The Human Performance Dr Explains HRV, Performance Anchors & Hydrogen Water | Dr Andy Galpin

28:07We will break these down into what we call visible stressors and hidden stressors. And stressors, reminder, does not mean bad. Stressors are what cause adaptation. Stressors are what make you happy. Stressors are what improve your physical health, right? So this is very much a good thing. But you have visible stressors, which are things that you are aware of. You see, you feel, you know you didn't eat today. You know you ate too much today. You know you had a cigarette today. You will know and get a visceral response to these things. Hidden stressors are doing the same, positive or negative, to the same or even more extent, but you won't directly know them.

28:50So you don't necessarily know your vitamin C is getting low. No one wakes up and goes, oh, God, glutathione is just off today. Like, you have no idea, right? I'd love if they did, but yeah. But they might go like, man, I have a headache. Yeah. Or I'm just brain fogged. Like, what is going, like, you won't know them. And so you may not even have a physical sensation, by the way. Like, you could just be happening and you don't know it's there. And so when we, like, when I think about this is everything has a tax to it. And in physiology, there's no free passes. Everything you're doing, if it's going on or in your body, if it is an action you're taking, you're going to pay some price to that.

29:31And we just have to be a little bit more strategic and meticulous with understanding that cost. And so there are various tools that people will use that give you an estimate of that total allostatic load. And most of those tools measure the nervous system. That's my very long-winded answer to saying that is why I got there, is they're trying to approximate and estimate and saying, what is the total physiological load in this person right now? And if it's high or low, you don't necessarily know why. So it's a emotional or mental stress. It could be physical, could be environmental, could be something in the air.

30:13Like it could be, you wouldn't know, but it's saying, okay, we're going to measure the quote unquote nervous system typically as something like resting heart rate, reaction time, vertical jump, heart rate variability, respiratory rate, eye movement. There's lots of insulin markers, glucose markers. There's lots of ways we can measure that. And we would, again, generally call those like a nervous system one, but they're not really that they're, they're a systemic load management system. And so the last part about that is people will tend to pay attention to that a lot, um, because they're wanting to either understand total status, which is a way to say, like, do I need to recover more now?

30:51Do I need to back off more in my shot? Like, can I, can I learn something about my physiology that maybe I'm overloading or, or ignoring because I'm not in with my physiology or I'm expressing too much grit right now and something's going to break. So I want to stop that from happening. Or as a prognostic tool, such as to say, we know when you get to X level, then you start making less progress. You start getting hurt more. You start having more emotional blowups. And so let's just watch you and let's predict that happening. Then we'll pull the throttle back before that happens. So it can be a reactive or a proactive tool.

31:30I'm interrupting for one moment to ask one small favor. Please subscribe to the show. This helps it grow more than you know and I'm so bad at asking this from you. I'm so bad at thinking about this but you know my goal is a hundred thousand to get to on YouTube and I really want to bring you more content and better guests and bigger episodes and we can only do that with your help together so please do hit subscribe. Thank you. I'm really interested in the nervous system itself or the central nervous system. But I think because I have overlooked it for so long, and so now I have to become more mindful of where I am because I think I have a very strong mindset to override signals and I can easily reach burnout very, very quickly.

32:13I'm very kind of single lens from where I want to go and nothing will stop until my body says, well, then that's it. So now I've tried to become more aware of that. And you mentioned something there, which I'm really interested in, which is heart rate variability. It's become quite a big topic now of conversation. A lot of people, especially if they're wearing trackers, are aware of the heart rate variability or if they're doing certain workouts, they're always looking at that HRV. Is this a good indicator of health or not? Because mine's always very low. Yeah. Should I be worried? No. Okay. So low doesn't mean anything to me.

32:51Great. Good answer. I don't know what wearable you're using. Every one of them is different. Not only is their technology different, but the calculation that they use to derive the number is different. And so if you're simply comparing a number or a score, it is irrelevant to anybody else because of that fact alone. Even let's say you're using the exact same wearable devices as a friend of yours, it's still almost irrelevant because your normal homeostatic range differs. In fact, we have a paper in review right now that I co-wrote with some of the folks at WHOOP, where they looked at, I think it was two million data points or two million days with HRV score over time.

33:39There's also other published research. We've done this before in the past. We've used stuff. What you have to consider is, is it a general health metric? Yes. resting heart rate is as well. BMI is as well. It is a real metric and it is generally associated with health. When you have people that start getting HRVs very, very low, that is almost always associated with poor health and a higher HRV is generally associated with better health. And there is probably 50 plus years of research on this. So if you ask, is it a real metric? Absolutely. When you ask, should I be concerned about your low score?

34:16That's why I quickly said, know. I don't know your normal homeostatic range. I don't know what device or tracker you're on. And I don't know what's normal for you. There are genetic factors, probably 20 or so percent of HRV is just simply genetic. And I don't know if yours is being measured appropriately or properly. Last thing I'll say on that is, again, I don't know what context low means to you. Because when I get this from people and clients, I'll get wildly different answers right past this one. Like, what does low mean? And so low typically means something like, oh, my friend has A, B, and C.

34:56Like that doesn't mean shit. Where should it normally sit though? I mean, I feel like men and women are also gonna be very different here. Well, okay. Yeah, again, we have some, a little bit of data on men and women, and that it is true, men and women are a little bit different. And HIV does change with age. That said, the more research coming out suggests that it's not as big of a change as lifestyle. So when we see changes in time via age, it's generally because of worsening health patterns and activities than it is the age per se. And in fact, in the paper that I'm discussing that'll be out, I think it'll be open access too, you will see a different curve in men and women.

35:35And again, at least according to the WHOOP data, so this is again specifically coming from WHOOPs stuff, it dips during menopause and, or I should say 40 to 50 year or so age. Cause we didn't confirm it's in menopause and those individual people. It's like the menopause window, right? But then it rebounds and goes right back up. So are the numbers different? Yes, for sure. But when you ask like, where should it be? Again, if you were to pick a whoop device and an or device or our device or Morpheus or anybody else, the scores are wildly different. And so there is no like number if you contrast that to like resting heart rate.

36:13I can give you exact numbers because every device is going to say the same thing. Everyone uses the same equation. It's not the same for HRV. So if you use a Morpheus device, which is if you care about HRV, like that's one of the gold standard ones to use, you might get a score of 20 and that's phenomenal. And if you use an Oura ring, a 20 would be terrible. So it's like you're literally talking different equations and calculations, not even algorithms. Like if you get the exact same data in the back end, they're using different calculations of heart rate variability. Where something like resting heart rate, there is only one equation.

36:50How many beats did you beat in one minute? That's the whole equation, right? Yeah. Now the technology is different, but the equation itself for heart rate variability is different. So devices use them differently. So it's a very difficult thing. So my advice with HRV is you should pay attention to it. The absolute number... like pay less attention to, the variability is what matters. And so if you like, what device do you, do you mind sharing your, I mean, I'll just break you down. I have No Watch. Okay. So you don't use, what do you use for HRV? I have this brand called No Watch. No Watch. And they are a tracker and they are, they're amazing.

37:30It's called Compassionate Tech, but it basically isn't as, it gives you a rate every four days as a baseline, as opposed to every single day, which I prefer because then it doesn't make me obsessive. Does it give you like an average of the four days? Okay. A far better way to interpret that. So generally what we will say is you need 21 to 30 days to understand where your baseline is. And then the individual day like almost has no bearing. So if you wake up today and it's down 10 % or whatever, off. So again, I don't know about company at all, but my assumption is they're giving you it every four days to say, hey, let's normalize the data a little bit, which is a great way to approach it.

38:10Generally, if we see a change in HRV that's not consistent for seven plus days, I don't care. If it is consistent for seven or more days, then we might like start to pay attention like something may be happening here. But one thing you'll see really consistently is the standard deviation that happens with HRV for each individual person, the magnitude of that deviation differs. And that's an important distinction. So let's just say you and I had the exact same device on. and like what's the number like give me a score that you would get on yours it ranges between 10 and 13 okay again i don't even know what that means because i don't know the units and hrv well for this device i don't know what they're using okay yeah so the units can be different right um let's just say my resting heart rate is great what's your resting heart rate 45 okay that's that's pretty decent and what's do you have any idea of like your average overnight respiratory rate no okay that that's more important oh okay i'd probably pay attention of that.

39:08But let's just say 10 to 15. And that's, I assume, based on how you're saying it, that's a bad score on that device. Okay, fine. So if, let's say mine is 80. Okay. Now, if I wake up tomorrow, and instead of being at 80, I'm at 75. So I'm down five absolute units. And let's just say your average, just to make math easy, on yours is 15. And you wake up tomorrow, and you're at 10. We both are down five absolute units. But who actually had something happen and who didn't? In this case, me or you? Both of us? No. Nothing happened in me at all. Even though we both went down five units. Right. This is why it matters.

39:48In your case, going from 10 to 15, I'm making this all up, right? Or going from 15 to 10 represents a 50 % drop. That's a huge change. where me going from 80 to 75, I don't know what that number is, but that's a small percent, right? And so when we see that change, when I say like your normal standard deviation, you don't have anywhere to go. And so my guess is your deviation is within one or two every day. Why? You can't drop 12. You don't have 12 to drop. But I can drop 12 and it still maybe doesn't mean anything. I might not have any actual change in my allostatic load until I drop 20 to five points or more, which is more of a typical thing by the way so even interpreting with from person to person this again there's why i say like it gets really complicated generally roughly here is not perfect but roughly the healthier the person the more stable their hrv in in response to stressors generally the opposite happens so even if somebody came in and on that same device had an 80 but they wake up tomorrow and they're at a 40 and then they're at 115 i might look at that person and go that person's worse than you who's 15 every single day on that thing and so it's not just the number that matters but it's also the variability that happens that's a bigger signal to me than the number so one of my initial answer to you was no don't worry be worried about it it's all the stuff i laid out i don't know that device i don't know if that's been validated i I don't know the data behind that.

41:27I don't know what technology they're actually using. I don't know what calculation that they're using. I don't know what that number means. I don't know what units they're using. And then I don't know your variability in HRV. So overwhelming majority of the time with something like HRV, it's fine. It's not good enough of a metric for me to go, missing all that information alone, that's a problem. We see people all the time who function really, really well, but have a low HRV on a tracker. And we don't see any other signs and signals of nervous system overload or systemic overload or anything else.

42:02And so it's another one of my classic dual answers. It is an important metric. It has been validated HRV on its surface for many decades. It's highly associated with cardiovascular disease, mortality, cancer, like tons of things. And we use it in every single person at absolute rest, at our coaching practices, at all of them. but there's a lot of context there so you've mentioned this already but that thing gives you a lot of like maybe anxiety may maybe or may not be the right word but then i just probably wouldn't use it that's why i use this one because i don't have to check it every day and it gives me a much more comprehensive score than all the time having to check if i want to increase i mean I think travel is a big part of a bit of a lower HRV for me, but yeah, jet lag.

42:53And you know, that's coming in from Seattle to London. But if people want to increase their HRV, what would you suggest? Yeah. First thing is going back to the earlier conversation, remove any performance anchor that will do it. Number one. So if you have a negative health practice, so when people lose weight, HRV tends to go up. When people eat higher quality food and their HIV tends to go up. When people exercise, it goes up a ton. Very few things will increase HIV more than exercise. Those things will all shoot it up. If you have, well, in fact, I'll add one more. Nothing will improve HIV more than sleep, especially if you have a clinical or subclinical sleep disorder, which is really far more prevalent than people realize.

43:36Those big, huge practices will rocket shoot HIV up. past that we can start getting into some smaller impact stuff but that is the overwhelming majority of time the people that we have doubled hrv in or had huge improvements in that that actually had problems with hrv it's because usually one of those three or four big rocks is being taken care of the ones that will move it the most for sure will be against sleep and exercise and if you have to hedge this is probably when endurance cardiovascular like type of exercise does seem to win a little bit, you're more likely to see improvements when you see that go up.

44:18And that may or may not also be associated with a lower resting heart rate, but those are the biggest ways to move it. What about cold plunges and soreness and things like that? Because that's becoming huge. Yeah, but they're not going to have even close to this impact as those other ones I said. So you can actually look. So HRV will change with cold in a non-commonsensical way. So if you get into HRV, get into a cold plunge, you will see hrv drop actually immediately and this is exactly what it should be so maybe i'll back up a quick second hrv heart rate variability is again this indirect marker of autonomic nervous system and your autonomic nervous system is in multiple parts but the easy way to think about it is just in two parts although again there's there's more than this your rest and digest there's also freeze in there then you have your your sympathetic drive right So parasympathetic rest and digest, and sympathetic drive is arousal and upregulation and fight or flight and things like that.

45:14Great. HRV is telling us kind of where on that balance you are, how much of balance of sympathetic and how much of balance of parasympathetic, right? So we tend to say a low HRV is sympathetic, like you're more switched towards that side. It's not an on and off button, right? It's a gradient here. And a higher HRV means more parasympathetic, more downregulated. So when we say these things like a really low HRV is associated with poor health, it's generally because that's associated with somebody being stuck in sympathetic drive. This could be stress. This could be, you know, poor sleep. This like, okay.

45:49So that hopefully that kind of connects the picture a little bit of what's going on. So if you get into a cold water or anything like that, your HRV will drop immediately. This is going to shoot you into sympathetic drive. This is why you get out and you feel you're exhilarated. your adrenaline has gone up. Cortisol doesn't go up much, actually, like a huge misnomer. It doesn't really change that much after cold in men or women, like in humans, at least to be clear on that one. But adrenaline will go way up, like way up and HIV will drop down considerably. But if you look at that person 30 minutes, 60, 90, up to several hours, three to four hours plus, HIV will climb in those three hours, four hours, five hours post cold, and it will generally climb for at least three plus hours and it will go way past baseline.

46:40And so if I wanted to hack a test, I would say, take your HRV and let's just say it's 20 and get in the cold water. You get out of the cold water, it might be 10. Again, I'm making numbers up here. But an hour later, instead of being 20, you might be at 30. And two hours later, you might be at 40. So it'll have gone way up. That didn't really change your physiology. This is just a compensatory response to going into a huge sympathetic drive, and now you have this parasympathetic rebound. It's the exact same thing that happens with cortisol in exercise. You go exercise right now, cortisol goes up.

47:16In the few hours post-exercise, it'll come way back down in a compensatory response. That's what it's supposed to do, right? That's exactly what we're looking for. It's the exact same reason why taking a hot shower or a hot bath at night gets you really hot, but then your body has this compensatory cooling and you have to cool down to fall asleep. So getting really, really hot actually helps you get colder to fall asleep. It's like hormetic stressors, right? Like very classic over-response. So the question really though is if I chronically did ice plunges or cold plunges or something like that, would I chronically improve my HRV?

47:55And I don't think that we really have any data to suggest it's really going to be a strong effect. If you like cold plunges from probably, you know, like different topic we can go into at some other point, fine. But that's not, and it wouldn't compare nearly as much as sleep and exercise. Sauna does seem to be pretty effective at that. And chronic sauna use has more data. It has data There's observational studies on it. There's randomized controlled trials. We have epidemiology on it. There's enough there. In fact, there's enough molecular mechanism stuff there to say, okay, generally associated with positive health and probably a really good thing.

48:33So I'd be more comfortable saying, okay, if you want to use, and again, it's not sauna, it's hot. So it's sauna or any other methodology of that. But the way to think about that is you can get hot with exercise too. And exercise does a lot of other things for you that just sitting in a hot sauna doesn't do. So if we're looking at pecking order, again, I will really go back to exercise and sleep for sure. And of course, mental health. A nutrition. Yeah. But if you're already doing those things, or like my grandfather, he doesn't exercise, he wouldn't even know where to start, but he uses a sauna.

49:16Like, great. It's better than nothing. There are positive things there. The only thing I would really caution one against is saying, oh, the sauna is more important than the exercise, or I don't need to exercise because I'm in the sauna, or I don't worry about my sleep, I'm doing my sauna. Like the problem we have with these hacks and stuff, not to call it a sauna hack, but you get the point, is when they exceed the baseline stuff. So that's, I think, the most appropriate way to think about this. I love that you're talking about the baselines because I think so often, and I've been sold into this narrative a lot of the times, and I sometimes have to weave myself out of it, of going, wait, where are we on the basics?

49:55Where are we on nutrition, on sleep, on exercise, even just on daytime light? because, you know, I can be in a studio all day or if I'm writing and I haven't been outside. I've spent 90 % of my time indoors and then I worried why I'm feeling anxious. It's not because I'm like missing a supplement routine. It's because I literally haven't done the basics to feel good. With our professional athletes, it's funny. We call these EDDs, so everyday drills. So in American football, there's these classic drills that football players will do every single practice, right? They're like, they're the everyday drills.

50:30It's like really, it is six-year-old, eight-year-olds. Like it's really the absolute basics, right? Regardless of what sport you go into, golf, baseball, there's a certain set of things that they will do really consistently that your six-year-old, again, eight-year-old is probably doing as well. We do the same thing with our clients. What is your everyday drill? Maybe you're not hitting a golf ball a certain way or doing a footwork drill, but we have these same things, right? So it's like your EDD is like, did we get outside yet? Did we do the basics? Did we drink water? Did we do this? Whatever, right?

51:04Like we tend to give our athletes two to three EDDs and we check in on them and then we give our clients the same thing, right? And so we will actually use that same terminology for our lifestyle and health practices with our pro athletes too. So we'll say, for example, you might be a professional athlete and we'll say, all right, did you do your EDDs? And that might literally mean did you walk outside this morning? Did you drink water before you got on your phone? Okay, great. But we're using like sporting language to connect to them more. So EDDs might not connect with like the average person.

51:40But my point I'm trying to make is even with our pro athletes, we are still daily going over the basics of lifestyle. Did you drink water when you got up? Did you say, did you write something nice down today? Did you say something nice to somebody? whatever like the two or three things we that are most important for them and then they have their actual like on-field edds too but those things are really critical we all miss as you perfectly said we all miss on those big basic things all the time and like the ones i loved always like did you say something nice to your wife today ah no damn i'm so happy you said that because i always say did you say something nice to yourself okay that's the one that i always say so i'm glad that we're on the same sink then this wasn't a question that i had in but it's actually just pops into my head because as we're talking about the fundamentals, you know, hydration you just mentioned, which so many people overlook, there's a really big hype going on right now on hydrogen water.

52:37What is your take on this? Okay, I can speak pretty well on this, actually. Now, I have to disclose conflicts of interest here. So, we are actually doing a study right now in my lab with a company called Echo Water. And so, I can't speak anything about that. That's an ongoing project. Echo has a flask that it makes that actually generates hydrogen water that they sell. So I know this research very well in preparing for that study. We've looked at this. The easiest way to explain hydrogen water is it's not alkaline water. Okay. So hydrogen water is a, like if you talk to a chemist and you know this very well, it's a very funny term.

53:17Some people will call it molecular water and the same thing. You're like, that doesn't even like, That's a nonsensical word. Like, of course, it's molecular. Like, what? Anyways, hydrogen water. Okay. So confusion number one is just like giving it a truly awful name. Okay. So many years ago, alkaline water became a rage. And for the most part, scientists pushed back hard, and they rightfully so, because it turned out to be mostly nonsense. And most of these things do. Right? So that's a good stance to have is nonsense until proven otherwise. We actually ran an alkaline study, like a six-week study in my lab many years ago, and we found the same thing, like did nothing for performance at all of any kind.

54:00All right, so hydrogen water and molecular water are not alkaline water. Number one, alkaline water is literally giving you water that's at a different pH. And the assumption is, oh, you'll drink it, you become more alkaline, i.e. less acidic, and that should have more positive health benefits because being acidic is bad. Two major problems with that. One, ingesting a little bit of alkaline water becomes immediately changed to the acidity level in your body, particularly in your stomach, so it does nothing. Two, being acidic is not bad. Your body has a natural pH that it runs in different areas.

54:35Your stomach has a different pH than your, in fact, if you look at the pH in your arteries versus your veins, they differ slightly. That's a good thing, right? That's the way that you clear bicarbonate. Even in your mouth. 100%. Like the pH in all the orifices in your body, In your ears, in your nose, in your mouth, vaginal pH is different, right? So it's everywhere and it should be different, right? Things work better at a certain temperature and a certain acidity level. And so if you're actually too alkaline, you'll see breakdowns as well. Not good, okay? Now, let's set that aside. What hydrogen water or molecular water is attempting to do is very, very easy chemistry.

55:14It's saying if we can add more hydrogen protons, so quick chemistry for folks, Hydrogen is H +, right? That's also the same way as saying like proton. Now, pH, the term pH stands for two things. We won't get into this debate, but one of the ways you can interpret pH, the acronym, is potential hydrogen. And so the way that chemistry work in the pH scale, what makes something alkaline versus acidic, is the exchange between H +, and OH -. Why that matters? if you take an H +, again, it's got a positive charge, and you take an OH that has a negative charge, and you put them in the same room, what's going to happen?

55:59They equalize. There you go, right? Because they're going to come together. The negative and the positive will balance each other out because they have strong affinity for each other, and they're going to make water. H2O, right? So two hydrogens and one oxygen. Pulling them apart gives you those separate things. Okay, great. So if I were to give you a big bolus of hydrogen plus, which is, again, pure acid, and that's in an environment with a bunch of OH negative, you'll take that acid, you'll take that alkaline, and it will all become neutralized because you'll just make a neutral, inert water.

56:36This is the rationale. If we gave you hydrogen water, another water with a bunch of extra H plus into it, it will run around your body picking up a bunch of OH negatives, converting it into water. Now why that is a potentially good thing is oxidative stress breaks down tissue, breaks down DNA, breaks down anything. Again, this is a good thing. This is what scavenges your body of broken down tissue. It fights off infections. It's important for clotting. It does a ton of things. But excess amounts of oxidative stress are detrimental to mitochondria and, again, every tissue in your body. So the working assumption thought process theory here is if there is too much oxidative stress going on and we can bring in extra hydrogen, we can neutralize that potential effect and also produce water, which is great.

57:29So it should be quite hydrating, but the real thing is cellular stress. So the available human research, and there actually is some human research. There's not a lot of high quality human research. There's not a lot of placebo and randomized trials on it. But again, we're doing one right now. It was more impressive than I anticipated, to be quite candid. I was like, okay, there's something here. Now, most of the research is preclinical, meaning non-human and molecular based and all that stuff. interesting part of the story. You don't throw it out, but we don't put as much stock in that as we do human research.

58:04And so the human research is emerging. What it looks like it does, again, thinking through the chemistry a little bit here, nothing to pH. You don't drink hydrogen water to change your pH, as we already explained in the alkaline story. It's not what it's doing. But it does seem at this point to potentially have some sort of anti-inflammatory potentially, but more importantly, directly, an antioxidant benefit. So here are the outstanding questions. Does it do anything to performance? How much do you have? How long from when it was activated between then and ingestion? Does the preparation matter for it?

58:46Does it actually make you better in the long term? Is it an acute effect or a chronic effect? If so, how? And we actually have some things that we think that are happening there that I won't even share yet, but it's not the stuff that most people are talking about if it's potentially working. Does it work in young people? Does it work in old people? Does it only work in people who are unhealthy, right? And it is generally true to complete the story. Oxidative stress itself, when excessive, is associated with poor health effects, okay? When you smoke, when you don't sleep, when you are exposed to environmental pollutants, oxidative stress gets really, really high.

59:24So are the potential benefits exclusive to people who are just kind of in a really highly oxidative stress state? So somebody who is exercising a lot, drinking clean water, eating clean food, and they're not overly exposed, are they still going to see the same benefit? We don't know the answer to really any of these questions. So at this point, I would say, do I recommend it? No, not per se. We'll see what our study comes up with. And again, that's funded by that company, Echo. like very important this is conflicts of interest um so we'll see we'll see where the data shake out in our study we'll see where if other folks are funding studies and getting those things done i don't know it's plausible is it better than any regular antioxidant does it does does it outperform vitamin c i don't know like does it outperform just eating more antioxidant rich foods.

1:00:20I don't know. So the question in science and performance is always, okay, compared to what? And I can give you a thousand products that can show some efficacy or effectiveness in a control trial, especially at the molecular level. Like if you know anything about molecular or biochemistry, you can make a trial work, right? Like it's pretty easy. But is it better than this? It's important to say. Really easy to make that happen. So we'll see. It's been a pleasure. I can say working with that company has been phenomenal. They are super transparent. And I really think that they're in it for the openness and to make sure the product works.

1:01:02So good on the people at Echo for being like that. But we'll see. I think it's so important that you said all those other things. I think it's an interesting area. I've watched a few talks on it recently. um but i do think you know people might hate me on youtube for this and write comments but if you're living like a high keto diet which doesn't have many fruits and vegetables and antioxidants and trying to drink hydrogen water is there going to be a benefit and you're living in a city that is full of pollutants yeah i don't know you know it's all context isn't it yes i think that's the most important thing so i'll say one more thing sorry to interrupt you um most of what i've seen thus far in the social media and podcasts regarding molecular water and hydrogen water is complete garbage.

1:01:45Most of the effects are greatly exaggerated, if not flat out lied about, and the impact, how to use it are incredibly inappropriate use. So that is very, very fair criticism of the field. And I think I have no problem saying that because because that field has, that product specifically has done itself a huge disservice. So people that are being like, man, is that all nonsense? You're right to think that because most of what I have personally, I'm just saying what I've seen and again, starting to look into these products prior to our study, those claims are egregious to flat out fraudulent, to be candid.

1:02:27And so I don't know if this is a case where the pun here, this is the throw the baby out with the hydrogen water situation. We'll see. But I think it is fair to say this has been a really inappropriately positioned product thus far. And at the same time, there is actually some research behind it. It's not a complete scam. But many people that are associated with these types of products are complete scam artists. So it takes me to recovery and sleep. I can't not have you here and talk about sleep. I know that's such a big thing for you. And in our five questions for Substack, which we put out the day before, I asked you what you changed your mind on in the last year and you spoke around sleep.

1:03:11So I can't wait to get into this with you. So you've mentioned continuously there's four basic pillars, you know, and sleep is one of them to really look at when it comes to human performance, but just like good general health. And that's something that I've changed my mind on a lot in the last five years. You know, I used to always think I had to get up at five. you know, the 5am club and be part of that kind of hammer, hammer, hammer, hammer, hammer, go, go, go. And the more I worked, the better I was. And actually I'm realizing that that's probably not the best way to look at things, especially for performance.

1:03:44So talk to me about sleep. How should we be looking at our sleep levels? And is there like a specific time that we should be trying to hit every night? Or is that also a load of garbage? Okay. So there's lots to think about. We just published a study this weekend. Congratulations. And it is open access. So people can go read this. You can put it in your sub stack or your newsletters if you want on all the environmental impacts or all the things in the environment that impact your sleep. So this is led by actually a British guy. Greg Potter led this paper and it's up. So you can see all the details of what I'm about to rattle off in that individual paper.

1:04:24there's figures, and there's actually a table we include that gives people specific recommendations for where to set all these environmental factors. Okay, I'm answering the question this way because we are spending globally 60 plus billion a year on sleep, and it is getting worse. It's one of the few areas of health that has a huge financial impact, but at the same time is getting significantly worse. People are aware of obesity. People are paying attention to other things. I'm not saying we've solved those problems by any means, but there is some hope there and there is attention. We're spending more on sleep than ever and it's getting worse than ever.

1:05:06And so the question is why? My dear friend, Matt Walker, he works with me at Absolute Rest, to my company. And he's been speaking about sleep for years. He's, he, you know, his book came out and people were like, he really turned the world's lights on to sleep. So people are aware and we're spending money, but it's getting worse. So the question is why? In that paper, we make, I think, a pretty compelling argument as to some of the many, many reasons sleep, like anything, is multifactorial. There you'll never find one explanation for why sleep is still getting worse. But one of the things to consider are the environmental factors.

1:05:49The world, there's actually satellite imaging data that make it really clear the world is getting brighter. And there is this splash that happens. Actually, light that goes up splashes off of the clouds effectively in the atmosphere and comes careening back down to the world. Our physical temperature around the world is changing. Technology is changing. Lights in the home, engagements. Like there's all these things, again, all in the paper, that are changing. People are living in cities more. Why this matters, there's really clear data on things like carbon dioxide concentrations in your bedroom, in your house, in working environments.

1:06:29Not from a green light, but simply because you're in a closed environment, you inhale O2, you exhale CO2. If a bunch of people are in a room with a closed window set, CO2 levels rise. If ventilation is poor, if a lot of people are in that, you're going to have a higher CO2 concentration. If that gets to a certain level, you see really, really strong changes in sleep onset, sleep quality. All architects of sleep, so REM and all your various end stages. Next day, arithmetic. Next day, executive function. Next day, subjective sleep and arousal and wakefulness. all change dramatically when CO2 levels in the room rise too much.

1:07:11So you have all these things happening and people are like, oh, it's A, B, and C, but the environmental factors alone, again, I'm not even talking about ozone layer. I'm literally just talking more humans in the same space is a difficult thing to deal with. So you have this light spraying thing that's happening throughout the globe. You have this CO2 stuff in people's rooms because they're living in more concentrated areas. We talked in the rapid fire thing about the world is more engaging. people are going to be on some type of device one way or another. And so simply procrastination, people just don't want to go to bed because the living world is really entertaining.

1:07:46And so you're going to put off going to bed. People are working at home more, which means people can work in different time zones much more effectively. It would be really difficult for me to run my companies 10 years ago. Now, all of my companies are remote. We're out here in the UK with absolute rest for our first time ever, but we have clients across the world. We can do that because of the internet, because of video meetings. So because of that, your expectation as an employee is to be more available during different times, right? Especially if you're trying to raise money or you're whatever, you need some, you're going to be more available in off times.

1:08:25That didn't happen in the past. So at night, for the most part, you are going to be left alone. You're pretty much expected to answer Slack or whatever at any time. So boundaries have completely changed. So I could go on, on, on, on, on. You also have, it's getting better. It used to be at 80%. It's now down to 70%. But at least the data in America will show 70 % of true clinical sleep disorders go undiagnosed. We have actually huge, huge areas that are called sleep deserts, right? So people are maybe like aware of food deserts and stuff. We have sleep deserts going on, which are these concentrated areas of extreme light, like in a city and sound, because now the world works more overnight.

1:09:18So restaurants are open later, services are open later because the internet and things are changed. So it's harder to get more sleep in these sleep deserts. The sleep disorders persist because there have been really no changes in technology for medical sleep testing in 50 plus years. It's all the same. You have sleep hospitals, but if you run the numbers, you have hundreds of millions of people with sleep disorders and you have a few thousand sleep physicians. So each sleep physician is responsible for tens of thousands of diagnoses per year. You have no chance, right? You want to get a sleep test done, what do you do?

1:09:55You find a sleep hospital, you pay 5 ,000 pounds, you wait four months to get in, and they check you for apnea or not and then send you home. So you can just imagine whether this is a behavioral issue, work expectations, you're on your phone too much, this is an environmental issue, air quality, or there's too much light or it's too loud, whether this is a pathological issue. Yeah, like a lot of people wake up at like 2, 3 a.m. and can't get to sleep. Super common. Had that question the other day when I was around a table at a wedding and three people woke up at 3 a.m. and just like couldn't get back to sleep.

1:10:34Extremely common. We deal with that and we handle that a lot of ways. It's actually like pretty easy to fix. Really? What do people do? Well, there's a handful of things. It's always, again, I will generalize. There can be many different things, but a handful of reasons why that happens. actually this is in our paper too. You can go read some of these things. I'll link this in the show notes. Yeah, a number of things that can be happening here. One of the biggest ones is actually your pre-sleep heart rate will predict this. So a lot of the people, you're familiar with the concept of wired and tired.

1:11:06Yeah. Oh yeah, far too well. Great. So I'll wind back just a touch here to settle a context. When people think, because you asked this question and then I'll come right back to here, of what is sleep? Is it just a number, like a duration? Okay, sleep duration is one of the many components of quality sleep. Okay, so the total time, right? The average human, seven and a half hours, like is enough total time for a health perspective. For optimal performance, we're probably looking at more. For peak physical performance, certainly more. But let's just say you can get by seven and a half to eight hours total.

1:11:46But that's only one of the components. Component number two is actual daytime function. Are you sleepy? How's your inertia the next day? Getting out of bed? How hard is it or how groggy? Is your brain sharp the next day? Are you feeling energy throughout the day? That's component number two, right? So I don't even really care about the numbers. If you're like, no, I wake up, feel phenomenal. I'm on point all day, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, so your subjective nature is number two. Number three is quality. and this is how long did it take you to fall asleep your sleep onset did you wake up at all throughout the night if so why how hard is it to go back to sleep um what's the people will focus on sleep stages deep sleep and REM massively overrated like in general throw those things entirely away if you're getting those from a tracker throw that entirely away what you want to pay more attention to are things like your stability fragmentation positional awareness how how much movement are you having?

1:12:46Those things actually determine architecture, but like the sleep staging is like almost entirely nonsense at this point. So that's not the appropriate way to think about it. Quality is that other stuff. Then there's also regularity. The simple fact of like how consistent are you at going to bed and waking up at the same time? This can have as much or more of an impact than quality or duration can have. You also then have timing, which is what time of day are you waking up and what time of day are you going to sleep. Any of these independent factors can be your problem. So the person that wakes up at two or three in the morning, let's just assume, because there's so much to go over here, let's just assume they're not having changes in regularity and that their timing is normal so that they're going to bed at say 10 or 11 and waking up at six or seven in the morning, but two or three, they're still shooting away.

1:13:40Okay. The walk into that time matters. So when I started this answer, I told you about that heart rate wind down. Okay. Well, one thing that predicts this is, and I went immediately to wired and tired because a lot of times what happens at night is people are extremely tired, super fatigued, like a sleep pressure is really high. So they'll fall asleep pretty quickly or regularly, But they'll shoot up between two to three in the morning, really common number, by the way, like almost always, because they've hit those first few hours of critical sleep window. They're not actually down-regulated. And so they get too close to that sympathetic drive window and they get kicked into arousal.

1:14:21And now they don't have strategies and techniques to get back down into a parasympathetic drive. They don't recognize it. And so now they're up and up and up and up. Always happens at two to three because it is that three to four hours post-sleep where you've hit a critical threshold. Brain has done what it absolutely has to do. And now you hit that threshold of awakening. It can be some other things like blood glucose drive, cortisol, and so on and so forth. But for the most part, this is almost always driven by actually a poor down regulatory routine. We will see this in people's heart rate data.

1:14:57We actually just had this happen. Where was I just at? Costa Rica, just before this, at the Four Seasons. with some clients down there. Ran through all their data, really consistently see this. You will see a heart rate irregularity and their heart rate is being too high in the 90 minutes prior to sleep. Sleep onset is fast. Five minutes, they fall right asleep. Sure, exhausted, tired, but shoot awake at that time. The nights that they had this happen versus the nights that they don't happen were 100 % predicted by that pre-sleep heart rate. And that particular person, that's all we had to go solve.

1:15:34And so this is a classic example of this is a extremely high level individual. Everyone would know this person, like very famous person. And we're like, hey, you have to do this down regulation routine. And this person was like, zero chance. I'm not doing yoga. I'm not doing breath work. Like could not be less interested in these things. Showed the data and said, I don't, it's not about the breath work of the yoga, whatever. Do whatever you want. Just make your heart rate go down prior to bed. Oh, I don't need that. I'm so tired tonight. I fall asleep easy. Has nothing to do with that. So people will conflate the exhaustion with down regulation.

1:16:14Sleeping and falling asleep is not down regulated per se. Those are different pieces. And so in this particular case, it is very often one of a few things. Let's assume also, by the way, it's not a menopause or perimenopause situation where it's getting hot. Those are different answers. But that, in that particular case, was that issue. And so we actually have to have that person go through a wind down thing. And again, that wind down thing can look different. It doesn't have to be breath work. It can be any number of things that are more aligned with your personality. If breath work is your thing, like, great.

1:16:50But we got to find a way for your heart rate to come down prior to sleep. And then you'll actually walk into sleep with a higher or lower, sorry, Higher HIV, lower heart rate, more prepared for sleep. Your onset may or may not change, but that two to three a.m. waking up thing almost always goes away. Wow, I love that. I feel that that is something that so many people struggle with. I'm going to link all of that in the show notes. There's so much more I want to talk to you about, but we have to finish. And I have to leave you with one last question. And I want to also link Absolute Res, because I know you're here in London.

1:17:24We're doing the quickest turnaround ever for this episode. to get this out. But I got to give you and the squad a huge shout out. I'm generally pretty like low demand, but I was very demanding with you on this one. And I had a huge ask and you guys delivered. So yes, we are here. Absolute rest in the UK for this month, October. That's it. So maybe we can have a time to do a round two. Because honestly, the amount of stuff that we still haven't spoken about. Oh no. But the crew is here. So if you live in London or want to come to London for the month, this is the only time outside of America you work with our team at Absolute Rest.

1:18:01So I'll let you get your question, but thank you very much for letting me do that and for turning this around. No, I'm so happy. I'm so happy we finally had this conversation. So I always ask one last question for all of my guests, which is what does live well, be well mean to you? I think it's a state of joy, which is if you are in joy, experiencing joy, I don't think you can live or be well without that. And I think part and parcel to that is you have to have some semblance of health, some semblance of community, some semblance of purpose. And those can come in lots of different forms or fashion.

1:18:36But I think it would be difficult to live or be well without that. And I think if you had all those things, but you weren't experiencing joy, I don't think you'd feel well or live well. I couldn't agree more. Thank you, Andy. thank you thank you so much thank you