6 Things Wrecking Your Recovery, Sleep & HRV — Whoop's Head Scientist Explains

If I drink a lot of alcohol tonight, my HRV tomorrow will be acutely suppressed. The more alcohol I drink, the more suppressed it's going to be, and the worse my sleep is. And women, their HRV-CV took a bigger hit than men when they drank alcohol. When you are not able to build a natural pressure for sleep consistently, you end up not releasing the most potent kind of bolus of melatonin. And melatonin not just helps us feel sleepy, but melatonin is a really powerful antioxidant and we know it is cancer protective. Humans are not meant to be feeding over the course of 15, 16 hours. The average American is eating their calories over the course of 15 hours. And what happens is you end up eating really close to bed and digestion is a parasympathetic activity. So when you're asking your system to digest food, metabolize food, it's gonna prioritize digestion at the expense of getting into these deeper stages of sleep. So creating a buffer between your last calorie and when you intend to sleep is an amazing strategy. And for folks who are struggling with your metabolic health, might be a path to help improve markers of metabolic health.

Today on the Being Brigid Show, I'm joined by Dr. Kristen Holmes, the head scientist at Whoop, one of the largest wearable device companies in the entire world. She's also the author of the book Aligned. Today we'll dive into a conversation that will be so rich in better understanding the Data insights that she has access to that can help with your health optimization, how to think about recovery and sleep as part of your health protocol, heart rate variability, a masterclass on heart rate variability, how to increase it, how alcohol impacts it, and VO2 max. Dr. Kristen Holmes, in the data that you have access to, you have access to millions and millions of data points, which gives you such an— a unique perspective. I'm interested from you, what are the biggest predictors in just starting off that impact poor recovery and poor sleep?

Yes. So recovery, uh, and sleep are kind of intertwined, right? Um, you know, sleep is the mother of all recovery modalities, right? So if we think about recovery, uh, in the sense of, you know, our ability to respond and adapt to external stress, and what are the behaviors that facilitate recovery? And we can measure recovery by understanding your resting physiology at night. So we measure your resting heart rate, your heart rate variability, you know, at, at Whoop, the data that I'm inside, we're also looking at your respiratory rate and your sleep stress. And we have an algorithm that then helps us understand over the night, over the course of the night, how well did your body recover and restore? So there are behaviors that are happening during the day that influence our ability to recover over the night and in our ability to have restorative night's sleep. So I think that's probably the place to start. How do we create conditions during the day that facilitate recovery, that in— that increase our capacity to respond and adapt to stress during the day? Okay, so one of the biggest influencers is in the lead-up to bed, ensuring that we create a big enough buffer between, you know, if we have a glass of wine, for example, if we have that within 2 to 3 hours of bed, that will have a negative impact on our recovery and our sleep quality, which is linearly correlated with heart— a marker like heart rate variability, which is a good proxy indicator of, um, of your autonomic nervous system robustness, okay? So alcohol is one of the biggest recovery detractors. And so if you are gonna drink, you wanna try to make sure you leave as big a buffer as you can before you intend to sleep. The other big recovery detractor is, of course, just illness and fever and, you know, things like that. But dehydration is right up there at the top of the list. So if you're not, drinking enough water throughout the day and you, you know, approach your bedtime in a dehydrated state, that will basically increase your heart rate, decrease your heart rate variability, and put you into a scenario during sleep where your sleep stress is increased, okay? So that prevents you from dropping into that restorative sleep, which again is so important for recovery. So dehydration is the other big, detractor. Sleep-wake inconsistency is another detractor. So, you know, basically having unstable sleep-wake time, okay, so when you go to bed and when you wake up, so having that be really inconsistent over the course of a week, for example, would really impact your sleep quality. So we know from the literature that sleep-wake consistency is a driver of sleep quality. So if you wanna get into that, you know, beautiful restorative sleeps consistently, you know, decrease sleep fragmentation, those 3:00 AM wakeups that a lot of folks experience, sleep-wake consistency is really important. And in order to back into sleep-wake consistency, there's some things that we need to do during the day. Number one, try to stabilize when you wake up. If you wanna try to stabilize when you go to bed and have that sleepiness, happen at a predictable time at night. You wanna make sure that your wake time is consistent. And once you wake up, you wanna make sure that you're getting out into the natural light so you can start, so your circadian rhythm knows that, okay, it's daytime, it's time to be alert. And that sets off a cascade of communication across your clocks, right? So when we view light, it's a kind of a photic time giver, right? It hits our suprachiasmatic nucleus, which is located in our hypothalamus. In our brain, and that then communicates with all the clocks in our body that, okay, it's time to be awake and alert. And then that basically 16 hours later after that moment, you should start to feel sleepy and you should start to feel, you know, you should be releasing melatonin, right? As long as you're exposing yourself to dim light, okay? And so, you know, just understanding that there's some of these behaviors that have an outsized impact on our ability to get that restorative sleep. And get that in, in the ability to recover. So light during the day is really important. Light, light, lots of artificial or bright light when we first wake up is really critical. And then I think the other lever that's really powerful, and we see this in our dataset, is time-restricted eating. So basically consolidating the timeframe when you're consuming your calories, ideally during the daylight hours. So humans are not meant to be feeding over the course of 15, 16 hours. The average American is eating their, their calories over the course of 15 hours. And what happens is you end up eating really close to bed. And digestion is a parasympathetic activity, right? So we know that there's two branches to the autonomic nervous system, okay? And which HRV is a measure of. And you've got your parasympathetic and sympathetic. They're both competing to send signals to the heart. When you are trying to digest, you're activating the rest and digest, the parasympathetic branch of the nervous system. When you are sleeping, you're also trying to engage the parasympathetic branch sympathetic branch of the nervous system. So, when you're asking your body, your system to digest food, metabolize food, it's gonna bias toward that. It's gonna prioritize digestion at the expense of getting into these deeper stages of sleep. So, creating a buffer between your last calorie and when you intend to sleep is also an amazing strategy and can also, for folks who are struggling with your metabolic health, might be a path to help improve markers of metabolic health. And we have, There are lots of external data to suggest that, and we certainly see in our data, you know, big heavy meals prior to, just prior to bed do impair markers of recovery. Now, if you're not, if you're really active and fit, you're not getting the macronutrients you need appropriately distributed across the day, and you're hungry before bed, there has been data to show that out of Dr. Michael Ormsby's lab at Florida State University, that, a really quality high casein kind of protein prior to bed, 30 minutes prior to bed, does not impact markers of sleep or recovery. So if you are, you know, hungry before bed, that's a really good solution is just a really high quality protein. That said, a lot of folks struggle making good choices before bed at night with regard to food, right? Because it's, you've been making, you know, you've already made 200 decisions throughout the day, your willpower's low, you know, you kind of maybe crave something, you know, starchier, higher fat, and that's, and so for a lot of folks, just thinking about time-restricted eating in the sense of just, all right, I'm gonna eat during this 12-hour window, and then after 7 o'clock, I'm not gonna eat another calorie, that takes away that cognitive load, that decision-making, and that could be a really powerful intervention for a lot of folks.

Folks.

So time-restricted eating is another one that really bubbles up in the data. And then I'll do one more and then we can stop and take a breath. But the other one that is really powerful is zone 2 activity. So these low-level cardiovascular efforts where, you know, you're moving, but you can have a relatively comfortable conversation is very recovery-promoting. And I have not published these data yet, But I will, but across the lifespan, men and women, we all respond really, really positively from a recovery perspective with zone 2. So if you are in a situation where you've kind of, you know, maybe you've been working out hard and you've got a couple days where, you know, your training load or your strain is really high, that's when building in just a nice, low, easy effort will do a lot to promote your recovery the next day, help promote sleep. So zone 2 is really powerful.

Amazing. So when it comes down to detractors, so we basically have a list of 6 that you've, that you've established: alcohol, dehydration, sleep-wake inconsistency, not enough light during the day. If we're talking about from a detractor standpoint, yeah, eating too late, too close to bed, and then not moving your body enough. Said differently, the enhancers to help to improve sleep and recovery would be not drinking alcohol, making sure you're hydrated, making sure that you are waking up at the same time every day. And then trying to go to bed at the same time every night, getting enough light exposure, specifically first thing when you wake up, incorporating a 12-hour time-restricted overnight eating, and zone 2 activity. Is that right?

Yep. And I probably just add stress management strategies throughout the day, also really important. And I— and this is a really big kind of theme throughout my book, is, is just this skill that I think we need to develop because modern life does not set us up for success, right? Modern life is inherently really stressful because we have access to, we basically, modern life goes counter to what our bodies want endogenously, right? Like we are craving a lot of contrast, right? Between, we want bright days and dark nights. Well, we have access to light 24/7. We want to eat all of our calories when we're active, right? We have access to, and not as, no calories when we're trying to rest and digest, right? And that we have access to food 24/7. So, you know, and we have these incredible schedules, right? Where we're going, going, going, right? We're producing, we're, you know, we've got kiddos who are taken all over the map, right? So modern life is just inherently pretty damn stressful. So we need to be more proactive about building in many moments of rest throughout the day so we can deactivate our nervous system. We can, you know, basically decrease our heart rate in intentional ways that give us this buffer, right, of give us more buffer in our system really, right, by basically mapping these high moments of stress with these mini moments of rest. And that can be through breathwork. One of my favorites, I guess, modalities or ways of being in the world is just to literally be mindful, just to notice, to get my head up, Right? When we, when we make separate, uh, create separation from our chin and neck, we automatically reduce our heart rate. Isn't that wild? Because that is wild because it increases our safety, right? Because we're able to see, right? When our head is down, we can't see, which makes us less safe, right? So our heart rate increases.

So just literally getting your head up, noticing this is mind-blowing because we were traveling all last week and just looking around. I have two young kids, 2 and 3 years old, and we're like super, super mindful about how our phone activity impacts, you know, their desire to see anything.

Yeah.

So we are like extreme, we're almost to the extreme where I like am just trying not to be on my phone as much as possible anytime I'm around my kids. And when you're in those instances and then you just see like everyone around you in the bathroom line at the airport, or, and then your daughter's like, why is everyone looking at their screens? Like, and that is our society when you walk around. It's It's like you get on an airplane and everyone is looking down on their phones. It's crazy.

I know, it, it, it like, it kind of makes me emotional in the sense of like, like it feels lonely.

It's lonely. And I didn't realize how much that was the case until having kids where I'm trying to create a life for them that isn't like that. But how do you do that in the society that we live in?

I know, it's, it's, we have to get into cahoots and we have kind of fight against what is now becoming more and more normal, right? Before there's no porn, there's no, like, ability to return, right? And, and so I think, and I think this is why, why we're sick, you know, is, is we just, we've lost that perceptive acuity, that muscle to perceive, you know, because we, we don't practice noticing anymore. And, you know, Dr. Ellen Langer, she's a social psychologist out of she trained at Harvard and has done so much work in the area of mindfulness. And I'm looking at a book, The Art of Noticing. It's a beautiful, beautiful book that she wrote. And, you know, it's just literally about being mindful. You know, she was like, I don't even— and I totally took this page out of her book a few years ago. She's like, I don't even meditate anymore. I just literally notice. And I was like, damn, I'm just going to do that. Like, I am just going to notice. I'm going to notice the leaves on the tree. And, you know, I've always been kind of a naturalist. And, you know, I really— I just love, love, love being in nature. I love drawing and, you know, like I just— so I've always, you know, I have that desire, I guess, that innate desire to notice. But, but I feel even more bullish on, on just ensuring that this is just how I am going to be in the world. And, and I, and I do think it has an incredible impact on our nervous system. You know, I, I, you know, I, I, in our just our capacity to just be present and, you know, enjoy the world, enjoy the people around us. Yeah, I worry about that.

So much of your work is in, you know, talking about measuring recovery and heart rate variability is focused on trying to be less sympathetic dominant and more parasympathetic. How would you describe it? Parasympathetic active?

Yeah, just, just balance, I think, is really— yeah. So you just want to ensure that the proportion of time that you're spending in a sympathetic state is balanced, you know, by appropriate levels of time in a parasympathetic state. And you can imagine a scenario where if you are, you know, taking on stress, you know, and you can imagine kind of, you know, an X-axis and a Y-axis, and you've got on the Y-axis, you've got time, and on the X-axis, you've got stress. And you can imagine over the course of, your life, you know, if you're constantly in a situation where, you know, each little point on the axis is a stressor, right? If you're not mapping that with appropriate levels of rest, you end up just adapting to a lower level of functioning over time to a point where you get to the, the end of the end of the graph, right? And at the end, you're basically— you've just declined, right? You're not actually adapting in a functional way over time. And at the end of that axis is essentially what we call allostatic overload. Allistasis is based on the wear and tear on the body, right? And we wanna be able to respond and react functionally to the world around us, right? And in order to do that, we need to build in buffer. We need to build in rest so that stressor, so we could capitalize on it. We can, 'cause stress isn't bad, but we have to be able to recover from it so we can go back tomorrow and get after it again in a way that feels really good to us. When we get to the state of allostatic overload, that is the basis for aging. That is the basis for disease. That is the basis for injury, right? It's this kind of overtraining, overstressed system, right, that can no longer adapt functionally. And so what it does is it shuts down. And that's when you get sick. That's when you, you know, you get cancer, you get, you know, your cardiovascular risk increases, you might get diabetes, you know, like your metabolism isn't functioning, you know, because your body's constantly marshaling all these defenses to deal with the stress that you're putting on your system without appropriate levels of rest. So to me, and this is really the red thread throughout my book, is this idea that recovery is a way of being in the world, right? And we did this incredible study with professional golfers tour-level golfers. And it was the largest physiological study ever done in professional sports. It spans 7 years. And we looked at performance metrics of tour-level golfers. There was 570-ish events, 390-ish tour-level golfers. And basically, we looked at them across the 7 years. We looked at their performance metrics. So how good were they at golf and their physiological data?. And the thing that predicted success in these golfers was recovery. Were they proactively managing the recovery over the course of the 7 years? And the individuals who were proactively managing recovery, you can imagine better HRV, better resting heart rate, right? Which translates to all sorts of metrics we care about in performance, very clearly. So in this study, better sleep-wake consistency. Was also a predictor and helps, again, facilitate recovery. So, you know, this idea that we can go, go, go, go, go, go, go and not pay a price is just flat out wrong. And we have to fight against the traps of modernity is really what we need to rally around and create conditions in our life where, which you have done so beautifully, Brigid, in terms of how you're thinking about your family's engagement with technology and getting their heads up and, You know, just little things like that have a compound effect, right? And reduce that negative cumulative lifestyle exposure to these detractors.

Yes, yes, yes. And the fact that you see that on a professional athlete basis, I think, you know, there's so much for us to take away as individuals. And like you said, if you don't take time for recovery, even if you don't, you know, if it doesn't lead to cardiovascular disease, for a lot of women it'll show up as autoimmune disease. Or thyroid issues or GI, IBS or other GI issues that you end up being diagnosed with, knowing that stress is a large predictor of a lot of these diseases that women have a much higher statistical risk of getting over their lifetime.

So well said. Yeah, that's exactly right.

I actually, I read, uh, um, something that, uh, Dr. Sarah Gottfried had put on, yeah, Substack or something where she said that that the majority of women that she sees over the age of 40 are having glucose spikes due to stress, not as much of what they're eating. And of course, I think every— sometimes it could be from what you're eating and sometimes it's not. But the important thing to note is that there's over 40 reasons for why a person's blood sugar could spike. It's not just related to food. And so if you are in an actively stressed state, it doesn't matter what your diet looks like, although I guess to some extent it does because these phytonutrients and things can help offset some of the stress that you're, that you're under. But you have to be able to, to account for the stress factor. And most people in my audience will say, I'm not stressed. And then when we dig into it, it's like, oh yeah, I guess I am carrying the load on this. And I do have a lot of, you know, all the stressors that do come up in everyone's day-to-day life that we have to be able to account for.

I think we, we accept a lower bar. We accept things as normal, you know, when— and I think that's just the way women have been socialized. And again, we have to fight back against that, you know, like we're not on the savanna anymore, right? Like we are— we, you know, women work, women, you know, like we have to figure out how to share the load, you know, with, with our partners in ways that don't burn us out. And, and I think that that is those are conversations that, that you just, you need to have with your, with your partners and, you know, with your partner. And, and, and I think women are getting better at that. But, you know, I, I think that that's a, a real— we know that women biologically are going to, going to carry an emotional load in ways that, that men might not. Right. So, and that does come at a cost if we're not aware of it. Right. And And it's just little things, right? Like we know going to bed after midnight, for example, you will have a higher, um, waking glucose level than you do if you go to bed before midnight, right? There's just like little things that we need to do as women, I think in particular, to help ourselves, right? And a lot of this, a lot of the ways that we can manage our metabolism more effectively, we can reduce symptoms during perimenopause and menopause is through these lifestyle interventions, right? And just, and just being that we don't have to be perfect, but we do have to be aware, like we have to have a strategy, right?

Like we—

I was giving a talk at the Women's Health Conference a couple of years ago. I was like, we can't afford to wing it. Like, I'm 52 years old. I don't wing it. Like, I am very, very intentional at making sure that I honor the behaviors that I know that are going to help me show up and be able to engage in the world in a way that allows me to live my values with more peace, more energy, and more joy. And I do everything I can to protect that. And, you know, and I think that's, that's, that's having agency, right? And, and, and I think when, you know, I wrote Aligned because, you know, it's— that's really what I— I want to feel like I'm steering the ship, that I am in control of my own life and for a lot of my life, I didn't feel like that, you know. And, and, and I think that, um, you know, I really want people to understand that a lot of these behaviors that move the needle the most are democratically available and free. It's just building a system around it, being consistent, and you don't need to be perfect, but being, you know, on average as good as you can be. And, you know, and, and just, and stick to that strategy and, and you will create, I think, a lot of, of peace in, in your life.

Yes, I could not agree more. Okay, let's talk a little bit more about HRV. We talked about the predictors of poor recovery, poor sleep, and can you, for someone that is like, what is heart rate variability and why is this important? Can we back up a bit and explain what heart rate variability is and then what it's correlated with when you have high heart rate variability or low heart rate variability in the research.

Yeah, so there, there's actually like a lot of really good meta-reviews, you know, stress and HRV, um, where you can like, you know, there's, I guess I just wanna point out there's lots of evidence that HRV, um, can be considered a tool that reflects your overall health. So I think that's just important to— for people to understand that this is a marker that's been around for decades, and it started out in the ICU for infants, and they noticed a relationship between high HRV, which is literally the time interval between your heartbeats, and you want that to be highly variable. That is a, a marker of a healthy autonomic nervous system. And they noticed when infants were in the ICU were struggling, their HRV was really low. So, they started using that as a measure to understand how an infant was doing. So then, the Russians kind of adopted HRV in athletics and kind of here we are today, everyone is measuring their HRV. But, But really what we, what we're looking at is, is that time interval between, between heartbeats. And you want that to be highly variable. You want that, you know, it could be, you know, 859 milliseconds between one and then 753 and another and then, you know, 620 and another like that would be highly variable. The more your heartbeat becomes like a metronome, the worse off you are. And as you age, the less variability you have between heartbeats, which means the less capable you are of adapting to stress, external stressors in a functional way. So there's, I think, a lot of interest in adopting behaviors that help preserve this variability. And, you know, HRV is a, is a function of the heart, of course, as I just said. But it, but it originates in the, in the autonomic nervous nervous system. As I mentioned before, your— our nervous system has two branches, the parasympathetic, sympathetic. They're both competing to send signals to heart— to the heart. When your heart is responsive to both branches in appropriate ways and is given the requisite of time, time to recover, your heart is going to be responsive. And I guess why recovery is so important is that if you're in a situation where you are not, you know, you're constantly engaging in these recovery detractors, your heart over time is going to become less responsive to the demands of that autonomic nervous system. And when your autonomic nervous system becomes less efficient, less functional, you just become more vulnerable, just, generally, right? More accident-prone, you know, less quick on your feet. And, and also, you know, there's a relationship to your HPA axis, you know, and so your hormonal functioning, like, you know, everything kind of can start to decline when your HRV is, is, is not functioning as it should or you're out of—

naturally, HRV decreases with age. How much is that also hormonally dependent? So for instance, like when we talk about the risk factor for Alzheimer's disease and other conditions, we know that it's not just age dependent for women, it's also hormonally dependent where risk increases as hormones shift. Is that the same for HRV?

You will see with cognitive decline, neurodegenerative disease, a suppressed HRV. Absolutely. And you will see, and it's, you know, insidious just in the same way that Alzheimer's is, right? It just doesn't happen on day, you know, one day you have Alzheimer's, right? It's been, it's been a decline, a steady decline. So yeah, preserving or engaging behaviors that preserve HRV like sufficient time in bed and sleep-wake consistency, reduction of alcohol, stress management, connection, purpose, self-efficacy, feelings of agency, right? Like, those are all things that will increase HRV, will enable kind of the sleep, the restorative sleep that you need to prevent the onset of neurodegenerative disease, right? So, what we know now is that for neurodegenerative disease, I mean, a lot of, you can pay down your risk almost entirely by engaging in behaviors that we know are highly associated with neurodegenerative disease. So that's what's exciting, I think, is that—

So exciting. It's so exciting. Yeah. Because— and then you also said that HRV is modifiable. So what your HRV is today doesn't mean that that has to be what it is one year from now. But can you talk about the natural decline that's happening at— with age? And like, what are the normal, quote unquote, average levels?

Yeah.

For women within the age brackets?

Yeah. We'll see a 10% decline over the course of the lifespan every decade in HRV.

Regardless of what a person's doing?

No. Well, it is.

Or is that if they're not doing anything?

Yeah. So if you are drinking a lot of alcohol, if you're not getting sufficient sleep, inconsistent sleep, you know, you're metabolically unhealthy, like that will accelerate for sure.

Okay, got it. Higher than 10% then.

Yeah, yeah. And those, you know, exactly. Yes. So just on average, you know, for just like to look at just population averages, we— it's a 10% decline every decade, but it doesn't have to be. So you can attenuate that that, that decline by engaging in all the behaviors that we're talking about.

And then what is like the average for a 30 to 40 year old versus a 40 to 50 year old versus a 50 to 60 year old?

Yeah, those, those buckets are, I think 50 to 60 is probably in the 40s and then it increases by about 10 milliseconds for every decade. So the 30 to 40 would be probably in the 50s, and 20 to 30 is in the 60s averages, right? And we have this posted on our website at thelocker@whoop.com. And I think it's maybe a little bit higher, like 67, maybe 68. So, so yeah, I mean, I, I mean, for me personally, like, I, when I first joined Whoop a decade ago, and I think I'm a good example that you can improve your HRV if you know how to apply your effort. My, my, my resting HRV was, was 62 milliseconds, and now my average resting HRV is 102. Wow.

That's amazing.

My resting heart rate is 51. 50, 49. Yeah.

So what— and you follow the protocol. Is there anything else that you do in your protocol outside of those 6 detractors/expanders?

Yeah, I, I really focus on those. I mean, I, I definitely, you know, I resist the train, which you didn't, you know, we, we didn't talk about, you know. So I'm— I lift weights a few times a week. Um, you know, I play tennis 3 times per week. Yeah, I mean, I, I honestly, I, I I like running and lifting on the same day, so I run and lift almost every day and I'll, I'll do maybe like today I did chest, I did a chest press, I did fly, I did reverse fly and I did tricep pull down dips and tricep extension and that was it. And then and I ran, I did like just a couple like I ran for 30 minutes and inside that 30 minutes I did, you know, kind of a minute on, minute off. And so that was my workout today. And then so every day, so tomorrow I'll probably do, you know, some legs, some goblet squats, some lunges, you know, and I'll do maybe biceps. And, you know, so basically every day I kind of do, you know, 6 exercises lifting and then some sort of cardiovascular work.

So in comparison to 10 years ago when you joined Whoop, have you— what has changed the most? Have you— because I think you were probably always strength training. Are there things that you've implemented that you weren't doing previously?

Yeah, I'm really lucky. I, you know, I was a double sport athlete in college in the Big Ten, and I played on the US national team for 7 years. So I've been literally lifting for like 35 years. But, um, so I'm very, very grateful that, you know, uh, and I coached, you know, for 13 years. So I did programming for my athletes. I was a Division 1 coach. So, um, yeah, so I, I feel very fortunate that I can program and I know how to do all that. But so, yeah, that's been relatively consistent. But, um, What, what really changed, uh, about 8 years ago, and really 2017, was a paper that came out by Andrew Phillips, um, looking at relationships between, um, really what was the predictor of, of GPA in Harvard students. And what he found is that sleep-wake consistency was the only thing that predicted, um, GPA in Harvard students. So I was like, really interesting. So at the time I was working with, you know, collegiate athletes, you know, everyone on our platform basically. I was kind of managing their data and kind of coaching them. And, um, and so I started manually tracking sleep-wake consistency. And sure enough, it predicted everything. I was like, oh my gosh. So basically 2017, I was like, I'm all in on sleep consistency. And then, so that was really probably the biggest change. And then sleep-wake consistency then made me, um, so much consistent, so, so, so more con— like more consistent in so many other areas of my life. I just became regulated, like metabolically. Um, and then I, my next one I layered on was time-restricted eating. I started really getting into circadian rhythms. I was like, whoa, circadian health, circadian alignment is like the thing, like the biggest needle mover, because sleep-wake consistency, of course, is, um, you know, is, is one of the non-photic time givers for the clocks in our body. So I started looking at all the non-photic and, and kind of getting into the photic time givers and, and their impact on our cellular health and, um, you know, how our cells communicate and just the, you know, just that's ended up doing my PhD in that because I was like so fired up about it. But, but yeah, I think circadian alignment, like as a, you know, as kind of 4 practices were, were the biggest shift starting in 2017. And I credit, you know, not having to manage really any symptoms, you know, related, you know, to, you know, to this transition in my life, you know, perimenopause, menopause, like I'm pretty, you know, I really, I attribute that to a lot to this kind of circadian piece.

That is so fascinating. I've heard you say before that sleep duration is helpful, but that sleep regularity is the biggest predictor of mortality and that you consider it to be the mother of all performance optimization. And I told you that I was, I think that it was like 2020 that I heard you speak on this when we were at the CrossFit Games and you were on a panel and it was like one of my biggest takeaways. That I still, you know, like talk about to this day within my community because of how much that woke me up to the importance of the sleep regularity factor. And then you said that you're working on a research paper that hasn't been published yet about symptoms as you are talking about perimenopause and menopause. Can you tell us what those findings are?

Yeah, yeah, I can. So basically what we started looking at, so it was in, I guess, December of 2025, you know, just the advent of Claude and, you know, being able to kind of wrangle huge amounts of data, like huge, so many lines of code. And so I got an engineer to pull the second-to-second data of 5,000 women who were— who identified as being in perimenopause or menopause. And I was—

they were using like you use their—

yeah, I was using our data. So basically on our, on our platform, you know, women have the ability to track symptoms. They have the ability to identify their status, to track different medications and kind of see how all of that is impacting their sleep and recovery and how they're training and how they might wanna modify things based on their symptomology. And so we have a really beautiful kind of ecosystem that we're continuing to build. But yeah, so I got really into this idea of amplitude. And I got into it because Dr. Jamie Zeitzer, he's a sleep and circadian biologist from Stanford University. And he and I have collaborated on lots of different papers. And he and his colleagues came out with a paper on this idea of circadian amplitude as a therapeutic intervention. So, this idea that if we can improve the amplitude of our circadian rhythms, we then improve our health. What I've been doing unbeknownst to me is kind of like over the course of the last, you know, 8 years is really optimizing for my circadian amplitude, right? So basically your amplitude is just the peak, the diurnal rhythms like that are happening during the peak and the trough of your circadian rhythms. And you can imagine every kind of physiological variable has a rhythm, right? You've got your heart rate and respiratory rate and skin temperature and blood pressure, and they all follow this like beautiful pattern. Pattern, right? And if you were to look at someone who is old and diseased, they'd have very little amplitude. They'd almost look flat. If you have someone who's young and has cancer, they would be flat, right? So this amplitude is a really good kind of proxy for health. So I was really interested. I'm like, what does the amplitude of these women look like? And is there a relationship between women who are are, you know, really highly symptomatic in perimenopause and menopause and Amplitude versus not, right? Because I kind of like wonder, I'm like, you know, why am I not symptomatic? Like, why am I not struggling with, you know, these 175 symptoms that like we know can persist during this timeframe? So, so I started looking at Amplitude and basically what I found and, and I actually just filed a patent and I have a paper in review because this is just like a mind-blowing result. But the Amplitude Amplitude of these women predicted symptom severity and frequency during perimenopause, menopause. And then I replicated that finding in menstrual— in women who are naturally cycling. So menstrual cycle, perimenopause, menopause, right? We can basically— a few days before, um, or, you know, a day before the reported symptoms, your amplitude is compromised. That is, you have less amplitude.

And what are the markers for that that indicate that?

It's basically looking— so we're able to look at, we're able to measure the peak in the Trow of each individual woman.

Okay.

So when their amplitude relative to their own individual baseline is lower, they are more likely to report symptoms the next day.

And then so you see that throughout all of their perimenopause journey?

Yes.

Wow, that is crazy.

So the idea— and obviously there's a lot of work to be done here, but we already know from the literature, right, that circadian health, circadian alignment is a really big piece of our overall health and function. And all we have to do is look at shift workers, which is a natural experiment in circadian misalignment. And we know how detrimental that work can be. And a lot of my work is to try to figure out how do we mitigate the deleterious effects of shift work? Help these heroes in our society not have to take as big of a hit as they do in terms of their healthspan, right? Which we know is compromised because we've got oceans of literature that tell us that's the case. So very focused on that. And this is a piece of that, right? How do we preserve amplitude in individuals who are engaging, who are up during the biological night and sleeping during the biological day and are not getting the benefit of this contrast of, you know, light, lots of light during the day and lots of darkness during the night, which we know is what our body craves and needs in order to function healthily, right? So yeah, so I just, yeah, so I'm really deep in this whole notion of amplitude. And like I said, there's a lot of work to be done, but I think we can't go wrong with preserving amplitude. So engaging, really again, trying to get outdoors as often as possible throughout the day, stabilizing our sleep-wake consistency, being as active and social during the daylight hours and then really finding time to wind down, um, you know, after the sun goes down. And, um, and again, not all the time, right? Doesn't mean, you know, go to weddings. And I, you know, I do those things too, but, but, but I'm, I'm strategic about it, right? Just because I know that this is a, a really big lever. And, um, and I know how much pain is associated with Um, kind of stepping outside, you know, a lot of, um, what this natural light-dark cycle is calling us to do.

And when you talk about the research in shift workers, it's primarily focused— I mean, for decades they've been showing this in the research that it— being a shift worker and up at night increases your risk of pretty much every single cardiometabolic disease, correct?

Yeah, and, and a lot of that is, is because, you know, a lot of the hormones, like melatonin, I think is a really big player in shift work in that when you are not able to build a natural pressure for sleep consistently, you end up not releasing the same, like the most potent kind of bolus of melatonin. And melatonin is not just the hormone of darkness. Yes, it helps us kind of feel sleepy, um, but melatonin is a really powerful antioxidant and we know it is cancer protective. So I think one of the reasons why shift workers are so vulnerable to diseases like cancer, particularly women, breast cancer, um, is because of, um, this lack of circulating melatonin. This, this, they're not getting that protective antioxidant, um, or enough of it. So I think that's one of the big pieces. And then I think again, when you're up after midnight, we know that that has an impact on your fasting glucose next day. Obviously, just your ability to drop into these deeper stages of sleep during the biological day, we're just not as good at that, right? Um, because our, our body, regardless of whether we're shifted completely or not, like our body still there's something about, you know, we just haven't evolved to, for our bodies to be able to just shift and drop into these really deep, you know, deeper stages of sleep. We might be so sleep deprived that we do get into these deeper stages of sleep. But again, how restorative is that? You know, that hasn't really been quantified. But, but yeah, so there's just a lot of, there's just a confluence of issues I think that makes, makes shift work really challenging. We see, we have this insane dataset. It's 270 acute care surgeons that we followed over the course of a year. I published these data in Annals of Surgery in 2023. And what we see is that the mean age across those 43 surgeons, sorry, those surgeons was 43 years old. Their resting physiology looks like that of a 60-year-old. 17 years old.

Wow.

Yes, 17 years. So we know that shift workers have a reduced lifespan of 10 years, but there are, there's just an epidemiological study that was just released that actually puts it at 15. So, wow. Yeah, it's, again, this is a huge sacrifice that these folks are making and they deserve everything that we can provide them. And, you know, a lot of like Mayo Health and Cleveland Clinic, they're starting to build these kind of high-performance centers for their frontline clinicians to help them with nutrition and fitness. And I will say strength training, cardiovascular work, I mean, that can really, really improve outcomes for shift workers, I believe. So there are a lot of these bigger hospital systems who are starting to think about, all right, how do we help these workers in this really challenging, demanding environment thrive and preserve their healthspan in the ways that they deserve. So there's a lot of— it gives me like goosebumps, you know, like a lot of good things happening, but we just have to like keep talking about it and, and, you know, not be afraid to talk about it and, and give the shift workers all the tools that they need to be healthy and thriving.

Yes, it's so important. And so, and, and having access to such a large data set like Whoop changes everything because even when I was at the Cleveland Clinic before I was even in functional medicine. I was at the Wellness Institute, and Dr. Michael Roizen was the chairman there, and he was talking about shift workers at the time, trying to— they were working at the Wellness Institute to create a program for the internal employees with the nurses and doctors that were working overnight. And so I can't imagine how much further it's come just in the last 15 years with having access to data sets like yours that like bring just even more to the masses and establish that credibility.

Yep. Yeah.

Of why hospital systems needs to be focused on it in addition to many other professions. My husband's a pilot and I worry about that for him on a regular basis, not just with the radiation exposure, but then also the changes in his schedule that are happening on a day-to-day basis, being in different time zones often many days in a row.

Yep. Yep.

Gosh. For someone like that, do you have recommendations? Like, obviously exercise and then nutrition, but is there anything else like supplements or PMF mats to help to amplify the response that you can get from just the day-to-day things that we incorporate?

You know, obviously there's lots of different configurations of, of shift work, but I think trying to eat a bulk of your calories when it's still biological day is a really good intervention. And then, you know, when you're on your shift during the biological night, really just go for the high-quality protein. You know, try to just avoid the highly processed, you know, starchy, high-fat kind of foods. That I think is a really important lever. I think creatine has been shown to offset the deleterious effects of sleep deprivation. And there might be, you know, I think the evidence is still, is not there yet, but there might, creatine might be protective of the brain in some ways. So, you know, we know that again, when you're getting short sleep, when you're, you know, engaging in shift work, like it, the brain volume, like you're, you know, like your brain takes a hit. So, you know, creatine could be a really important supplement to buffer that. Again, that's very early and I don't know that there's enough evidence evidence to say that definitively, but there is good evidence showing that high doses of creatine, we're talking like 20, 30 milligrams, can offset the negative effects of sleep debt. So, if you're going into a period of time where you know you're going to be sleep deprived, getting, you know, that high dosage of creatine in the muscle tissue in advance of that moment is, I think, a great strategy. You know, I think doing everything that you can to get, you know, as much of your nutrients from whole foods is really important. But I would say omegas, you know, making sure that— get, you know, those can— can of mackerel, like sardines. Like, you just want to make sure that you're hitting the very top of those levels. I think that's really important. Probably vitamin D. Vitamin C, both probably really important for shift workers and just generally. But I— get your labs done though. Like I have really high vitamin D levels and I was like supplementing. Same with my son. I think we have like some sort of genetic thing, but I was like at the very top. I had like 100 or something and I think like 90 is like the top or 93 or something. So anyway, I no longer supplementing that. So I think labs can be really helpful for just to kind of see where you're at to make sure that you're not You know, supplementing at super physiological levels, which is totally unnecessary. But yeah, I mean, I think working with a functional medicine professional, if you're a shift worker, if you have the means, and hospitals should be providing this for their shift workers so they can figure out, okay, how do we offset? Where am I deficient? You know, because they will be. And this is why all of the negative— there's so many negative outcomes with shift workers is because of these probably deficiencies, right? With, again, being up during the biological night is gonna create a cascade of, of issues. So yeah, I mean, those would be, be some, some of the things I think definitely when you are off, getting outside, outdoors as much as humanly possible is also another really important piece of the puzzle.

Yes, that's huge. And I mean, this also applies to postpartum women, right? That are up for many, many hours of the night. Night, same thing where it's a shorter period of time. It's not like you're doing it for years and years. Well, I mean, depending on how many kids you have, you could be doing it for years and years of your life. Um, but same thing applies where decreasing that sleep does impact us. And I remember like in that phase just being like, I do not want to hear one more thing about the importance of sleep because there's nothing I can do about the circumstance outside of some of these things that you're talking about. Creatine was huge for me and, um, Magnesium in order to try to like improve that quality of sleep when you are sleeping. But I think that the other thing that can be really helpful is understanding that these changes in sleep and staying awake also impact your cravings the next day 'cause of the changes in our hunger hormones. And so knowing how important it is for nutrition to offset those can help with you fighting some of those cravings that are more, that are higher the following day, which is also why we see increases in obesity and other diseases in shift workers outside of that, but probably likely, uh, with the research done showing that it increases the desire for those sweet foods because of those changes in hunger hormones.

Such a great point, uh, and, and so important. Yeah, any, you know, dysregulated sleep is abs— you know, you'll be eating, you know, if you're not really mindful, you know, somewhere in the tune of 200 to 400 more calories the next day, which is just wild.

So yeah, it's crazy.

Postpartum, I mean, I— same, I had two kids kids, you know, um, pretty close together, 18 months apart. So I was kind of in that, you know, for a few years where— but I think where, you know, now over the course of the last decade, I've had so many conversations with parents, like a gazillion, right? Like at this point where I'd be like, I'm struggling. And I think what is so important is that— is recognizing that it is transient. And I do think that when you have— and this is the protocol that I give to athletes, right? If you didn't get a great night's sleep, it's going to happen, right? Like, and we're fine, we can deal with that. But, you know, for a parent with an You're talking, you know, might be 8, 9 months, right, before your child really stabilizes. And then, you know, it still might be off and on, but you know, there is gonna be a period of time where you are getting short sleep. It's just the reality of the situation. So the extent to which you can just get in a nap, protect your nighttime sleep as best you can, but if you can get in a nap before 1:00 PM, you know, maybe when your child is napping, like do it. Go such a long way in terms of helping your cognitive functioning. Just again, that sleep pressure is building over the course of the day, that adenosine. So this, this, the nap will block it, um, uh, that, that, that sleep pressure in a natural way. Caffeine is unnatural and not the best strategy, um, but, but, but napping, even short, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, like, do not underestimate the power of these short little mini naps when you are a new parent, um, even women who are perimenopausal, menopausal, and are getting that wake up in the middle of the night, do not be shy about incorporating a little bit of a nap again before 1 PM if you can, to make sure that you're protecting your nighttime sleep. I think too, like, being active during the day, like getting in a hard workout, we also see is going to help with sleep at night. The fitter you the better you sleep, the less you sleep actually when we're looking at the massive, massive dataset. So, we also see a relationship between amplitude and fitness, not surprising, right? The more fit you are, the higher amplitude you have. The less fit you are, looking at, you know, your workout frequency, your resting heart rate, your heart rate variability, you're independent of age, independent of age, looking at basically this kind of fitness profile, the higher fit you are regardless of age, the better amplitude. Attitude. So prioritizing fitness across the lifespan, there's nothing probably more important than that.

Yes, yes. I mean, it's such a good way of saying it. When it comes to the data that you're looking at for Whoop, what do you— do you see anything correlated with people who nap? Because you can— they could sense when you're napping. So do you see any, like, changes across the board when— in people who nap?

That's such a great question. So I did look at— it was a very small data set. It was, it was 223 athletes athletes, so collegiate athletes, and the individuals who basically reduced— so basically what I would tell them is that if you wake up and you have 30 minutes of sleep debt or 90 minutes of sleep debt, try to do a nap that basically maps with the amount of debt you have. So basically what Whoop said you needed versus what you got, whatever that delta was when you wake up, try to sneak in a nap before 1:00 PM if you can. And the individuals who kept their sleep debt to basically zero, and there's a caveat to this, and their sleep consistency above 85% were basically bulletproof. None of those kids got COVID. None of those kids got like, you know, like in, you know, just the sickness. None got COVID, which was, I think was like insane stat. But just even illness was reduced relative to the year before when we didn't have that intervention. Injuries were down relative to the year before. So, so I think so that to me is the best data set that we had to demonstrate that naps in combination, sleep, keeping sleep debt down with by using a nap or just getting sufficient sleep. So there are folks that didn't nap, right, in this, in this data set, but were just getting sufficient sleep. So basically, sufficient sleep, keeping sleep debt, you know, at zero, and sleep consistency above 85% basically made you bulletproof.

And so when it comes to the sleep debt, let's say you're— you typically go to bed at 9 o'clock every night, and then you wake up at 7 AM, and you're trying to keep with that sleep-wake regularity. But one night you get in bed at 9:30. I've heard you say that it's more important to stay with the regularity and lose that 30 minutes than it is to wake up 30 minutes later, since sleep regularity is more important than duration. Is that an instance then that you would recommend making up for that 30 minutes in a nap that day to stick with that same total duration in a 24-hour cycle?

So I think this is a— there's a lot of like mixed evidence on this, so I kind of like go back and forth. I make up sleep, um, or, or extending sleep, um, as long as it's not exceeding an hour outside of your typical sleep-wake timing, seems to have a positive impact on average for most folks.

So you'd recommend sleeping in 30 minutes later?

I, I, yeah, I mean, a lot of folks are just going to wake up naturally, and that's for those individuals individuals, getting that nap in is the best possible thing. Like, what I don't like athletes or individuals to do is basically you wake up and you force yourself to try to extend your sleep longer because you know you didn't get as long as you wanted, right? But you end up then having just kind of a junky, unrestorative 45 minutes or an hour in bed, right? When you just could have woken up because your cortisol alcohol's already rising and, you know, kind of it's at its peak, just go ahead and get up. And then, yeah, the extent that you can build in that, that nap, um, yeah, later that day.

Okay, helpful. Yeah, last thing that I want to address is, is a deeper dive into alcohol. Okay, how— for a person that's having 2 drinks on one day, how long does that take that you see on average for their body to recover? And how harmful is alcohol when you look at your data? With that?

We see on average a 6% decrease in recovery, which is that algorithm that I told you about, um, for any amount of alcohol. So this is just basically if we take our entire population who reports drinking, on average, you know, for some people it's going to be a 20% decrease, for other people it's going to be a 2% because they just had one drink, you know. So the average is about 6%. So we did publish a paper recently, and I'm just gonna pull it up so I can reference it more directly. So basically what we saw in this dataset, and this was published in January of this year in American Journal of Physiology: Heart Circulation, Journal, Heart Rate Variability, Coefficient of Variation During Sleep, as a digital biomarker that reflects behavior and varies by age and sex. And what we saw is that, so basically, and this is, this is not that complicated, complicated. So HRV is going to, if I drink a lot of alcohol tonight, my HRV tomorrow will be acutely suppressed. The more alcohol I drink, I drink, the more suppressed it's going to be and the worse my sleep is. And that is absolutely what we see in, in this dataset. And we actually kind of discovered this novel biomarker called heart rate variability coefficient of variation, which basically looks at the day-to-day variability in your HRV and basically that day-to-day variability. So if we were to zoom out and look at your HRV HRV over the course of a week and we look at your— the variability of your HRV day to day, that biomarker basically reflected your behaviors. So whether you consumed alcohol, how you trained, you know, all sorts of different behaviors. And that changed with age and sex. So women, their HRV-CV took a bigger hit than men when they drank alcohol.

Interesting.

Young kids also took a bigger hit. Now, part of me, like, you almost want your HRV to take a hit because that means it's responsive to that detractor. The moment your body doesn't respond to the detractor means that you basically have a less robust autonomic nervous system. So if I were to have, you know, let's say a decade ago, I had 3 drinks of alcohol within 2 hours of bedtime, and my average heart rate variability, let's just say, is 100. And after those 3 drinks, within 2 hours of bedtime, my HRV drops. The next day, I'm at 50 milliseconds. So 50% drop, right? Now let's say, let's fast forward 10 years. I do this exact same thing, 3 drinks within 2 hours of bed. And let's say my, let's say my HRV is 100 still, but I only get a decrease of 20 milliseconds. That means that my heart is not as responsive to that toxin as it was decade ago, and that's not a good thing.

Oh wow. So it's actually good that your HRV takes a hit when you engage in alcohol. I hadn't thought of it that way.

Yeah, it means that your, your body is kind of responding to that stressor in, in a way that's appropriate, right? When we're no longer responding, that means that your, your autonomic nervous system functioning is not great.

And that doesn't mean that people should be drinking alcohol on a regular basis. This and giving themselves that drop. But you would recommend—

You're just slowly killing yourself, you know, essentially when you're— yeah, if you're like drinking consistently. And that's reflected in HRV-CV in that you basically— a high HRV-CV is bad. We want less variability. It's expressed as a percentage. So you can imagine HRV-CV of like in our surgeons, the HRV-CV in our surgeons is like 30%. %, right? In the best cyclist in the world, it's 4%. Wow. Okay, so more variability, the worse, right? The worse it is. So, um, yeah, when— so for someone who is consistently drinking, they're going to have a high HRV-CV, and that's, that's not a good thing. That's a bad thing.

And so you recommend, based on all the data that you've seen, that people engage in zero alcohol Is that the recommendation that you give?

Yeah, I mean, I pretty much don't drink alcohol. You know, maybe once a year I'll have a Prosecco or something. Like, that's kind of been my trend over the last, you know, 5 years or 6 years or so, just in the face of this data. It's just so hard, you know? And I just kind of, you know, not really anyone in my social circle drinks a whole lot. So it's easy for me, you know, thankfully. But But yeah, I mean, no amount of alcohol is good for you. From what I see, what I observe in the data, no amount of alcohol is good for you. That said, you know, I know having a glass of wine with your family, you know, during a celebration is— and you're connecting, you know, gosh, there's nothing wrong with that, right? But, but yeah, I mean, I think the data are very, very clear that it does— that the cumulative lifestyle exposure of alcohol is, is, it's just not positive.

Yeah, it's, it's so interesting because I feel like alcohol is a hard one for people to really get past, or to, to, you know, like they can do the nutrition but then the alcohol is typically after. One thing that I do think about often is the Blue Zones and Dan Buettner's work recommending one drink a day. Why do you feel like he— obviously he didn't have access to the data that you have, but why do you feel like that was recommended for improving longevity and healthspan in those cohorts of people in the Blue Zones.

I don't know if that was because of the resveratrol that's in wine. That, um, I think there's a moment where, you know, we were associating the high concentration of resveratrol in red wine, uh, being— having a, a positive impact in some way on on our physiology. But I think that's been debunked because I think you have to— in order to get high enough levels of resveratrol to actually impact at a cellular level, you have to drink 9 bottles of wine, I think. So that was quickly debunked. But I think it had something to do with resveratrol. But, but yeah, I think that that has been proven to not be, not be the case.

So I've also heard him say that they think the reason that these people that live long are having a drink at every day, and that the connection could be that they are very low stress in a lot of these, like, European populations, and they're using it as a way to connect, and they're having one drink a day versus, like, in America where people are, like, so stressed and then unwinding with alcohol and then overconsuming it to the point that it's even more detrimental.

Yep, I, I think that's a perfect explanation of why, um, those individuals in, in Blue Zones zones, you know, live longer is the connection. I mean, definitely the sunlight too. I mean, they're outdoors and way more active, I think, than, than us generally in, in America. So I think there's that. So yeah, I think there's a lot of— in those Mediterranean regions, I think there, there's a lot of positive lifestyle factors that work, work for them. But yeah, I think stress is really a big one too that you, that you just mentioned.

So yeah, amazing. Dr. Kristin Holmes, you are so unbelievable in the perspective that you have and the amazing way that you're able to pull together all this data and help people live a healthier, more fulfilling, longer life as well. Can you share where people could benefit from your work?

Yeah, I, you know, I try to share our research and just tidbits that I'm learning from the data and things that are working for me personally that people might benefit from. Um, so Dr. Kristen Holmes on Instagram, and then also I'm very active on LinkedIn as well. And then I did just write this book. Um, it comes out August 25th. Um, so really try to, try to put all the knowledge in, in one place, and there's a really robust workbook at the end, um, that people can engage in that is kind of chapter by chapter that allows allows people to kind of internalize a lot of the learnings from the chapter. And, you know, in one chapter, you know, is on, you know, is, is on trauma, you know, just understanding, you know, what, what healing journey actually looks like and, and why unresolved negative emotions and unresolved trauma could get in the way of our ability to kind of move forward in our life. And just, you know, so for some folks, maybe that's a chapter that you want to work through. For other folks, it might not be. So you can kind of like bounce around based on, you know, what chapter you feel like you really— maybe it's sleep and circadian rhythms, maybe it's personal readiness, like really identifying your, you know, your values and aligning your values with your identity. You know, people can kind of bounce around to work on areas that feel like are most important. And I think what's cool, I hope, about the book is that, you know, it's not really, you know, I think it's something that you can go back to different phases of your life. You know, I have a section on sleep and hormones sleep for both men and women at different phases of your life. So, you know, maybe you're in your 30s now or 20s now, or, you know, you're, you're postpartum. Like, you know, you can kind of go back to the sections that are relevant for you based on your phase of, of life. So yeah, I hope, I hope people really love it.

I'm so excited for this book. And you also have a YouTube channel? No, a podcast.

I— well, I used to, so we have paused. I have The Line, which is through Flight Story, um, but I I paused it because I needed to do all this book promotion, and obviously I have lots of research in the pipeline that I'm trying to navigate. I have a full-time job. So anyway, I had to pause the podcast because it was too much, but I also do the Whoop podcast, so I, I just had too many things going on, so I had to let one go, um, for now. But hopefully we spin that back up, um, after I get through this, like, you know, book promotion.

For anyone that's interested, the interviews that you have conducted are with, like, world-class athletes and high performers and achievers. There are episodes, even if it's not currently live, that could be another resource. But we'll funnel everyone into your Instagram, into buying your book so that we can support your work that way and people can benefit from your book launch coming up.

Thank you so much, Brigid Titgemeier. It was such a, such a joy to talk with you today, and, and I'm just really grateful for all the important work that you put out and all these conversations that you have, and they're just so spectacular. Thank you.

Thank you, Dr. Kristen Holmes. Thank you for being part of the Being Brigid Show. If you like this show, please share it with someone that could benefit. Leave a comment and a review so that we can understand your key takeaways, and I will see you next time.