How Wearables Affect Your Mindset and Long Term Health Tracking | Dr. Joana De Calheiros Velozo | Be Well Moments

0:00Welcome to Live Well Be Well, a show to help high performers improve their health and well-being.

0:10When I think about wearables, I've had like an interesting journey with them. We all want to feel better, right? And we want to live better and we want to have more happier content lives overall. But when wearables came out, I struggled with them because I would then obsess over them. yeah and if I had a bad sleep score it would make me feel terrible and sometimes I would sleep really well or I thought I slept really well so when the mindset's really interesting and then I'd look at my wearable and go oh I haven't and then I'd be more tired yeah and so I had this love-hate relationship and then I spoke to Brian Johnson who I'm sure many people are aware he's been on the show so has his son Talmadge and so has his co-founder and CMO Kate and they're all obsessive about wearables and analyzing every inch of their data so if there's like an extreme person to connect to in this area it's them and they always say well it's really important to know where your data is and I agree with that I do think you know getting a blood test like once a year seeing where your minerals are and things like that having a baseline but you can tip into obsessiveness and I find it interesting that that can also shape your health if you're constantly So how can we have a compassionate, caring, relatable relationship with wearables?

1:35What's that landscape look like? Yes, that's a question. I mean, I'd like to go back a little bit to what you said about your sleep score, because it's such an important thing in that, you know, a lot of the research has actually shown that how you feel you sleep is actually more meaningful for your health than what your objective data says. So it's actually very troubling that you're seeing a negative score changes how you perceive that sleep and then will have a negative impact on your health. And actually, we see that changing the score by just about 5 % has a direct impact on your mood, which is really quite important.

2:14So we really don't take that lightly at all. And like we've spoken quite a bit at length, your mindset will really shape how your body responds to things and will really then shape the outcome, the impact that it has on your health. So we need to be quite cautious about what wearables are telling you. And I think there are ways that you can have a wearable without making it obsessive, without making it addictive, without it disempowering you from yourself, actually. because I think what a lot of wearables are doing right now is actually distancing you further from your body, right? Because it's almost, you become over-reliant on what it's saying and you stop actually paying attention to what you feel.

2:59So that's more harmful than it is useful. Ways in which you can mitigate that is by, well, there's several ways, but one I think is important is to stop focusing so much on the now, actually. So I think what's really fantastic about wearables is that they allow for this long-term passive muttering. And actually what you want is this long-term tracking. It's not so much about what is happening right now, but it's about how you are doing over time. So it's a lot more about trends than it is about daily scores, right? What you want to know is, are you going through a period in your life that requires more attention?

3:46Or are you going through a period in your life where everything is fine? So that's the first thing. We really want people to zoom out and not worry so much about these day-to-day fluctuations. As in, a bad sleep won't wreck your day and it won't wreck your life. It's normal, no worries about it. And actually, it's very healthy that you go through these ebbs and flows, right? If you were always feeling fantastic, then your fantastic would be your normal and you would need something else to feel better actually. So be comfortable with these ebbs and flows. When it becomes problematic is if you are in this more chronic state and that's where you need to zoom in a little bit more.

4:25So that's the first thing. The second thing is scores are actually quite problematic. And I look at scores a little bit like t-shirt sizing. It's a bit, I guess, and it's very manipulative. So I don't know that you know, but in Europe, for instance, we added like XXS instead to kind of give people this perception that they have smaller sizes than they actually are, right? So t-shirt sizing can be very manipulative, right? It's also trying to say something. Scores are a little bit like that as well. and we need to be cautious about it because while it may seem that it is an easy way for you to interpret your data and to get to understanding what the body is saying, it's actually a barrier between you and what your body is saying, right?

5:12Because there's a whole layer that's kind of masking what's really happening. And that layer, a lot of things can go into it. So it's not a very straightforward thing, right? A score is a very arbitrary value, right? And you don't really know what goes into it. It's a series of things that you don't know how much each of them weighs. So instead of doing that, we want to empower you. And the way that you do that is by giving the data as is actually. So while a sleep score of 90 seems fantastic, you knowing that you slept seven and a half hours and that's the amount of time that you feel good is also very meaningful.

5:52or that you didn't wake up a single time tonight as opposed to previous nights where you woke up four or five times, you know, those things, data that is contextualized is much more empowering, right? What you want is people to see their heart rate and understand their heart rate. 82 beats per minute. My average is normally 74. I'm a little bit high. Maybe I'm a little bit stressed what can I do so really recognize what the body is saying for what it is rather than over interpret it I think what's the most powerful thing of that which was really interesting when I spoke to Dr. Amdi Gelpin on here who's been on recently he's the human performance expert was he was saying like every wearable is different like you're not really sure of their technology and how it's going to be used and so you're going to be getting lots of different mismatched scores the most important thing is the long-term data like understanding like over the week how has that looked over the months how has that looked and I think a lot about that in relation to weight gain and weight loss and your weight stability if you're constantly weighing yourself every day you're going to have water retention you might be dehydrated menstrual fluctuations all of these things are going to make your weight fluctuate up and down like you never say the same weight every single day yet if you're giving yourself a mean average and you're looking this over like the month the next month the three months like is your weight stable that's a really good indicator of health and I think this is how we should be tracking with our wearables a lot of people post like 100 sleep score last night brilliant but like how is it looking over three months exactly feels like the more compassionate way and also i guess like the more reliable data because if you're also hrv which is your heart rate variability which we did speak a lot to andy gap and i'd say go and listen to that episode if you want to know more about it he was like if your hrv is going up and down so erratically constantly then that's actually an indicator that something's going on absolutely you know rather than it just being maybe you are naturally more on the low side but are you stable exactly and i think a lot of data isn't always translated in that way yeah so it confuses and then the irony is it stresses out the user yeah where all of a sudden people are worried because something's plummeted yeah um which weirdly adds more stress yeah yeah you're beautiful describing it thanks so much for listening to hear the full episode there's a link in the description Thank you.