Finding Harmony: The Key To Resilience With Dr. Erik Korem

Life happens, and not always the way we expect it to. Every single day we face change, stress, and uncertainty. What if you could learn to thrive no matter what life throws your way? Resilience expert Adam Markel and his inspiring guests explore breakthrough strategies to fully embrace change and build the resilience required to become change-proof.

Hey everybody, welcome back to another Welcome to another episode of the Change Proof Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Markel, and I am stoked for today's guest. He is Dr. Eric Coram, a high-performance thought leader who introduced athletic tracking technologies to collegiate and professional football. He's worked with the National Football League, Power 5 NCAA programs, gold medal Olympians, Nike, and the US Department of Defense. He holds a doctorate in exercise science and is an expert in sleep and stress resilience and is Also the founder of AIM7. He's also the CEO of that company. We're gonna talk a little bit about that particular tracking technology a little later in the episode. For now, just sit back and enjoy. Resilience. It's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And in times of massive change and disruption, the kind of rapid change that we're all experiencing as leaders, as business owners, as entrepreneurs, we have to learn how to not only increase our own resilience, but That of our teams. So right now we have a powerful opportunity for you to find out just how resilient you are. Some years ago, my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilience leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com. All right, Eric. So dude, you have a powerful bio. I mean, it's impressive. In fact, I remember when I shared my— well, I'll say it was a goal of mine to get you on the show because I listened to you on a podcast of another dude that I really dig, this guy, Dr. Nick Morgan. Actually, I know Nick. He's a good man, really good man. I've been on his show. He's been on our show. I heard you there and I said to My wife, I said, we gotta get this guy. You gotta get him.

Well,

I'm

excited to be here. This is gonna be a lot of fun. I love the topic that you're discussing and the, the theme of what you're chasing after, this idea of what your shirt says, resilience.

Yeah. For those of you that are, are on YouTube, you see it. I'm wearing this resilience t-shirt. It's my talking tee for the day. Those of you who are just listening, you just have to imagine it's a black t-shirt. It says resilience. Not even for my imagination, not too difficult. So here's my first question for you, buddy, is with an impressive history like you've got, and obviously those are the kind of things that you want people to know about you. It makes sense for people to know those things about you. What's one thing that's not a part of that standard intro or bio that you would love for people to know? Just one thing that would be good for them to know about you.

Yeah, I have been married for 14 years and I have 3 wonderful children, 3 boys. And I think that hopefully the crowning achievement of my life will be pouring into them and being a good husband and father above anything else. You know what I'm saying? Like at the end of the day, like that really is the most important thing because the world that I lived in for a long time in elite sport, I saw a lot of people chase trophies only to be left unfulfilled with a family that didn't love them, or there was a lot of bitterness because dad prioritized work and winning the championship at the end of the season over ever seeing his kids. And so that really stuck with me. You can be excellent and still be a good human being.

Yeah. Those things are not mutually exclusive, or they don't have to be, right?

Exactly. 100%.

I mean, that couldn't have dropped in any deeper for me. I'm a daddy. I've always Above all else, I say I'm a daddy, I'm a husband. We have 4 kids, 3 girls and a boy.

Wow.

And to be, as you said, the crowning achievement being good father, good husband. There are other things, of course. There's other things that we're interested in. There's other things we've been spending our time doing. We're going to talk about some of those, but, but that would be more than enough. And I know there are people out there who probably have had messed up childhoods. Yeah. My childhood wasn't perfect. There are people out there who don't have kids, don't have any desire to have kids. So I hope you're not getting turned off at the start of this. folks that are listening, you know, have to be one. I certainly don't think a good life has to be being a parent or being a partner even. I do think that the connections that we form in our lives are the most important things at the end, that the people that we've known, the people that we've been around, and, and how we've been our best in some respects with those people. And that doesn't have to be family. It doesn't have to be blood. Doesn't have to be kids. Has to be somebody, right? Don't you think?

Yeah. Living a healthy life and living a life that we talk about resilience later. One of the things the scientific literature is very clear on is, is living in isolation is detrimental to that. So fostering healthy relationships and living in community will help you thrive. So whatever that is for you, whatever that close network, loving and serving others and being a good friend and being a good support network, it could extend in that direction.

It can. And we talk in our research, we've, and this isn't what I'm going to mention right now isn't our research, but it's, we've been looking at it in a little bit of a different way. And it's something called weak tie connections. You familiar with that term?

No.

So weak-tie connections, it's something that was discovered in the early '70s in regard to innovation and how it is that we form, how innovations occur, how unique changes in systems occur. And what the study showed was that when people just sort of randomly in the workplace, that's the context, or in any collaborative environment really, where people who don't typically work together, maybe don't even know each other by name or don't know much about each other, sort of just I don't know, have a collision of sorts. They run into each other in the walk, in the break room or wherever. It could be somebody from HR and somebody from marketing or somebody from accounting that never runs into somebody from research and development. And then all of a sudden they have a conversation about whatever. It could be the weather, it could be their kids, could be politics, could be anything. But that somehow or another, that I'll call it random, if you will, but I don't believe in randomness, but that collision of sorts. Produces a new insight, a new mindset. Something happens that led to innovation. That was coined the term weak tie connections. How we've been using it and where we've been studying or sharing some of our studies with folks has been around the idea of what you just said, Eric, how important it is, especially during the pandemic, to our resilience that our weak tie connections to other people are strengthened. And by that, like the person you get your coffee from or the person that you used to run into at the dry cleaner or any little sort of conversation that you might have with a total stranger, even in the supermarket.

Yeah.

Right. Where you could see their face because you, back before this thing happened, you could just see their face, see their smile, see their grimace, whatever it might be. I want to ask you, in your work, how important have you seen the connection component to be to performance and resilience over time?

Yeah. So one of the things that I look into a lot in research and I'll kind of take a step back in my career in sports, working with elite athletes. We noticed that the best athletes in the world, no matter what the sport was, were highly adaptable to physical and psychological stress. And I'm talking about, this could be in an elite environment, the top-notch player versus even the first-string player that's playing or working with an Olympic gold medalist versus somebody that maybe was a world-class sprinter, but they weren't the league champion. What we noticed is they could handle a tremendous amount of stress and biologically they could adapt very quickly. And stress, by the way, is one input, physical and mental stress. The brain and body does not differentiate. It's one signal and it has one global response. You turn on different systems. Okay. And those systems switch on or they switch off. And if they don't switch off, that's when bad things happen. And so we started looking at like, what drives adaptability? Okay? Because the world is changing, and if you don't change with it, you're going to be in a lot of trouble. Resilience is truly adapting to your surroundings. And so, in order to become a more adaptable human being, there's 5 pillars that lead to adaptability. And we could talk about these in different— I'm going to zero in on this community one, relationships one you're talking about, but there's sleep, exercise, mental fitness, nutrition, and fostering healthy relationships. And there was a paper that I found by the British Psychological Society that was pointing out how greater social connectedness during the pandemic period lockdown was associated with less worry and fatigue, as well as lower perceived levels of stress. What they found was by staying connected in times of stress, you create a buffer against poor mental and physical health outcomes, which enables you to adapt to new and changing circumstances. And so if you think about it, just in a realistic sense, when you are engaged with somebody, you can share that burden and that load. There was a paper that just came out. Let me see if I can pull this up from the University of Kansas. This was super interesting that demonstrates that one, this is like this month, one meaningful conversation per day boosts your mood, Lowers your stress and enhances social connectedness. So, what's a meaningful conversation?

Exactly.

Catching up, joking around, listening to someone, offering a sincere compliment, showing care, valuing someone's opinion. They have the power to change your literal health and wellness. Doing this once a day was kind of like the minimum threshold. The more frequently this occurred, the better. And here's the kicker. Face-to-face communication was significantly more effective than electronic forms. So DMs and texts did not count.

Didn't do it.

No. And so you literally have to engage with another human being. And then if you notice, most of these meaningful conversations involve you listening or like actually absorbing something and taking it. You know, the difference between like, we're talking here and I'm just waiting to talk and it's really not an engagement. It's just one-way street, a meaningful conversation, something that has a little bit of depth. And this adds to resilience. There was another paper I found. Are you familiar with the terms allostasis or allostatic load?

I've heard them. I had, couldn't, I wouldn't pass an exam if you asked me to define it.

Okay. Our view of stress really started changing. So there was Hans Selye had this thing called the general adaptation syndrome. And basically Hans Selye was a Hungarian endocrinologist. And he set the foundation for our understanding of stress. And what they found was that when you gave rats in a lab, and they would give them like a noxious agent, there was this general pattern of reactivity that occurred. Their body went into this alarm stage. Their sympathetic nervous system ramped up, their HPA axis ramped up, cortisol increased, their body's mobilizing resources to deal with this threat. And then there was this resistance phase. And then if the body seems to be going back to normal, it's kind of getting back to homeostasis. But if the stimulant persists for a very long period of time and it exceeds the organism's adapt capacity to adapt, that's when the organism would die. Then we found this general pattern in humans. It's all biological organisms react the same. Bruce McEwen, who's a giant in the field of neuroendocrinology, came up with these terms, allostasis and allostatic load. Allostasis is what your body wants. It is trying to achieve stability through change. It's the brain and the body adjusting its internal environment to reach homeostasis. So whenever something happens, a physical stressor, psychological stressor, the body's going to react and then it's going to try to get back to like—

I prefer that term homeostasis much more than balance. I think we have a, there's a huge issue in terms of what that the language that people use to describe the state that they want to get into. Meaning where they would define happiness or contentment or peace or whatever it might be, they call it balance, work-life balance. And that's total bullshit. At least that's my theory.

Doesn't exist.

Doesn't exist, right? Or if you think of it as balance, think about how— what balance looks like if you're on a tightrope or wherever else balance where you'd see an example. It's fleeting. It's temporary. But homeostasis is a state that is achievable for length that can be sustained, and that's different. Yes or no? Yeah.

I mean, your body's going to go, it's always adjusting. It's micro adjustments. What you don't want is massive perturbations. Okay. So you go out for a walk, guess what that is?

Except that's not the world we live in. Right. Massive perturbation is the world we live in, isn't

it? Well, no, that's what I'm telling you is that you can create a system that can adapt to more stress at less cost.

Right. I guess what I wanna say to you is that the issue is that we're living in a world of massive— I mean, I wrote a book called Change Proof because I feel like we live in a world of massive perturbation. I love that term. Typically only used it when it came to like facilitating trainings and things like that. So I'm really happy you just brought that up. But change is everywhere. So people are dealing with change, unexpected change. They're dealing with uncertainty and ambiguity on a daily basis. So I wanna dig into how it is And I didn't expect that we'd take this particular tack, but I'm really happy we are. Wow. The pace of change over the last couple of years has been rapid. And if you're a leader, a business owner, an entrepreneur, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Every day it's something different and something new. But the one thing that I've learned in performing at the height of all of those roles has been that we must be resilient. In fact, it's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And it's the reason why my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilient leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free Resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So, go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. Is there a way for people to create homeostasis in the midst of that kind of massive, constant, continuous stress and change?

Yeah, 100%. I think we're on the same wavelength. We want to get to homeostasis. We have to understand that the world's— we're going to constantly bring in these inputs, right? Physical and psychological stress is coming. The idea that you can manage stress is a fallacy. You can't manage the stock market. You can't manage how people are going to react to things that you say. You can't manage if you pull out in the intersection, somebody hits your car. But what you can do is build the capacity to adapt to more stress with less cost. So, The second part of what McEwen did was, is he said, hey, stress comes with a cost and it's actually called allostatic load. There's actually a term for this in the scientific literature. So when you have a physical or psychological stress, there's a load that comes with it. Okay. The problem isn't stress. Stress is the gateway to growth.

Exactly.

The only way you get better at anything, you're a fit guy. I can see If you want to get fit, you have to train your body. Guess what that is? If you were to look at all of the things that happen when you work out, it's a massive stress. You have oxidative stress, you have tissue damage, you have all sorts of things that are going on, protein disruption, creatine kinase is increasing, all this stuff, right? But that is the gateway to growth. If you want to learn a new skill, you have to deliberately engage in the difficult task of learning, which comes with agitation, which comes with sympathetic nervous system increase. You're going to feel those breakdowns.

Breakdowns.

Yeah.

I mean, literally breaking down muscles, breaking your cognitive breakdown. I mean, all of those things which are involved in your relationship to stress happen when you engage with stress and you're not living in a cave trying to avoid all stress, right?

Yeah.

There's a growth that occurs from that. Exactly right. But the issue is not the stress itself, as so many people think, is it?

No, stress isn't the problem, the acute stress. It's when it exceeds your capacity to adapt to it. That is when you have physical and mental health issues. So, I call it like the low-grade fever of stress. You have these long chronic stressors that are lingering and they compound and compound, and then it eventually exceeds your capacity. So, what do you need to do? You need to build I like to think of it as a gas tank. Your capacity right now to adapt to stress is like a gas tank. You have a limited capacity. You can increase that capacity so that when you have these perturbations, these big spikes, guess what? It doesn't cost you as much. It's smaller, right? And every day you wake up with a certain amount of gas in the tank that can be referred to as like biological readiness. Certain things can add or take away from that. You get great sleep, you're adding to the tank. You work out in a way that is matched to the type of stress. Great. Let's say you have kids and you're up all night, or you have a work project, or you had to pull an all-nighter, or now you're drawing from the tank. The key thing is, is to engage in consistent behaviors that build more capacity, understand where you are on that readiness spectrum, and then deliberately engage with stress in a way that you can continue to increase your capacity. So there's 5 pillars, like I mentioned earlier.

This was the reason, by the way, for Our audience, I just wanted you to. This is the reason why I wanted Eric on the show was to talk about this exactly because I remember when you got into this a little bit with Dr. Morgan, and I thought, oh my God, this is so the capacity pieces is really amazing, and it overlays, I think, quite well with through line, if you will, of our discussions about this, which is that stress is not the thing that's the issue. It's not the thing that causes the disease or even the death. It's a lack of recovery from the stress, which begs the question: So how do you return to equilibrium? How do you get yourself back to homeostasis? What are the I would say the rituals for recovery that are required to bring that about more quickly.

Yeah, Adam, you nailed it. The recovery is what leads to the adaptation. So adaptation or growth is the right dose of stress with the right dose of rest. Okay. So my PhD, my doctoral work was in, so I wanted to understand how to make the general population more, I started with athletes. How do I make more athletes more adaptable? And I was like, wait a second, how do I make human beings more adaptable? And just as a kind of aside, I was like, huh, I want to study something that's really fundamental. What are things that you have to have to live? Food, water, and sleep. If you don't have sleep, you die. So I was like, huh, I wonder how sleep impacts our ability to adapt to stress. Directly measured how the brain or the central nervous system, how sleep impacted that. And the brain is the master organ. And there's some complexity to this, but it was really cool. We actually could measure how much sleep impacted your ability to adapt to more more physical and psychological stress. So sleep is like the number one recovery tool. And there's a lot of stuff out there about sleep right now. I'll give you kind of 3 highlights and then kind of 3 behaviors that are really important. Love it. But the sleep does several things. One, it helps with restoration of your immune system. So here's something really interesting. The stress response is necessary for you to get up and walk. You need the stressor, like you're turning on these little systems. At nighttime, you need to turn these down. When you go to sleep, the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, you can think of those as the gas pedal and the brake. Okay? Sympathetic puts down the gas pedal, releases different what are called catecholamines, which increases your level of alertness. The parasympathetic system is that braking system. That's where you want to spend more of your time. You don't want to be stuck with the gas pedal down. And then there's this thing called the HPA axis, which one of the glucocorticoids that is released is cortisol. Cortisol is not a bad thing. As a matter of fact, you want a massive spike in cortisol in the morning because it makes you alert. But when it's chronically elevated, it's bad. So when you go to sleep at night, these systems are turned down. Cortisol goes down and your immune system is ramped up. This is when your immune system creates long-term immunological memory. So like invaders that it's fighting now, it's creating this memory. So the next time it sees it, it can deal with it. In addition, your tissues are restored. So growth hormone is released during early phases of sleep, which help with tissue regeneration. For males, testosterone is released later in the night. Most of your testosterone is released during sleep. As a matter of fact, just 1 week of sleep deprivation to 5 hours or less will age you more than a decade in testosterone loss, because your testosterone decreases about 1 to 2% per year. There's a lot of amazing things that happen during sleep. In regards to regeneration. So you put in the work during the day, your body and brain regenerate at night. The second thing is detoxification. Your brain. So the rest of your body has this thing called the lymphatic system. It's kind of this drainage system. Your brain doesn't have that. Your brain, about 15 years ago, we discovered something called the glymphatic system. It's this, what's called, it has these little perivascular pathways. And what happens when you sleep is metabolic waste products are filtered out, of which some of these proteins like amyloid beta are highly correlated to dementia and Alzheimer's disease. And guess what? The only time the glymphatic system is active is during sleep. And we are now finding staggering relationships between the rapid rise in Alzheimer's and dementia with the dramatic decrease in how much sleep people are getting. And so this is why neuroscientists now believe that like when you get a really great night of sleep, you feel very refreshed. Your brain is clear. It's because literally if you don't get enough sleep, your brain is full of crap and it hasn't been able to flush that stuff out. And this can be detrimental to your long-term mental health. So we have restoration of the tissues, we have detoxification. And then finally, like this is kind of just a bonus. But sleep is when learning and memory consolidation occurs. So when you study a very difficult text, something for work, right? You're trying to upskill yourself. You feel that state of agitation. It's like, oh, this is kind of hard. The neurons that were used during that learning are marked with different neuromodulators. And Tononi and Cirelli are actually the ones that found this. They found that when you sleep at night, those neuronal connections are strengthened, actually enlarged in size. So your brain is actually expanding and contracting when you sleep at night. So sleep is what they say is the price your brain pays for plasticity. So without sleep, you're going to have poor tissue regeneration. Your brain is not going to be able to detoxify and restore itself. And then learning and memory consolidation is going to be very poor. So now the question is, is like, well, how do I sleep better? Everybody's like, okay, I need to sleep more. Well, gee, thanks. Like, I know that, like my Apple Watch tells me I'm getting 6 hours. So McEwen's work, this was really interesting. I read it years ago when I was doing my dissertation, then I came back to it and I've really started about 2 years ago digging back into all this literature. And he made a statement that was really profound. If you want to set up the human organism for resilience to stress, the number one thing that you have to do is keep the circadian clock anchored. So circadian means about a day, about 24 hours. And there's multiple different types of rhythms, but your circadian clock can be entrained or synchronized by several factors. Number one is light. Number 2 is food, temperature, and I'll throw exercise in there. We'll kind of just stop. But we were not designed to live indoors. Living inside If you want to unhinge somebody psychologically and physically, like disrupt their circadian rhythm. Like that's why when people go into the hospital and they're in there for a while, they typically get worse and worse and worse. The fact that they come in and flip the lights on in the middle of the night and take your vitals 3 times a night is just insane to me.

Yes.

It's completely nuts and there's no reason for it.

Right. Because the one thing that you need probably more than almost anything else, and I'm not saying that it's not vital to check someone's vitals and all that kind of stuff, but We need our sleep more than anything. You need your sleep. And the thing that I found recently, I don't know if you also have heard about this, but the importance of light, of early morning sunlight, not just, well, I mean, there could be replacements for that, but let's just say good old-fashioned, go outside, find the sun, look at the sun for 5 minutes. How important that is, not just to wake up to and activate what is your energy for the day, your ultradian rhythms, but also how it is that you will sleep that night has a lot to do with how you've begun the day. And whether you got sun early in the day. That blew me away because I was thinking to myself, how do you set yourself up? Because I think all this, what you've been saying, leads to that conversation that people are probably already having in their own heads and going, I don't sleep as well as I ought to. I used to sleep better. And maybe even some people are having some real challenges either getting to sleep, staying asleep, waking up in the middle of the night, not able to get back to sleep. And I've had trouble in all of those areas at points in my life in the past.

And that's normal, by the way, to have these kind of fluctuations. Sometimes life gets a little stressful and it's hard to turn your brain off, or as we age, there's a natural decline in our sleep duration. But you're exactly right. I recently had Satchin Panda. He's the head of the Salk Institute on my podcast. Satchin is the one that actually, he is like the world's leading expert on circadian biology. And some of the stuff he talked about, I'd never heard before, but one of the fundamental things that we learned in my dissertation are 10 years ago in my doctoral work is the circadian clock drives sleep. Then, there's 2 kind of systems. There's the circadian part with the light, right, that synchronizes what's called the circadian pacemaker, the suprachiasmatic nucleus, which sits above the roof of your mouth. So, you nailed it. When you see sunlight, it gets taken in through these special receptor cells called melanopsin retinal ganglion cells, sends a signal to this thing above your mouth called the Pacemaker that sends a signal to every cell in your body that it's time to be alert and awake. And it does that through a spike in cortisol and an increase in temperature.

And that makes sense, right? That's intuitive. People get that. I mean, you don't have— look, nobody's going to repeat the words you just said, least of all me at the moment, right?

Just know you have this pacemaker.

But you go, okay, get it. That's how we start the day. It makes sense.

Start your day with sun.

But what freaked me, and I thought, oh, this is like— I don't know how many people really are hip to this, or they will be more and more, I suppose, that this has an impact on how you will sleep that night.

It does.

That's the part I really want to like—

It does have an impact because it does kind of start setting up this melatonin process, which is the sleepy hormone that needs to rise.

There's— Calibrating your clock, right? It's telling your body there will be a period 12 or so hours later. Yes. It's time to go to sleep. Yes. Your body knows I will be sleeping. And the other piece of that light experiment or that paper that I was mentioning earlier, and I wish I knew the author of that right at this moment, we'll get that put in the show notes, was that if you also finish your day sort of, again, when the sun goes down around dusk time, if you can get out, obviously there's a lot of reasons for getting out in nature and walking and breathing air, and that's a whole other conversation. But relative to sleep, if you can just get out and see the sunset or be outside around the time that the sun goes down, looking at the sky, that that will also contribute to your body's natural ability to get you to bed and get a better sleep. Is it? Yes.

Yes, you're exactly right. And I would say the next part of this though is like when the sun comes up, you go up. When the sun goes down, the lights in your house need to dim down.

Yeah.

Because you could do all of that, and if you have consistent light exposure at night, it's going to suppress melatonin and you're not going to feel sleepy.

Meaning you're watching TV before bed, you're on your iPad doing a crossword puzzle. And I live with somebody who likes to do that crossword puzzle before bed. I'm just saying, with the iPad, that's a big issue because it's like a message to your brain. It's like, it doesn't know what are we doing?

It's pushing back this melatonin signal. But then the other part we're finding too is, is have you ever like been ready to go to bed, lay down, and you're like, oh, I'm just going to check one more thing on my phone. And all of a sudden you watch something or read something that stimulates you emotionally.

Yep.

That is almost as big or more, just as big of a problem as you watch a few videos and now you're emotionally stimulated and it's hard to wind down. So you nailed it. Viewing sunlight in the morning, viewing sunlight in the evening. As a matter of fact, my app AIM7, we send you a notification with a timestamp, with an image of the sunrise when you should go outside in the morning and 90 minutes before sunset.

Yeah.

So you've got to view sunlight morning and evening, but then you've also got to start dialing it down in your house. And you need to start changing your relationship with your screens if sleep's an issue, because you're going to be suppressing melatonin production, which is what— there's still a lot to be learned about melatonin. We now know that it's a powerful antioxidant. It's not just secreted from the pineal gland in your brain. It's created in in the mitochondria of all your cells. But we do know that light can positively and negatively influence it.

Is it positive, negative, or just neutral for people who take melatonin as a supplement at night to help with sleep? I mean, that could be a whole podcast all by itself, right?

But I'm not kidding. I recorded this thing with Satchin like 6 weeks ago and it was a mind blower. There's still a lot to be elucidated on this subject, but for the most part, like we don't know.

Okay.

Because here's the thing, to do the studies, you would have to be sampling melatonin from the blood at such a frequent interval. We don't even really know the moment it starts spiking and how long the tail is. They're starting to think that like, this is way off track, but it could be melatonin kind of gradually goes away in the morning and eating too soon after waking, like immediately after waking. could have some negative impacts on blood sugar regulation. So, they're starting to say like the whole time-restricted feeding isn't so much for weight loss, which is kind of where that whole thing went. It was like we're starting to see its impact on the circadian system.

Yes.

So, if you eat too late at night, that can significantly hamper sleep. Cutting off food 3 to 4 hours before bedtime is going to allow your heart rate to drop down, It's going to give your digestive system a chance to break. If you track and measure HRV, I think you're wearing an Oura Ring.

Yeah. The heart rate variability is really important to how you feel when you wake up in the morning, right? To your readiness state.

It is a direct measure of your autonomic nervous system adapting to stress. So if that number's low, it means that your body is in a state of stress. It never switched off. And so when you eat a large meal at night, guess what? You went to bed stressed and you woke up stressed and you didn't get the recovery that you needed. And so now you're not recovering very well.

And what you said about how quickly you eat in the morning, again, you think about a lot of what we were brought up to think, just no criticism, just the kind of program we all receive is like breakfast is the most important meal and you should have it right away and it should be a big breakfast, you know, like to start your day. And again, there's periods, I suppose, where maybe that, that's a beneficial thing, especially if you're a school kid and you got to go the whole day without a decent meal. So that's your only one, or at least the first 6 hours a day kind of thing. But for grown adults, delaying the eating is not just for intermittent fasting benefits or other things, or it has a lot to do with how those rhythms will play out and whether or not, like, as you said, your body is in sync to be able to sleep when it's time to sleep. I think people, everybody wants to sleep. It's the issue is that people who want to sleep can't sleep or can't—

Yeah.

Don't sleep as well as they Wanna freaking sleep. I was looking, man, we like to listen. My wife and I, we do 2 things before bed. I'm a big fan of just like, is there a tool? I'm not like a huge hack guy, but what's the tool that you can apply even or start to sort of shift your really well-ingrained habits, even, even just a small percentage to create a change, you know, small. That's often the way change occurs anyways in these microsteps. So for us at night, we will listen to a meditation before bed. We'll, Do legs up the wall right from bed. You know, just literally get into an L shape with our legs up the headboard for 5 or 10 minutes before sleep, before we're gonna go to sleep. Because it's just an incredible way to help with insomnia from my standpoint. I've never had a huge battle, but I've had trouble with it at times. It's, it helps with anxiety. It helps to just basically physiologically get me in a, in a state where I'm more, more relaxed and ready. For sleep. But as we were looking through some podcasts recently or meditations, wanted to try something new. They have podcasts for people that go like, take me to bed with you, or literally middle of the night podcasts for people that cannot sleep. So I, I feel like that has millions and millions of downloads. People that are having this issue more and more, especially given the world that we're living in where the frequency, I think they call it constant cognitive arousal. That just we are being—I don't want to say interrupted, but I'll use the word, I guess—interrupted from a concentration standpoint, from a focus standpoint. We're being interrupted 200, 300 times a day, depending on the engagement with your devices. In the end, it's taking us further away from this goal of how do we get back to homeostasis when perpetually when our phone is dinging and ringing and there are lights and all kinds of. other things that we're interacting with, it's making it more difficult to get back to that state of equilibrium. Do you agree with that, Eric? Is that a part of what we are also dealing with in terms of how we will sleep or how we wind down at the end of the day? How much of the technology is controlling us versus the other way around?

Yeah, I think, I don't know if you remember the exact number, but it's thousands of times per day people interact with their phone, touch it, move it, and just having it in your visual field. can significantly hamper focus and productivity. But yeah, we have a ton of inputs and at the end of the day, you want to start quieting those inputs down. And

do you stow your phone? What's your own personal ritual around when you first engage with it in the morning? Is there a rule about that for you when you last engage with it or some other technology before bed? I know I'm asking a really—

No, I try to be really good about The alarm goes off and not starting to check emails and look through that stuff. I try to give it an hour. I like to go for a walk. So my morning routine is I go for a walk, come back. I usually go out early, like 5:30 in the morning, come back.

What's bedtime for you if you're out for a walk?

9-ish, 9 to 9:30.

Got it.

Something at the latest 10 o'clock, but I would like to be in bed around 9 to 9:30 at the latest.

How old are your girls?

I have 3 boys. They are 11.

Sorry, boys.

No, you're fine. 7 and 2 years old.

Got it.

So I get up before they do.

You get up before they do and you go to sleep.

I go on a walk.

Around the time that after they go to sleep, is that about it?

Yeah. As soon as they're going to bed, my wife and I are going to bed.

Got it.

That's just, we really value sleep and it not because of any work that I've done. We both just like to go to bed. And so it takes a lot of energy, as you know, right now to be a good parent, to do all the stuff, take them here, take them there, run a business, do all this. So

I'll just say it's exhausting. I mean, on a good day, on the best of days.

You're exactly right. So I actually, I used to never listen to anything during sleep. So one of the things you want to have is a very steady sleep noise environment. You want your room to be cold, dark, and quiet, like a cave. And then you want a constant sound. So either complete silence, white noise is great if you're in a big city. I started using Endel, E-N-D-E-L. It's an app. That

E-N-D-E-L.

Mm-hmm. That creates AI soundscapes based off of your physiological metrics and circadian rhythm. I really like it. I use it at night. It kind of goes to this little wind-down sound and then it kind of turns into a white noise. Very interesting. But yeah, so before I go to bed, I'd say the hardest thing for me is, is like, and something I'm working on is, is going like, okay, at a certain time at night, Like, I'm done. Because right now we just launched our product. We got all these things going on. And so in the morning though, I try to give myself a buffer of like, don't get up and look at your cell, turn it off. Maybe look at the weather.

So

if you know, I got to put a jacket on, go out for a walk, come back. I take a cold shower and not because of any biohacking reason or yes, we know increases, just ramps up your sympathetic nervous system.

It's those adversity mimetics or anything you can do to kind of get yourself—

That's not what it is for me. The reason I would do that Is I like to invest in spiritual time in the morning and I noticed that I was not focusing. I was just still in the process of waking up. So I was like, I'm going to go on a walk and then I'm going to shock my system so that I am awake and I can actually focus on something that's important. And then it's like helping my wife get the kids out the door and hopefully getting some good hugs and kisses in. And then I'm at work when they go to school at 7:20 in the morning, I'm working. I feel like I get my best work done before noon. And so I love to just get it in. And

that's a really good ritual, or let's say for people to establish a ritual that is good for them. That's a good ritual for you. Might not be a great ritual for other folks. And we had our kids out the door in that same time zone for too many, for a lot of years. And now And now we are happily empty nesters in that respect. But it's a phase, it's a period in your life where your schedule is governed by things that are important to you, that are important then and later on, or at some other point, those things are not as relevant. So given the diversity of the audience who's listening to this, I'll just say there's some standard, for me, I would call them rules for these rituals. And one of them is that, and I call it a rule only because I try not to be too absolutist, but to me, this is one of those things that if I engage with my phone upon waking, I always get some smartass who'll say, that's the thing I use for my alarm clock to wake me up. I'm like, dude, there is such a thing that's an alarm clock. You can get a windup, really go old school, and then you don't even need an app to go to sleep because that's your constant sound is the ticking of this alarm clock, right? But those first at least 10 minutes upon waking, I want that agenda, if you will, the agenda of beginning of the day, moving out of my unconscious state into a conscious waking state and all the creative juice that is available in that moment or in that early part of the morning to be driven by what's inside of me, where I'm leaning or what I'm craving, what the universe is bringing to me, as opposed to what's on this cell phone. Like if I pick this up, I look at texts or emails or get on social media, it's everybody else's agenda that I'm engaging with. And I think that's, so if we're gonna just talk about like, how do you get off, as my grandmother would say, on the right foot, start the day on the right foot. I would say whether it's somewhere between 10 and 30 minutes that you just don't engage with your cell phone or maybe any other technology at that point.

Mm-hmm.

And then yeah, if you can get out and move your body, if you can get out and see sunlight, be outside even for 5 minutes, it's gonna help with that end of day. And you think about the booking and ending of this thing, waking up, feeling ready for the day. Going to sleep ready to do, as you said earlier, which is to get your most important recovery. If all about, if resilience to change and disruption is all about how we recover from it, and sleep is the number one recovery tool, then to me, if you only did one thing, if you just said, hey, for the next 3 months, my number one focus for my own wellbeing is that I'm going to sleep better at night so that I can perform better during the day. Again, if I was an Olympic athlete, That's what I'd be focused on. Sleep better so I can perform better. Then we'd be talking about the things we've been talking about.

100%. I think that sleep problems are an epidemic and it is one of the 5 pillars. It's one of the highest yield behaviors that will lead to improved adaptation.

Where can folks, I know we're going to have show notes where everybody's going to be able to get more information and I know they're craving this anyway on these 5 pillars. So, and you also mentioned that you have an app. So just tell us about the app. I'm fascinated about that. And yeah, and then as I said, people will be able to get more information about the 5 pillars as well. But anything else you want to say about that would be perfect right at this point as we're winding things down.

Yeah, absolutely. So about a decade ago, I pioneered the use of athlete wearables in American football and helped open a billion-dollar market in the US. So if you ever watched the Super Bowl or any NFL game, you see somebody running down the field and it says they ran 20 miles an hour. That's the technology I brought to the US. The problem that we had though is that that data without actually turning it into recommendations was completely useless. When we were able to turn that data into recommendations specifically for athletes to improve performance and reduce injuries, the team that I was on had almost a 90% reduction in injury that year. We won a championship and it really changed the landscape of sports health and wellness. So I started a company a couple of years ago called AIM7, and we just launched our app into what's called private beta. And what we do is we turn wearable technology data, like from your Apple Watch or Oura Ring, into daily personalized recommendations for your mind, body, and recovery to help you look, feel, and perform better. So we literally have systematized how to build adaptation leveraging technology. And so it's no longer just like, oh, you walk 5,000 steps or slept 7 hours. Like, that's totally worthless. What do I do today to feel better, perform better? And then what area do I need to focus on? So after 7 days, we analyze all your data. And then we'd be like, Adam, this is the area you need to focus on. Then we create goals for you so you can change this behavior.

So this app integrates, like I'm wearing an Oura Ring. You noticed that earlier. And yeah, I love the information that I'm getting, but what you're doing is optimizing even further what it is that this—

We tell you, we actually make it actionable. So for instance, I'll give you an example for your body. We didn't even get into exercise, but we did the foundational research in something called fluid periodization, which means this, we can tell you the precise type intensity and duration of exercise that your body is able to adapt to each day. And we leverage the types of things that you like to do. Let's say you like to do the elliptical, lift weights, do yoga, whatever. We would be like, hey Adam, today your body's in this state, so why don't you go get on the elliptical for 25 minutes in this specific—

How did you know that mine is the elliptical, by the way? That's uncanny, dude. Are you watching me?

I'm watching you all the time. So yeah, our team of scientists did the foundational research in all this, and this has never been available to the public. So we just launched into private beta.

AIM7.com.

That's it. AIM7.com. So you can find me on Instagram @ericcoram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Eric Coram, and then AIM7.com. If that interests you, building more adaptive capacity, if you use a wearable, come on, check it out. If you put in there that you heard about me on this show. We have over 2,000 people on our waiting list ready to join, and we're letting small numbers of people in at a time. It's a glove experience. You get 4 Zoom calls with me and my team in the first month. And if you put that in the show notes, the Change Through Podcast, then we'll prioritize your registration.

Love that. And I know our people love it as well. Eric, again, I feel like this is part 1 of a series of conversations.

Let's do it.

So, should we do that?

Yeah. I'm coming back whenever you want.

Buddy, that, I mean, yes. And I'm like, oh my God, where do we, and I got so many questions in my head that I'm gonna save for the next go around. Let me ask you as we wrap this up, something I don't typically ask, but I'm feeling the call to do it. How aligned, and this is super personal, how aligned are you and your wife when it comes to the kinds of rituals that we've been talking about? I say that because I know that even in my own relationship, which I'm married to my sweetheart from college. It was like past 30 years at this point. There were periods in time where I was craving more self-care. She was so sapped by what it took to be a mother because that was her 100% commitment. And I was working more the business end of it and was a full-time dad for sure. But I knew I had to take care of myself. And there was, I wanna call it, yeah, I gotta say it, conflict there. Mm-hmm. For maybe in the first 5, 6 years of our marriage where I would sneak off to go to the gym or sneak off to go to the pool to swim and then would feel super guilty about it, would lie even if I would just say I'm going somewhere else. Like, I'm, I'm gonna go to the sh— I'm gonna go do the shopping for the week for us. And then I'd be back 3 hours later. It's like, when does shopping take 3 hours? You know, that kind of stuff. So,

she was a college athlete. She was actually way better than I was. And And she's a doctor of physical therapy specializing in women's health and outpatient orthopedic stuff. So we really align on that. Now she knows that if I don't exercise, I will go insane. She does jiu-jitsu. Our whole family does jiu-jitsu as a matter of fact, but she's a brown belt. She's very good. That's her thing. When things are back in rhythm, she just had a shoulder surgery. She'll go 5 days a week and she'll go teach. She'll go do it with the kids. She's also a baseball coach. So we're aligned on that, like sleep, exercise. I used to feel guilty about asking and now I just say, hey babe, I want to go exercise. Does it work with this? Or I'll get up some days, I get up early, early in the morning to get it done. Some days I'll do it at lunch. I try not to let it take away from our family time, but if I don't do that, I'm not showing up good for anybody. The sleep stuff, we just don't watch TV very much, although we did talk about a television show, but like I think We'll get like one episode a week, sometimes every other week, just because it's, it can't be the priority. I will say this, like something I'm maturing into is being better at listening, finding the signals for her of when she's starting to burn out and then leaning into how do I get her the rest that she needs? I need to do a better job of that. It's something that I constantly am thinking about of like, I don't want her to hit the wall. And I'm an early-stage founder. I left a successful career to build something, and there's a lot of stress that goes with that. And I think I married a wonderful person, but you know what? We're all humans. And so it's top of mind, man. This is real-life stuff right here. I also think there can be some selfishness, not with her, but if your spouse or partner is not letting you do that, that's also a discussion to be had.

The permission is so key. I know when Yeah. That within that intimate relationship, there, this, how do you get permission? How do you give permission to do the most fundamental thing for all of us, which is to make sure that we are not just alive, but that we're in a state where of value and of use really to others.

100%. And I think that you and your spouse or partner need to really have some serious conversations about what that looks like. Because if you don't, there's going to be friction there. And because of our lifestyles nowadays, we don't get this through work. We used to work, like work was physical. Now it's more intellectual. We're in a knowledge worker economy. So if we don't move enough, guess what? Our lives will be cut short. So we have to be far more intentional about it. And guess what? That takes time. So maybe there's ways you can do it together. Maybe there's ways you can make it a family thing, like our whole family does jiu-jitsu, whatever that looks like. But I think that's a real conversation that you need to have with your loved ones.

Yeah. Eric, thank you for going there. I really appreciate you answering that question. Yeah. For folks that— well, just because I'm married, my Franny and I were married a long time. We're madly in love to this day. I will say we've been through all the usual stuff. That's what relationships are about. You're going to have tough times. You're going to have conflict. You're going to have times when you can't figure shit out. And so we did. We had to figure that out, that to see the signs when someone is— it's not Not that somebody is necessarily being less about the judgment of they're a good person or bad person, or they're patient or not patient. It's like there are signs of depletion everywhere that we see, and we can rush to judgment even in the world we live in, which is so divisive these days that other people are just somehow they're wrong, they're bad, they're different. That's BS. We're just collectively as a world, we are depleted. And I love the conversation today because a lot of what we're talking about is how we fill the tank back up. As you say, the resilience tank or bank account, even, if you will. Because ultimately, when you do that, you are able to be there. You are more of the person that other people can be around and want to be around and all that. So I think that's been a big thing in our marriage. I think it's a big thing for all of us right now is to just go— to take care of yourself is just not selfish. It's not. Right. How do you get permission? That's a question. And maybe it's a question for another day. Whether it's at home or it's even in the workplace. Because we've gotta know that it is vital, as you said, to living a full life that we also recognize that we've gotta take care of ourselves.

Yes, sir.

Yeah. So I so appreciate the conversation today. I already can tell you're a really good dad and all that is, yeah, makes the world even better than it already is. So thank you for being that.

Thank you. Thank you for having me on your show today.

Yeah. Terrific. Full show notes as always, everybody. I would love it if you're thinking about somebody that might benefit from hearing some of this, whether it was this last little bit or it was some other part of it. We'd love it as always if you share this episode.

Mm-hmm.

I know I'm not so hip to how the algorithm works. I mean, I think we all get it that there's something going on there that puts these shows and puts other things in front of people based on how people rate it, how people think about it. It's selfish, I suppose, self-serving for me to ask you, but I'd love it if you would Not only share the episode, but rate the episode. If you loved it, give that 5-star review. And if you didn't, if there's feedback, if there's things you want to know, things you want to let me know or our team know about how we can make things better, you go to adamarkel.com/podcast and leave a comment. I'm— there's no bot, there's no other team member that's assigned to respond to those kind of things. That's going to be me. And we really appreciate feedback. It's like literally oxygen for us. And this is part 1 of We'll see how many parts to the conversation with Eric. But again, I want to wish you all a beautiful, blessed day, evening, wherever you are in the world right now. I'll just say ciao. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Dr. Eric Coram. Man, he's got so much wisdom and intelligence to share. Absolutely loved how he framed things. We talked about how stress is in many ways Like the gas and the brake in a car. And the idea that we're constantly kind of going back and forth, toggling between that gas pedal and that brake pedal. And the goal here when it comes to resilience is to create the right dose of stress or have the right amount of stress match up with the right dose of recovery. That concept really, I think, is, it was very poignant. The idea that stress is only a problem when it exceeds our capacity to adapt to it. I wanna repeat that, that stress is only a problem when it exceeds your capacity to adapt to it. And this concept of when we adapt in an optimal way, that gas and brake relationship, that parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system relationship, that when those 2 things are in harmony, we have equilibrium. We have something that we might call balance that I reframe as harmony. This is fundamentally important because we have to understand how to perform better in every area of our lives, whether it's in with our relationships personally and professionally, whether it's with our physical health, our mental health, our emotional health, our spiritual health, all of it. All of that is gonna require that we come to grips with this idea that we've got to be managing in our stretch more effectively. That concept really came through today. And that ultimately resistance, while it can be a harmful thing, we actually need to have that stress. We need to have that resistance in order for us to grow. So we look at stress often often as a bad thing, and yet there's some really positive attributes to it. Again, assuming that we also create a commensurate amount of recovery to match up to that. And that, I think, is where the car leaves the road and we end up in the ditch often, is because we've just missed on that one concept that we just don't have the recovery incorporated, that we're not integrating recovery And the principles of what it means to truly recover ourselves mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually. We don't understand how to recalibrate, how to restore and renew and regenerate our energy. And it's because we don't put enough focus on that. We don't obsess about the quality of our recovery that ultimately leads us into that ditch and where we are not in equilibrium, where we don't have a homeostatic Balance. And that's the place where we can improve. I love the conversation, the wisdom, the intelligence that Eric Corum exuded today. I hope you loved it as well. And if so, please share this with a friend or family member. Feel free to leave us a comment at adammarkel.com. It will be me to respond. Of course, you can leave that 5-star review for us as well, whether it's in, you know, whether it's with iTunes or Stitcher or whatever the platform is that you're currently using. What that does for us is it helps this podcast get in front of more people. It puts us in the way of others that could be positively impacted by us. So yes, it is self-serving for me to ask that. And at the same time, I feel like it's the way the ripple effect works, and I don't mind asking for the support. So thank you in advance for taking the time to give us that 5-star rating or whatever the rating is, frankly, that makes sense for you. And also, if you've not yet determined this moment, in this moment, how resilient you really are mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually, all you have to do Go to resiliencerank.com and 3 minutes, and I promise you, just about 3 minutes later, you will have your own results in each of those 4 zones of resilience. And on top of that, what it means and what you can do about it, because ultimately, that's getting new awareness. Creating that clarity is fundamentally important. And then we have to know what to do with it, what's possible beyond just the awareness. And I don't wanna say just the awareness because the awareness is really, truly transformational. Yeah. And you go to resiliencerank.com and 3 minutes later, 16 questions later, you're gonna get your answers, and you're gonna get those next steps as well. So again, wanna say thank you for all the support of our Change Proof podcast, and I'll just say ciao for now.

Thanks for listening. We hope you now have even more tools and greater insights to build resilience and become change-proof. Remember to leave a review on Apple Podcasts, and you may be featured in an upcoming episode. For more resilience tips and strategies, including some support for building change-proof teams, visit adammarkel.com. To get your own free resilience assessment, go to rankmyresilience.com.