartman on the grueling culture of medical residency and why "I'll sleep when I'm dead" is a dangerous motto. He connects chronic stress to cortisol and heart rate, and shows how breath work and wearables like the Oura ring can help you actually recover.

I literally used to say, I'll sleep when I'm dead. You have to, when you're in your residency, you kind of have to say that because that's the only way you self motivate. I could do that for 20 years in the ER, like flipping my shifts all the time. Yeah. So we talked about the cortisol, we talked about heart rate availability, which is, I really like that as well, because it get, you know, it's as well as you mentioned, heart rate throughout the day, which you can measure either with different devices. And oura ring, you can measure heart rate. Built with the heart math, which I actually got. I did it for a short period of time, but it really kind of educated me how important breath work was.