Brian Johnson breaks down how to read wearable sleep and recovery data without becoming a slave to the numbers. His son Emerson had a low Aura readiness score in the 40s but crushed it at chess anyway, showing when to trust your gut over what the device says.
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In the 40s
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Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another heroic one. In our last couple ones, we talked about my trip to Tampa to spend some time with some of the most elite special forces warriors in the world and the fact that Aura thought I didn't have a great night simply because my sleep data was a little less than what it wanted to see. I mentioned how I approached that data and connected it to some wisdom from renowned researcher Ellen Langer. To briefly recap, I squeeze the winner learn juice out of the data through a quick 1, 2, 3 process. Check out that one. Then I throw away the numbers as I tell myself my SO4 score is at a 101 while I scroll to the last great day of data and tell myself that's how I feel today. Now here's another thing I always think about when I do what I just described. I think of Emerson as in my son Emerson. He got an aura ring several months ago and the little micro moments of awesome we have every single morning as we quickly 1, 2, 3. His data has been goosebumps. Awesome. That kid knows more about what influences his resting heart rate and HRV than nearly anyone on the planet. It's astonishing. As Alexandra and I often joke, we wish we had ourselves parents. Now, one day not too long ago, Emerson had a terrible aura readiness. It was something in the 40s if I'm remembering correctly. And note if you don't know, that's really bad. Now he didn't feel that bad, but he must have been fighting something. So we looked at the data, thought about what might have been going on. Then I sent him on his way. And you know what happened that day? Well, he played a lot of chess, as in a lot of chess. And he played at an insanely high level. In fact, he had one of his all time best Chess.com rating games. He was truly next level, like 100 points gained on a single day, which is really hard to do. Now note that was on a day Aura told him he should basically stay in bed and do nothing. Now, to be very clear, of course there are days when we need to pay attention to the data and make sure we train our recovery to make sure our chronic bad habits don't lead to chronic diseases. And there are days when we need to completely ignore the data after the juice has been squeezed and go out and make today heroic. And that's what I strive to do on days where the readiness numbers might not be pointing to a heroic day as I channel my inner Emerson. And that's today's +1. Use the robot data when it's useful, and know when to program your mind with whatever data you need to be useful today.
