Moment 88 - Daily Habits That Everyone Needs To Hear: Will Ahmed

What are the habits and hacks that can make sure that you are as efficient as possible in all areas of your life? In this moment Will Ahmed the founder and CEO of Whoop, the wearable technology that measures Strain, Recovery, and Sleep, discusses his daily routine that embodies his companies values and mission: to unlock human performance. It’s not alway easy, from morning workouts to ice cold showers, but by investing in himself everyday, it turns into huge dividends. Listen to the full episode here - https://g2ul0.app.link/Hel56MkXMvb Will: https://www.instagram.com/willahmed/?hl=en https://twitter.com/willahmed?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Steven Bartlett?

  You developed lifestyle hacks to help you disassociate.

• 0:07Speaker 01

  Well, we talked about meditation, which was a big one. Exercise, big one. I got into hot, cold transitions. Gratitude's a big one.

• 0:23Steven Bartlett?

  So take me through your day then, because I think this will reveal a lot of your habits.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Sure. So let's take a given day in Boston.

• 0:34Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  The day actually starts for me a little bit the night before because I'm getting into a framework for, you know, the next day. A few days a week, I work out with a trainer early in the morning. So I'll actually pack everything up for that. Well, I've got my workout clothes out. I'll have the what I'm going to wear to work the next day. I'll probably have written down like two or three things that I'm going to focus on the next day. And then like sleep, because you know, building whoop, you think a lot about sleep. I, you know, I sleep in a really cold bedroom, a really dark bedroom.

• 1:20Steven Bartlett?

  Why cold and dark?

• 1:22Speaker 01

  It's just shown to give you higher quality sleep. Yeah. And I try to go to bed at a somewhat consistent time. This is a little trickier because my wife's kind of a night owl and I like to go to bed a little earlier, but so I'll probably get to bed between, I don't know, 11:30 and midnight. And then I'll wake up at around 6:30.

• 1:42Steven Bartlett?

  Controversial question about your wife then. Does your sleep deteriorate with your wife in the bed?

• 1:48Speaker 01

  It doesn't because we have, we've got good intimacy. Like we've got good bed cuddle habits, you know? It's like a.

• 1:56Steven Bartlett?

  Cuddle and tongue.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. We.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  We've done a good job coexisting in a bedroom environment. Although that's an interesting thing you can track on Whoop. So if people really want to know whether or not they sleep better or worse with a partner, you can literally record that in the Whoop journal in the app. So in a second, I want to hear what's in your Whoop journal.

• 2:19Steven Bartlett?

  No comment. You can probably check.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  What you're checking against. So cold room, consistent bedtime.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then I wake up and I'm like out the door, really quick shower, workout clothes, got my stuff. I always give my wife kisses before I leave. That's like a nice relationship hack while she's, while she's sleeping. And then I work out for an hour with my trainer. I'll do steam room after that, freezing cold shower. I do a breakfast that's mostly like egg whites. It's mostly proteins like egg whites, like avocado, bacon, that kind of stuff.

• 3:02Steven Bartlett?

  Two points there. So the first was working out in the morning.

• 3:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:06Steven Bartlett?

  Is there any like data or science around that being advantageous?

• 3:10Speaker 01

  So back to being able to control the controllables. I like to work out in the morning in large part because it means I can then stay at work later if I need to.

• 3:20Steven Bartlett?

  Ah, okay.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  What I hate is when I go to work without having worked out in the morning and I'm supposed to play like squash that evening. And then a couple of things come up around 6:00 PM and all of a sudden I realize I'm not going to be able to get out the door. And so then, you know, you don't exercise. So the nice thing about working out first is like, okay, I've checked that box.

• 3:40Steven Bartlett?

  And then the other thing was this, the cold water.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  Cold water.

• 3:44Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. Talk to me about why you do that and how that helps.

• 3:47Speaker 01

  So there's something I think to be said for doing things that naturally make you happy, even if in the moment they're a little painful. And for me, being in the cold is one of those things. Like I feel a huge jolt of adrenaline from it. It also forces me to breathe properly. And I think anything you can do that helps you breathe properly or forces you to breathe properly is good for you. And then I feel kind of happy after doing it, like, like this little injection of happiness. And so I end 100% of showers that I take cold and as cold as possible. The colder, the better.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  And then the the steam room aspect or the sauna aspect, depending on where I am, is,

• 4:37Speaker 01

  I mean, there's a fair amount of research that shows if you do a steam room or a sauna a few days a week, it is likely to increase longevity.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  I would say I like the cold more than the hot, but anyway.

• 4:50Steven Bartlett?

  I'd say I'm the opposite. My, my girlfriend is a breathwork practitioner.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 4:55Steven Bartlett?

  Coach. So obviously you understand what comes with that and cold water is a big part of what she encourages on me. So she jumps in these ice baths and I'm like, I'm trying not to feel a masculine. I'm like putting my toe in and I'm like coming up with reasons, but no, she's got me into it. So.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  So what kind of breathwork do you do?

• 5:12Steven Bartlett?

  Um, I don't even know the name of it. She's got her own method. She teaches classes. She's doing classes in London at the moment, big groups, one-on-one sessions. She's doing, she does sessions with lots of people that come on this podcast, in fact.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  Oh, cool.

• 5:24Steven Bartlett?

  Cause they end up getting, getting to know her. So, but yeah, I don't know what type of breathwork it is, but it's an hour in a room like the.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, the double inhale.

• 5:36Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. Game changer. Just learning that we don't breathe.

• 5:39Speaker 01

  I think it's amazing. Yeah.

• 5:40Steven Bartlett?

  That's a huge industry. That's, that's, it feels like a wave coming into shore because this word breathwork showed up like 18, 24 months ago over here and now it's everywhere with like Wim Hof.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  That's a good point. I mean, Wim Hof, yeah, I think Wim Hof pushed a lot of it, especially around the cold. And I, look, I think it's taking off for a good reason, in part because, again, back to controlling things you can control, you can literally control your breath in a second. And there's an interesting whoop hook to all this because one of the core things that led me to starting the company was discovering this statistic called heart rate variability. And heart rate variability is essentially this lens into your autonomic nervous system. It's the amount of time between successive beats of the heart. So it's a little confusing, but if your heart beats at 60 beats per minute, it's not beating every second. Like it might

• 6:35Speaker 01

  be point seven seconds and then 1.3 seconds and then point six seconds and 1.4 seconds. And it turns out that variability of time between successive beats is actually a good thing. Cause it's a sign that your body is able to regulate in its environment. And your autonomic nervous system literally consists of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity. Now sympathetic is activation. So that's heart rate up, blood pressure up, respiration up. Often it's what's happening when you're feeling a little bit of stress or you're exercising, right? Now, parasympathetic is all the opposite. Heart rate down, blood pressure down, respiration down. It's what helps you fall asleep. But where this all

• 7:19Speaker 01

  comes back to breath work is literally inhaling.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  That's sympathetic.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  That's parasympathetic. So just by controlling your breathing, you can decide whether you want to be sympathetic dominant, parasympathetic dominant. You can increase your heart rate variability, you can decrease it. And that's something that's in your control. And heart rate variability is one of the core statistics that we look at as a lens into how restored your body is.

• 7:52Steven Bartlett?

  I noticed that because my friend Logan, he went for a night out. He got drunk. It was a wedding. Yeah. And then he screenshotted his whoop dashboard the next day and put it into our chat and went, fuck, because everything was red. And he was trying to explain to me heart rate variability and why it was important, but I couldn't quite understand. And I remember trying to, trying to read about why it was important, but I knew you were coming here. So I thought I'd ask you myself, because you, I've heard you talk about the importance of heart rate variability. I understand now what it is. But why is it such an important indicator? And what are the things that we do that make it plummet?

• 8:28Speaker 01

  So the fascinating thing about heart rate variability is it's been measured since like roughly the eighties. And the physiology research that I was reading in college was showing that Olympic power lifters were using heart rate variability to determine how much they should lift. So based on whether they had a low or a high heart rate variability in the morning, and they'd get hooked up to an electrocardiogram, like this is an intense thing. And then they would go decide how much they were going to lift based on what their reading was. I was like, that's kind of interesting. Turned out cyclists were doing it in the eighties. The CIA was using heart rate variability for lie detection tests. Doctors, cardiologists were using heart rate variability to predict whether former heart

• 9:12Speaker 01

  failure patients were going to have a heart attack again. So I'm thinking to myself, this is a pretty powerful statistic that I've never heard of, that feels like everyone should be measuring. And so that's really, that was one of the core insights in building Whoop, was that you need to be able to measure heart rate variability continuously. And in particular, it's going to play a huge role in helping us understand the status of your body's readiness, and how well you're sleeping. So those are two ways that Whoop is primarily using heart rate variability. You know, things that decrease heart rate variability, dehydration, bad diet, we just

• 9:52Speaker 01

  talked about alcohol, heavy exercise, you know, heavy psychological stress. Often, people are surprised how just the wrong conversation with their partner the night before bed can totally throw their sleep out of whack, or their heart rate variability out of whack. So it's a very powerful statistic, it's a fascinating statistic, and I'm mostly glad like a lot more people are measuring it.