Optimizing Health And Performance With Dr. Tracy Gapin

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 episode Welcome to another episode of the Change Proof Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Markel, and you're going to love my guest today. I'm going to get right into it and give you his intro and then his bio, and then we'll, we'll get after it. I know it's going to be a great conversation. Dr. Tracy Gapen, Doc Tracy is how I'll refer to him later, is a leading men's health optimization and longevity expert. He's the founder of the Gapen Institute for Precision Medicine and a board-certified urologist with over 25 years of experience. I noticed on his website it says that he's a recovering urologist. Dr. Gapen helps high-performing entrepreneurs, athletes, and executives executives reach peak performance through cutting-edge data-driven health strategies. He's a bestselling author, TEDx speaker, and a trusted top professional to optimize other professionals' health and energy. Looking forward to this conversation for a number of different reasons, personally and professionally speaking. I know it's going to be exciting, so buckle up and stay tuned. Okay, Doc Tracy. I love that, first of all, Doc Tracy. You have, you know, a very substantial CV, a wealth of knowledge and information and experience and all those things. And the question I've got for you at the outset, which I know from our community, they love this question. What's one thing that's not in that bio that you would love for people to know about you at the outset?

I love that question. Without question, my immediate response is my why. My big purpose in life is to be an amazing dad. I have 2 incredible kids. I have a 9-year-old little princess. She calls herself Slay Queen. She is night and day different from My 11-year-old buddy, he is just like me. He's a mini-me and he is a competitive high-level golfer. Started at age 5. He's been competing at world championship level. He scratched from the whites. He's been smoking me for years already. So that's a joy to get to be his caddy daddy and be there and support him. And it's good for personal development, not just for golf skills, but it teaches you about the challenges of life. So it's great to see him competing. And my daughter's now doing figure skating competitions as well. So, but that's, to me, that's more important than anything else we may talk about today.

Amazing. Absolutely. Listen, I'm newly addicted to the sport of golf. Like any good parent does, I've infected my children, or at least some of my children, with that addiction now. So primarily the sons. So repeat again, how old is your boy?

So he's 11, and he started playing when he was 5. Grandma got him a set of plastic club set, you know, and he started hitting in the backyard with plastic balls, and he fell in love with it. And, you know, I think if I had tried to push on him or force upon him, he wouldn't have taken to it. But it's like, it's his passion, it's his love, and he has a natural God-given talent to where he started competing at age 6 and he was crushing it from day one. And so, here we are now, 11 years old, and he drives a 220. He is a scratch golfer from the whites. It's so amazing to see. It's like it's nothing. It's like it's just, of course. Yeah, of course I make par. Like it's nothing. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, look, some people are listening to this perhaps and they are not into golf, and I appreciate that. So, for those folks, we're not going to spend the entire episode talking about golf. So, don't have to worry. But, and those that are interested or are addicted in some respect, then you'll love this. So I want to get at the mindset piece because I think for most golfers, including the best golfers in the world, and then on down to anybody else who's kind of like a duffer but wants to be better, the hardest part of the game is really not the physical, the physical piece. And I know part of your work— so I'm going to sort of dovetail this into the work that you do in the world because you work with athletes and you work with high performers on stuff. And physical is important, and we're going to talk about the physical today, to be sure, but at least in my own experience in golf and in watching some of these great players over the years, it seems like the physical is not the difference maker. It's the stuff between the ears. And you got an 11-year-old who's a scratch golfer. So what can you tell us about that?

It's a challenge. It's a battle. Um, you know, it's a life lesson in resilience, in perseverance, in, you know, what do you do when you've been knocked down? What do you do when you hit a bad shot? That's been our biggest thing from day one. His skills were there. Hitting the ball, that was never his problem. It was If you miss a putt, if you miss a birdie putt and you're devastated by a par, then you're not going to do well long-term. You have to be able to kind of move on and deal with it. And so it's about dealing with adversity, dealing with challenges. How do you pick yourself up? How do you remain confident and focused? How do you not look backwards when we look ahead? All of the life lessons that are so important for all of us, this book instills all that. And it's about resilience and about you just never give up and perseverance and focus on your goals at hand. And all stuff that comes into play. And so I think that applies to golf at any age. It applies to executives, to entrepreneurs, founders, running a small business. It applies to a parent. It applies to focusing on your health, everything. It comes down to that kind of resilience. So there's a strong parallel. So I love that you went down this path.

So your 11-year-old, I thought you were going to maybe share with us a bit of how somehow his mindset is different than the mindset of a person who's a bit older and gets sort of attached. Attachment to results, for example. Yes. That attachment to the result, to winning or to some other result, is so strong that it impacts how you approach the pre-winning and the pre-result. So, is that true for him or not really?

Absolutely. And, it's almost like he was successful so early that he almost had to learn how do you deal with loss. In golf, almost every shot is a miss, right? You only make 18 good shots around when you actually sink the ball in the hole. Every other shot is technically a miss. And so, a great story actually that I'm writing my second book right now, and this is how my book starts. And so I'll give you the preview of the story. I mentioned this in my TED Talk as well that I gave a couple years ago. So he was 6, and we're at a tournament up in Tampa, and we're on this par 5, and here's the second shot. There's water in front of the hole, and caddy daddy that I am, I said, Graham, let's lay up here and go for the green on your third shot. He looks at me— true story, no lie— at age 6 and tells me, Dad, I didn't come here to lay up. And I look at my wife who's on the side and we're both kind of laughing. I go, okay, what do I— just step back. You know what? I'm just the caddy here. I'm not playing. So, um, he pulls out his 5-wood, that's his, his big wood, and he smokes it. He crushes it over the water. I didn't think he'd make it. I figured he'd put it in the water, but let him learn, you know, whatever. He smokes it over the water, gets it, lands on the green, 2 putts for birdie, and he wins that tournament in Tampa that day by 1 stroke. And so to me it was just such a powerful moment to just see how he was so freaking confident. And determined that, no, I'm not gonna lay up. Why would I lay up that? I could do it. I'm gonna make it. And so, if he failed, he would've failed and that would've been okay also. But it was quite a moment at age 6.

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. Let's just say he didn't have a lot of experiential lessons in life that would have contributed to his— to negative self-talk. Like, he wasn't thinking in that moment, oh, the last time I tried this, or I remember back when I tried to do that and I ended up, you know, with this— it going sideways on me. So there wasn't that conflict happening. He said— so has he seen the movie Tin Cup? No.

We've talked to him about that. He hasn't seen it. I told the story of that scene, yeah, but he hasn't watched it. The kid doesn't have an attention span for that kind of movie, but I've shared the amazing ending.

That might be one for him to see. The number 1 golfer in the world is a guy by the name of Scottie Scheffler. And at the end of 2024, somewhere around that time, maybe it was over the holidays, could have been at the beginning of the year. I think it was in December. The story goes that he's home, new dad. He and his wife have a baby. Maybe the baby's like a year old. a year or so old or whatever. And he's a family guy, and pretty much everybody likes this guy or loves this guy. And he's, you know, had an amazing year last year. He's number one golfer in the world and all that kind of thing. And as I understand it, he cut a part of his hand, might have cut his finger or cut a part of his hand with a knife as he was preparing food for dinner. I think it might have been steak. He might have been carving— Remember that? Carving a steak or whatever. And here it is when you and I are recording this podcast, it's months later, and he missed a good part of the first, you know, the for first part of the season, a good number of tournaments. And while he's still ranked number 1, he certainly— if it were just based on his performance this year, he would not be ranked number 1. He might even not be in the top 10, frankly. Right. So, I'm bringing that up not just because it's related to what we're talking about in the golf, in a sense of it being about the sport of golf or a performer in that, but it's an interesting thing that I've been not just noodling on. Our research has taken us to this place. We've been speaking to leaders in various organizations about this particular thing, and that is the degree to which we are depleting ourselves, exhausting ourselves, or even burning ourselves out trying to do too much, multitasking to a degree that, that is not sustainable, and frankly just not being present in the thing that we're doing. So, you know, my theory is with regard to this guy, right, his hands are vitally important to him. These are million-dollar, multi-million-dollar hands. He is one of the most coordinated people on the planet. He's a consummate athlete. For him to cut himself— and somebody might be chuckling at this, right? How many people have cut themselves while cooking or cutting garlic or whatever it might be? And you go, yeah. And here's this guy, you know, with this massive, you know, financial career that involves, you know, so much money, etc., who injures himself in that way and it directly impacts his performance for some period of time later. And you go, You know, what was he actually thinking about in the moment that he was carving that steak? Was there something going on in the room that distracted him? Was he thinking about golf? Was he thinking about something else? You know, was his head in a different place? He wasn't fully present. That would be my, my theory as to how something like that occurs. But I want to get your sense of, of, you know, is that something you're noticing? And what's the real cost of just sort of not only not paying attention but not being fully committed in the moment? Sure. So,

I love your shedding light on stress and how stress is a massive culprit in a lot of the chronic disease and health issues that we're suffering from. It causes from the medical physiologic side, it affects hormones, it causes inflammation, it tears up our gut health which controls neurotransmitters in our brain and controls metabolism and controls our immune system. So, almost everything in our body in some way affected by this chronic stress that most entrepreneurs, founders, professionals, leaders fail to acknowledge is affecting them. And like you said, they, you know, we grind and we multitask and you go, go, go, and it's like you're pushing a race car in the red for so long and eventually it's gonna blow. And so I think it's so important to really emphasize there has to be balance. And for anyone, I don't care what position you are, CEO to bottom-level employee, everybody needs to create balance in their life. So that, that stress doesn't overcome them. And so, you know, being present with your family, for example, is a big part of that. Doing what you love. Like for me, I actually hate golf. I, I'm a hack. I'm terrible. But I go out there cuz I love being with my son. But what I really love to do is I love playing tennis. It's like, that's my freedom. I, that's my space of zen. And I love it. I'm actually decent at much better at that than golf. And so I schedule time for relaxation, for enjoyment, for things that I love to do. I schedule time with my family, vacations and trips, and, and I schedule What are called free days on my calendar. This goes to the Strategic Coach model of buffer, focus, and free day where you have to schedule this balance in your life or else it'll never freaking happen. And so everyone's so busy grinding in the Gary Vee model of just keep grinding and push harder and harder. There has to be balance. And what you find when you have that balance, suddenly when you do come back, you're much more focused and you're much more efficient and productive because you've had that chance to turn that engine off and let it cool off. And so, Really a massive deal. And one of the big things we work on with our clients is not necessarily the medical stuff, but the lifestyle stuff, like how do you mitigate the effects of stress? Because it's such an important component.

Yeah, it's fascinating because resilience— I think the research is pretty clear, at least, you know, some of it is. I know our research points in this direction, but we've— we're not certainly not alone in it, that resilience is not really about grit. I mean, there's an element of being tenacious and persistent and not quitting things easily and that kind of thing. And your capacity to grind at times can be helpful. But if the pandemic, I think, taught us anything, it's that you cannot win a race that has no end. So resilience is much more about our method and our rituals for recovery, it seems, than it is about how you're able to just grind your way through it. Yeah. I'm a music fan as well. And by the way, you and I have a lot in common in that Well, I love tennis and I don't want to say I prefer tennis to golf because, again, I'm addicted now to golf, but I know that my tennis game sometimes gets in the way of my golf game. The swings are not exactly compatible. Sure. Like baseball, if you're a baseball player, it's kind of tough also for some of these things. But as a music lover, in particular the Grateful Dead, a band that I've followed since the late '80s and through all of their iterations and Jerry Garcia dying and Phil Lesh dying and all this, they've got a guy named John Mayer that a lot of people know. a very successful artist in his own right, prolific guitar player. He took on the role of being the Jerry Garcia piece of the band. And sometime last year, maybe in July or August, right before I was about to go and meet up with my brother and see him at the Sphere in Las Vegas, he slammed his finger in a car door and lopped off the tip of his index finger on the hand that he, that he chords with. So it's like, again, what does this tell you? You know, like, again, he had million-dollar hands. It's part of not just, you know, it's so important that we recognize that the model of grinding and gritting or thinking that you can continue to do that without a cost, whether, you know, it doesn't have to be the tip of your finger or, you know, slicing your hand, but there's a health cost to that acute stress that is not abated through recovery ritual. Would you agree with that?

100%, yeah. And a good parallel to this that I think is to point out is fitness, exercise, weightlifting. So, a lot of people may not be aware of this, but lifting weights does not build muscle. They're like, what? And people have quoted me online, what the hell? Nobody's talking about it. Lifting weights does not build muscle. You are actually damaging your muscle when you lift weights. When you recover is when you repair bigger and stronger and you actually build muscle. And so, this is why when you're sleeping, And when you're recovering is when you're— that muscle actually hypertrophies. And that's how you build mass. That's how you build muscle is the recovery time. If you don't have the recovery time, then you don't build muscle. I've actually seen it so many times where these big bodybuilder dudes are massively stressed and they're inflamed and they have cardiovascular disease and they're not nearly as healthy as you would think because they're actually overtraining. They're overdoing it. It's too much. And so this parallels exactly what you're saying, where there is a fine line there, nuance of where, yeah, you got to push yourself. Yeah, you got to You gotta work. I'm not saying be lazy, but you also need balance. You need recovery time if you're gonna actually get the best results.

Yeah. What— tell us about sleep. I'm— I know you're not exactly a sleep expert, but you must, as part of your work, have to sort of meet a lot of people, deal with— work with a lot of people that are experiencing sleep issues. And in fact, I know that anytime I deliver a keynote presentation, I typically will ask an audience about their sleep and be shocked at the number of people that either have difficulty Getting to sleep at night or difficulty staying asleep at night. Yup. So, could you speak to any of the things that you know there and not just the problems, but if there are some solutions or things that you recommend, that would be super. Sure.

Absolutely. So, in general, people are focused on how long they sleep. You know, I slept 7 hours, 6 hours, 8 hours. But what's much more important is the quality of sleep. And by quality, I mean that there are different stages of sleep and how well did you sleep. So, when you first fall asleep, think of the ocean water and you go just below the surface of the ocean, and that's REM sleep. That's rapid eye movement sleep when you're dreaming, you're arousable to sound, dog barking, et cetera. And, that's a very important stage of sleep. You then go into non-REM sleep, which consists of light sleep, which is shallow water, and then deep sleep where you're going even deeper into the night. Deep sleep is the most important stage of Mm-hmm. Sleep that there is. And typically you get all your deep sleep in the first half of the night, in those first 4 hours. And then you come back up and it's like about a 90-minute cycle or so, 90 minutes to 2-hour cycle of going from awake to REM, down to light, down to deep, coming back up. You actually have microawakenings throughout the night. You're not even aware of it, but you have microawakenings and then you go back down again and you have about 4 to 5 of these cycles throughout the night, or maybe less if you wake up early. So what's so important is the deep sleep, and the number to focus on is 1 hour of deep sleep. And REM sleep, you want 2 hours of REM sleep. So, those are the 2 stages of sleep to focus on. And obviously, the only way to know that information is to track it. And so, this is why wearables are so valuable. And there's UltraHuman, there's the Oura, there are several devices out there. Yeah, one way or the other, you want to track the quality of sleep. What I find so often is that people will say, yeah, I slept 7 hours and 20 minutes, but I got 5 minutes of deep sleep, for example. That's when you wake up and you feel like crap. You thought you slept okay, you wake up, you're still tired and you're struggling through the day and you can't wait to go back to sleep again. Very, very common to see that type of picture. The other picture we see is where typically it's 2:00, 2:30, 3:00, right around that, after 2 cycles of sleep in the middle of the night, you wake up, you think you have to pee. That's the common trigger. But typically, that's just the brain. When you wake up, your first response is a natural Normal reflex, I gotta pee. But that's typically very rarely, if ever, what's actually waking you up. Hmm. What's waking you up is stress, is cortisol, is— I was telling you about the, you know, going again, going just below the surface of the water, going back down deep, and then coming back up again. Right when you're up there close to the surface of the water is when you'll pop your head up from stress, and now you're awake. And now you think about what you should have said yesterday, what you got to say tomorrow, and, and all the things that you wish you'd done differently, and your mind goes Next thing you know, it's an hour later and the whole night is ruined. Very, very common. And, that's all from stress. And, we can measure it with cortisol testing to actually show that that's the problem. Very, very common. A lot of times we see guys who take forever to fall asleep. That's more related to sleep hygiene and growth hormone levels and some other markers that can affect falling asleep. That's the type of picture where you lay down at 10:45 and it's 11:50 and you're still laying in And you're trying to fall asleep and you can't. And so those are 2 very different pictures that cause very different outcomes in your sleep pattern. So what do you do about it? The cortisol part I was mentioning, that's a whole different conversation. How do we mitigate cortisol and the effects of stress on our system, especially on sleep? And cortisol is from psychological stuff, like I'm worried about finances or the house or my wife or kids, or not necessarily anything, not distress from mind. That may be stress from things like like alcohol, things like crummy diet, things like toxins in your environment, in your food or water, gut health issues, infections in the gut, for example, overtraining. So a lot of different things are stressors to our system that can raise cortisol and, and cause that sleep disruption. So that's a whole other long story of how do we mitigate. First, it's identifying the cause of that cortisol issue, obviously. So, what do you do? What I like to talk about is some sleep hygiene things that, that everyone can do at night to kind of set yourself up for success. Number one, probably the most important piece of advice I'll give is to have the exact same bedtime every single night, weekday, weekend, regardless, same time every night you're going to bed. Your circadian rhythm senses that pattern, that consistency, and it needs that consistency. And so, pick a time, whatever it may be, that works in your life. And that's your bedtime every single night. Of course, things are gonna come up. You're traveling, but for the most part, you need to try to stick to that exact time. I would also work backwards. Like if you're someone who has to, has to get up at 5:30, count backwards. What's 7.5 hours from there? 10:00 PM. You gotta be in bed at 10:00 PM. You could work backwards and very quickly do the math and, and that tells you that's your bedtime. So whatever your wake time is can help you set your bedtime. In the 2 hours before bed, that's the most critical time. I would avoid eating food if you can at all costs. In general, a lot of foods can be very stimulatory, so I'd avoid food. I'd avoid drinking water if you can as well. If you need sips of water with your pills, your supplements or medications at night, that's okay, but try to minimize any intake. The biggest trigger here is blue light. So, your phone, Your iPad, your laptop, your computer, any of these devices are emitting blue light, a special wavelength of light that is affecting your brain. It affects melatonin production and it disrupts your sleep. It increases latency, which is how long does it take you to fall asleep. So, it's a big factor in that initial part of the night. So, no devices for 2 hours before bed. You can use blue light blocking glasses when the sun goes down, which is fantastic. And, I recommend everyone do that when the sun goes down. So, 3, 4, 5 hours before bedtime. But that still doesn't mean you can use the blue light device in those last 2 hours because those glasses don't eliminate 100% of blue light. They're good but not perfect. So, eliminating blue light is really a big deal. In those last 2 hours, people say, well, what can I do then? Well, you can watch TV still, although I recommend other activities. And I'm going to give you 5 things to do instead. Number 1 is read. Best time to read a paper book, not a Kindle, but an actual paper book. Best time to read is those 2 hours before bed. Number 2 is journaling. I'm a big believer in the power of gratitude and documenting what you're thankful for, documenting your successes from the day, your wins from the day. Um, you know, talk about the, the whole gap and the gain concept from Dan Sullivan is focus on the gain that you've made for the day, for the week, for the year, instead of focusing on the gap of where you think you want to be, you should be. So, that's your time to practice gratitude, journal your successes, document your plan for tomorrow as well. So, journaling is great. Third one is meditation. One of the ways to affect cortisol that we talked about and also help kind of get your mind ready for sleep is meditation. I'm a science guy. I'm a doctor. I've been a doctor for almost 30 years now. And for the longest time, I thought that was woo, BS, nonsense. Yeah, whatever. But there's real science. There's real studies that show that genetic expression is affected and altered by meditation and mindfulness practices. And so, for those of you who've never done meditation, there are apps on your phone you can get. Headspace and Calm are 2 examples of apps that you can get that will guide you through it. It's literally just laying there and don't think. And if you do think, that's okay. Just try to not think. But if you do think, let it go, let it flow. But it's an incredible source of relaxation and peace that helps, again, set the tone for sleep. So, that's number 3. The 4th one is sauna. Sauna is great for mitochondrial function, for recovery, for repair. It's also great for reducing stress and helping kind of set your body up for sleep as well. So, number 4 would be sauna, half an hour before you go to bed is awesome. And then, the 5th one is sex. Sex is a great way to calm your body, calm your mind, and it gets you ready for sleep as well. And so, those are 5 things to do. I joke and say don't do them all together, that'd be really, really awkward. But those are for the last 2 hours before bed, those are great.

I'm going to do something, I'm going to say something awkward in honor, I think, of Dr. Ruth, who may have been more than 100 when she passed in the last— I think she passed in the last year or so. And, uh, for those of you that don't know who Dr. Ruth Westheimer was, look her up, watch a video of hers. She's kind of like from the same era as— who was that fitness guy? Do you remember? You know who I'm talking about? Oh geez, the, uh, the skinny guy would wear the, you know, the tank tops.

And what was that guy's name? The hair.

Anyway, right, exactly. So Bruce Simmons. Bruce Simmons? No. Yeah,

Gene. Gene

Simmons. Not Gene Simmons, that's the KISS guy. Anyway, somebody's laughing. In any event, it's that era. But so all that to say, um, you said sex. I want to ask you, does that include masturbation? So for anybody who was thinking, yeah, I'd love to have sex before bed, and if you've got a partner at this moment, yeah, that'd be a great idea. And I'm not a sex therapist, but, you know, sex with your partner Great idea. That's beautiful. If you happen to be not with a partner, does that mean that masturbation wouldn't suffice? Yeah.

That actually provides a physiologic benefit as well. There are different emotional factors that you're missing with that. So, there is actually a real difference there. But yeah, if you're by yourself, then that's certainly going to have a beneficial effect as well.

Yeah, fantastic. And, we're staying on sleep for just a minute because I use an app as well. I have an Oura Ring and I check out what was my low resting heart rate. Yeah. And I've learned through, through trial and error and through reading and research and things too, that there are things that will raise your heart rate. My understanding is it's really important that if your low resting heart rate, whatever that might be, mine is typically like 47 or 48, at some point in the night when it's in the middle of my sleep, I wake up and I'm like shot out of a cannon and I'm ready to go. When my low resting heart rate happens really close to when my waking time is, more like 5 AM or 6 AM or something like that, then I wake up, I'm groggy, not quite, you know, hungover or whatever, but, but groggy. Kinds of things that raise your heart rate And where it is that it takes a little bit of time for your body to recalibrate and get back to a low resting heart rate are things like alcohol. So alcohol in the evening or eating or exercising in the evening, those things raise your heart rate, make it a little more difficult. But the thing that I still don't quite get, and maybe Dr. Tracy, you can explain this to me, is the whole heart rate variability thing. And again, I know this is not your full specialization area because you're a urologist by specialty, right?

This is our world. Yeah, this is what you

do. Okay.

This is what we do. Yeah. We are massive focus on data and how do you interpret the data? How do you apply it to what you're doing? And, you know, we do a lot of stuff— hormones, peptides, supplements, nutrition, fitness, and all kinds of different protocols. But the data is how you actually can measure what you're doing is actually working. Otherwise, how do you know if you're actually getting anywhere? So I love that we're having this conversation. So it's right on cue. So what is that? Yeah, it's great. So heart rate variability is, um, or HRV for short, Is a direct marker of stress. Okay? Our internal stress that I was telling you about earlier can be measured through heart rate variability. So, your heart rate may be 70, let's just say, on the pulse monitor or when they— when the nurse checks you, but it's not really 70. It changes every single heartbeat by microseconds. So, milliseconds, excuse me. So, you may have from one beat to the next, it may be 70.01. From that beat to the next, it may be 70.03, 69.97, 70.04. It varies literally every single beat. There's a variation in your heart rate. It varies, hence heart rate variability. And so—

And the more variation, this is like one of those inverse things where the number's higher by— it's like supposed to be higher.

Exactly.

The more the better.

And the way to think about it is, is when your body is rested and recovered and in an optimized state, you're dynamic. You're able to adapt. You're able to pounce. You're able to do whatever you gotta do. You can quickly dynamically adjust. Yeah. To the situation like that in a split, literally a split second. And so, the heart rate variability measurement is measuring your body's ability to very quickly and dynamically adapt to the environment. If you're sick, if you're ill, if you're stressed, what happens is your system becomes contracted and tight and you'll have maybe a high heart rate, but more importantly, your heart rate variability will plummet. It's very static. It doesn't change. It doesn't— you can't adapt to your environment as well. And so, that's how you can use that information. So, we are big on tracking HRV and it's going to tell you how you're responding to your behaviors, to your environment so that you can adapt. Example, when you drink alcohol, you will see your heart rate variability plummet. When you drink alcohol, you'll also see your sleep, your deep sleep scores plummet as well, but it'll affect your heart rate variability. When you travel, when you eat crummy foods. When you get a poor night's sleep, you'll see your heart rate variability plummet. When you overtrain, same thing. So, it's a great way to measure how rested your body is. I love the fact that we started this conversation talking about stress and how it impacts your body. This is the direct way to actually measure that on a daily freaking basis, and you could do it yourself from the comfort of your own home. So now, how do you measure it? So, this is really important. A lot of people use their Oura Ring, and I love Oura. They use their Garmin. I have had Garmin for years. They use their Apple, they use their Fitbit, they use their Whoop, they use all different devices and I'm agnostic to device. More important to point out here is heart rate variability is not something you measure all day. And, that's the big mistake. So, I did that for years with my Garmin and it would be fluctuating all day and high and low throughout the day. The problem is that's comparing apples to oranges. So, one day you may be doing strength training, you may be doing intervals. Another day, maybe you're traveling, maybe you're not working, you have a rest day, maybe doing light activity. Things happen throughout the day. Stress comes up. Us on a podcast right now is very different than when I'm working on my computer on my next talk. You're just in a different state. And so, long story short, you want to measure your heart rate variability at one specific single time and setting every single day. So, what that looks like is at 6:00 AM, I wake up. First thing I do, I get my cup of coffee. I sit on the couch. I put my Morpheus strap on. And I hit 2.5-minute scan and I get my heart rate variability score for the day and I'm done. And I compare that from one day to the next.

Alright, so I think just for fun, I don't know if you— do you have your phone with you? Do you have your stats from last night? My night was not as good as, as it's been in the last— a couple times the last couple of weeks, but I'm gonna share it anyway.

Yeah, let me see yours.

Alright, so I'm gonna show you mine first and I'm gonna put it on the screen for those of you watching on YouTube. But what I'm gonna do is tell you what it is. So I was a 90 on my readiness. Which, you know, says I got a crown. It was optimal. And my resting heart rate was 47 BPM, beats per minute, and then 37. My heart rate variability was 37 ms. My body temperature was up 0.4 degrees, which was interesting because that's not typically the case. And my respiratory rate was 12.6 per minute. So what was yours? And we're not comparing, we're just comparing.

Yep.

And then my low resting heart rate was at 3 On a total sleep between 12:04, I went to sleep late last night, 12:04 and 8:00 a.m. I stayed in a little bit.

Okay. So, this was my sleep score from yesterday.

Okay.

Sleep score was 77. Not great. Not great for me. Total sleep, 7 hours, 18 minutes, which is okay. Deep sleep, 43 minutes. That's red for me. Not good. And so, see, the question is why. And now, I dive into, look REM sleep, hour 57 minutes. Awesome. Restfulness, fair. Efficiency, 90%. Latency, 9 minutes. So, what I do with that is most importantly compare to other days to understand what has changed. And, this is the context, the nuance of it all. People will look at their data and brag or complain about what their numbers are, but the point of it is the application interpretation of what the numbers mean. And from one— like, your heart rate variability, it is what it is. You can't compare yours to mine, for example. What's really more important is how does your pattern look over the last week, over the last month? You know, what has— so if your HRV is 45, 46, 44, 45, 22, holy cow, what happened? A lot of variance. Yeah, the aberration. You want to understand what's causing the delta like that. So that's the real value of it. If it change, you know, The one thing to point out is, is I don't look at my data like it's absolute, exactly, you know, 43 minutes of, of, of deep sleep, whatever, because they're not that accurate. They're not 100% accurate. It's the gestalt, 30,000-foot view, general understanding of where you are and when you see big changes, what caused it.

Yes. No, I feel like it's really important. No, I mean, I think when I'm sharing about it and I'm, I'm not sponsored by them, I don't have an interest in the company, you know, like I'm, I'm not an affiliate or any of that. stuff. But for that particular device, the Oura Ring, um, but I think it's about awareness. Because if you're an athlete, you know, it's a good comparison again because we started talking about this anyway. But let's say you're a professional athlete. Let's say you're an Olympic athlete and you have an Olympic race, you know, tomorrow. You know, what would you be doing? What would you be thinking about? How would you be taking care of your body and treating yourself today if that were your, you know, what you were gonna be doing tomorrow? I think people just routinely are taking themselves for granted. And it's ironic because a lot of the work that we do in the way of resilience training and things, we do for health professionals. It can't get any more ironic than that. Like, you're a doctor. Yeah. So I was not sort of baiting you, but it's just more like if I spoke— if you lined up 10 doctors and you lined up 10 nurses and we did an evaluation of how they take care of themselves and what they are actually helping other people to do, like life-saving work, really important work, those people who are such— are so nurturing to others Doctors usually nurture themselves dead last. I don't know if you fit in that category or not, but I just— that's what I've noticed about the health profession and industry as a whole, if you see that as well. Do you speak to your own colleagues? I know you speak to the finance— very prolific in the finance space. You were speaking to the airline industry just yesterday. And, you know, like, so, you know, but how about your own people?

They don't listen.

There you go. Thank you.

This is because our healthcare system is so broken. I can talk an hour about just this alone, about how doctors in this country, we're 17 years behind the science. We're so focused on just finding the right drug to treat whatever problem we're treating for the patient in front of us just to get them out the door and move on that you think they're focused on their own health and thinking about sleep and stress and gut health and no way. It's almost sheer survival mode. It's all about diagnosis, drug, diagnosis, drug, and you get very siloed into what you're doing. And so, I don't even bother. I don't even try with my colleagues because they'll come to me when they're kind of ready and open to learn more about this stuff. And that's when it's fun, but not until then. Yeah.

I'm so glad that we got to actually have that enter the space just now and chat about it. I love, you know, I don't know if Dr. Casey Means is a name you're familiar with, but the book Good Energy, I think a lot of people have heard of this book. My son-in-law gave me that book over Christmas and halfway through it and loving it. And it shares a philosophy with you in that regard. So, look, I know our time is wrapping up. I want to cover one more thing and maybe squeeze out a couple of extra minutes here. The wealth gap, health gap. You know, you and I, before we hit record, we sort of chatted about that. You do work often with people in the finance space and the family practice groups there. And then, you've also worked in corporate, but that's not sort of typically what you've done. And I asked you, well, what's the difference between those 2 groups in terms of speaking and your content, etc.? And then, you shared that nuance with me. Yeah. Share that with our audience as well, please.

So, I work with a lot of high-performing leaders, founders, entrepreneurs, small business owners, professionals, some executives. I work with a lot of retired athletes. I've worked with NFL players, race car drivers, Olympic athletes, all walks. But what's interesting is it tends to be the entrepreneur, the founder who is more on the cutting edge and open and receptive to this idea around health optimization and not just waiting, you know, like our traditional healthcare system is all about just treating disease, wait till there's a problem, very passive reactive. Entrepreneurs get it. They're forward-thinking. They recognize that there's a lot of conversation out there and books like Casey Means' book and lab testing companies that are out there. And a lot of voices are now starting to bring this to the public realm. And I love it. It's awareness. It's awesome. Awesome. A lot of executives, they're so entrenched in their corporate office and in the boardroom and grinding that they tend to, in general, this is a generalization, but they tend to be less aware, less willing to kind of make change. And this is where executive health is such a big deal. And I talk about this concept of healthspan, wealthspan, what you were talking about earlier, that you look at guys like Paul Allen who was worth Worth $30 billion. He was the co-founder of Microsoft, worth $30 billion when he died at age 65 from lymphoma. Steve Jobs, we all know, diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at age 48, and he died at age 56. These guys had all the money in the world, but they couldn't buy one more day. And so, this is why I think it's so important that we start to pay attention to our health and be proactive and start to really take charge of it and not wait for our broken healthcare system to recognize a problem when it's too late. And one of my talking points is I believe your health can be your greatest asset or your biggest liability depending on how you approach it. And so, my big passion is just to get people to start to wake up and recognize and pay attention to how much they can do to improve their health and how that translates into their performance at work, their performance building their business, their performance as a parent. Peak performance is not just an Olympic athlete. It's me being a caddy daddy. To me, that's peak performance. It's probably harder on me than my son, but to me, that's what it's really all about, that the stuff we're talking about applies to every aspect of your life.

Brilliant. I guess what I'd love to ask you is one final question, really. When it comes to how you manage stress in the day, I mean, there's a million things. You've given us a lot already. We talked and spent a lot of time on sleep. So thank you for that. I'm glad we did it because so many people are really challenged by that. They struggle with it. Is there something that is a ritual for you each and every day? And I'm sure if you're like— and I think we are simpatico in this respect— we probably have lots of rituals. I know we do. Is there, is there one specific thing, if you could recommend or share with an audience of people that may not be ritualizing their recovery or optimizing that opportunity, that you would say, hey, do that, do this one thing? I've got an answer to that question as well if you, you want to turn to turn the tables on me. But what do you say to that?

Spend time with who you love. And for me, it's a matter of I'm very intentional about organizing my day, organizing my life, because my business can take over and consume me. And I could work till all hours of the night and never stop and grind and try to make more money and more money and more money. But there's so much more to it than that. It's the human connection. It's one of our core values is human connection. And so, So, to me, it's getting to sit down at dinner with my 2 amazing kids, my beautiful, incredible wife, and that's what it's all about. And that gives you the strength and the foundation to do anything else that you do. And so, that would be a big thing is just to don't lose sight of that because I— and you have to schedule it or it won't happen.

I'm such a big believer in that. I mean, you think about all the times there's somebody in your life that you say, hey, I would love to— I want to get together with you. Let's get together. Let's do something. Let's go somewhere, right? Whatever it might be. drinks, eat, vacation, something. And we know those things tend to not happen, and they tend to not happen when we don't schedule them. So, old friend who is somebody I've lost touch with, interestingly enough, as I'm, I'm thinking about this lesson and where the lesson originated was from that particular person, funny enough. So, yeah, um, yeah, thank you for sharing that. For those of you that want to get my answer to it, I'll just, in the interest of time, refer you back to my start of the year podcast where at the beginning of the year I do a solo cast about just something important. I've been noodling on, and this was around my start of the day practice. It doesn't have to be a start of the day practice, but it was one particular activity that created a space for me to work on things, sort of asking the question, what do I want more of in my life? What do I want to let go of in my life? That kind of thing. And creating this really wonderful opportunity to not only develop the list, but actually check in with it each day and in particular in the morning. So I get into more details in that podcast about that. Love it. Love it.

It's awesome. Yeah.

I have so enjoyed our conversation, so many levels today, Doc Tracy. Appreciate you. Appreciate the work you're doing in the world. For our audiences, they know, but I'll remind them in the show notes, there's full information about how to get in touch with Doc Tracy, find out more about his work in the world, especially how you might access it if you're a leader or, you know, people that potentially could benefit from this. And you've got a new book that you're working on. Is that right?

I do. I do.

And so do I. I have a new one working on. Takes a village. It's a heavy lift, right, bro? Yep. It really is. So we got that to look forward to. For everybody out there, have a beautiful, blessed day, evening, wherever we're finding you right now. I'll just say ciao. Well, as promised, I love that conversation with Doc Tracy. I love the fact that we were able to navigate the distance or the, the delta between the initial statement he made about his son and his family, his wife, his daughter and golf. We sort of followed the breadcrumbs from golf to sleep and really diving in at a pretty granular level, you know, something that's sometimes difficult to do in a short-form podcast like this, to really dig into one particular area like sleep, but we did. And I think very, very helpful to understand better what it is that promotes better sleep. And I think we have to understand as well that sleep is the number one. I think it was sort of stated, but I want to be even more sort of redundant in this statement to say sleep is the number one form of recovery. It's the number one recovery tool that we have access to. So if you want to perform better, you want to think better, you want to feel better, you want to live better, then you ought to sleep better. There's no question about it that if I had to pick one area and say, this is how you will up the ante on in every area of your life that is important to you, this would be the first focus, the first area that you just cannot ignore. Because we understand through our experience and our research, it's many, many years of it now, that resilience is created through recovery. And the number one way to recover, as I just said, is based on sleep. That is, if you did almost nothing else to aid in your recovery, if you were sleeping great every night, if you were optimizing the opportunity for true restorative rest and recuperation and regeneration and recalibration, and there's a whole bunch of other words that start with re that would help us in this area, then your outlook on life, your attitude, your ability to think and think quickly and think rightly would increase exponentially. Your ability to navigate relationships more effectively, just any area that you can think of would be magnified, would be improved by an exponent. Just 2x, 3x, 5x, whatever it would be if you simply focused on this one area. So the fact that we got to spend so much time thinking about it, speaking about it, really, really brilliant. I also loved so many of the other things that, that Dr. Tracy shared with us about the wealth gap, health gap, the stories in that area. A really great episode. If you know somebody that would benefit from hearing this episode, please share it. Please share with a friend, a colleague, family member. Of course, we'd love it if you would share also your feedback with us. You can go to adammarkel.com/podcast And leave a comment, or you can leave a review using the star system on the platform that you consumed this podcast. And we very much appreciate your time in doing that, whatever it might— it could take 5 minutes to just do that, and it's 5 minutes out of your day, and it's super helpful to us to have this community grow, to help with the algorithm so that more people find out about it. So I thank you for taking the time to do it. This— there's really nothing in it for you other than just giving something back if you feel like this was additive to you. This was of value. If you got anything out of it and you could share that, pay that forward, that would be spectacular. But again, we thank you just for being a part of this community. Hope that that's working for you. And again, always welcome to your feedback if it's not. Thank you so much as always. If you want to check out just in a snapshot, in a moment in time, what level of resilience you're at from a mental standpoint, from a mindset standpoint, from an emotional intelligence standpoint, from a physical standpoint, from a spiritual standpoint, which is really about alignment and values, really about congruity in your life and that feeling of purposefulness, any of that, you can simply go to rankmyresilience.com. Rankmyresilience.com. 2.5 minutes is all it will take. If you're doing it slowly, it'll take 3 minutes. So it's not a big time suck, and you're gonna get a tremendous insight, many insights out of it when you get your own personalized confidential report just seconds later. No one else will see it. It's yours, and also it's complimentary. That's right. rankmyresilience.com. Please, if you haven't done so yet, take advantage of that opportunity. Thank you so much again, and we'll see you soon. Ciao for now.

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