A Data-Backed Approach To Perfect Sleep w/ Tom Hale (Oura CEO) & Dr. Rebecca Robbins | EP #73

26:13them. So sleep is a circadian rhythm. Our heart rate operates on a circadian rhythm. Our body temperature, ebbs and flows also. And again, virtually every part of the body. So what that means for our sleep is that the timing of our sleep is incredibly important. We recently went through the time, the painful time change of the hour lost during daylight saving time. And we can all probably attest to that one hour making a huge difference. But there were a couple things going on in the spring, spring -forward transition, the vast majority of Americans don't prepare for that. So they just generally take that hour hit from their sleep duration and Americans aren't getting enough sleep.

26:51So that translates into a very sleepy country, more heart attacks, more car accidents, more something we called, this is another favorite science term called cyberloafing. Employees show up at the office, but slack off by surfing the web. So all these bad things happen. But in part is that loss of an hour and we're shifting our clocks also. And so that one hour, believe it or not, makes a big difference. And that has implications for sleeping in all the weekends. So we want to try to resist that as best as possible and really be laser focused on your target fall asleep time and your target wake up time.

27:27And that will allow your circadian rhythm to know when it's supposed to be tired and when it's supposed to be alert and and then organize itself within those windows. Yeah, mine, interesting. I fine tuned it. When I was in medical school and I was at HMS where you are faculty at Harvard Med School, I remember I was 2am. It was like when I was, I would hit my stride between like 10 p .m. and 1 a .m. And until morning rounds and that shifted everything. But today I need to be in bed by 9 .30. I need to be in bed by 930 to get my score and then I'll wake up at about 6am on my own typically. And it's interesting that changes throughout life, doesn't it?

28:14It does. So Peter, your schedule in medical school sounds a lot like my college students and medical students that I mentor. They're traditionally owls, true owls. We're not sure why this happens. This was research at Stanford. but we first, some reason around puberty transition collectively by and large to be more evening like. So our youngsters after puberty until the early 20s was this change really persists. There was a strong preference for eveningness or being productive in the evening hours, coming alive in the evening hours. And I heard that was generally speaking after that. I heard that was basic, basically to get away from your parents to go find your mate and reproduce.

28:54I mean, I can imagine that, right? It's all about reproduction. It's a good hypothesis, Peter. Tom, how about you? When do you wake up and go to sleep? Yeah, you know, it's funny. I'm a sort of 10 p .m. to 5 a .m. or 6, you know, between 5 and 6. And I've actually been experimenting with a blood glucose monitor. And the thing that I learned that was just fascinating from that was that the beginning of my, you know, circadian rhythm in the morning is a cortisol spike. They call it the dawn spike and anybody who's worn a glucose monitor might know this, but it's basically your body when you're waking up, you know, your temperature starts to elevate a little bit coming out of sleep.

29:34You get this little blast of cortisol, which is there to sort of wake up your wake up your body and it starts the production of glucose being released into the blood, which gives you energy in the morning. And the thing is that if you if you time that right, that little spike of cortisol and that glucose spike is something that kind of launches you into your day. It's actually, I think, in many ways, what's responsible for me feeling like I don't need to drink coffee in the morning because I've got that little jolt of energy coming in from waking up. So the circadian rhythm, it defines so much.

30:02On the other side, the night they go into bedside, for me, the fact that matter the most was eating late. Because if I eat late, and particularly since I have a fun as for sugary desserts, it would have an impact on my sleep if I wasn't careful. So I have now made a real habit of making sure like give a nice window before bedtime of not eating and I try and avoid the sugary desserts at night and it's made a huge difference. Again, in the quality, not necessarily just the quantity but the quality of my sleep. Yeah, let's talk about those specific getting ready for bed and the dos and the don'ts there.

30:36And one of them is eating for sure. You know, those of you who've been my podcast, we talk about intermittent fasting and it's basically can you eat dinner at 6, 630 and then fast till the next day and get a good 12 to 16 hours of fast time. That helps the body in different ways. But one of the other ways it helps you is to get a good night's sleep. If you are snacking and people who take ambient, for example, one of the things that it does is it lowers your inhibition to eating and a lot of people are snacking late at night when they're on and Ambian, which has a lot of detrimental effects in terms of obesity and others, but the impact of eating late on your quality of your sleep.

31:22Let's talk about that a second. And the two things that kind of, you know, what you're eating and when also, but one of the things that I love to talk about in this topic is the old adage from nutrition of of breakfast of kings, a lunch of princes, a dinner of poppers, has actually been tested from the standpoint of our sleep. And that also is better than much better to structure your nutritional intake. A little bit heavier in the morning, heavier in the afternoon, and then lighter in dinner. I think that's kind of a good across the board, kind of, you know, guideposts to keep in mind for all of us.

31:56But then the intermittent fasting literature is amazing. This is all Sachin Pandas' work at the Salk Institute. And his work is just so compelling. it shows that we can move people from being pre -diabetic, this, you know, health trajectory in the direction of type 2 diabetes and pull them out of that nose dive, really with these small changes that are, you know, also I think really powerful because behavior can become a little bit mindless at night. We've been processing information all day. We've been doing, we've been responding, and then your day suddenly comes to a halt. And then maybe you want to spend some time with your spouse and then you're watching a Netflix out at so and then maybe one more and so our behavior can kind of start to spiral and then maybe enjoying some popcorn with that movie.

32:35But I think one of the single things about intermittent fasting that the science is so cool, but it's also just helpful to have guardrails around behavior. You know, try to be done eating by a certain time and at least give yourself an hour and a half, two hours and then any more would be better of a buffer between the last time you finish eating and your bedtime, but two, three hours would just be, would be terrific. Going to ritual of getting ready for bed, and Tom, I'm curious, your thoughts here. My ritual, just to share it, and then we can comment off of that, is I try and give myself a half hour wind down, where I'm off computer, I'm not watching TV, I'm wearing my blue light blocking glasses and I'm typically actually using audible to listen to a book like a bedtime story and then I'll put on my my eye shades.

33:33I love my math to mask and I use a mouth guard. We'll talk about that in a minute for sort of like not you know getting good good airway and that is a ritual that gets me off to a great night's sleep and then I'm out. Talk about rituals and what that sort of approach to landing so to speak, as I'm a pilot, I think about getting ready to get your airplane prepped and get down to the runway of sleep. Tom? Yeah, I mean, obviously not staring at a computer screen is so key. You know, the kind of light that comes off of a, you know, a lead display is blue light and blue light is a signal to your body that it's not time for bed and that you shouldn't have that surge of melatonin, which is the starting gate.

34:21So absolutely, that's probably first and foremost. The second one, I think, and Dr. Robbins can confirm this, but your body temperature actually, when you go to sleep, your body temperature declines a little bit about a degree. And so setting that up and getting your body into that cooling cycle is really important. You can see that there are products that actually help cool your bed or taking a hot shower at night, which actually forces your internal thermostat to adjust lower. These are all factors that kind of ready yourself and ready your body for deep sleep in particular. There are other things, of course, as you said, like something that's calming or soothing and takes your mind off of the cares of the day, whether that's reading a book or listening to a soothing podcast or a sleep story.

35:05Those are all demonstrated. Obviously dark, you know, going to a dark room. The other one I think is really interesting is just the nature of how you use your bed and using your bed not for other things besides sleep Makes it's a place where it trains your brain to expect that when you go to bed that this is the time per sleep You start to build this kind of association all of those factors. I think come together I think the key is everyone's different and so you have to kind of experiment with each factor to see Which one is is maybe most powerful or most impactful for you as you're optimizing your sleep over the years I've experimented with many intermittent fasting programs The truth is, I've given up on intermittent fasting as I've seen no real benefit when it comes to longevity.

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36:31Now back to the episode. Let me hit on something you said and it'll turn to Dr. Robins here, I have to have my room set at 64 degrees or 63 degrees Fahrenheit, right? And I have also have a, you know, an H sleep, a chilling mattress if you would that brings the temperature down. And a lot of times if I ever wake up, it's because I'm too hot and I haven't turned the mattress on or I haven't set the proper environmental controls. But cold is my dear, dear friend for getting a great night sleep. Dr. Robbins, what are your thoughts on all these sort of prep mechanisms that hygiene of sleep here? That's all right on.

37:11Temperature of the bedroom is a key consideration and there's some individual preference and difference within the range, but generally you're really right on target. What we generally recommend is somewhere between 65 and 68 that keeps you in what's called a thermal neutral zone because in certain stages of sleep we're not able to thermally regulate our body, shiver of her cold, sweat of her hot. And so we want to keep you in a zone where you're not going to be susceptible to those swings. And if that in your environment where you live, that does, you know, the colder mattress pad or if you're able to turn your thermostat down in the warmer months, some data came out last summer that looked at sleep in the UK where air conditioning isn't as common as the US.

37:52And there were a couple heat waves and sleep quality was just abysmal across the country. So temperature really really matters. The other dictates of a great room for sleep are quiet and cool or sorry dark quiet and and cool. So our eyelids are very thin. I love that you're wearing an eye mask. If you have any light that comes in at your doorway in the morning or through your curtains, then an eye mask is you know a great way to go to make sure that you're doing your best to create a really dark and kind of cave -like environment. You really want to walk into your bedroom and be able to turn everything off.

38:27And just literally have a hard time getting around because it's so dark, because that can again helps trigger this accretion of melatonin. And I think we all are maybe a little guilty of spending in other areas of our life than our bedroom. One of my kind of jokes is I love asking people where when they call their mattress and wear, because very few people can actually articulate those things. They're like, oh, you know, Uncle Jim gave it to me 10 years ago. And it's over so much more likely to go. But by a pair of shoes, then invest in our sleep environment. And I think that's starting to change.

39:00We're kind of collectively waking up, is a society to the importance of sleep. So I think that it's a really, it's just an exciting time in sleep tech and sleep science for that reason. Invest in your sleep. Critical. Invest in your sleep. There's so many tools, and there's so much education available now, right? That people can draw on. The thing is, again, everyone's a little bit different, and some people's lives don't actually lend themselves to having a really, really great fleet routine. Maybe you've got young kids or maybe you have a demanding job, whatever it is. But there are definitely things that can work.

39:31So for example, if you do have to stare at screens, as you said, Peter, having blue light blockers, which are glasses that will keep the blue light from getting to your optic nerve and then affecting the production of melatonin. That is actually really, that's a great solution. I will admit that sometimes I do check my phone after nine, just for our last minutes and look at the day. And when I do that, I'll wear blue light boxers. And you know, my sleep scores and the experiments that I run to sort of see what the impact is, illustrate that those kinds of things work. So I think the key I think is that there's lots of tools available and you need to find what works for you and having a tool that allows you to measure and track your outcomes.

40:09If you can't, if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. Exactly. And it's not everyone's the same. These are all great pieces of advice, but the things that you've got to find what works for you and your life and where you are in your existence. because folks like, you know, who have young kids sleep, it's hard for them to get good sleep. That's just the nature of the business. Yeah, I have 11 year olds now and, you know, when they were young. But there are different phases in life, and you should always be trying to do your best. Dr. Robbins, you're gonna say? Oh, I just wanted to chime in.

40:40I love your comments, Tom, around how individual, especially the pre -bed time is. And whether it's an I'm ask, I love your routine, Peter, the I'm ask, you know, the couple of things. you can really think of that as your checklist. What are the two or three things that suit you? And I love the question, what is the most relaxing thing to you? Is it the idea of being at a spa? And if that's the case, maybe get some really nice hand creams or an aroma therapy, a smell that you love. And make sure to integrate that into your routine. And so whether it's a warm bath and then you take off your makeup or wash your face and brush your teeth and then you turn off your iPhone, these steps, they sound trivial, but they're actually really important because then you start its classical conditioning from psychology.

41:22You start to train your brain to understand, okay, it's a warm shower, a couple pages in a book. I turn off my phone and then I meditate for five minutes or I do the 478 breath technique or alternate nostril breathing or another one of my favorites is progressive muscle relaxation. A really easy one to do in bed, crawl into the sheets, turn off your phone and then clench and release different muscle groups and it's your inhaling kind of imagine a like a part of tension or you know a place where there's tension and as you're exhaling you let that go from your body and if you just do that and you know work the way up at the body you might you know find yourself sleepy by the end.

42:01So whatever it is think of those things as your toolkit and I've used that word because that toolkit gets you to fall asleep but then that toolkit is also there for you if you're having middle of the night in Somia so if you're up for or whatever reason you had to use the bathroom or your stress and go back to that toolkit, that playbook that gets you to sleep. Next on my list, let's talk about that. It's 3 a .m. your eyes pop open and you're hoping it's 6 a .m. in the morning, but it's not. It's 3 a .m. in the morning. You know you can't go just get up right now. And so the question is, what do you do?

42:36So you were saying go to that toolkit. I've heard people say if you really in insomnia get out of bed and go and change your environment for a few minutes and just don't lie there and then go back to bed and try and re -initiate any advice on for people who have that bout of insomnia? Well, the first thing is to notice that this is part of the fabric of the human condition. Awakening's are actually not something necessarily to worry about. our ancestors were sleeping in two periods. They were up for, you know, a stretch of time in the middle of the night. So number one, think about, just notice how you're talking to yourself.

43:14If you wake up and are you kicking yourself like, oh, not again. And as soon as you do, try to change that narrative and just tell yourself, no big deal. I'm up. I'm going to think about doing whatever maybe got you up. If it's using the bathroom, go do that. And this self talk is really important. just I'm up no big deal. I'm going to go back to bed and then crawl back in the covers and give it a shot and go back to that playbook for seven eight breath technique. Think about happy thoughts, maybe read a couple pages in a book and then try again. Turn off, you know, slip into close, close your eyes and then if that little voice comes on again, it's like, oh not again.

43:50That's when you get out of bed. As soon as that little voice comes on and go to your floor to a meditation technique, do some gentle yoga poses, maybe read a couple pages with a light slow, and then try it again, come back when you're tired. And if you're really experiencing insomnia, that dictative, really being diligent about this, leaving bed as soon as you toss in turn, because there's really this kind of old wives tale that if you stay in bed, any sleep will be better than no sleep, or leaving the bedroom. And kind of leaving bed is really key to kind of reset yourself and set yourself up actually for your best shot at getting back to sleep.

44:28I'll mention something Tom will ask you if you have any other advice. A lot of times will wake me up as my mind is racing. I've just thought of something. What I typically have learned to do is go get out of bed, go to my desk with the lights low or my blue blocker lenses on and do a brain dump. I'll write down everything I've been thinking about and the list of things I hope I remember in the morning and it will feel complete when I get it out of my head and Then go back and try and re -initiate Tom any other advice on insomnia? That I would totally echo what you just said Peter because I think that sort of waking up on your mind ray thing and you're starting to kind of process information Maybe formulate some strategy like writing it down one, it saves you the need to sort of store it in memories so you can kind of let it go.

45:22And then two, I think actually, as you said, you kind of say, okay, good, I've kind of taken care of that. I will say this, I think breathing and counting are super underestimated in the toolkit because both of those things put your body, your physiology into a restful state. And if you can work deep, nostril breathing, long breaths, whether it's box breathing or portion. You know, how whatever approach works for you, breathing is so powerful, especially if you if you couple it with sometimes like a sleep story, something that takes your mind off of the, you know, whatever you're causing your mind to race.

45:57And so breathing, distraction, and having something that allows you to sort of, you know, export the information from your mind so you don't have to store it in memory. I think those are those are all really good tactics. And just the relaxation response just to add a colleague here wrote a book on this topic, and it's not innate. And so really thinking of our ability to relax is kind of a muscle that you need to build. And whether it's a breathing technique or the progressive muscle or a prayer, whatever gets you into that state, it's something that those human beings we really have to work at.

46:30Any mother of a new child, you know, a screaming baby coming out of the womb, going to test to this, there's no natural reflex, which is interesting when you think about, right? So it's something we have to kind of ever work for. Let me touch on two last subtopics. I want to turn to the sleep tech these days, which is naps during the day and dealing with jet lag. We're back in our travel schedules again. Tom, I saw you in Saudi Arabia last October, 12 hour time zone change. The worst.

47:04So, do you think Dr. Robbins' naps are okay if so when, how long, and then any advice on dealing with jet lag, or you just, you know, are you just stuck with an hour change per day? So, naps in many cases can, let's start with naps. Naps can, in many cases, be a part of a healthy sleep routine. If you're a healthy sleeper and you maybe feel a little bit groggy in the afternoon, totally fine to go for what we call a power nap, which is about 20 minutes. It's going to get you a little bit of rest, not a lot, but it's enough to power you through. And a much better solution than coffee. It always makes me laugh that people will literally do anything, but the one evidence -based thing that pays off sleepiness, which is sleep.

47:48And everyone's like, no, what's the 10 -hour energy drink or whatever. You can sleep guys. It's not rocket science. And so, Ken via God sent a lot of companies are waking up to this, putting nap pods and things like that and work sites. So they can be a part of a healthy sleep routine. The one, I'm so sorry, my dog is snoring. I hope you guys can be a good one. You can't even tell me now, right? I'm wearing a bun brand for the sleep podcast. I'm so sorry. So, but okay, so the one exception is anyone who's suffering from insomnia. We want to build what we talked about earlier, that homeostatic drive for sleep and give that person the best chance of hitting that peak in their homeostatic drive and then coupling that with their circadian rhythm and their target fall asleep time So that's the one exception, but otherwise again, you know, indulge in that app if you're feeling a little bit groggy You know, I know I just I'm about to have a chat with With Chris Paul basketball player and Laura ambassador and one of the things that he swears by is the afternoon App especially for the night game, you know, you think about For someone who has to play game at night.

48:51They can't control their bedtime because who knows how long the game's gonna go and then you take a bus back to the hotel, all these kinds of things. The nap before the game in the afternoon is like, it's a standard in high -performance athletes. And again, it does go back to like, it is your natural thing. If you're retired, the natural thing to do is to fall asleep. I think the other thing to call out, and we wouldn't really talk about this yet, but it is about daytime activity. One of the most important daytime activities that contributes to good sleep is exercise, right? Just keeping your body both moving and activated, particularly not, you know, not close to bedtime, but during the day, it gives you that opportunity, both to, you know, wear off the mental stress that you might have, but also it does help prime your body for better sleep.

49:33So, when I exercise at night, that has done had a negative impact on my sleep. So, I do exercise first thing in the morning. I'm like usually a 7 to 8 a .m. weight workout person. Is that true in general that exercising at night has detrimental effects? Well the science is a little bit mixed on this. I think we need more studies but it kind of depends on the population. I think there's been some studies with endurance athletes that have shown no detriment. There have been other populations but I think one of the key things is just noticing what works best for your body. We talked a little bit about circuit and rhythms and we didn't get too too far a little bit into chronotypes which basically refer to your preference for being alert and productive.

50:16A true morning person will tell me, I want to get up, Peter, this sounds like you. Often type A individuals are this morning type, you know, morning workouts, I'm up, I'm, you know, ready to go. And then you're winding down at night and then evening people will conversely tell me that they become alive at night. And so evening people might do well to have an evening workout, have a dinner, and then wait two or three hours, set themselves up, you know, shoot for a one a .m. bedtime. But then their challenge is going to be keeping the morning light out of their bedroom. So really investing in thick curtains so that they can sleep in their optimal window and not be disrupted.

50:52Let's talk about jet lag, which destroys a lot of people and not immune to it. Typically, it hits me on the second night and the third night. Any advice? I mean, the old adage is, it takes you an hour to shift an hour, I mean, a data shift in hour time zone. Is that still correct, Dr. Amin? I believe so and essentially it's all refers to modern day air travel of the amazing ability to wake up you know and it's really rocket lag yeah. But our of course our internal rhythms are lagging behind in our home in our home location so I the key question for me with this is how long is your trip are you going to be there for two days then I'd say rip off the bandaid do you you're going to be in survival mode it's not going to be pleasant but I'd say it's probably not worth adjusting to your new time zone and then having to readjust back because if If you do want to adjust to the destination time zone in a perfect scenario, you're really being thoughtful and preparing.

51:49So, using that one day per hour and then thinking, okay, if it's London from Boston, I'm going to start preparing a week out and move my bedtime methodically in the direction. One of the kind of myths is people say, oh, I'm going to take an overnight flight, I'm going to wake up in London, I'm going to walk around, you know, best thing, walk around in the morning. But what that's actually doing, if you think about it from a circadian rhythms standpoint, I've landed in the middle of my biological night. And so if I expose myself to light, what I'm actually doing is extending my rhythm, basically putting myself on California time.

52:25And so think about where you're moving towards and then how you're shifting your internal rhythm. And I'm telling you, we'll get circadian scientists together and be like, wait, which direction again? I'm so confusing to think about this, you know, light and rhythms and time and the directions, but do use blue light to your advantage. But if you're going from, say, New York to London, the key time to expose yourself to light is actually in the afternoon. So where sun glasses in the morning and then try maybe get a small nap and then sunlight exposure. And you're really going to be on kind of a modified schedule for the first, you know, night or two anyway, and then hopefully adjusting thereafter.

52:59after? You know, this is the hardest problem of being kind of a global business traveler is that there really is no perfect solution. Honestly, I do find that light exposure is really powerful for sort of, you know, sort of setting that trigger. And if you're intentional about light exposure, you can make a, you can make a big difference in the feeling of jet lag. You know, you can give yourself that sort of feeling of wakefulness. I, I, I've often used a product called time -shifter, which is basically a scheduled set of activities, whether it's drinking coffee, or going to bed later, or light exposure to shift your time, particularly for long trips.

53:36That's actually what I use when I went to Saudi Arabia. It did make a difference, but it was not a perfect solution. There is just some amount of shifting you're going to have to go through with your body adjusting to a new time zone and a new rhythm. Everybody at his Peter, a quick break from the episode. I'm a firm believer that science and technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world is the only real news out there worth consuming. I don't watch the crisis news network I call CNN or Fox and hear every devastating piece of news on the planet. I spend my time training my neural net the way I see the world by looking at the incredible breakthroughs in science and technology.

54:18How entrepreneurs are solving the world's grand challenges. What the breakthroughs are in longevity. How exponential technologies are transforming our world. So twice a week I put out a blog. One blog is looking at the future of longevity, age reversal, biotech, increasing your health span. The other blog looks at exponential technologies, AI, 3D printing, synthetic biology, AR, VR, blockchain. These technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur can do. If this is the kind of you use you want to learn about and shape your neural nets with, go to demandus .com, backslashblog, and learn more.

54:57Now back to the episode. Alright, let's go to the third part here. I'm a geek. I love tech, and I love my aura ring. I think I was one of the earliest users of aura when it was, you know, really huge. And, you know, I'm holding my ring here, and it's just an exquisite device because of the tech that's packed in my bag. to it. Let's see if we can rattle off Tom one second. First of all, the ore rings become beautiful. You beautify it nicely. But what is inside? We have a we have Bluetooth transmitter to get to your phone. We've got batteries in there and a bunch of sensors. Yeah, infrared LEDs.

55:35You've got red LEDs. You've got green LEDs. Those LEDs are different for different kind of wavelengths of and also their resistance to noise. So green LEDs are great for heart rate during the day. Red LEDs are great for continuous measurement during the night. So if you're measuring Spo2 and you're using your arraying you'll often see a red light around the edge of your ring. There are negative temperature coefficient sensors, advanced calibrated sensors, there's finger detection, an IR sensor, there's Spo2 sensors, there are the sort of photo receptors that are reading the light that comes back from the light that's shining into your body.

56:13battery life is very, very effective where we kind of expect to be able to get you five to seven days under heavy usage. There's memory on board the device, 16 megabytes to store data so that you can go, you know, for a couple of days and not have to copy the data up to your, up to your phone or into the club. All of these things enable you to track your heart rate, your temperature, your respiration, your blood oxygen, your sleep, including sleep onset and the sleep stages. We're just about to introduce a new sleep staging algorithm them, which is on par with, you know, the most accurate gold standard that there is.

56:45We've got things for women's health, so being able to look and see how your cycle is affecting all sorts of aspects of your physiology. Your temperature, of course, is hugely implicated in where you are in your cycle, so we can see very clearly when you're about to have the surge of the hormones that regulate your cycle. We can see those things on your temperature changes and then content of course and you know all of these things are in the app to help you understand your data and your experience translated into data in a way that you can understand it really easily through three scores sleep activity and readiness and sleep is of course how well did you sleep and you know congratulations Peter on your 97 that may be an all -time high I don't think I've gotten anywhere near that I've pressed in 90 a few times.

57:27Yeah it's it was it was really shocked by it I want to come back to that in a minute but for those of you who have not or ring dot com is the website. It's amazing what's been packed in this. Again, just from a tech standpoint, it's a beautiful packaging and if you're watching this podcast on YouTube, you know, the ring, it looks like a wedding ring. It's not, it used to be the earlier versions had a very large head on them that had the tech, but the tech has become super micriminuturized and you have it in gold and silver and black and stealth and the whole slew of different designs. And I know a lot of people who actually use it as their wedding ring, which is pretty cool.

58:12And just to again, it's measuring those LEDs, the red and the green and the blue LEDs are looking at pulse waveform in the little arteries on the underside of your fingers, that's correct? That's right. Yeah. And that's important, by the way, because I think many people think about, you know, the ring, of course, is being very small and very light. It's four grams. So it feels great. It's actually a great tool to go to sleep with because it's the one thing you don't take off your body when you get into bed. You know, you're just, it just sort of goes with you. But it is really important to understand that this, this site on the body is a really excellent site for measurement.

58:51And the reason for that is twofold. One is, it's on the leading edge of the pulse waveform. So when your heart pulses and blood shoots down your arteries, down your arm, it goes straight through the pulmonary artery right underneath the sensors. And there's not very much flesh in between that pulse and your sensors. Plus that flesh is very uniform. You're talking about basically very little muscle and a little fat. That's basically the tissue. So the signal that comes back from this site on the human body when you shine light into it and what light is refracted back. It's 50 to 100 times better and more accurate than what you might get on the outside of your wrist and why is that?

59:30Well, first of all, you're receiving the signal on the trailing edge of the pulse waveform. You're getting capillary action as it's returning to your heart. Secondly, the tissue here is not uniform. You've got bone, you've got sinew, you've got tissue, you've got hair, your skin may be darkened by light and melanin. This is a famous court case right now. Apple's being that they're measurement for people of color is actually not as accurate, simply because the light that's absorbed into the skin based on different profiles of melanin actually changes the readings that the device gives back. So all of these things add up to a really great site for measurement.

1:00:08You think about it when you go to a doctor, they put the pulse ox monitor on the tip of your finger and shine a light into it. That's where they put it. They don't put it on the outside of your wrist. So that accuracy is really key. And that translates into accuracy around sleep as well, because the way we interpret sleep is we're looking for these changes in things like your temperature. We have accelerometers and gyros on the device, so we're looking for a motion. We're looking for changes in your heart rate and respiration and your HRV, which turns out to be a really interesting predictor of moving between different stages of sleep.

1:00:40So the accuracy is really critical because it means that really the the software and the sensors get to know you personally and rather than sort of giving you some average It's really personalized to your experience and your physiology Now and for me this is about when people say what is your or ringdew for you? It's about game -of -fying my sleep, right? I know when I go to sleep at night I'm shooting just for fun because that's who I am. I'm shooting for my best nights sleep and I know if I get to sleep at 10 versus 9 .30 or if I have that glass of wine in the back of my brain, it's going, it's going to impact your sleep.

1:01:19And that becomes a trained behavior for me. And it works. I mean, if you can't measure, you can't improve it. We've said that before. And it's true. And I guess, can anybody get to 100, have you ever seen 100 of the score on this? It does happen. Yeah, it does happen. It's very rare. And so we think it's pretty amazing that people can do that. But there's a slew of factors that if you really drive, you can get there. It's not necessary. Just making incremental improvements in your sleep will yield major improvements in the quality of your life. And as you point out, your mindset, your mental health is tied to it.

1:02:04But also your longevity. I go back and forth on the gamification and actually philosophically in the company, I think, we're mostly about giving your body a voice and allowing you to really, you know, understand that voice and how it changes from its baseline. That is the key. It's about saying, you know, I'll give you an example. One of my colleagues has a body temperature that's actually about a degree below 98 .6. And so when he goes to the doctor and he has a temperature reading that says 98 .6, you know, he's got a fever. And that's because he is different from everybody else. And the thing is like giving your physiology that kind of baseline so you can understand the deviations from it That's the key because as you change your behaviors You can see the deviations and understand how you can improve or how that affects your physiology So sleep would be one example heart health would be another fitness would be another all these things are our Measure from your baseline because you know what for some people 10 ,000 steps is great or other people 2 ,000 steps is way too much So it is important to think about it as a personalized experience for you which is really the future to think about just how personalized the advice because when we give people these you know take to almost bring it back to sleep duration and if we give people these you know ranges or a number like eight hours go for that and then that's hard if someone's you know that's not their target number and then they feel uncomfortable and then conspire all kind of into some sleep difficulties so the personalization is really exciting.

1:03:28It happens all the time I mean people are always HRV is a metric that in some sense it's not as well understood or well known, I think, by the common public. Heart rate variability. It's maybe where heart rate, resting heart rate was in the 90s. People didn't really know what was good or what was bad or what's zone. We've all become, I think, really attuned to that because, largely, I think, fitness wearables have educated people. HRV is one that's great for recovery. It measures the degree of change between heartbeats and that degree of change between heartbeats is a good indicator, almost of the tension between your nervous systems, your parasympathetic in your sympathetic nervous system.

1:04:04So HRV is one of these metrics that as you get educated about it, you learn how important it is and you start to see how sensitive it is. A bad night's sleep, a glass of wine, a big workout two days ago, like you'll see that in your heart rate variability and it becomes something that you start to really change your behavior around as you as you learn it. I think it's so important to recognize though because we get this question all the time. What's a good heart rate variability? And the answer is, There isn't one. It's what's good for you. And by the way, it does change over your life. And men and women at different ranges.

1:04:34But it's not one answer. It's a set of guidelines. And frankly, it's about your physiology and the voice of your body talking to you. You just need to know how to listen to it and what to do about it. Amazing. Well, Dr. Rebecca Robbins and CEO of Rang Tom Hell. Thank you for this hour. I hope those of you listening realize sleep is a critical superpower for your health, for your peace of mind, for those that you love and those that love you. I love my R -ring. Just going to put it out there. If you haven't played with one, they are relatively expensive and they'll change how you spend a third of your lifespan in sleep.

1:05:18So check it out and guys thank you so much for our time together today. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪

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