Evening Exercise, Poor Sleep, and Resting Heart Rate

Does working out at night hurt your sleep?

Is that really true? Is there truly no other time for you to work out?

And this is interesting because I've been talking about resting heart rate as the single most important biomarker in my entire life, as all the efforts we've done basically collapse into this marker. So, to me, this was really cool to see that things that increase your resting heart rate before bed negatively impact your sleep and exercise, maybe counterintuitively is one of those things.

Today we're going to talk about two things, which I'm really, really excited about, because they're both incredibly practical, and they're also zero cost. So a lot of people, if they're doing, like, saunas and cold plunge, great. Also, if they're not doing these basic things, they could be missing out and also starting their health off on a bad start. So I really, really am excited to talk about these two things. One is the whoop sleep study that got published. And then the second thing is resting heart rate. So we're going to dive into both those topics today.

Y', all. I am super excited about this study. Like, this is. This is just really exciting for me because this is, like, really great data that I think the medical community and longevity community has been waiting on since we, you know, started using these. These wearable devices. And to actually see this getting published is just super cool because it's just gonna. It's in my mind, gonna change the way we think about research in a lot of ways.

I'm wondering, why did it take this long to get a study? We've had this data. I mean, wearables have been really part of the health community for over a decade now. And you can argue that the quality was maybe on some kind of improvement trend. But why did it take that long to get a study out on this basic thing?

They had 4 million nights of biometric data. So that took a little while to gather, I guess. But, you know, I think, like, there's not money behind this. You know, like, when you look at, like, what NIH funds, they don't fund sleep studies, right? Like, you know, like, lifestyle studies are not backed by, you know, pharma or any other financial institutions. So you've got to have companies or people that are, like, you know, inherently motivated to produce this type of research. So it's just. It's hard to. Hard to. To get your hands on. Hard to get. Hard to get backed.

When I read these kinds of studies, I'm always reminded of the basic premise that we are not taught the basic elements of health in society. So we in school, we learn sex ed. Great. We take driver's lessons before we get our license. But we do not learn the basics of sleep. We don't understand, like, is it better to exercise in the morning or the night? And so these really fundamental basic questions of life are just unanswered. And you can live an entire lifetime and never actually be taught how to sleep. And before I really went into this deeply, even in reading all the books I read, there was never actually a practical guide on how to structure your life around sleep. So I think this study actually bridges nicely to these. These two topics pair nicely. The study on. On exercise and sleep, then also resting heart rate. So this will be an episode everyone that you can send to your friends and family and to those you know, want to introduce the health and wellness. Like Kate was saying, these are very practical tips that everybody can do and you don't have to spend any money.

So the study that we're referencing, it's by whoop. This is the wearable from whoop. So essentially you wear it on your wrist. Some people wear it on their bicep. But they analyzed 4.3 million nights of sleep, which is an insane amount of data across 15,000 Whoop members. And they were asking the question, does working out at night hurt your sleep? And so what they found was that. I'm gonna read this list here. Strenuous. Strenuous evening workouts can delay sleep onset, shorten sleep duration, and reduce. Reduce sleep quality. Elevated nocturnal heart rate and. And decreased heart rate variability were observed after high strain evening stress or evening exercise and workouts, concluding at least four hours before bedtime showed no negative impact on sleep. So essentially the TLDR is that if you work out too close to bed, especially high strain and it will negatively impact your sleep, which is such practical and useful information. What do you guys think?

100% like the. The interesting thing for me about the study is one, the size. So, you know, 14,000 participants. I think anyone can realize that's huge. Four million biometric data points or nights of biometric data is. Is also huge. So huge study when you compare to the prior research we had in this area, is really small studies and a lot of subjective data.

So.

So a lot of like survey, yes, I slept well. No, I didn't sleep well. Yes, I exercised. No, I didn't exercise. Now we're actually getting like exercise metrics. So we understand not only how intensely someone is exercising, but how long they're exercising. And then when they're exercising in reference to when they normally fall asleep, which is another really interesting aspect of the study that I didn't realize at first. But they're not just looking at when you exercise in reference to when you fell asleep that day. When they're looking in when you exercise versus when you normally fall asleep, what's your habitual sleep pattern look like? So if you stayed up later but you ended up exercising past your normal bedtime, that was noted in the study. And this kind of information is things that we just haven't had access to before. So it's really changing the, the, the breadth and depth of data that we've had on sleep and exercise previously and.

Some other data points from the study is the Highest intensity exercise two hours before bedtime increased resting heart rate by 3.9 beats per minute, which is 6.8% and HRV down was 32.6%. They showed a, a lessened recovery with any with exercise between two and six hours before bedtime. So even they, they highlight the four hour marker. But really it's, it's two to six hour window where you're lessening recovery. You increase resting heart rate, you lower hrv. And this is interesting because I have been, Mike, you can attest to this. I have been talking to Kate, you can too. I have been talking about resting heart rate as the single most important biomarker in my entire life, as all the efforts we've done basically collapse into this marker. So to me this was really cool to see that really things that increase your resting heart rate before bed negatively impact your sleep. And exercise maybe counterintuitively is one of those things. So even if you do exercise and you feel great, you're like, I don't think it affects me. And it, you know, calms me down from, from stress. It really has widespread effects within the body. So to me, I thought this was a really great. We never had data, actually large scale data that showed, I mean, actually there's a few studies, but this is a good one to show the correlation of resting heart rate and sleep quality and recovery.

And they found that it was dose dependent too. So the higher the intensity of the exercise, the longer duration. So they use this metric called strain, which is basically intensity and duration combined and they call that strain. So maximal strain had a bigger impact on your sleep the closer it was to your bedtime as compared to like light strain, for example. So they, they actually found that the, the higher the intensity, that longer the duration actually led to worse outcomes. The more we increase Those, those two factors. So it really is dose dependent with the best outcome happening. If you basically exercise, if you're gonna have high intensity exercise, doing it, you know, six plus hours before bedtime, that's when there's, you know, virtually no change whatsoever. Although one thing that was interesting is even in the maximal strain group, there was a change in resting heart rate, even if you did it that morning. So there was actually a slight increase in resting heart rate, but in terms of overall sleep metrics, very much dose response mediated.

Yeah. And this was actually, if I'm remembering correctly, worse for folks that weren't already exercising a lot. And so if you're like getting into a new routine, it's New Year and you're exercising a lot before bed, you're actually affected worse when it comes to your sleep quality. Is that right?

Yeah, they found it affected everybody though, even like pro athletes. So they, they did find that it didn't matter gender, you know, your experience with exercise in terms of whether there was an effect. Granted there may have been more effect if, if you are less trained. And, and that's probably has to do with the sympathetic activation. So the cortisol response. If you don't exercise very regularly, you're more likely to have a higher, like, you know, cortisol stress response to that exercise. So it's going to take your system longer to relax afterwards so that you can get back into that parasympathetic state and actually get to sleep. That makes kind of sense.

And I was someone who was for a long time taking long walks before going to sleep. Do we know if you were doing a chill workout? Would that still negatively affect your sleep?

So chill workouts, if they're done more than two hours before bed, did not affect sleep in any significant way. So yeah, like yoga, slow walk, things like that. And the actual effect if it was done within two hours before bed was pretty minimal compared to like strenuous activity. Got it.

Okay, so then what would be the protocol that someone should follow?

So for me, like reading this study, what, what I would suggest, and I think like my takeaway, what I'm going to start telling friends patients myself, is that strenuous exercise should happen at least four hours before bed, probably closer to six hours before bed. Um, so if you are going to exercise within that four hour window before bed, it really should be light activity, it should be yoga, it should be walking, but you shouldn't go for a half marathon, you shouldn't play a hockey game, you know, you shouldn't do anything super, super strenuous. And then try to go to sleep immediately because it's just going to wreck your sleep.

Yeah. This goes back to what Brian was saying about like, the habits in society. Reading this reminded me of my cousin who's a professional soccer player and he's constantly playing at like crazy hours of the day. And that's just part of his profession. And he's always talking about how he can't go to sleep. And so it feels really practical. And also it's a, it's one of those situations where I'm sure plenty of people at home are listening to this and like, man, I can't fit a workout in in the morning. How do I do this? And I think that's something that I had to adjust with my protocol too, is like, actually I need to go to sleep earlier, even though that's not my typical MO in life, so that I can do something in the morning workout. Cause I also saw in my personal anecdotal data that my general health overall was worse when I exercised in the afternoons. So I love how practical this is.

Brian, have you noticed, I know you track your resting heart rate every single night. Have you noticed that days that you do higher intensity exercise, it's higher? Where does it go back down for you?

Yes. My life experience and conclusions basically mirrored this paper. I've, I've been telling others to follow these protocols for years. And so to me, it's really a great point of validation that a lot of people, when they, when they talk about health protocols, they immediately jump to, oh, well, I must be different and things need to be personalized to me. And I think the actual correct thinking is the inverse, where we have more in common than we do indifferent. And I don't know, the certain areas may be like maybe 70% in common or 80% in common or 90% in common, even 99% in common. But we do share so much in common with our shared biology that we're really trying to find the exception more than the rule. And the rule here is late night exercise and high intensity. It did negatively affect my sleep. I saw it in the data. It was very clear. Increase my hrv. I'm sorry? Increase my resting heart rate. Lower my hrv. Lower my recovery. I just wouldn't feel as good. And so that was very obvious to me, like early on in the game of doing this. And so you can also take these same principles and map them to every other part of life. The same rules apply. So I would just encourage people that when on Topics of health and wellness. Try to find the rule, the power law that applies to you and all of us and then you can pull off the exceptions. But I think it's a mistake in thought process to find the exception above the rule because usually we, again, we have more in common.

Okay, I'm gonna ask a tough question. You might not have an answer, but what would you say is worse? Not exercising or if you can't fit it in, or exercising before bed? Like, what if someone's making a trade off? What would you prefer they do?

You're gonna ask this question.

I was hoping you for.

Yeah. I'm interested to hear what your thoughts are on this, Brian. I guess my first, like where I go to first is, is that really true? Like can we challenge the, the, the notion that you can't exercise anytime other than right before bed? I mean, I'll answer the question anyway, but my first thought is like, can we really challenge that, that thought process? Is there truly no other time for you to work out? And I'm sure there's people out there, there's edge cases where that's your only option. In that case, I would say that this data would suggest it's better to do a lighter type of exercise. But, but if that's true every single day of your life, that would mean all you would ever get to do is light exercise because you would be worried about messing up your sleep. And if that's truly the case, this has gotta be less than like one in a thousand. But if that's truly the case, then I would say there were some days that you need to just exercise harder and it's gonna hurt your sleep some because like we know the, the that exercise is such a huge, has such a huge impact in longevity where, you know, higher VO2 is having 300, 400% decreased risk of mortality. There's obviously a huge benefit to exercise. So if there's truly a situation where you can only exercise maximally in the evening right before bed, then I would say some days you need to sacrifice sleep for that exercise.

Love it. Super practical.

Yeah, I would, I would say a, an additional opinion, a contemplation for that is that I think sleep deserves being the number one spot in everyone's life. Above family, above work, above everything. It is the fuel, source of existence and the challenges. And I saw this in my life is there were times where for example, I would overeat at night and I would be so upset with myself that I would then exercise and be like, I've now Have to work this off. Like I just can't go to bed because I'm really upset. Which of course is a double whammy because now you're full, your body is, your heart rate's high. Cause trying to digest the food and you've exercised in a strenuous fashion. And then when that happens, you try to go to sleep, you can't, you're hot, your heart rate's pounding. Then you wake up the next morning, you feel absolutely awful, you do not feel like exercising. And then you have lower willpower. And so now you're more likely to eat bad foods again and get in the same cycle. And I was only able to break my bad cycles because I would, I would prioritize sleep above all, which when you do that, it increases your willpower, it improves your likelihood of you going to exercise, it improves your eagerness to eat well. And so I hear you, Mike. And there's certainly edge cases here where a person has a life circumstance where their responsibilities begin at 4 or 5 in the morning, they don't finish until 2:03 in the afternoon, then they've got children responsibilities. So certainly there are people listening who cannot do this for structural reasons I agree with. But I just know that in my life, when I haven't been able to sleep well, everything else in my life falls apart. I am more sensitive to stress, to negativity, to mood swings. It just throws me off entirely. So I'm guessing most people feel the same. But I hear you. It's a tricky trade off because exercise does also counteract that in some ways, like if you're have a bad night's sleep, you can exercise and actually do yourself some good to get back on your your two feet. I know, like when I've had a bad night's sleep traveling internationally, a really hard workout like reset me in a fresh way. So yeah, it's not to say this is the only way, it's only to, to try to, to point out that you can never overestimate the gains of high quality sleep.

I definitely found that to be true for me too, that like my day tomorrow is a direct correlation to how well I set myself up. But going to sleep. All right, you guys ready to move on to the second topic?

Yes.

Okay. So Brian, you've been investing years and years of your life, millions of dollars to try and figure out this longevity protocol, and you've distilled it into one thing. So you say here I've become the most measured person in history. And of all the things I measure. There's one marker that I value above all of them, which is high praise. So this thing is resting heart rate before bed. What is that?

Yeah, and Mike, I don't think we've ever actually walked through this together. These are all my distillations, so I'd love to hear your take on this.

Can't wait.

Okay, so the hypothesis is this, that, yeah, sleep is the number one most effective performance enhancing drug available to every humans. Every human. And there therefore warrants getting high quality sleep as your number one objective. And the most influential variable determining whether or not you're going to have high quality sleep is your resting heart rate before bed. And the reason why it's a linchpin to predict that is because if you eat a heavy meal before bed, your resting heart rate's going to increase and your sleep quality will decrease. If you drink alcohol before bed, your resting heart will increase and your sleep quality will decrease. If you are in a high stress state or, you know, in arousal, you got in a fight or you're worried about something, that too will increase your heart rate. And so if you start listing out all the things in life that increase your resting heart rate, it's most of the vices we have in society, right? It's stress, conflict, overeating, alcohol, stimulants, doom scrolling, you know, screens. It's all these things that we know are not good for us. They have a direct relationship with increasing the resting heart rate, lowering sleep quality, which then starts this vicious cycle. And now I have less willpower, I'm less likely to work out. And then it also has a bunch of these other positive effects where if I have a low resting heart rate, I go to sleep, I'm going to have high quality sleep, which means I'm more likely to exercise if I'm exercise, I'm more likely to eat well. If I eat well, you know, I have much more willpower because I slept well and ate well. And now I'm not going to eat the bad food or take the stimulant or make this kind of debaucherous behavior. And so I can go through more detail, but basically it captures an entire person's life. It's a single number of record that is an accounting for all of their behaviors.

I like it. I mean it, it is a. You're right, resting heart rate is a good metric for autonomic system performance. So what is your sympathetic versus parasympathetic? What's your fight or flight versus your rest and rest and digest right? Like that's the. It, it, it encapsulates your body's current physio physiology around that particular state. Whether you've been, you know, drinking caffeine or smoking nicotine or taking THC or on a stimulant or exercise recently or digesting, all those things are going to show up in your resting heart rate. So it is a very simple and easy metric of that. I, I wonder if I want. Have you looked at heart rate variability at all as a, as an additional metric on top of resting heart rate in terms of like evening heart rate variability and sleep performance?

The same relationship every time my heart rate. So my heart rate is directly correlated with my HRV when it's down. When my heart rate is low, HRV is up. When HRV heartbeat is up, HRV is down.

Yeah. And just for everybody who's listening to HRV heart rate variability, you actually want more variability. More variability means more parasympathetic nervous system activation and, and less variability means more sympathetic nervous system activation. So more stress, the lower your heart rate variability is. Just get everybody on board with that.

And resting heart rate, to clarify, is that when you are going to sleep, this is the average number while you're at rest, while you're sleeping, is that right? So overnight, what your heart rate is while you're laying down asleep, not doing any kind of activity?

Yeah, generally resting heart rate is, when we talk about it in medicine, we're usually talking about the lowest heart rate that you have at rest, which generally happens middle of the night, like 3am Something like that. Brian's talking about a resting heart rate measured at a particular time point before bed, right, Brian?

That's correct.

So they might be slightly different, but they're not super different. I mean like few beats.

Brian, do you find that the, your heart rate before bed is the same as. Cause whoop will give you a resting heart rate, which is what, while you're sleeping, if I'm not mistaken. So do you find those two numbers of the same, like when you're going to sleep? It's, it's the same.

Yeah. Yeah. So what? I have a ritual before I go to bed, right? Before I go to get bed, I hit my. Put my head on the pillow, I'll pull up the app and I'll see where my resting heart rate is at and I'll do a breathing exercise for about 60 seconds and that will settle me down. And typically I'll be somewhere between 44 beats per minute and 55. So 44 beats per minute Means I had a perfect day. Uh, and I can walk through these things that's with related to the food consumption, like the amount of food and the type of food, my stress levels, my preparedness for sleep, my wind down routine. And so when 44 beats per minute is on screen, I'm going to have a guaranteed perfect night sleep. Now I should clarify on screen the light is so all blues are out and it's a low, the lowest possible light to be on the phone. So it's the least light exposure possible with no blues and everything is down. You almost can't see it, it's so dim. And that's a perfect night. But if I do that exercise and I'm at 55 to 57, it's going to be a rough night. And so there's a few things that can cause that. Like maybe I've traveled somewhere internationally. Maybe our, my food schedule got messed up cause I couldn't eat in the morning because of something and I had to eat later in the day or there's certain things that can get. Or I exercise in the evening. Like I did a dance party or something. And so it's now I know this so well, having done this a few hundred times that I can predict with unbelievable accuracy. REM and deep and HRV just based upon that alone.

Okay. Did you notice how quickly he like clarified the, the screen light and everything?

He's like, I see the comments.

He's like just seeing the comments coming right now.

I'm just gonna clarify this. Yeah.

Which is true. When you switch it over to Reddit, it's. If you guys don't know this at home, it's such a cool feature. You can set up your phone so that you can triple tap and switch it and it really cuts out all light, which is great. So that's what Brian's referring to. Yeah. That's so crazy that this is so this is something that I experienced early on doing blueprints. Like Brian would say all these things and I was always very skeptical, like is that, is that really, is he just, you know, experiencing something as a one off and is it going to apply to me? But I found the same thing that across doing this, if my heart rate is higher than usual, I know it's gonna impact my sleep quality. I know my HRV is gonna have like a 20% drop the next day. So it's, it's definitely true. Like you, you build up these intuitions with your numbers and resting heart rate is one of the most important things to predict that and so, and if I'm not mistaken, there's a bad things that you can do before bed, so like exercising, eating late, that kind of stuff, arousing yourself before with a, a fight. But also you can drive resting heart rate down with better fitness. Is that right?

Yeah, 100%. So like one of the benefits of resting heart rate as a, as a marker, a longevity health marker is beyond sleep quality. It's actually like, it's actually something that I think we should probably look at more in the medical community as a measure of overall health because it is directly affected by overall stress. So how much stress you live in your life, the more stressed you are, the higher your cortisol response, the higher sympathetic activation, the higher your resting heart rate's gonna be by a few beats by physical fitness. So the more fit you are, the lower your resting heart rate's gonna be. And there's actually been good studies that show that, you know, even a, like a 10 beat per minute jump above 60 is equivalent to about a 10% increased risk for cardiovascular disease. And the higher you go, the higher that increase. So if your resting heart rate is 90, that might be equivalent to about a 30% increased risk of cardiovascular disease or all cause mortality, as opposed to someone whose resting heart rate is less than 60. So it's a great surrogate for stress, physical fitness, overall health, which we, we don't really use it enough.

That's what I love it so much. Is that it, it's not only does it keep in check bad habits that could otherwise overrun your life, but also once you sleep well, the probability you're going to exercise the following morning after a great night's sleep is very high. And that of course has the double benefit. Right. You feel good about yourself, but also it's improving your cardiovascular, cardiovascular fitness and it's going to lower your resting heart rate. So it's this continuous cycle where great sleep leads to great exercise, within lowers the resting heart rate again, which then contributes to, you know, continuously good sleep. So really it captures cardiovascular fitness, bad habits, high quality sleep. So you basically, this is why if you can keep your resting heart rate before bed in check, it is the number one highest performing performance enhancing drug in the world because it's at the epicenter of all things you do in life.

Yeah. Both short term and long term.

Yes.

Like what are you eating, what's your lifestyle, what's your fitness level, what are your habits, what are your vices? It's all ultimately impacted by resting heart rate.

Yeah. Show me your resting heart rate and reveal your, your soul.

Is it fair to say the resting heart rate is the most important biomarker you can track on yourself?

Mike, that's what I would put forward. Is that it? It is that. If you, I mean, this would be an interesting assessment to do. If you know somebody's resting heart rate. What is the, what is the relationship to inflammation, to body fat, to stress levels, you know, cortisol? Like, if we just looked at that across the board, it may be one of, if not the most predictive markers of everything else.

It'd be interesting to try and figure out a way to test that.

Okay, let's just like think through a few of these. It's highly doubtful that you're going to have a low resting heart rate and be obese.

Correct? Yeah. There's actually good studies that show that there's an increase in resting heart rate. So you see, we do see an increase in resting heart rate based on a certain amount of BMI increase. So I think it's every five BMI increases, resting heart rate goes up by five or something like that. It's, it, there's a direct linear relationship.

So let's just run through a few more. It's, it's highly unlikely for you to have a low resting heart rate and be under high stress.

100.

So let's say how does resting heart rate relate to inflammation? Do we think someone could have a low resting heart rate and high inflammation, or do you think that one is. Wouldn't be directly correlated?

I think there's probably a correlation there. I'm not sure if it's as close as stress, but I would suspect there's also a correlation there.

Yeah.

And then you've got physical fitness, which is clearly correlated.

Yeah.

Total amount of sleep is actually correlated. So the less sleep you get, the higher your resting heart rate. They're actually like, they, so they're, they're cross correlated. Right. Like if your resting heart rate's too high, you're not gonna get good sleep. And if you're not getting enough sleep, then your resting heart rate's gonna be gonna.

And you could probably also say resting heart rate is highly predictive of VO2 max. One of the best, best predictors of all cause mortality.

100. Yeah. I mean like, you see like, you know, pro athletes regularly have heart rates, resting heart rates in the, in the 40s, sometimes even high 30s.

Yeah.

Crazy low.

Yeah. Although many of these ultra marathon runners, they, they have very low resting heart rates, but they've got, they're Pre, pre diabetic. So, so there may be some, like, some kind of blood glucose insulin dysfunction that is not tied to resting heart rate. Would that be a possible theory?

Yeah, I, I don't think. I think the issue we're seeing there has less to do with a relationship with the resting heart rate to pre diabetes and more an association with how you're eating. How are you feeling during exercise, the amount of exercise? Are you over trained? That's, that's a different, more complex relationship, I think.

Okay, cool. So it's, it's a contender for probably the, you know, the most knock out the big ones. Yeah, like, yeah, if you. Basically, if you have to reduce health to one marker because let's just say you feel overwhelmed, you're not quite sure. The diet world has you confused with all the things everyone tells you to do exercise, there's a million different ways to do it. You're confused if you focus on this one marker to simplify your life. This is probably the highest value thing anybody can do.

How long would you need to start seeing results in lowering your heart rate? Like someone listening at home, they're like, okay, I'm gonna take on this challenge. How quickly do you expect them to knock out the increases in heart rate, and how quickly do you expect them to start to drive it down beyond just like baseline?

Dare I say immediately? I think, I think pretty quick. Especially if they're coming from a situation where they're not currently cardiovascularly fit. If they're eating late meals, if they're in a high stress environment, if they're not sleeping well, I think you would see a response very quickly, and then dramatic responses within a couple months would be my estimation.

And if someone's listening, what would be the protocol? So we all use whoop. But if someone else has a different wearable or they don't have any wearable, what would they be able to do?

Right, I'm gonna let you answer that one. You're the protocol master here.

Okay. There's, there's a few really important things that are the power laws. One is food. So I, I have my final meal of the day around noon. And so that's roughly eight and a half hours before my bedtime. I do that with the specific objective of lowering my resting heart rate. And so over the years, I've run hundreds of experiments eating two hours before bed and three and four and five and six. And I found that eating at noon optimizes for my resting heart rate above all other times of eating. So one is eat earlier and lighter. So if you're starting off, if you go to bed at 10pm, just begin at 8pm as your last meal and then try 7pm and 6pm on working your way back, you're going to see a relationship where the earlier you eat, the, the better your resting heart rate. So it's going to go down. Number two is actually, and also on, on number one is the kinds of foods you eat matter a lot. So some foods you eat will actually elevate your resting heart rate. So if you have a big piece of pizza or lasagna or, you know, something hard for the body to digest, your body's got to work harder to digest that versus something light, steamed vegetables or something like that. So you're going to understand and create a relationship that certain foods lower your heart rate and certain foods increase your heart rate. And so I've dialed in. This is the diet. These foods are the best, have the best evidence for longevity, and they also are going to contribute to lowering your resting heart rate.

How about alcohol? Really quickly? How about alcohol? I know a lot of people.

Yeah, just get to the mic.

Yeah, it's going to increase your resting heart rate. Right? For sure. I mean, like one of the. I think aura is really interesting. I, I think whoop does this too. I, I actually don't use a whoop. I use, I use an aura. But like, it shows you what the impact is across the population of alcohol consumption. And it's about a 7% increase, at least according to aura of resting heart rate, which.

Oh, come on.

I totally believe. And my personal experience, when, when I do drink, even though I don't drink very regularly, and when I do, it's, it's very little, even one alcoholic drink will increase my resting heart rate by four to five beats.

Come on, guys, give me a break. You gotta have fun in life. You gotta have at least a drink. You're gonna have social benefit, you're going to have community, friendship, love. You spend your whole life trying not to die. You're not living. You need to have a drink of alcohol. Give me a break.

BRIAN DROPS SARCASM.

I mean, what do you mean? What, what do you guys say to that? I mean, so if a person, you know, they, they basically, people hear this and it challenges their existing models of reality, where their models of reality say moderation in all things right is a good thing, or, you know, community is a thing that helps promote wellness and being with friends and laughing and having fun and letting loose and winding down. So they'll argue through these Various models that it ultimately is more beneficial than not. Which I think, if I'm not mistaken, I think I've seen a few papers maybe suggest those kinds of trade offs. How do you guys think about that? Your life, your personal lives?

My instinct when you ask a question like that is to be very soft, to be like, I can understand where they're coming from. Like, you know, it's really hard when our society is built around these social rituals. But then I remember, what do I do for my life? And once you learn the information on how bad something is, it changes your relationship with the thing. So now if I think about drinking, it's just this, like, it's, it's not this like, clean lot. Like, I'm gonna have this and I'm gonna really enjoy it. It'd be like, I'm gonna have this and I'm gonna feel like, you know what, this is actually really bad for me. So I would say, like, that is probably the biggest thing. Like educate yourself on what you're doing to your body, because once you have that information, it's really hard to unlearn it.

For me, I think the, the thing that comes up is what is the actual impact of drinking versus not drinking in a social situation? How much, how much does abstaining impact my ability to connect and commune with others? And it's not clear to me that it does in an impactful way where it is definitively clear that it impacts my sleep. Definitively. I mean, there's just no question.

I was talking to a doctor on Monday and he was making an argument to me that in the morning, if he wanted to spend some precious time with his wife, they would get a croissant and that having a croissant together would increase their ability to have a shared experience. And I was like, I don't think that is actually a correct hypothesis. I don't think a croissant is necessary in this equation. And he pushed back again. He's like, but giving me the arguments of, but it's a shared experience and it's love and all the benefits that flow from a loving, caring relationship. And so I was like, okay, let's just like, look at this from a biochemical perspective. We are, we are a collection of 35 trillion cells. You take the molecular substrate of a croissant and you put it into the body that's going to interact with chemicals. It's going to have a blood glucose response. You're going to have, right, you know, certain inflammatory markers in, in relation to that, like it Doesn't. There's no law of biology that says the molecular substrate of croissants hold the secret to oxytocin inducement and otherwise good health. Right. Like, let's just break this down from a molecular perspective. He's like, all right, I concede the point that, you know, like, a croissant is not necessary for love in a relationship. I'm like, great. Like the. But I guess the point is, even doctors maintain these robust defenses, but they. It's really. We're challenging something that has been part of people's lives for a long time. It is. Alcohol is not necessary to connect. And nor our croissants. Nor is sugar. You can connect with another human in the morning. You can connect with a human over healthy, healthy foods. But this idea that somehow getting down and dirty on the debauchery is the secret to happiness, I just don't buy.

But anyway, you were going through the protocol on how to get an incredible resting heart rate. So the three questions that I have left is, so, what do you do? What do you do if you don't have a wearable? How do you measure resting heart rate? And then what are the targets that people can have? So, like, for example, men and women different.

Yeah. So if you don't have a wearable, then just simply put your fingers on the side of your neck and feel your pulse and count the beats for six seconds and then multiply that by 10. That's your baseline resting heart rate. Now, to do that, give yourself around 60 seconds to calm yourself down. It's like, lay down, take a few deep breaths, try to calm your body down, and then take that. Because if you don't give yourself that one minute, you're going to have a elevated heart rate, because maybe you've been walking around or something. So that's. That's. That's your baseline. So, like, a practical thing we're talking about here is, let's say you. You listen to this today and you want to take this challenge. So tonight, before you go to bed, let's say you take your pulse and it's 60 beats per minute. Your goal in the next week, let's just say, is you're going to try to drop it by 10%. So you're going to try to get to 54 beats per minute by the following week. And so to do that, you're going to start with food. You're going to eat earlier and lighter. So start with two hours, move your way on back. As you move back, you may experience some Hunger before bed, it's fine. It's actually I really enjoy that, that feeling. So just learn to get comfortable with a little bit of hunger. Why you guys laughing?

I'm just like just thinking of the audience listening to this and being like I'm supposed to enjoy being hungry.

Yeah, like what, what Brian enjoys versus what the average person enjoys.

So funny. As you both started laughing at the same time, is that, are you indicating that I'm out of touch? I don't understand.

Perhaps, perhaps maybe just like different things than other people. Hungry, feeling uncomfortable, you know.

So the next thing you're going to, going to do is you need to have a wind down routine. So the rule here is screens off 60 minutes before bed. And 60 minutes probably feels like an entire workday to most people. Like 60 Minutes without your screen, you know, like you're going to go through withdrawal symptoms because everybody is addicted to their phone and we just need to be honest. It is an addiction full on. And so when you don't have the screen in front of you, you're going through this withdrawal symptoms. Like all the same stuff you would be going through crack or heroin or meth. Like you're going through this psychological experience. And so you need to start creating a habit where screens are off and you're doing some kind of nighttime routine where you're reading a book, going for a walk, light walk, you know, having a conversation with a friend, breath, work, meditation, a hobby around the house. But anything other than scrolling on your phone which is going to induce anxiety, create fomo, you know, create negative social experiences and then you need to have some kind of wind down routine. I'll stop there first and come back. What do you think about that? Screens off 60 minutes before bed.

It's great. Love it.

Yeah. Minimum. I figured this out on my own as I think most of us do. Like that's my, that's my necessity. I, and for me it's actually more than 60 minutes. It's, it's more like two hours. Um, I, I seem to have a elevated cortisol response especially to work email. So like I just gotta like, I actually like for the most part cut that off at 6pm like just no more emails. And so if I am on my screen, it's not like it's not looking at email.

Yeah. Kate, what about you agreed that.

So if I had to distill the protocol into one thing, it'd be eat further away from bedtime. Like that is the number one thing for me that would impact my resting heart rate. So yeah, totally agree. And that's just anecdotal data. Like I've tried also like Brian, not as many experiments, but definitely he said this and I was like, I don't know about that. Um, cause I would be someone who doesn't have breakfast and so I would push a food later and later. But then yeah, it really does. The data reflects it.

Like with, with the eating part. Like I've gotten to the point now where if something happens and I don't get to eat dinner by a certain time, I just don't eat dinner. Yeah, just at that point, like it becomes late enough that like the solution is to skip dinner as opposed to eating late. Like that's.

Yeah, I a hundred percent agree. There's, there's not a worse feeling for me than having eaten late and going to bed with a full stomach and having my resting heart rate in like the mid-50s. It, I just, I feel the pain of the entire next day. My head hurts, I'm tired, I'm fatigued, my emotions are, you know, I'm much more sensitive. Yeah, so I agree. I would rather not eat. All right. So yeah, the next thing is a, a wind down routine that I do where I break myself out into various versions of Brian's. I figured this out several years ago when I was working on my eating disorder and you know, I would overeat every night at 7pm and I couldn't stop myself from doing so. And so I tried everything. Nothing worked. And the only thing that worked is I gave that version of me, Evening Brian, a name. And I identified who he is, what his emotional state is, the problems he's dealing with in life, and the arguments he uses to say, like, let's do the thing. So evening Brian. We show up to duty at 7pm Having fed the kids, bathed the kids, put them to bed, you know, told them stories. And then he's like dead. Like the stress of life has just wiped him out. He wants to be like an opossum and just lay on the floor and play dead. Like it's too much. And the only thing he can do to soothe his pain of life is to eat food. And so, you know, brownies, graham crackers, like whatever's in the kitchen, like just devouring the whole thing. And then that process of not being able to sleep and feeling guilt and shame on being, you know, overweight. And so Evening Brian is, has a lot on his plate. He's very stressed. He is bearing the weight of the world and he comes onto duty when other Brian Just spent all the willpower. And so I basically just made a rule and I said, evening Brian cannot eat food ever. So from 5pm to 10pm, which is the highest risk zone, he cannot eat food no matter what. Because you can't negotiate with even Brian. He's not going to like, be reasonable. He just wants his, his objective to be met of eating food. And so that rule really helped. And so I started doing that with other brines that wrecked my sleep. And so Evening Brian is now in check. He can't eat in those, in those time windows. So now I know that there's an Anxious Brian, an ambitious Brian, and father and dad Brian. And so I gave myself all these different names and I articulated the characteristics of each version. So, like, for example, Ambitious Brian is a, is a very dominant, a very prominent character in my life. So the moment 7:30pm comes, my wind down routine is meant to start screens off and trying to calm myself down. Ambitious Brian is the first person to show up. And he's always like, I have a brand new idea. How are we going to make don't die into the most influential ideology in the world? And the human race is going to survive this moment with AI and sleep? Brian has to say, ambitious Brian, we love you. You're really doing a great job in life. Good job. Keep it up. Also, right now we're, we're preparing for sleep, so we'll write down your idea. Then tomorrow we're going to, then, you know, look at this idea because it sounds really promising. Let's think about it. But I have to systematically go through this process and I have to talk to Anxious Brian. Anxious Brian's like, hey, today on the podcast you said that thing, you sounded really dumb. Like, people are probably gonna like, you know, hit you up in the comments about the idiocy of what your statement was. And so I have to take. All right. Evening, Brian. Thank you for the comment. I'm going to, like, address this, so that really helps me because otherwise, what happens if you don't address these various challenges you have within your mind before bed? Your head hits the pillow and then you just loop through all these thoughts because they're not reconciled. You're thinking about work and family and relationships and what you're mad about and how you've been wronged and like, all these things. And then if you do finally go to sleep, you get an hour or two of sleep, you wake up and you're looping again. So now the entire night you're in this light sleep, you wake up the next day you're stressed, you're worn down, you're not well rested you and you're in the same bad spot. And so this one hour routine, you have to be off your phone and also walk yourself down off the anxieties of the day and calm yourself down. And so people can do other things. You know you can. Again you can take your own nighttime routine but to me that really works. And right before like 10 minutes before bed, I'll just hold a book in my hand and do that for like 10 minutes before I go to sleep. It works so well. Screen off, talk through the things book and it just creates a a great night's sleep.

Awesome. So don't eat and then do everything in your power to calm your body down in preparation to bed for bed so that your resting heart rate is as low as possible. Is that a decent summary?

Yeah. The quickly two of the things is you want to avoid blue light. So turn off. You want to use red light and amber light, avoid blues. So screens off or if you do have screens on, turn to red lights. There's a great app called Flux F dot Lux that knocks off blue on your on your screens and you can change your red mode on your on your mobile phones, iOS or Android. And then consistency. So giving your body a consistent bedtime also gives your, your. It lowers your resting heart rate because you're doing the same patterns every single day and the body gets to fall into a routine. So if you make sleep your top priority and you know by, by default resting heart rate, it really is the, is the single highest value thing you can do for your health.

Consistency is, is underappreciated as an important tool as well I would say. And then just a couple other things that I've seen work a lot for people journaling bath or some people sauna. There's, there's other things that other tools you can use in your tool belt for creating that, that routine. But the consistency not only in the bedtime but also in the routine is super important.

Okay. And then what should people target? So you know, I'm a 29 year old female. Is that the same as Brian? What are the targets that people should opt for for optimal resting heart rate?

So if we look at the data, the, the target for the best longevity is less than 65. And how far less than 65 is going to depend depend a good bit on mostly your, your athletic prowess. Right. So how, how physically fit you are. Less than 65 is the bottom of the the curve in terms of longevity. So that's where you can have the best impact. But some people are, you know, healthy at 40 or 38 for professional athletes. But generally I would say a good. A good spot to aim for in terms of overall physical fitness and for longevity would be in that low 50s. Women are going to be on average about two beats per minute higher than men. So not a huge difference.

Wow. I thought it was much bigger.

Yeah. Slightly elevated.

Does it rise with age, your resting heart rate?

It rises, but it's mostly due less to aging and more due to loss of fitness. So as we age, many of us lose our fitness, and the predominant effect is a fitness loss causing the. The increasing resting heart rate.

That's awesome. And Brian, what did you say your resting heart rate is?

We'll make that alcohol 50 right now. It. Yeah, it's a bit higher. It was around 46 before. Uh, that was for the. The nighttime rest. It's now 50. I increased calories recently a little bit, and also I exercise a ton. So those two things increase resting heart rate a little bit. But somewhere between 46 and 50 is where I've hovered for the past couple years.

Yeah. I will say, when you are really in a caloric deficit, I felt like your entire. You were like, you're before bed. It was like you were so steady and slow and like very. It felt like you were already so calm heading into. Into sleep. So that doesn't surprise me.

Yeah, you know, I. I love caloric restriction so much. I mean, when I was doing, I see 1,000, like 900 calories a day thereabouts, I was like a 25% restriction. Um, I got way too skinny and so I had to back off. But I love that state. My resting heart rate is incredibly low. I feel very high energy. So, yeah, actually I find that, like, as I boosted calories, it has some kind of drawdown on my, like, heightened experience. So, yeah, I really love to be at the lower end of caloric intake. I think it really helps. And I. All my sleep stats for the past 12 months, I've averaged 8 hours and 35 minutes per night. That's 94% sleep efficiency, 3 hours and 54 minutes average of restorative sleep. That's REM and deep. My recovery is 69% and my HRV is 48. So on the HRV is average for my age. The other metrics. Luke did an analysis for me, and I'm on some of the metrics. I forget I don't have the data in front of me now, but it was like in the 90th 98, 99th percentile in some areas. I forget the actual numbers, but yeah, definitely it's elite level sleep performance.

Awesome. All right, you guys. So the takeaways for folks exercise earlier in the day and then make resting heart rate your number one priority in life.

Brian likes being hungry and.

What?

Brian likes being hungry.

Yeah, Brian, go back to that intensive restriction.

I mean the, the main problem was when I lost so much weight, I, my face got really frail, you know, it got really skinny. And people associate really skinny faces with old and whereas, you know, they associate fat faces with young. And so I learned the hard way that when you lose a lot of fat in your face, it's really, really hard to get back. Well, the hardest thing to do. And so yeah, I wish I could, I wish I could be caloric restricted and still have the sufficient fat where it wouldn't ding the project. Cause people I would try to say like, but look at my markers, like I'm, you know, healthy. But they'd be like, you look like a skeleton. How do I believe you? So like, what do you do in that situation?

Yeah, it's the entry price to have the conversation about health, ironically.

Yeah. Like, unless you've got fat in your face, it's very hard to have a conversation about health. Like you can't talk about your heart or your lungs, your liver, your pancreas, because people, it can't, it doesn't pass their eye, their, their eye filters. Like, can I trust this conversation? I mean, Mike, what do you make of that?

I mean, I think we're all, we're all human. So it's natural to, natural to have those stereotypes. Just like, just like I think it can be hard to listen to a physician who's overweight. You know, how do you take their advice seriously? I think similar, similar sort of issue. It's hard to get past our own stereotypes when we're in our own intuition.

Yeah. What's interesting is like it's probably a bias that's been built because folks that aren't eating enough probably aren't getting enough nutrition. So like the correlation between like super, super skinny and, and like bone mineral density, for example, it's pretty probably like typically in the past on a great correlation.

So these, these intuitions are evolutionary and they're, they're going to be hard to fight.

Yeah, yeah.

Just to make this obvious is if you treat your resting heart rate as your accountability partner, then it's really a beneficial thing for you. So for example, when you're on your couch at night, it's an hour before bed and you feel the munchies and you think, what do I have in my closet, you know, in the pantry that I can just do one or two bites of in that moment? It's a high risk situation because if you do that, you're not going to have one or two bites. You're going to probably have the whole bag and then a whole, you know, pint of ice cream or like whatever. Like it's going to lead to more debaucherous behavior that of course is going to have these really negative effects. And so if you can keep in your mind and say, if I eat even one chip or like one spoonful of whatever, my resting heart rate is going to increase. And that is going to be the accountability where like now I've, you know, I've messed this process up. And so it is your best friend. I wish I could actually have, I wish I could have a dashboard of my best friends in life and see their resting heart rate overnight and then be able to call them and say like, hey Mike. Hey Kate. I see arresting. Heart rate's up 7%. How are you doing? How out of your night go? You know, like it's, it's such an important indicator of someone's well being. I wish I could do that and call all my friends all the time and say, how, how's it going? Like kind of help on something.

We saw doing that like a sign.

We, I mean Kate, Kate and I share that data like every single day. Like we will just send each other screenshots of like certain numbers. And we both know it tells like a thousand word story. I know everything behind the entire thing that happened. It tells me her emotional state. It tells me what she's going to be like working today. It tells me like what to prioritize and what to deprioritize. It's amazing how much information we've been able to capture in these, these very small data points.

Yeah, it's true.

Yeah. Hey Mike, does, does your family follow this? Do they adhere to these kinds of principles or is this something you do yourself or do your children kind of have their different routines?

We, we adhere to these principles, I mean like globally in terms of overall overall health, nighttime routine, all of those things. Yeah, we do, we do adhere to those principles. The children. Yeah, like screens are off well before bed and my wife's the same way. Yeah, we've just found it works and I think everybody's committed to it.

Okay, you guys.

All right.

Thanks.

Thank you.