Are You Aging Faster Than You Should? - Dr. Kristen Holmes

24:16So I think a lot of those same dimensions of human flourishing have held true. And I think what I argue in the book is that, you know, modern society has kind of pulled us from those primal thresholds of nature, right, which have a real cost to both our psychology and our physiology. So when you think about the lack of access to light, right? Natural light, natural light's really, really important, but we spend 93 % of our time indoors. That comes at a cost, right? We have access to food, but our brain is wired, you know, it's still wired for the Savannah, right? So we have to enact huge amounts of discipline and willpower to fight the fridge, right?

24:58You know, we've got, and we don't have to work to get our food anymore, right? So it's just, it's there in a package. It's there in the fridge for us, right? So, you know, that comes at a cost, right? That this, the easy access to food and eating, you know, not just over the course of 12 hours, but for many Americans, 16, 17 hours, right? Which, which comes at a, at a cost, right? When we think about our, our metabolic health and our sleep and, you know, other, other things that it impacts. We have access to, you know, alcohol and yeah. So I think all of these, you know, we have the ability to be super active

25:34Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:during the inactive phase of our circadian rhythm, you know, after the sun goes down. That's me, pretty much. Yeah, no, I mean, it's all, you know, it's a lot of us, right? And I think, you know, it's, we, I don't know that modern life is going to change, but I think we have to understand its impact on our health and do our best to, you know, mitigate some of those negative effects with other behaviors that can kind of, you know, put us into balance. As a physician, I spend a lot of time talking to patients about healthy aging. And one of the most important factors is maintaining skeletal muscle.

26:12Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:I know it's unsimple, but simple isn't the same as easy. And many people struggle to consistently consume enough high-quality protein to support muscle health, recovery, and long-term metabolic function. And thank you to one of the sponsors of the show, Perfect Amino. that's one reason why I personally use and recommend Perfect Amino by Body Health. Perfect Amino provides all of the essential amino acids your body needs for protein synthesis and beyond. It is a highly bioavailable form of amino acids. It's easy to take and can be a practical option for individuals looking to support muscle health, especially when meeting protein goals are difficult.

26:56Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Remember, muscle is the organ of longevity, whether you're training hard in the gym or simply focused on staying strong and independent as you age. Giving your body the building blocks it needs is an absolute non-negotiable for your long-term health. Go to bodyhealth.com and use the code LION20 for 20 % off your first order. That's bodyhealth.com, code LION20. You were driving back up to, I don't know if you remember this, but you actually were driving back up to Phoenix. I was like, why are you not kind of staying down there? And you're like, you know, because I have to get up at a certain time.

27:41Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:And actually you had arranged your travel so that you weren't going to be like sleep deprived in the way that, you know, the rest of us weren't thinking about it, but it was just so simple. Do you think there's the thinking aspect and then there's the behavior aspect? And you talk a lot about aligning the food and the sleep-wake time. Which do you think pushes one more? I'll answer that. But I think you need to, the thinking, the behaving, like I think you need to back out and figure out, all right, if I know all of these things to be true and they're important, like maintaining my circadian rhythm while traveling so I can get up the next morning and take my son to ice hockey, which I think is what was happening.

28:30I just wanted to be safe, not sleep deprived and present for him. Um, but, but, but that gets to my point is that that's my why. My why is to say, you know, I, I, my whole entire life, my mom was really sick, you know, And I want my kids to see a mother who is thriving, who is healthy. And I just frankly don't want them to have to worry about me in the way that I worried every single day about my own mom. And that's my why. That's why I work out. That's why I drive to Phoenix to maintain my circadian rhythm. That's why I prioritize my sleep in the way that I do. That's why I think about circadian alignment, which is a driver of autonomic nervous system resilience.

29:13You know, that's why I think about these things. you know, and that's why I carve out time to be in nature every day so I can show up for them, really. And that's my why. And that's what motivates me to kind of what feels like or sounds like a sacrifice. It just isn't a sacrifice to me anymore, you know, because I would never trade my how I am with them, you know, being able to be patient and tolerant and kind and available to engage with them in a way that, you know, makes me feel proud. In terms of like the levers that move the most, I mean, I would say contrast is really important. One of the concepts that I think folks need to understand is this concept of circadian amplitude.

29:54And the way, and I want a shirt that says, got amplitude, the same way as got milk.

30:01Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:We need merch. I mean, come on guys, get on that. Got amplitude. So you want a robust circadian amplitude. And And the way to do that is to create a lot of contrast that is aligned with a natural light-dark cycle. So we have these patterns that are happening over the course of a 24-hour day, right? And you've had some amazing circadian scientists on this podcast as well. Sachin, your friend. Sachin, Alexis. Yes. Phenomenal. And Sachin, yeah. So I would encourage you to watch and listen to those. Yeah, because they're so good. They're so good. but if you want to understand more about circadian rhythms.

30:39But this is an area that, you know, my PhD thesis was basically looking at circadian alignment and its relationship to both physiological and psychological resilience in humans. And indeed, circadian alignment predicts both physiological and psychological resilience.

30:54Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:And that simply means that you are waking up at the time that the sun is coming up, you are going... So sleep consistency was really kind of the basis of... It is a proxy for circadian alignment, so absolutely. So sleep-away consistency is a huge, huge driver of amplitude, right? But in order to kind of have amplitude, we want to have a lot of contrast. So back to the big levers is you want dark nights and bright days, and you want to create as much of that amplitude as possible. I see, visually or within the environment. Yeah, so when you have that contrast, you sleep better, you recover faster, Your metabolism works more efficiently.

31:40When you are super active during the day and not active at night, again, contrast. You eat when you're most active, so you're fueling for your activity requirements, which I talk about in the book too. I'm very passionate about that, which is happening during the day, and you're not eating at night. So basically, you create this contrast, helps facilitate this amplitude that we know is correlated with health and longevity. And I have a paper in review right now that basically looks at this very thing. It's 5 ,000 women and a few different cohorts, but 5 ,000 women who are in perimenopause and menopause, I think 3 ,600 women who have a natural menstrual cycle.

32:22And basically the thing that predicts symptom severity and frequency is amplitude, is heart rate amplitude. And you can imagine all the physiological variables have that amplitude, have it kind of are following this 24-hour pattern. The more amplitude, the less pain is the bottom line. For every domain? For all, so just heart rate, this paper is just heart rate, but we're looking at all these other physiological variables play ball in the same way. But I just wanted to get this paper out there, kind of put a stake in the ground, because I thought it was interesting. The effects are small, but you can imagine, if you were to look at someone who has cancer, for example, their amplitude, they'd have no amplitude.

33:10You look at someone old and unfit, okay, or even young and unfit, low amplitude. Amplitude is an incredible proxy or kind of marker of health. We want to try to preserve our amplitude, and we do that through these circadian levers. And you improve the circadian levers, you improve your autonomic nervous system resilience. How long does that take? Not long. So, you know, there's been some studies, like just a couple weeks camping, no artificial light. You can cure a lot of ills. So it doesn't take that long. In heart rate variability, it's the space between beats, right? That would determine if you could lay out the heart rate variability,

34:00Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:exactly what it is, where amplitude fits in, so that we can understand exactly what lever in terms of what order we need to pull. So we want lots of amplitude. So when we look at, think about heart rate variability, just to define that for folks, it's quite literally the time interval between heartbeats. And that is, you know, your heart is not a metrodome, like it's highly variable between heartbeats. And the more variable, the more robust and healthy your autonomic nervous system is. So we want a lot of variability, higher HRV between heartbeats. And would that equal higher amplitude? And that correlates with higher amplitude.

34:40So more contrast between the day and the night. So when you're sleeping, you want lots of parasympathetic saturation. You want lots of amplitude for parasympathetic saturation. And so during the day, you would expect to have, because you're engaged in life and you're moving around, you're going to be more sympathetically driven, right? But that's normal. And that contrast is really what the body craves and needs, right, to be healthy and thriving. That said, modern life is such where, you know, we're not sitting under the tree after we hunt for an hour and a half. You know, we're like basically on to the next thing, right?

35:24So we need to build in moments during the day to basically ensure that we're giving ourselves an opportunity to rest and restore, right? So we can re-engage our task with the same level of kind of focus and quality as we did previously. We don't want to degrade across the day. And one of the ways to do that is to kind of build in these little mini moments of rest throughout the day. But in terms of relationship between amplitude and HRV, I mean, HRV has a circadian rhythm, right? So it's a little confounded, right?

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37:38I would say wake up at the same time every day. If you had short, disrupted sleep, if at all possible, you want to try to build in a nap. And I know that's not possible for everyone. And some people will laugh, you know, but if you can, even 30 minutes before, you know, 12 o 'clock, you know, even just shutting your eyes.

37:58Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Is that important, the time? Yeah. You know, you just don't want to interfere with biological sleep, right? There's nothing more frustrating than not being able to sleep when you want to sleep. So in a lot of setting yourself up for a restorative, beautiful night's sleep actually starts during the day. And I think that's what folks get wrong, I would say, as someone who studies sleep and is inside this world a ton. I would say people think about sleep in the lead up to sleep, but not actually how their day, how their behaving during the day actually impacts sleep. We know that. Even though it says, but I'm a night person.

38:31Yeah.

38:32Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:We can talk about that in a second. But I would say, again, in order to facilitate, in order to mitigate some of the symptoms that occur in perimenopause and menopause. And this isn't the, you know, the holy grail by any means. I understand how complex, you know, this phase of life is for so many women and debilitating for so many women. So I don't want to like, I'm not dismissing that, but I do believe that circadian alignment is a really important path, creating as much contrast, waking up at the similar time every day, getting as much natural light as humanly possible and you got to move all day long or just in the morning as much as possible like i am getting as much light as i possibly can throughout the day contacts no contacts glasses doesn't matter uh sunglasses matter you know you want to be able to take in all of the the entire spectrum that exists in the sky of light is is good for our bodies.

39:33Obviously, if you're out for extended periods of time, you know, protect your skin. And maybe at that point, if you're on the water, you know, wear sunglasses if you're out on the water for a long time.

39:43Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:But we're deconditioned to be outside. For sure. It's like working out. Like no one is really overtraining, right? No, that's why I was listening to you say, okay, we have to build in rest. And I'm thinking that's from the sympathetic response, like the nervous system response, but we probably have to encourage people to push. And as you're talking, I realized that I'm probably not even moving enough, creating enough contrast. Yeah, I know. And most folks aren't, you know, and we wonder, we kind of wonder why, you know, why, why do I get sick? Or why am I going to injure? You know, a lot of it is this lack of contrast.

40:17And we want to make that as stark as we can. And it, and, and that's, I think that's just a great, like, um, just a very simple way of, of thinking about your day. You know, you've got the active phase of your circadian rhythm and the inactive phase of your circadian rhythm. During your active phase, you're eating, you're socializing, you're freaking working out, you're walking, you know, like you're doing little exercise snacks, you know, like you're, um, you're engaged in life. Um, how many hours?

40:45Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:So for example, as you are building out an ideal day, in an ideal day for a woman or a guy to create as much contrast as possible, you're outside as much as you can. Yeah. I will always prioritize working outside if I can. So like, you know, today's a good example. I lifted in the gym, you know, probably spent 45 minutes and then went out on a little terrace and jump roped, you know and and like you know did some abs and weighted abs and and some jump roping and like was out there as much as possible last night i got in went for a walk you know as a setting and you know i i really make every effort i can um you know before i left so if i know i'm traveling and i won't have access to light um i will i will make up for it like um before i traveled like i I went on a long run outside.

41:37I went for a walk. I worked outside in the morning. You know, I brought my laptop out there outside. Even, you know, at Whoop, we have outdoor areas. I work outside as much as possible. I'm really, really conscious of being outdoors. Is there a light debt? I have absolutely no idea how to quantify that. But, I mean, I think the minimum effective dose is something like 90 minutes, you know, in order to really, you know, keep your mental, physical, and emotional well-being online. I think that's what the literature says, somewhere around 90 minutes. But the fact is, zero Americans are probably getting that.

42:15I mean, totally. I was just thinking about Shane, who's operating or working 100 hours,

42:21Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:and he maybe is outside a total of 40 minutes a day when he runs to work and back. I know. If that. I know. It's crazy. And frontline healthcare workers, I mean, whenever, when you are not working those hours, I think in terms of the same way you have to bank some sleep, you got to be outside. You need to be just make up for like you, I think you can make up for it. But that has to be the priority. So you're outside as much as possible. What about this movement? Yeah. I mean, I, you know, I have a, I have a, I have a standing, I have a treadmill at my desk. I have, you know, kettlebells, resistant bands.

42:56Like I'm doing, I write in my book. it's one of the domains of intelligent training is exercise snacks. I put it in there because I really believe in it. I've been experimenting. I'm probably like on a good four years of exercise snacks, but I stopped thinking about my workout as the end all be all. So, you know, that's a really good point. Yeah. I mean, a lot of us were 45 minutes, an hour in the gym and we're, then we're sitting literally all day. And a lot of us are knowledge workers, right? Like, I mean, I'm, I'm writing manuscripts and reviewers comments. Like I'm working with teams and athletes and, you know, I, I'm on zoom a lot.

43:32Um, but, but I stand generally. Um, and I have like a little bouncy ball. Um, and I'll, I'll literally just rip out like, you know, a hundred kettlebell swings over the course of a day, you know, just, just to kind of break up, even if I've worked out in the morning. Um, so I, I just think we're not meant to be sitting, you know, and I, and I think that's really clear and there's lots of folks that talk about that which i love um but it's worth i think uh saying again that we need to make movement uh an all day kind of thing that's what i mean when you think about you know folks who and i don't want to suggest that you know everything that was on the savannah was was was great that that's you know there's a lot of wonderful things that um we are afforded by modern science and technology um but i think one of the real downsides is that every, when we drive everywhere, you know, we just don't have to walk and move like in ways that we, that we used to, I mean, we used to on average walk about 10 miles a day.

44:31You know, I think women were seven men were 10. So that's like a, that's a lot of movement. So I think figuring out how do I build in movement and we know people who move more on our, in our data set, which is absolutely massive. We're talking hundreds and thousands of thousands of people when we look at what are the features, what are the behaviors that people engage in that have the best sleep? I mean, the people who move more sleep better. There's no question. The people who are fitter sleep better and actually sleep less.

45:05Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:How many hours by, if someone is fitter, are they sleepy? Is it about seven hours and 20 minutes is kind of the average for the really fit person. And then if you're unfit, you're sleeping over eight hours, eight and a half. And what's really interesting is a paper just came out looking at duration and all cause mortality. And indeed the long sleepers have far, far worse outcomes than the short sleepers. Why do you think that is? Well, I think inflammation probably, you know, like I think if you are dealing depression, if you're, if you're dealing with mental or physical issues, you're going to spend, your body just feels like it needs to spend more time in bed to try to heal and right itself.

45:47So yeah, I mean, that's another reason why to think about your movement because it's very highly correlated with what's happening at night. The depth of sleep as well.

45:58Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:And the intensity of training because you do train pretty intensely. I've seen you carry logs and you're doing that. I mean, I don't even want to come hang out with you because I don't have to be running down the trails and then I have to jump into this lake. this lake. No, I'll come anytime. And there's like ice frozen, you know, protein is having a major moment right now. It seems like it's being slapped on everything from water bottles to cereal. I don't know what a Kleenex boxes, but with all the hype, it can be tough to figure out if you're getting enough of the right kind of protein, because Hey, it's not just about the quantity of protein you meat.

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47:35Lion and subscribe to save 10 % on every order. To create as much contrast, what I'm hearing in my mind is that you have to work really hard.

47:45Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:It's not just the overall movement, but there's probably a level of intensity, which is different than say, if we look at the data, right? So training in geriatrics, the data would suggest that it doesn't matter if someone is lifting heavy weights or higher volume, just as long as they're getting the stimulus. But I didn't take into account any of the contrast data or any of the amplitude data. I am thinking about it in a very unidimensional way. Is this improving strength and or hypertrophy? But maybe the better question is, is it improving strength and hypertrophy? And what is it doing to amplitude and contrast?

48:26Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that's a really good framework. You know, that isn't probably taken into consideration as much, you know. I think as it relates to training, there is a sweet spot. And like I said, I think we both agree that most Americans need to move more, right? So that's just the bottom line. But there is a subset of folks who are overtraining for sure. And you see that manifest very clearly in heart rate variability. And what's interesting is, you know, I have access to literally the most elite athletes in the world who are programming, you know, down to the millisecond, right, across their day.

49:11They have to. But what they don't do is overtrain. Like they have this, because they can't. But I think the weekend warrior or like the recreational athlete, I think the default is like more is better, right? And that's where I think the data become really powerful, especially around HRV, you will see in your HRV if you are overtraining, if you're not getting this balance. And so I think as it relates to intensity, intensity matters, but it's not intensity every day necessarily. You know, we want to have, it's a few days a week, right? And then, and I include this in the book because this is also very clear in the data, zone one and zone two are really powerful drivers of recovery.

49:57And I don't even label them as exercise because they are literally, they, they activate the, the parasitic branch of the nervous system. They improve vagal tone immensely. So I think that when we think about our week and how we, how we program our movement, it's this combination of, you know, the long, slow walk or the long jog, or, you know, again, ideally outside in nature, and then you're sprinkling in some really high intensity work, right, that might mimic, you know, when you're chasing after and running from a lion or chasing after the deer, whatever it might be. You know, it's just like thinking about like, what were those movements that we used to do, right, that, that are protective, right, and trying to kind of program for that is the way I think about it.

50:46Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:And the other thing that potentially maybe we've gotten wrong, not you, but I think in the literature, this idea of, you know, I've been very critical of cycle syncing. And I don't know if I, it's critical is the right word, but I think that it's almost before it's time with our level of understanding. When it comes to, do you need to train a certain way because you're in the follicular phase versus another phase. Where does all of that fit in? Yeah, I mean, I have access to a lot of these data. So I come at it from like an actual point of view from the data. And there are definitely for women who are naturally cycling, there are differences between menses, follicular phase and luteal phase in that there is more, you know, there are declines, you know, in resting physiology during the luteal phase, right?

51:50There's, you know, folks get less sleep in the lead up to menses on average. But I think in terms of, and I like this pushback that, you know, it doesn't mean that you can't PR during your luteal phase. It doesn't mean that you can't have your best performance, right, during that timeframe.

52:10Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:But, but I do think there are differences, you know, and, and I think that, and it's more of just like, when you know that, then you can prepare for it, right? You can be a little bit more strategic. And, and, but I would say that you go on how you feel, you know, the other thing that we see in the data is women are highly, highly variable, you know, in terms of length of, of cycle. And, you know, there's, there's, there's a lot of variability. One of things that is very protective is a lower CV. So lower heart rate variability coefficient of variation. So there's, what's that? So it's just basically the day-to-day variation in HRV.

52:51So when you have lots of changes day-to-day in HRV, that actually isn't good. So you want a lower CV, which I know is opposite to when we're looking at HRV and an average HRV, like you want it kind of high. But when you're looking at the CV, you want to actually limit day-to-day variability. And this is consistent with across all the variables. So respiratory rate, resting heart rate, like we want low CV across all these. And if you look at the very top... Which makes sense. Which totally makes sense, right? You look at the top cyclists in the world who we work with on the Tour de France, they have very low CV.

53:27I mean, they're like 6%. So if you look at a frontline healthcare clinician, they're 30%. Meaning their heart rate variable from day to day.

53:35Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Their CV, their day to day. It's so expressed as a percentage essentially. And I would say the average person on our platform is probably in the 20s, right? And that's just not being aware that this is a thing, right? Totally. So we don't have a lot of stability in our physiology because one night we're up until 2 a.m. trying to finish a paper or, you know, the next night we're going out with their buddies, like, you know, drinking alcohol and like, you know, having late meals and getting short sleep. And, you know, the next night we sleep for 13 hours. Like this creates enormous amount of instability in our physiology.

54:10And the fact is women are way more susceptible to that than men because we are, it's just the way it is, regardless of whether or not I want to have a baby, my body is set up for that to be, to create safety. And a lot of this variable behavior creates variability in the physiology, which is not protective.

54:32Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:I actually really like what you said because you see probably both sides of the arguments all the time, right? So you've got one loop. And it's interesting because what I would say that we measure from a muscle health perspective potentially doesn't or isn't that sensitive to these changes in the follicular phase or the ovulatory phase or perimenopause or the estrogen, progesterone. The kind of single time points. We're talking massive longitudinal data sets. This is... I like being wrong. You know, I like learning. And I can tell you that, say, from a strength perspective or a training perspective, and again, you see this all the time.

55:20Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:You've got one group that says it doesn't matter if you're male or female or where you are in your cycle, good training is good training. And I think that we could agree on that. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. But I'm also, as someone, you, as someone who studies and sees these time points over large data sets, which I don't really think anyone has access to, it just doesn't exist in the way that you have access to it. I'm also hearing you say that there's something else going on, that maybe the outcomes that we're looking at from a training perspective are not sensitive enough. Yeah, to pick up on some of these nuances.

56:00Whatever the changes.

56:01Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:You know, for example, we have a mutual friend who I think is actually very ahead of her time and she gets criticized a lot. And I don't know if it's warranted criticism, it potentially, again, from a performance standpoint, maybe the science just hasn't caught up with the things that you are talking about now. Because it seems like there's the performance aspect and then there's the medicine aspect. And the performance aspect seems exponentially more advanced than how this relates in a outcome for a healthcare provider. For sure. And obviously I can't speak to the clinical side, but I can speak to the performance side.

56:45And there are sensitivities, right? And the more variable physiology, the more unpredictable your menstrual cycle is going to be, right? So there's an impact, you know? And so that does maybe change if you have performance goals, that might change how you train slightly, right? Which I know, you know, is opposite of the narrative. right now.

57:10Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:But no one is talking about what you're talking about. And it's a huge, there's a whole other sector of data that it's essentially the autonomic nervous system data set that is not necessarily being incorporated. And I think that's smart. I think that we're missing some of this. I think so. Yeah. And you know, it's, I think what is maybe hard for folks to hear because it's hard to adopt is consistency in certain behaviors, sleep-wake time, meal timing. And there's a whole kind of subset of folks who believe that meal timing doesn't matter as much. And I think calorie for calorie, it might not, but I think there is enough data, I think, to support that we are more metabolically primed earlier in the day, you know, we should be generally speaking, be, I mean, you're a nutrition scientist, so I would be curious your thoughts, but I think we should be generally eating the bulk of our calories, you know, between 7am and 7pm, generally speaking.

58:22Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Yeah, I think that that's good advice. If you are, have performance goals, if you are not getting the macronutrients you need distributed across the day, and you are hungry at 10 o 'clock at night, yeah, have yogurt. Mike Gormsby's lab has shown that that's fine. Awesome. But generally speaking, I think if we can give ourselves at least 12 hours where we're not eating, that has massive health benefits. And again, I'm talking about a massive data set that again, not many people have access to. And there is no question that late night eating bubbles up almost on par with alcohol, almost on par as sleep-wake consistency, almost on par with fever in terms of having a deleterious effect on resting physiology.

59:08So again, content, quality very much matters, but I think timing matters too. And do you think it's fair to say that you guys are ahead of the curve?

59:23Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:I mean, I think a lot of this is ahead of the curve. And just like with science, when the two meet, right, you've got groups of scientists, but this is, again, cycle syncing is not even the right word for it. But timing or training, what I'm hearing you say is that, yes, if you care, I am not someone, you know, it's interesting. I think that we're very desensitized to how we feel. And if someone I think that there are two groups of people there, the groups of individuals that are robust and maybe they were born that way or whatever it is. And they can ride out. And have less perturbations hormonally.

1:00:07Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Right. And they're fine. And then there's another group that might feel like they need to pull back when actually what they really need is to push forward because the mind doesn't allow them to go there, whether it is whatever holds them back. but it doesn't allow them to make the decision that's right for their physiology. It might be right for their mind. Yeah. And that's okay too. You know, like, so it's kind of a complicated situation. And sometimes I feel like, you know, data has like a complicated even more maybe for some folks. But I think if you zoom out and think about it, just basic principles, go with how you feel.

1:00:47Like that's the most important thing. But I think a lot of elite athletes in particular get pretty disconnected actually from their body. Like we can push through almost anything. And yeah, it's the athlete's trap. That's what killed Kyle Busch.

1:01:02Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:I mean, Shane was in the hospital with pneumonia because he also did the same thing. I know. It is so dangerous. Yeah. And I think our heart goes out to the, I mean, the families and the fans. I know. You know, and people that are very fit are able to ignore and push through. Yeah. Yeah. And that's part of what I talk about in the book is just this really, like we have to come back to our body and have to come back to our body signals. And I'm saying this as a person who is, you know, is very much a science. Thinks about data. Yeah. I mean, I appreciate data and I appreciate the role data has in my life.

1:01:45I would never be from a health perspective where I am today without data. It has transformed the awareness that I have about my body and about how my behaviors impact my resting physiology just at a very basic level. I would never have been able to unpack that myself. What is the worst offender? It accelerates my wisdom. I mean, sleep-wake consistency. I hate hearing that. I know. Everyone does. When you look at our platform, the average sleep wake consistency of everyone on the platform is 67%. It's so bad. You know? And our frontline healthcare workers, they're like 55%. This is why I hate it, because there are people that don't get to choose.

1:02:23Totally. And that's why a lot of the research that I am doing with frontline healthcare finishes is to figure out how do we mitigate the deleterious effects of inconsistent sleep wake time? What are other levers that can maybe... protect us and offset, you know, and certainly exercise is one. I mean, we know when we age match, um, physicians, operators, you know, the, how they train really does matter, but they're, you know, for frontline, they're about 17 years older than their age match. Military operators on average are 12. So we look at resting physiology, those two cohorts, you know, where they sit from just pure resting physiology is decade, decade and a half, you know, relative to age match.

1:03:14Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Because what I am hearing you say, what I am trying to put together in my mind is that the autonomic nervous system stability is its own beast. It really, it is. And we are completely ignoring that. So like think about the research that is done in, you know, I think about when I was at Wash U in the metabolic lab, but we never took into consideration. I mean, we did morning clamps, euglycemic clamps in the morning. But we weren't thinking, okay, so they haven't been outside. I know. Like all of this stuff which probably affects the data over time. I can't help but think about it. I mean, to think that that is not a core driver of everything else is just – There's just too much to eat at this point.

1:04:04Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:So we have sleep, wake... Sleep, wake consistency is just massive. I mean, I would argue that time-restricted eating... I know like people also like... I don't want anyone coming hard at me on time-restricted eating, but hopefully there's enough evidence to... There's enough evidence for that. Also, even from a medical standpoint, it allows for bowel rest. Time-restricted feeding is just... It allows for a restriction, which is extremely valuable. And I also think there's a psychological component too. A lot of folks are making so many decisions across the day. You have such decision fatigue when it's 9 o 'clock at night and are you going to have the yogurt or are you going to have the pint of ice cream, right?

1:04:43So I do think there's a psychological component that also gets ignored. And again, I think it's different if you're an elite athlete versus like a layperson who works out twice a week. It's just a different calculus. And I think time restricted eating for those folks becomes really, really important because it just creates a boundary. If you're just like, all right, I'm 12 on, 12 off, you're going to get 60 % of the weight of your metabolic goals, I think. We have found it very effective in clinic for exactly that reason. It creates structure and less chaos. And we know you get a huge boost in parasympathetic activity during sleep when you're not having to digest.

1:05:27right? They're kind of opposing, like you can't digest. When you are sleeping and digesting a big meal, basically your REM slow wave sleep are impaired, right? Until you finish digesting and then you kind of pop back into those more deeper restorative stages of sleep. So we know that they're in competition and that's another just reason to just keep your feeding window. So what about exercise timing?

1:05:55Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Does that matter? Yeah. So our team at Whoop published a paper in Nature Comms recently that looked specifically at exercise timing. And high intensity close to bed does impair markers of sleep at clinically meaningful levels. So getting into deeper. So quality as well as duration. and low level activity does not seem to have any impact at all. So if you're a zone one, zone two kind of workout or maybe a lighter lift or whatever, that doesn't seem to have much of an impact. It's really just the high intensity stuff within four hours of bed will impact your sleep from what we see in the data. Postpartum pregnancy?

1:06:42Yeah, be gentle. You know, it takes time to rebound to your baseline physiology. There's no question about it. But, you know, we did a study that we published with West Virginia University that was really interesting. It was one of the very first studies on exercise and pregnancy. It took us really a long time to get through IRB. But all 19 women who participated in, you know, different levels of activity, they all kind of had different starting points. But, you know, all 19 had healthy pregnancies. All of them worked out, you know, at moderate to vigorous levels throughout their pregnancies. So that was really cool to see.

1:07:24And I think what was cool with those 19 is that now that we... I haven't published these data yet, but when we look at those women in that cohort up against women, albeit that was a very small sample size, but we look at against women who are on our platform, not working out, having pregnancies, their rebound is not as good as the women who are working out. But I thought that was really interesting. And I think that is consistent with, I think, what we're learning about exercise and pregnancy that is very protective, obviously under supervision, but it will help postpartum recovery a ton. How long did it take you to write this book?

1:08:05I mean, it's kind of a lifetime of work, but three years.

1:08:10Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:there are a ton of takeaways. Was there something that surprised you? I don't know why I was so naive, but writing a book is really, really hard. But in terms of like the content, I would say I, you know, it was like, I found myself like quite emotional at different points writing a book. I love that. Was it because it was cathartic? I think so. Yeah. That totally surprised me. I had no idea that I needed to write this book, you know, that I needed to put language, you know, to a lot of the experiences, you know, that I've had across my life, you know, and I think the thing that really surprised me is how much, how I've lived my life, the things that I've chosen and which sounds obvious, but when I think about my evolution as a scientist, so much of my early days, you know, was spent looking at the rhythms of life, you know, and, and, you know, being in nature, it's so wild.

1:09:15Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:What you're talking about is this full circle moment that might, you might think might be obvious, but it's almost as if you were always meant to do exactly what you were doing, right? I mean, it's not dissimilar and it's like this full circle. Yeah, there's definitely forces that are well beyond our understanding control operating. And I think that's part of, I think, the bigger project is I think when we have a healthy autonomic nervous system, the bused autonormic nervous system, we are in a position to receive from life and from other people in ways that we can't otherwise. You know, it opens up your heart, I think, in a really important and special way.

1:10:09And I think that's the real, you know, if you were to kind of zoom all the way out, I mean, that's, I think, one of the bigger motivators of getting your autonormic nervous system, you know, firing and online. And do you think the behavior precedes the thought? It does. Just do the thing, do the behavior and you'll start to feel, you'll attract a new energy into your life. Like I really believe that. When you're healthy from the inside in that way. Whole. When you're whole. Yeah. You know, you just, you bring the right things into your life. and I just have a lot of faith in that. But I think it starts with doing.

1:10:56You have to take action. And I know that in all of your books, this is really what you, in everything that you put out online to your community, you're always, I think, challenging folks to do. Just do the thing. You're not going to be ready.

1:11:13Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:No amount of thinking about it or pontificating. And that's why the book starts with the physiology because I think that you can't talk yourself into a better future. Like you just have to start to, if you understand the influences, the physiological influences that impact your nervous system, then like that's like the place to start. It's just to start doing those things, you know, the exercise and the right kind of training and, you know, some of these hormetic practices that can make you feel alive and create that parasympathetic and sympathetic kind of push and pull, you know, that so many of us need.

1:11:51Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:I mean, I just loved that conceptually. I think it's really missing in a lot of the conversations. Right now, everything is very fragmented and you, you know, people talk about contrast therapy and then over here, they'll talk about training, but this creates a unified front. essentially aligned. Thank you. Dr. Kristen Holmes, you are just a dear friend and a sister, and I am so excited to share this book with the world. I am so grateful for the conversation today.