Hi guys! Welcome to Episode 330 of the Wildly Successful Lifestyle podcast. One of the biggest things I can tell you that has been so valuable over the years to my making progress is when I’m able to measure. Being able to know where you are and where you want to go. To be able to measure though, you have to have information. Technology is making that so much easier. At the tap of your phone you can know so much about your body. Simply by wearing something on your wrist. A lot of people have all kinds of information through the apple watch or even just having a mattress that tells you sleep patterns. Now, The Apple Watch didn’t work for me because I’m easily distracted and I felt too accessible and too beholden to answering things immediately. But this whoop strap. That’s a different deal. It measures your sleep, your strain, your recovery and now it even measures your stress level. It tells you your heart rate variability which happens to be very important to everything you do especially recovery and sleep. It lets you know how much deep and rem sleep you get and how much time you need to be in bed to get the amount you need. And you keep a daily journal of what you did that day so it shows you patterns of what happens to your sleep when you drink alcohol or eat late at night or spend lots of time outside. There’s so much valuable information and I am kind of obsessed. So many people talk about their sleep habits now because they have access to that information.
I really do feel very personally empowered by having this kind of information at my fingertips because it lets me know the areas where I can improve, which I LOVE to know.
Now. total transparency. The information I get from my whoop strap has been very frustrating at times. My sister Molly got one a little bit after I did and we both agree it can make you a little crazy. Because it’s real time information. And she’s like me. We want to be the healthiest best version of ourselves and nothing is better than measuring to do that. But when we get information we don’t like, we are trying like crazy to figure out what the fix is, how we can make it better.
And this strap gives you tons of really useful information.
Ive learned so much good information that I hadn’t known about sleep. Did you know we wake up several times a night even though we may not even be aware of it? I average waking up about 2 times per hour, didn’t know that.
Ive always said I am a good sleeper….but now I actually can see the levels of my sleep and how certain things affect it because of the journal I keep and the daily report I get. What was interesting for me is this. I have to be in bed for about 9 hours and 15 minutes to actually get a full 8 hours of sleep because of the amount of times I wake up. The other thing that was interesting was I would consistently every night be getting pretty much ONLY light sleep. There were several nights in a row where I didn’t get any deep or REM sleep which I learned is where your body actually does its work like healing anything that needs to be healed. Like this is when it works on helping your eyes not look and feel so tired and your skin not look so blah. So, when you wake up after sleeping what you thought was 8 hours but you still feel tired? You may not be getting that good quality sleep which I was not, on most nights. That’s good information to know. But knowing it and doing something about it are two different things. So, You better believe I made it my job to figure out how to fix it. So I was listening to Andrew Huberman and he was talking about how to get the best quality sleep and he suggested supplements that would fix it. One of them was Inositol. I will put it in the show notes if you are interested. I started taking 1 gram per night and every single night since Ive taken it except for one night when we ate late and I had two glasses of wine which duh, no-one gets quality sleep after that. But every other night since then Ive had 2-4 hours of deep and rem sleep. Incredible to me. So that is the first big change.
The second thing was I noticed I recently had several days in a row where it was telling me my recovery was in the red meaning my body was saying something is not right here, and my heart rate variability was super low which is not normal for me. So I looked back at what I had done the last few days and I realized that one of those days I had been in the sauna talking WAAAAY too long and my water intake has gone down because we changed the way we are drinking water and so I was basically dehydrated! As soon as I started drinking my body weight in water my recovery went to green and my HRV has been high again. All of this from just simple information.
Hydration, sleep and exercise are cornerstones for increasing health span which is basically maintaining health as we age and a lot of that has to do with measuring…measuring how much water you drink, how much sleep and what kind of sleep you get and what kind. Im getting all of that information thru my whoop app. But that still doesn’t answer the question is information really power?
My answer to that is NO. Information isn’t powerful unless you put it to work. Information is just information until you do something with it. You see if I had all of the information from my whoop strap but didn’t research ways to improve it, it would be just that….information.
So, Information is NOT power, it’s POTENTIAL power. What you do with it is what makes it powerful!
Share this episode with 3 learners in your life! I love you guys! I’ll talk to you in a few days.
