Evening Exercise, Poor Sleep, and Resting Heart Rate | Don’t Die Podcast #3

Does working out at night hurt your sleep? Is that really true? Is there truly no other time for you to work out? And this is interesting because I've been talking about resting heart rate as the single most important biomarker in my entire life as all the efforts we've done basically collapse into this marker. So to me, this was really cool to see that things that increase your resting heart rate before bed negatively Impact your sleep. And exercise maybe counterintuitively is one of those things. Today we're going to talk about two things which I'm really really

excited about because they're both incredibly practical and they're also zero cost. Um so a lot of people if they're doing like sauners and cold plunge great also if they're not doing these basic things they could be missing out and also starting their health off on a bad Start. So I really really am excited to talk about these two things. One is the Whoops sleep study that got published and then the second thing is resting heart rate. So we're going to dive into both those topics today. Y'all, I am super excited about this study. Like, this

is um this is just really exciting for me because this is like really great data that I think uh the medical community and longevity community has been waiting on since we, you know, Started using these uh these wearable devices. And to actually see this getting published is just super cool because it's just going to it's in my mind going to change the way we think about research in a lot of ways. I'm wondering why did it take this long to get a study? We've had this data. I mean, wearables have been really part of the

health community for over a decade now. And you can argue that the quality was maybe on some kind of improvement Trend, but why did it take that long to get a study out on this basic thing? They had four million nights of biometric data. So, that took a little while to gather, I guess. But, um, you know, I think like there's not money behind this, you know, like when you look at like what NIH funds, they don't fund sleep studies, right? like you know like lifestyle studies are not backed by you know pharma or any

other financial institutions. So you've got to have um Companies or people that are like you know um uh inherently motivated to produce this type of research. So it's just it's hard to hard to get your hands on, hard to get hard to get backed. When I read these kinds of studies I'm always reminded of the the basic premise that we are not taught the the basic elements of health in society. So we in school we learn saxed great we take driver's lessons to before we get our license but we do not learn the basics of

sleep we Don't understand like is it better to exercise in the morning or the night and so these really fundamental basic questions of life are just unanswered and you can live an entire lifetime and never actually be taught how to sleep and and before I really went into this deeply even in reading all the books I read there was never actually a practical guide on how to structure your life around sleep. So, I think this study actually bridges nicely to these These two topics pair nicely. The study on on exercise and sleep and also resting

heart rate. So, this will be an episode everyone that you can send to your friends and family and to those you want to introduce to health and wellness. Like Kate was saying, these are very practical tips that everybody can do and you don't have to spend any money. So, the study that we're referencing, it's by Whoop. This is the wearable from Whoop. So essentially you Wear it on your wrist, some people wear it on their bicep, but they analyzed 4.3 million nights of sleep, which is an insane amount of data across 15,000 Whoop members. And

they were asking the question, does working out at night hurt your sleep? And so what they found was that I'm going to read this list here. strenuous strenuous evening workouts can delay sleep onset, shorten sleep duration and reduce reduced sleep quality. Elevated nocturnal heart rate And and decrease heart rate variability were observed after high strain evening stress or evening exercise and workouts concluding at least 4 hours before bedtime showed no negative impact on sleep. So essentially the TLDDR is that if you work out too close to bed, especially high strain, it will negatively impact your

sleep, which is such practical and useful information. What do you guys think? 100%. Like the um the interesting thing For me about the study is one the size. So you know, 14,000 participants, I think anyone can realize that's huge. Four million uh biometric data points or nights of biometric data is is also huge. So huge study um when you compare to the prior research we had in this area is really small studies and a lot of subjective data. So a lot of like survey yes I slept well no I didn't sleep well yes I exercise

no I didn't exercise now we're actually getting like Exercise metrics so we understand not only how intensely someone is exercising but how long they're exercising and then when they're exercising in reference to when they normally fall asleep which is another really interesting aspect of the study that I didn't realize at first but they're not just looking at when you exercise in reference to when you fell asleep that day they're looking at when you exercise versus when you normally fall asleep sleep, what's your habitual Sleep pattern look like? So, if you stayed up later, but you

ended up exercising past your normal bedtime, that was noted in the study. And this kind of information is things that we just haven't had access to before. So, it's really changing the um the the breadth and depth of data that we've had on sleep and exercise previously. Yeah. And some other data points from the study is the highest intensity exercise two hours before bedtime increased Resting heart rate by 3.9 beats per minute, which is 6.8%. and HRV down was 32.6%. They showed a a lessened recovery with any t with exercise between uh two and six

hours before bedtime. So even they they highlight the 4-hour marker, but really it's it's two to six hour window where you're lessening recovery, you increase resting heart rate, you lower HRV. And this is interesting because I have been Mike you can attest to this. I have been talking and Kate, You can too. I have been talking about resting heart rate as the single most important biomarker of my entire life. um as all the efforts we've done basically collapse into this marker. So to me this was really cool to see that uh it really things that

increase your resting heart rate before bed negatively impact your sleep and exercise maybe counterintuitively is one of those things. So even if you do exercise and you feel great you're like I don't think It affects me and it you know calms me down from from stress it really has widespread effects within the body. So to me I thought this was a a really great we never had data actually large scale data that showed I mean actually there's a few studies but this is a a good one to show the correlation of resting heart rate and

sleep quality and recovery and they found that it was dose dependent too. So the higher the intensity of the exercise the longer Duration. So they use this um metric called strain which is basically intensity and duration combined and they call that strain. So maximal strain had a bigger impact on your sleep the closer it was to your bedtime as compared to like light strain for example. So they they actually found that the the higher the intensity, the longer the duration um actually led to worse outcomes the more we increase those those two factors. So it

really is dose dependent With the best outcome happening if you basically exercise if you're going to have highintensity exercise doing it you know six plus hours before bedtime. That's when there's, you know, virtually no change whatsoever. Although, one thing that was interesting is even um in the maximal uh strain group, there was a change in resting heart rate even if you did it that morning. So, there was actually a slight increase in resting heart rate, but in terms of overall Sleep metrics, um very much dose response uh mediated. Yeah. And this was actually, if I'm

remembering correctly, worse for folks that weren't already exercising a lot. And so if you're like getting into a new routine, it's a new year and you're exercising a lot before bed, you're actually affected worse when it comes to um your sleep quality. Is that right? Yeah, they found it affected everybody though, even like pro athletes. So they they did find that it Didn't matter gender um you know your experience with exercise in terms of whether there was an effect. Granted, there may have been more effect if uh if you are less trained and that's probably

has to do with the sympathetic activation. And so the cortisol response, if you don't exercise very regularly, you're more likely to have a higher like, you know, cortisol stress response to that exercise. So, it's going to take your system longer to Relax afterwards so that you can get back into that parasympathetic state and actually get to sleep. That makes kind of sense. And I was someone who was for a long time taking long walks before going to sleep. Do we know if you were doing a chill workout, would that still negatively affect your sleep? So

chill workouts if they're done more than two hours before bed did not affect sleep in any significant way. So um yeah like yoga, slow walk, things like that. And The actual effect if it was done within two hours before bed was pretty minimal compared to like strenuous activity. Got it. Okay. So then what would be the protocol that someone should follow? takes over for me. But reading the study, what what I would suggest and I think like my takeaway, what I'm going to start telling friends, patients, myself, is that um strenuous exercise should happen at

least four hours before bed, probably Closer to six hours before bed. Um so if you are going to exercise within that 4 hour window before bed, it really should be light activity. It should be yoga. It should be walking. But you shouldn't go for a half marathon. You shouldn't play a hockey game. You know, you shouldn't do anything super super strenuous and then try to go to sleep immediately because it's just going to wreck your sleep. Yeah. This goes back to what Brian was saying about like the habits In society. reading this reminded me of

my cousin who's a professional soccer player and he's constantly playing at like crazy hours of the day and that's just part of his profession and he's always talking about how he can't go to sleep and so it feels really practical and also it's a it's one of those situations where I'm sure plenty people at home are listening to this and like man I can't fit a workout in in the morning how do I do this and I think um That's something I had to adjust with my protocol too is like actually I need to go

to sleep earlier even even though that's not my typical um mo in life so that I can do something in the morning workout cuz I also saw in my personal anecdotal data that my um general health overall was worse when I exercised in the afternoons. So I love how practical this is. Brian, have you noticed I I know you track your resting heart rate every single night. Have you noticed That days that you do uh higher intensity exercise, it's higher or does it typically go back down for you? Yes. Now, my life experience and conclusions

basically mirrored this paper. I've I've been telling others to follow these protocols for years. And so, to me, it's really a great point of validation that a lot of people when they when they talk about health protocols, they immediately jump to, oh well, I must be different and Things need to be personalized to me. And I think the actual correct thinking is the inverse where we have more in common than we do indifferent. And I don't know the certain areas maybe like maybe 70% in common or 80% in common or 90% in common or even

99% in common. But we do share so much in common with our shared biology that we're really trying to find the exception more than the rule. And the rule here is late night exercise and high intensity. It did Negatively affect my sleep. I saw in the data it was very clear. Increase my HRV I'm sorry increase my resting heart rate. Lower my HRV. Lower my recovery. I just wouldn't feel as good. And so that was very obvious to me like early on in the game of doing this. And so you can also take these same

principles and map them to every other part of life. The same rules apply. So I would just encourage people that when on topics of health and wellness, try to find the Rule, the power law that applies to you and all of us and then you can peel off the exceptions. But I think it's a mistaken thought process to find the exception above the rule because usually we again we have more in common. Okay. Okay, I'm going to ask a tough question. You might not have an answer, but what would you say is worse? Not exercising

or if you can't fit it in or exercising before bed? Like what if someone's making a trade-off, what would you Prefer they do? You're going to ask this question. I was hoping you forget. Yeah, I'm interested to hear what your thoughts are on this, Brian. I guess my first like where I go to first is um is that really true? like, can we challenge the the um the notion that you can't exercise any time other than right before bed? I mean, I'll answer the question anyway, but my first thought is like, can we Really challenge

that that thought process? Is there truly no other time for you to work out? Um, and I'm sure there's people out there, there's edge cases where that's your only option. In that case, I would say that this data would suggest it's better to do a lighter type of exercise. But if that's true every single day of your life, that would mean all you would ever get to do is light exercise because you would be worried about messing up your sleep. And If that's truly the case, this has got to be less than like one in

a thousand. But if that's truly the case, then I would say there were some days that you need to just exercise harder and it's going to hurt your sleep some because like we know the the that exercise is such a huge has such a huge impact in longevity where you know higher V2 is having 300 400% decreased risk of mortality. Um, there's obviously a huge benefit to exercise. So, if there's Truly a situation where you can only exercise maximally in the evening right before bed, then I would say some days you need to sacrifice sleep

for that exercise. Love it. Super practical. Yeah, I would I would say um a an additional opinion, a contemplation for that is that I think sleep deserves being the number one spot in everyone's life above family, above work, above everything. It is the fuel source of existence. And the Challenges and I saw this in my life is there were times where for example I would overeat at night and I would be so upset with myself that I would then exercise and be like I've now have to work this off like I just can't go to

bed because I'm really upset. Which of course is a double whammy because now you're full. Your body is your heart rate's high. It's trying to digest the food and you've exercised in a strenuous fashion. And then when that happens, you Try to go to sleep, you can't. You're hot. Your heart rate's pounding. Then you wake up the next morning, you feel absolutely awful. You do not feel like exercising. And then you have lower willpower. And so now you're more likely to eat bad foods again and get in the same cycle. And I was only able

to break my bad cycles because I would I would prioritize sleep above all, which when you do that, it increases your willpower. It improves your uh Likelihood of you going to exercise. It improves your eagerness to eat well. And so I I hear you, Mike. And there's certainly edge cases here where a person has a life circumstance where their responsibilities begin at 4:00 or 5 in the morning. They don't finish until 2:03 in the afternoon. Then they've got, you know, children responsibilities. So certainly there are people listening who cannot do this for structural reasons. I

agree. But I just know that in my life When I haven't been able to sleep well, everything else in my life falls apart. I am more sensitive to stress, to negativity, to mood swings. It just throws me off entirely. So, I'm guessing most people feel the same. But I hear you. It's a tricky trade-off because exercise does also counteract that in some ways. Like if you're have a bad night's sleep, you can exercise and actually do yourself some good to get back on your two feet. I know like when I've had a bad night's sleep,

traveling internationally, a really hard workout like reset me in a fresh way. So, yeah, it's not to say this is the only way. It's only to to try to to point out that you can never overestimate the gains of high quality sleep. I definitely found that to be true for me, too. That like my day tomorrow is a direct correlation to how well I set myself up by going to sleep. All right, you guys ready to move on to The second topic? Yes. Okay. So, Brian, you've been investing years and years of your life, millions

of dollars to try and figure out this longevity protocol, and you've distilled it into one thing. So, you say here, I've become the most measured person in history, and of all the things I measure, there is one marker that I value above all of them, which is high praise. So, this thing is resting heart rate before bed. What is that? Yeah. And Mike, I don't think We've ever actually walked through this together. These are all my distillations. So I'd love to hear your take on this. Yeah, I can't wait. Okay, so the the hypothesis is

this that yeah, sleep is the number one most effective performance-enhancing drug available to every humans, every human. And there therefore warrants getting high quality sleep as your number one objective. And the most influential variable determining whether or not You're going to have high quality sleep is your resting heart rate before bed. And the reason why it's a lynch pin to predict that is because if you eat a heavy meal before bed, your resting heart rate is going to increase and your sleep quality will decrease. If you drink alcohol before bed, your resting heart rate will

increase and your sleep quality will decrease. If you are in a high stress state or you know in arousal, you got in A fight or you're worried about something that too will increase your heart rate. And so if you start listing out all the things in life that increase your resting heart rate, it's most of the devices we have in society, right? It's stress, conflict, overeating, alcohol, stimulants, doom scrolling, you know, screens. It's all these things that we know are not good for us. They have a direct relationship with increasing the resting heart rate, Lowering

sleep quality, which then starts this vicious cycle when now I have less willpower. I'm less likely to work out. And then it also has a bunch of these other positive effects where if I have a low resting heart rate, I go to sleep, I'm going to have high quality sleep, which means I'm more likely to exercise. If I exercise, I'm more likely to eat well. If I eat well, you know, I have much more willpower because I slept well and ate well. And now I'm not going To eat the bad food or take the stimulant

or make this kind of debaucherous behavior. And so I can go through more detail, but basically it captures an entire person's life. It's a single number of record that is an accounting for all of their behaviors. I like it. I mean it it is a you're right. Um resting heart rate is a good metric for autonomic system um performance. So what is your sympathetic versus parasympathetic? What's your fight Orflight versus your rest and rest and digest? Right? Like that's the it it encapsulates your body's current physiology around that particular state. Whether you've been, you know,

drinking caffeine or smoking nicotine or taking THC or on a stimulant or exercise recently or digesting, all those things are going to show up in your resting heart rate. So, it is a very simple and easy metric of that. I I wonder if I have you looked at heart rate Variability at all as a as an additional metric on top of resting heart rate in terms of like evening heart rate variability and sleep performance. The same relationship. every time my heart rate. So my heart rate is directly correlated with my HRV. When it's down, when

my heart rate is low, HRV is up. When HIV heartbeat is up, HRV is down. And just for everybody who's listening, HRV heart rate variability, you actually want more variability. More variability Means more parasympathetic nervous system activation. And less variability means uh more sympathetic uh nervous system activation. So more stress, the lower your heart rate variability is. Just get everybody on board with that. And resting heart rate to clarify. So when you're going to sleep, this is the average number while you're at rest, while you're sleeping. Is that right? So overnight, what your heart rate

is while you're laying down, asleep, not doing Any kind of activity. Yeah. Generally, resting heart rate is when we talk about it in medicine, we're usually talking about the lowest heart rate that you have at rest, which generally happens middle of the night, like 3:00 a.m., something like that. Brian's talking about a resting heart rate measured at a particular time point before bed. Right, Brian? That's correct. So, they might be slightly different, but they're not super different. I mean, like few beats. Brian, do you find that the your heart rate before bed is the same

as because um Whoop will give you a resting heart rate, which is while you're sleeping, if I'm not mistaken. So, do you find those two numbers are the same? Like when you're going to sleep, it's it's the same. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, what I have a ritual before I go to bed, right before I go to get bed. I hit my put my head on the pillow. I'll pull up the app and I'll see where my resting heart rate Is at. And I'll do a breathing exercise for about 60 seconds. And that will settle me

down. And typically I'll be somewhere between 44 beats per minute and 55. So 44 beats per minute means I had a perfect day. Uh and I can walk through these things. That's with related to the food consumption like the amount of food and the type of food, my stress levels, my preparedness for sleep, my windown routine. And so when 44 beats per minute is on screen, I'm Going to have a guaranteed perfect night sleep. Now I should clarify on screen the light is so all blues are out and it's a low the lowest possible light

to be on the phone. So it's the least light exposure possible with no blues and everything is down. You almost can't see it. It's so dim and that's a perfect night. But if I do that exercise and I'm at 55 to 57, it's going to be a rough night. And so there's a few things that can cause that. Like maybe I've traveled Somewhere internationally, maybe our my food schedule got messed up because I couldn't eat in the morning because of something and I had to eat later in the day or there's certain things that can

get or I exercise in the evening like I did a dance party or something. And so it's now I know this so well having done this a few hundred times that I can predict with uh unbelievable accuracy REM and deep and HRV just based upon that alone. Okay. Did you notice how Quickly he like clarified the the screen light and everything like he's like just seeing the comments coming right now. I'm just clarify this. Yeah. Which is true. when you switch it over to Reddit, it's um if you guys don't know this at home, it's

such a cool feature. You can set up your phone so that you can triple tap and switch it and it really cuts out all light, which is great. So, that's what Brian's referring to. Yeah, that's that's so Crazy that this is so this is something that I experienced early on doing blueprints. like Brian would say all these things and I was always very skeptical like is that is that really is he just you know experiencing something as as a oneoff and is it going to apply to me but I found the same thing that across

doing this if my heart rate is higher than usual I know it's going to impact my sleep quality I know my HIV is going to have like a 20% drop the next Day so it's it's definitely true like you you build up these intuitions with your numbers and resting heart rate is one of the most important things to predict that and so and if I'm not mistaken So there's the bad things that you can do before bed. So like exercising, eating late, that kind of stuff, arousing yourself with a a fight. Um but also you

can drive resting heart rate down with better fitness. Is that right? Yeah, 100%. So like one of the benefits of resting heart rate as a as a marker, a longevity health marker is beyond sleep quality. It's actually like it's actually something that I think we should probably look at more in the medical community as a measure of overall health because it is directly affected by overall stress. So how much stress you live in your life, the more stressed you are, the higher your cortisol response, the higher Sympathetic activation, the higher your resting heart rate is

going to be by a few beats um by physical fitness. So the more fit you are, the lower your resting heart rate's going to be. And there's actually been good studies that show that, you know, even a like a 10 beat per minute jump above 60 is equivalent to about a 10% increased risk for cardiovascular disease. Um, and the higher you go, the higher that increase. So if your resting heart rate is 90, That might be equivalent to about a 30% increased risk of cardiovascular disease or all cause mortality. Um, as opposed to someone whose

resting heart rate is less than 60. So, it's a great surrogate for stress, physical fitness, um overall health, which we we don't really use it enough. That's why I love it so much is that it it's not only does it keep in check bad habits that could otherwise overrun your life, but also once you sleep well, the probability you're going To exercise the following morning after a great night's sleep is very high. And that of course has the double benefit, right? you feel good about yourself but also it's improving your cardio cardiovascular fitness and it's

going to lower your resting heart rate. So it's this continuous cycle where great sleep leads to great exercise which then lowers the resting heart rate again which then contributes to you know continuously good sleep. So really it Captures cardiovascular fitness, bad habits, high quality sleep. So you basically, this is why if you can keep your resting heart rate before bed in check, it is the number one highest performing performance-enhancing drug in the world because it's at the epicenter of all things you do in life. Yeah. Both short-term and long-term. Yes. Like what are you eating?

What's your lifestyle? What's your fitness level? What are your habits? What are your vices? It's all Ultimately impacted by resting heart rate. Yeah. Show me your resting heart rate and reveal your your soul. Is it fair to say resting heart rate is the most important uh biioarker you can track on yourself? Mike, that's what I would put forward is that it it is that if you I mean this would be an interesting assessment to do. If you know somebody's resting heart rate, what is the what is the relationship to inflammation, to Body fat, to stress

levels, you know, cortisol? Like if we just looked at that across the board, it may be one of, if not the most predictive markers of everything else. It'd be interesting to try and figure out a way to test that. Okay, let's just like think through a few of these. It's highly doubtful that you're going to have a low resting heart rate and be obese. Correct. Yeah. There's actually good studies that show that there's an increase in resting Heart rate. So you see we do see an increase in resting heart rate based on a certain amount

of BMI increase. So I think it's every five BMI increases. Resting heart rate goes up by five or something like that. It's it there's a a direct linear relationship. So let's just run through a few more. It's it's highly unlikely for you to have a low resting heart rate and be under high stress 100%. So let's say how does resting heart rate relate to Inflammation? Do do we think someone could have a low resting heart rate and high inflammation or do you think that one is wouldn't be directly correlated? I think there's probably a correlation

there. I'm not sure if it's as close as stress, but I would suspect there's also a correlation there. Yeah. And then you got physical fitness which is clearly correlated. Yeah. Total amount of sleep is actually correlated. So the less sleep you get, the higher your resting Heart rate. They're actually like they um so they're they're cross-correlated, right? Like if your resting heart rate's too high, you're not going to get good sleep. And if you're not getting enough sleep, then your resting heart rate is going to be high. And you could probably also say resting heart

rate is highly predictive of V2 max, one of the best best predictors of all cause mortality. 100%. Yeah. I mean, like you see like pro, you know, proathletes regularly Have heart rates, resting heart rates in the in the 40s, sometimes even high 30s. Yeah. Which is crazy low. Yeah. Although many of these uh ultramarathon runners, they they have very low resting heart rates, but they've got they're pre- pre-diabetic. So, there may be some like some kind of blood glucose, insulin dysfunction that is not tied to resting heart rate. Would that be a possible theory? Yeah,

I I don't think I think the issue we're seeing there has less to Do with a relationship with resting heart rate to pre-diabetes and more an association with how you're eating, how are you fueling during exercise, the amount of exercise, are you overtrained? That's that's a different more complex relationship, I think. Okay, cool. So, it's it's a contender for probably the you know the most knock out the big ones thing. Yeah, if you basically if you have to reduce health to one marker because let's just Say you feel overwhelmed, you're not quite sure, the diet

world has you confuused with all the things everyone tells you to do. Exercise, there's a million different ways to do it. You're confused. If you focus on this one marker to simplify your life, this is probably the highest value thing anybody can do. How long would you need to start seeing results in lowering your heart rate? like someone listening at home, they're like, "Okay, I'm going to take On this challenge." How quickly do you expect them to knock out the increases in heart rate and how quickly do you expect them to start to drive it

down beyond just like baseline? Dare I say immediately. Like I think I think pretty quick. especially if they're coming from a situation where they're, you know, not currently cardiovascularly fit, if they're eating late meals, if they're in a high stress environment, if they're not sleeping well, I think you would see A response very quickly. Um, and then, you know, like a dramatic responses within a couple months would be my be my estimation. And if someone's listening, what would be the protocol? So, we all use Whoop, but um if someone else has a different wearable or

they don't have any wearable, what would they be able to do? Right. I'm going to let you answer that one. You're the protocol master here. Okay. There's there's a few really important things that are the power Laws. One is food. So, I I have my final meal of the day at around noon. And so, that's roughly 8 and a half hours before my bedtime. I do that with the specific objective of lowering my resting heart rate. And so over the years, I've run hundreds of experiments eating two hours before bed and three and four and

five and six. And I found that eating at noon optimizes for my resting heart rate above all other times of eating. So one is eat Earlier and lighter. So if you're starting off, if you go to bed at 10 p.m., just begin at 8:00 p.m. as your last meal, and then try 7:00 p.m. and 6 p.m. Keep on working your way back. you're going to see a relationship where the earlier you eat, the the better your resting heart rate. So, it's going to go down. Number two is actually and also on on number one is

the kinds of foods you eat matter a lot. So, some foods you eat will actually elevate your resting heart Rate. So, if you have a big piece of pizza or lasagna or you know something hard for the body to digest, your body's got to work harder to digest that versus something like steamed vegetables or something like that. So, you're going to understand and create a relationship that certain foods lower your heart rate and certain foods increase your heart rate. And so, I've dialed in this is the diet. These foods are the best have the best

evidence for longevity and they Also are going to contribute to lowering your resting heart rate. How about alcohol? Really quickly, how about alcohol? I know a lot of people just take Yeah, it's going to increase your resting heart rate for sure. I mean like one of the um I think uh Aura is really interesting. I think Whoop does this too. I'm actually don't use a Whoop. I use I use an Aura but like it shows you um what the impact is across the population of alcohol consumption and It's about a 7% increase at least according

to Aura um of resting heart rate which come I totally believe in in my personal experience when when I do drink even though I don't drink very regularly and when I do it's it's very little even one alcoholic drink will increase my resting heart rate by four to five beats come on guys give me a break you got to have fun in life you got to have at least a drink you're going to have social benefit. You're Going to have community, friendship, love. You spend your whole life trying not to die. You're not living. You

need to have a drink of alcohol. Give me a break. Brian dropped sarcasm. I mean, what do you when what what do you guys say to that? I mean so if a person you know they they basically people hear this and it challenges their existing models of reality where their models of reality say moderation in all things right is a good thing or you know Community is a thing that helps promote wellness and being with friends and laughing and having fun and letting loose and winding down. So they'll argue through these various models that it

ultimately is more beneficial than not, which I think if I'm not mistaken, I think I've seen a few papers maybe suggest those kinds of trade-offs. How do you guys think about that your personal lives? My instinct when you ask a question like that is to be very soft, To be like, I can understand where they're coming from. Like you know, it's really hard when our society is built around these social rituals. But then I remember what do I do for my life? And once you learn the information on how bad something is, it changes your

relationship with the thing. So now if I think about drinking, it's just this like it's it's not this like clean line like I'm going to have this and I'm going to really enjoy it. It'd be like I'm going to have this and I'm going to feel like you know what, this is actually really bad for me. So I would say like that is probably the biggest thing like educate yourself on what you're doing to your body because once you have that information it's really hard to unlearn it. For me, I think the the thing that

comes up is what is the actual impact of drinking versus not drinking um in a social situation. How much how much does abstaining impact my Ability to connect and and and commune with others? And I'm not it's not clear to me that it does in an impactful way where it is definitively clear that it impacts my sleep. Definitively. I mean, there's just no question. I was talking to a doctor on Monday and he was making an argument to me that in the morning if he wanted to spend some precious time with his wife they would

get a croissant and that having a croissant together would Increase their ability to have a shared experience. And I was like I I don't think that that that is actually a correct hypothesis. I don't I don't think a croissant is necessary in this equation. And he pushed back again. He's like, but you know, giving me the arguments of like, but it's a shared experience and it's love and and what all the benefits that flow from a loving, caring relationship. And so I was like, okay, let's just like look at This from a biochemical perspective. We

are we are a collection of 35 trillion cells. You take the molecular substrate of a croissant and you put it into the body. That's going to interact with chemicals. It's going to have a blood glucose response. you're going to have like you certain inflammatory markers in in relation to that like it doesn't there's no law of biology that says the molecular substrate of croissants hold the secret to oxytocin inducement and Otherwise good health right like let's just break this down from a a molecular perspective he's like all right I concede the point that you know

like a croissant is not necessary for love in a relationship I'm like great like the but I guess the point is even doctors maintain these robust defenses But they it's really we're challenging something that has been part of people's lives for a long time. It is alcohol is not necessary to connect and nor are Croissants nor is sugar. You can connect with another human in the morning. You can connect with a human over healthy healthy foods. But this idea that somehow getting down and dirty on the debauchery is the secret to happiness. I just don't

buy. But anyway, you were going through the protocol on how to get an incredible resting heart rate. So the three questions that I have left is so what do you do? What do you do if you don't have a wearable? How do you Measure resting heart rate? And then what are the targets that people can have? So like for example, men and women different. Yeah. So, if you don't have a wearable, then just simply put your fingers on the side of your neck and feel your pulse and count the beats for six seconds and then

multiply that by 10. That's your baseline resting heart rate. Now, to do that, give yourself around 60 seconds to calm yourself down. Like, lay down, take a few deep breaths, Try to calm your body down, and then take that because if you don't give yourself that one minute, you're going to have a elevated heart rate because maybe you've been walking around or something. Uh, so that's that's that's your baseline. So like a practical thing we're talking about here is let's say you you listen to this today and you want to take this challenge. So tonight

before you go to bed, let's say you take your pulse and it's 60 beats per minute. Your goal in the next week, let's just say is you're going to try to drop it by 10%. So you're going to try to get to 54 beats per minute by the following week. And so to do that, you're going to start with food. You're going to eat earlier and lighter. So start with two hours, move your way on back. As you move back, you may experience some hunger before bed. It's fine. It's actually I really enjoy that that

feeling. So just learn to get comfortable with a little bit of Hunger. You Why are you guys laughing? I'm just like just thinking of the audience listening to this and being like, I'm supposed to enjoy being hungry. What? Like what what Brian enjoys versus what the average person enjoys. So funny you guys both started laughing at the same time. Is that Are you indicating that I'm out of touch? I don't understand. Perhaps. Perhaps. Maybe you just like different things than other people don't. Feeling hungry. Feeling uncomfortable, you know. So, the next thing you're going going

to do is you need to have a windown routine. So, the rule here is screens off 60 minutes before bed. And 60 minutes probably feels like an entire workday to most people. Like 60 minutes without your screen, you know, like you're going to go through withdrawal symptoms because everybody is addicted To their phone. And we just need to be honest. It is an addiction full full on. And so when you don't have the screen in front of you, you're going through this withdrawal symptoms like all the same stuff you would be going through crack or

heroin or meth like there, right? You're you're going through this psychological experience. And so you need to start creating a habit where screens are off and you're doing some kind of nighttime routine where you're Reading a book, going for a walk, lightwalk, you know, uh having a conversation with a friend, breath work, meditation, a hobby around the house, but anything uh other than scrolling on your phone, which is going to induce anxiety, create FOMO, uh you know, create negative social experiences. And then you need to have some kind of windown routine. I'll stop there first

and come back. What do you think about that? Screen's off 60 minutes before Bed. It's great. Love it. Yeah. Minimum. I figured this out um on my own as I think most of us do. Like that's my that's my necessity. I And for me it's actually more than 60 minutes. It's it's more like two hours. Um I I seem to have a elevated cortisol response especially to work email. So, like I just got to like I actually like for the most part cut that off at 6 p.m. like just no more emails. And so if

I am on my screen, it's not it's not looking at email. Yeah. Kate, what about you? Agreed that. So, if I had to distill the protocol into one thing, it'd be um eat further away from bedtime. Like that is the number one thing for me that would impact my resting heart rate. So, yeah, totally agree. And that's just anecdotal data. Like I've tried also like Brian not as many experiments but definitely um he said this and I was like I don't know about that. Um because I would be Someone who doesn't have breakfast and so

I would push a food later and later but then yeah it it really does the data reflects it. Like with with the eating part like um I've gotten to the point now where if something happens and I don't get to eat dinner by a certain time I just don't eat dinner at that point like it becomes late enough that like the solution is to skip dinner. Yes. As opposed to eating late. Like that's Yeah, I 100% agree. There's There's not a worse feeling for me than having eaten late and going to bed with a full

stomach and having my resting heart rate in like the mid-50s. It I just I feel the pain the entire next day. My head hurts. I'm tired. I'm fatigued. My emotions are, you know, I'm much more sensitive. Yeah. So, I agree. I would rather not eat. All right. So, yeah. The next thing is a wind down routine that I do where I break myself out into various versions of Brian's. I Figured this out several years ago when I was working on my eating disorder. And you know, I would overeat every night at 7 p.m. And I

couldn't stop myself from doing so. And so I tried everything. Nothing worked. And the only thing that worked is I gave that version of me, uh, Evening Brian, a name. and I identified who he is, what his emotional state is, the problems he's dealing with in life, and the arguments he uses to say like, "Let's do the thing." So, evening and Brian, we show up to duty at 7:00 p.m. having fed the kids, bathed the kids, put them to bed, you know, told them stories, and then he's like dead. Like, the stress of life has

just wiped him out. He wants to be like an apossum and just lay on the floor and play dead. Like, it's too much. And the only thing he can do to soothe his pain of life is to eat food. And so, you know, brownies, graham crackers, like whatever's in the kitchen, like just devouring the whole Thing. And then that process of not being able to sleep and feeling guilt and shame and being, you know, overweight. And so, evening Brian is has a lot on his plate. He's very stressed. He is bearing the weight of the

world. And he comes on to duty when uh other Brian has spent all the willpower. And so, I basically just made a rule and I said, "Evening Brian cannot eat food ever." So, from 5:00 p p.m. to 10 p.m., which is the highest risk zone, he Cannot eat food no matter what because you can't negotiate with even Brian. He's not going to like be reasonable. He just wants his his objective to be met of eating food. And so, that rule really helped. And so, I started doing that with other Brian that wrecked my sleep. And

so, evening Brian is now in check. He can't eat in those in those time windows. So, now I know that there's a anxious Brian, an ambitious Brian, and father and dad Brian. And so I gave Myself all these different names and I articulated the characteristics of each version. So like for example, ambitious Brian is a is a very dominant a very prominent character in my life. So the the moment 7:30 p.m. comes, my windown routine is meant to start. Screens off and trying to calm myself down. ambitious Brian is the first person to show up

and is always like, I have a brand new idea. How are we going to make don't die into the most, you know, Influential ideology in the world and the human race is going to survive this moment with AI? And sleep Brian has to say, ambitious Brian, we love you. You're really doing a great job in life. Like, good job. Keep it up. Also, right now, we're we're preparing for sleep. So, we're going to write down your idea. Then tomorrow, we're going to then, you know, look at this idea because it sounds really promising. Let's think

about it. But I have to systematically Go through this process and I have to talk to Anxious Brian. Anxious Brian's like, "Hey, today on the podcast you said that thing. You sounded really dumb." Like people are probably gonna like, you know, hit you up in the comments about the idiocy of what your statement was. And so I have to say, "All right, evening Brian, thank you for the comment. I'm going to like address this." So that really helps me because otherwise what happens if you don't Address these various challenges you have within your mind before

bed your head hits the pillow and then you just loop through all these thoughts because they're not reconciled. You're thinking about work and family and relationships and what you're mad about and how you've been wronged and like all these things and then you if you do finally go to sleep, you get an hour or two of sleep. You wake up and you're looping again. So now the entire night you're in this Light sleep. you wake up the next day, you're stressed, you're worn down, you're not well rested, and you're in the same bad spot. And

so this one-hour routine, you have to be off your phone and also walk yourself down off the anxieties of the day and calm yourself down. And so people can do other things. You know, you can again, you can take your own nighttime routine, but to me that really works. And right before, like 10 minutes before bed, I'll just Hold a book in my hand and do that for like 10 minutes before I go to sleep. It works so well. screen off, talk through the things, book, and it just creates a uh a great night's sleep.

Awesome. So, don't eat and then do everything in your power to calm your body down in preparation to bed for bed so that your resting heart rate is as low as possible. Is that a decent summary? Yeah, the quickly two other things is you want to avoid blue light. So, turn Off uh you want to use red light and amber light. Avoid blues. those screens off or if you do have screens on, turn to red lights. Uh there's a great app called Flux F.Ux that knocks off blue on your on your screens and you can

change your red mode on your on your mobile phones, iOS or Android. And then um consistency. So giving your body a consistent bedtime also gives your your um it lowers your resting heart rate because you're doing the same patterns Every single day and the body gets to fall into a routine. So if you make sleep your top priority and you know by by default resting heart rate it really is the is the single highest value thing you can do for your health. Consistency is is underappreciated as an important tool as well I I would say.

Um and then just a couple other things uh that I've seen work a lot for people. Journaling um uh bath or some people sauna. Um there's there's other things that other Tools you can use um in your tool belt for creating that um that routine. But the consistency not only in the bedtime but also in the routine is super important. Okay. And then what should people target? So you know I'm a 29year-old female. Is that the same as Brian? What are the targets that people should opt for for optimal resting heart rate? So if we

look at the data, the the target for the best longevity is less Than 65. And how far less than 65 is going to depend depend a good bit on mostly your um your athletic prowess, right? So how how physically fit you are. Less than 65 is the bottom of the the curve in terms of longevity. So that's where you can have the best impact. But some people are, you know, healthy at 40 or 38 for professional athletes. But generally I would say a good a good spot to aim for in terms of overall physical fitness

and for Longevity would be in that low 50s. Women are going to be on average about two beats per minute higher than men. So not a huge difference. Yeah. Slightly elevated compared to men. Does it rise with age? Your resting heart rate it rises but uh it's mostly due less to aging and more due to loss of fitness. So, as we age, many of us lose our fitness and the predominant effect is a um fitness loss causing the the increasing resting heart rate. That's awesome. And Brian, what did you say your resting heart rate is?

We'll make that our goal. 50 right now. It Yeah, it's a bit higher. It was around 46 before. Uh that was for the the nighttime rest. It's now 50. I increased calories recently a little bit and also I exercise a ton. So those two things increase resting heart rate a little bit, but somewhere between 46 and 50 is where I've hovered for the past couple years. Yeah. I will say when You were really in a caloric def deficit, I felt like your entire you were like your before bed it was like you were so steady

and slow and like very it felt like you were already so calm heading into into sleep. So that doesn't surprise me. Yeah. You know, I I love caloric restriction so much. I mean, when I was doing, let's see, 1, like 900 calories a day, thereabouts, that was like a 25% restriction. Um, I got way Too skinny and so I had to back off. But I love that state. My resting heart rate is incredibly low. I feel very high energy. So yeah, actually I find that like as I have boosted calories, it has some kind of

um draw down on my like uh heightened experience. So yeah, I really love to be at the lower end of caloric intake. I think it really helps. And I on my sleep stats for the past 12 months, I've averaged 8 hours and 35 minutes per night. That's uh 94% sleep Efficiency, 3 hours and 54 minutes average of restorative sleep. That's REM and deep. My recovery is 69% and my HRV is 48. So on my HIV is average for my age. The other metrics uh Luke did an analysis for me and I'm on some of the

metrics I forget I don't have the data in front of me now but it was like in the 90th 98th 99th percentile in some areas. I forget the actual numbers but yeah uh definitely it's elite level sleep performance. Awesome. All right you guys. So, um, the takeaways for folks, exercise earlier in the day and then make resting heart rate your number one priority in life. Brian likes being hungry. And what did you say, Mike? Brian likes being hungry. Yeah, Brian go back to that intense a caloric restriction. I mean the the main problem was when

I lost so much weight I my face got really frail. You know it got get really skinny and people Associate really skinny faces with old and whereas you know they associate fat faces with young and so I learned the hard way that when you lose a lot of fat in your face it's really hard to get back the hardest thing to do. And so, yeah, I wish I could. I wish I could be caloric restricted and still have the sufficient fat where it wouldn't ding the project cuz people I would try to say like, "But

look at my markers. Like, I'm, you know, Healthy, but they'd be like, "You look like a skeleton. How do I believe you?" So, like, what do you do in that situation? Yeah. It's the entry price to have the conversation about health, ironically. Yeah. Un like, unless you've got fat in your face, it's very hard to have a conversation about health. Like you can't talk about your heart or your lungs, your liver, your pancreas because people they can't it doesn't pass their eye their their eye filters like can I Trust this conversation? I mean Mike, what

do you make of that? I mean I think we're all we're all human so it's natural to natural to have those stereotypes just like just like I think it can be hard to listen to a physician who's overweight. You know, how do you take their advice seriously? Um I think similar similar sort of issue. It's hard to get past our own stereotypes when we're in our own intuition. Yeah. What's interesting is like it's probably a bias That's been built because folks that aren't eating enough probably aren't getting enough nutrition. So like the correlation between like

super super skinny and and like bone mineral density for example, it's probably like um typically in the past not a great correlation. So these these intuitions are evolutionary and they're they're going to be hard to fight. Yeah. Yeah. just to make this obvious is um if you treat your resting heart rate as your Accountability partner then it's really a beneficial thing for you. So, for example, when you're on your couch at night, it's an hour before bed and you fill the munchies and you think, "What do I have in my closet, you know, in the

pantry that I can just do one or two bites of?" In that moment, it's a high-risisk situation because if you do that, you're not going to have one or two bites. You're going to probably have the whole Bag and then a whole, you know, pint of ice cream or like whatever. Like, it's going to lead to more debaucherous behavior. That of course is going to have these really negative effects. And so if you can keep in your mind and say if I eat even one chip or like one spoonful of whatever my resting heart rate

is going to increase and that is going to be the accountability where like now I've you know I've messed this process up. And so it is your best Friend. I wish I could actually have I wish I could have a dashboard of my best friends in life and see their resting heart rate overnight and then be able to call them and say like, "Hey, Mike. Hey, Kate. I see your resting heart rate's up 7%. How are you doing? How how did your night go?" You know, like it's it's such an important indicator of someone's well-being.

I wish I could do that and call all my friends all the time and say, "How how's it going? Like, can I Help on something?" Well, he's not doing that. We I mean Kate Kate and I share that data like every single day. Like we we'll just send each other screenshots of like certain numbers and we both know it tells like a thousandword story. I know everything behind the entire thing that happened. It tells me her emotional state. It tells me what she's going to be like working today. It tells me like what to prioritize

and what to dep Prioritize. It's amazing how much information we've been able to capture in these these very small uh data points. Yeah, it's true. Yeah. Hey, Mike, does does your family follow this? Do they adhere to these kinds of principles or is this something you do yourself or do your children kind of have their different routines? Um we we adhere to these principles. I mean like globally in terms of overall overall health, nighttime routine, all of those Things. Yeah, we do we do adhere to those principles. the children. Um yeah, like screens are off

um well before bed. Um and my wife's the same way. Yeah, we we've just found it works and I think everybody's committed to it. Okay, you guys. All right, thanks. Thank you.