How to Calm Your Nervous System: 4 Ways to Sleep Better, Stress Less and Build Resilience with Dr Kristen Holmes #691

Are you in control of your nervous system – or is it in control of you? It's a question that deserves your attention, because the answer affects everything from how well you sleep to how you react when life is hard. And my guest this week believes most of us have more agency than we realise. Dr Kristen Holmes is Global Head of Human Performance and Principal Scientist at the wearable-tech company WHOOP. She’s also a former US national field hockey player and one of the most successful coaches in Ivy League history. In her new book, Aligned, she argues that a well-regulated nervous system is the foundation for our health, performance and relationships. We start by exploring what a balanced nervous system looks like in daily life, why some people need to begin with their body and others with their mind, and why Kristen prefers the word agency to control. Kristen then talks me through a study she led with WHOOP, in which 39,000 of its members tried four simple, free daily behaviours, and what happened to their sleep and heart health as a result. She explains why most of us have no idea when our body naturally wants to fall asleep, why sleep consistency predicts health more strongly than sleep quantity or quality – and the single metric she believes reveals most about someone’s health. We also cover why variety matters in how we move, why eating earlier suits our metabolism, and why so many of us fall ill as soon as we go on holiday. And Kristen shares a powerful 72-hour exercise for auditing your daily actions against your values. In the second half, the conversation becomes deeply personal. Kristen talks about growing up around alcoholism, the trauma she experienced as a child, and how she found her way to forgiveness through curiosity. We discuss emotions rooted in trust versus fear, the role of nostalgia, and how joy differs from happiness. She also shares the meditation practice that helped her learn to love herself, and the science showing how it benefits the body. This is a conversation for anyone who wants practical, evidence-based steps to better sleep, energy and resilience. But, perhaps more importantly, it’s for anyone who senses that lasting change also requires some inner work. Kristen brings both the data and the lived experience – and I think everyone will find something here to carry into their own life. The Thrive Tour: Transform Your Health and Happiness, a live show: Book Your Tickets https://drchatterjee.com/live Thanks to our sponsors: https://boncharge.com/livemore https://thewayapp.com/livemore https://hellolingo.com/livemore https://drinkag1.com/livemore Show notes https://drchatterjee.com/691 DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified healthcare provider. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

  If you think you don't need a strategy to deal with the traps of modern life, you're crazy. Modern society is set up for us to fail. We just have to figure out, okay, how do we get back to a schedule that is more aligned with the natural light-dark cycle? Our mental, physical, emotional, and I would argue our spiritual well-being is what's at stake here.

• 0:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  Hey, guys. How are you doing? Hope you're having a good week so far. My name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, and this is my podcast, Feel Better Live More.

• 0:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  Are you in control of your nervous system, or is it in control of you? Well, this is a question that deserves your attention because the answer affects everything, from how well you sleep to how you react when life feels hard. Dr. Kristin Holmes is Global Head of Human Performance and Principal Scientist at the wearable tech company Whoop. She's also a former US National Field Hockey Player and one of the most successful coaches in Ivy League history. And in her new book, Aligned: The Data-Driven Guide to Performance, Recovery, and Human Potential, she brings together physiology and psychology to share

• 1:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  how we can all build a more resilient nervous system and live a life with more joy. We start off by exploring what a balanced nervous system looks like in daily life and why some people benefit from beginning with their bodies whilst others benefit from starting with their minds. Kristin then talks me through a study she led with Whoop, in which 39,000 of its members tried four simple, free daily behaviors, and what happened to their sleep and heart health as a result. She explains why most of us have no idea when our body naturally wants to fall asleep, why sleep consistency predicts health more strongly

• 2:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  than sleep quality or quantity, and the single metric she believes reveals the most about someone's health. We also cover why variety matters in how we move, why eating earlier suits our metabolism better, and why so many of us fall ill as soon as we go on holiday. Now, in the second half, the conversation becomes deeply personal. Kristin speaks openly about her childhood and the experiences that shaped her. We explore forgiveness, values, the difference between happiness and joy, and we look at why so many of us know exactly what we should be doing for our health, yet still struggle to actually do it. Kristin

• 2:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  explains why the changes that last tend to come from self-compassion rather than self-criticism, and she shares a simple practice that helped her to get there. For me, one of the most powerful ideas here is that there's no such thing as a neutral action. As Kristin says, every choice we make either moves us towards the person we want to be or away from them. And once you start to notice this, even the smallest daily decisions become a chance to live your values and approach life with an open heart.

• 3:30Rangan Chatterjee?

  I've once heard you say that the world is divided into two types of people, those who have control of their autonomic nervous system and those who don't. Which group do you fall into?

• 3:46Speaker 00

  Well, that's a great place to start, and that's definitely the red thread of Aligned, you know, is this idea that when we think about performance and we think about health, it is very much constrained by our capacity. And I guess the theory or the thesis of the book is that we build capacity by building a robust autonomic nervous system. And I suppose when we think about the world being divided in two, it's folks who have are able to respond in a way that is aligned with who they want to be in the world, right? And it's very difficult to do that when you have a dysregulated nervous system. So I like

• 4:29Speaker 00

  to think that over the course of my life, I've arrived at a place where I'm able to have more control over my state. You know, I understand when I am drifting from who I want to be in the world. When I feel that dissonance bubble up, I don't just let it fester. I take some action and I course correct, right? And I bring myself back into a regulated state. And I think we can step back even further when we think about stress and exhaustion and aging even, you know, that those are hallmarks of a dysregulated nervous system. And I think the literature, you know, there's a really great opinion piece that was published

• 5:08Speaker 00

  in December of 2025, where they look at the theory of aging and basically all of the hallmarks of aging that we we consider, you know, telomere attrition and genomic instability and mitochondrial dysfunction, inflammation, all of these are actually downstream of a dysregulated autonomic nervous system.

• 5:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 5:30Speaker 00

  So I guess the idea is if we can bring ourselves back into balance, if we are able to effectively toggle in between stress activation and deactivation and have a level of conscious awareness, we can, I guess, have more control over the trajectory of our health and certainly over our performance levels. That's the case I make in the book, and a lot of that comes down to how we manage our downtime, how we think about recovery.

• 6:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. It's interesting. You mentioned that health and performance. For me, it goes even further than that. A well-managed, a well-regulated autonomic nervous system, I'm not sure there's anything more important that we can focus on because, yeah, the downstream of that is better health.

• 6:21Speaker 00

  Right.

• 6:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  Better longevity.

• 6:22Speaker 00

  Right.

• 6:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  Better performance.

• 6:24Speaker 00

  Right.

• 6:24Rangan Chatterjee?

  But it's also how we are, our relationships with our partner, with our children, with our colleagues. How many of us are reactive these days? You know, we're not bringing our best selves to our relationships, and it's all downstream from a dysregulated autonomic nervous system. So can you explain in your words what is an autonomic nervous system? And then maybe come on to what I've just said.

• 6:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. So you have the central nervous system, which is made up of the brain and the spinal cords. They have their peripheral nervous system, which is part of that is the autonomic nervous system. And the autonomic nervous system has two branches, the parasympathetic and the sympathetic. And they're both competing to send signals to the heart. The more regulated you are, the more responsive your heart is going to be to the demands of the autonomic nervous system. And so when you can imagine a scenario when your heart no longer becomes responsive to the demands of the autonomic nervous system, you're dead.

• 7:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 7:28Speaker 00

  You know, or you are debilitated to a degree where you can't respond effectively to external stress. And I think that's the opportunity is to be able to respond, just all the things that you've just outlined beautifully, those are the things that we want to be able to respond and engage with in a way that feels good to us, you know? And in order to kind of get to a place of good, what are the behaviors, the foundational stuff, that allow me to perform, which is really an expression of capacity? So when we zoom out, we're like, how do we actually build capacity? How do we build a robust autonomic nervous system? And a lot of those things are the stuff that's talked about

• 8:10Speaker 00

  a lot, you know, sleep and circadian alignment, you know, appropriate training, appropriate levels of rest, understanding stress and rest at a very foundational level. And that's kind of the first half of the book. And then I guess the second part of the book is really more of how do we think about time and expectations, attachments, right?

• 8:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 8:28Speaker 00

  Memory, right? Like, those are things that we don't consider those as dimensions that influence how we show up in the world, right? That actually originate in the autonomic nervous system.

• 8:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. One of the things I've always loved about your work and I particularly like about the new book, Aligned, is the fact that you're covering both physiology and psychology. And I guess I'm biased. I like that because that's how I see the human body. I don't think you can actually look at one without the other. And I think when we try and do that, we really struggle. So with health, for example, you know, health and well-being is all the rage these days. You know, there's many podcasts like this one where we're trying to share positive, empowering information. But the problem is, I've found

• 9:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  that often the behaviors we want to do, let's say, you know, go for daily walks, reduce how much sugar we're having, whatever it might be, they're often downstream from our mindset and the way we feel about the world. So if things aren't going well, that we've taken a very negative view on how our life is, well, you're much more likely to want to soothe your internal discomfort with sugar and ice cream and alcohol. So we can keep telling you about the dangers of excess sugar and excess alcohol, right? But perhaps you need to address the psychology first, and that will then automatically change those behaviors. Do you know what I mean?

• 10:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, for sure. I, you know, I go back and forth on this all the time. I sometimes feel like the entry point is through physiology, right? And I think there's some truth to that. But but you land on a really important point. And I think it's it's not even how we see the world, it's how we see ourselves. And I think a lot of the self-sabotage that happens, and I opened the book about the story of my mother, you know, and, you know, just witnessing her.

• 10:31Speaker 00

  Essentially kill herself over the course of her life by abusing alcohol. She did not love herself. She did not have compassion toward herself. Right? And I think, I think that is the place to start. Is you have to figure out, okay, what is, what does loving myself actually look like? How do I need to treat my body? How do I need to treat my mind? You know, and I think all the things that you talked about reducing sugar and you know, those, those are, I call them kind of parasympathetic fixes. Right? We've got, so if you go back to the autonomic nervous system. Okay. When we feel that internal tension, right? That is usually a direct comment on something that matters to you. Instead of thinking about the thing that matters to us because it might be a little

• 11:16Speaker 00

  uncomfortable, we soothe it with the food or scrolling or, you know, we, we basically try to mute that signal. And I think that's the call to action is we need to actually feel that signal. We need to try to understand it, get curious about it. Right? And, and figure out, okay, do I need to take action here?

• 11:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 11:41Speaker 00

  Is there an action that's required of me? Or do I let it go? But I think just that conscious awareness of like, okay, this is a moment where I feel that dissonance, that tension. What am I going to do about it? And I think just that small conversation with yourself puts you in a seat of agency as opposed to just allowing life to happen to you.

• 12:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. It's, for me, the, the secret to this long-term sustainable change that actually we're all looking for, but no one's really looking for a quick fix.

• 12:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  We might think we are, but ultimately we want proper transformation.

• 12:23Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 12:24Rangan Chatterjee?

  You kind of gotta do the work to know yourself.

• 12:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  Understand yourself. And I also, like you, have this, you know, try to figure out, is it body first, then mind? Is it mind first and then body? I remember many years ago, a friend of mine, Dallas Hartwig, who curated The Whole Thirty with his, with Melissa, many, many years ago. I think their first book was It Starts With Food from Recollection, many, many years ago.

• 12:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  I remember, I remember I was at a conference with Dallas and I remember talking to him, saying, mate, it doesn't start with food for everyone.

• 12:56Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 12:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? We've all got different entry points.

• 12:59Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 13:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  And for some people, yeah, it does start with food and does start with physiology. But for some people, their entry point is with psychology and that's okay as well.

• 13:09Speaker 00

  Exactly. And I, and that's kind of how I structured the book, like, and how, there's a workbook at the end and it basically takes you chapter by chapter. And for some folks, it might be just understanding the relationship between stress and rest. You know, that they have this demand mismatch in their life that is so egregious. Right? That might be where they start. Or it might be they view the world, they're, they're, they have unresolved trauma and they need to really heal. And what does that healing process look like? That might be their entry point.

• 13:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 13:40Speaker 00

  To your point, we all have the thing that is kind of, I think at the, at the, at the basic level is keeping us from being that version of ourself that we aspire to be, you know? And in recognizing what is holding us back is the most beautiful source of insight we can have. Right? And then just figuring out, okay, if this is the thing that's holding me back, how do I, how do I make that leap? Right? And I think you said it, like transformation. And in the opening of the book, Rebecca Solis, she wrote this, this, a beautiful book on, on just this notion of a transformation. And she says that we are often scared of transformation because we don't actually know what's on the other side.

• 14:25Speaker 00

  And that in itself is a source of insight. Okay, am I scared of what that change could mean in terms of how it might shift my partnerships or, you know, my, my, my relationship with my partner or how it might, maybe I, I do this work and realize that the job I'm in is not the job I want to be in, you know, but I've got to pay bills. And, you know, there's a little bit of a reckoning that comes with, with change. And I think that fear is sometimes what holds, holds people back. But I think that's part of the invitation of this book is like, you gotta just make the leap.

• 14:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. There's a beautiful chapter where you talk about trust and fear. And from recollection, you talk about certainty there, this, this, this idea that certainty is an illusion. Right? We want to be certain of the outcome before we make a change, but you can't be.

• 15:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  Cause you've never been there before. Right? And the version of you who might be trying this time is different from the version of you who tried five years ago. So you gotta get away from this idea of certainty. And I think, I remember right at the start, the question I asked you was about this, this, this word control of their autonomic nervous system. That word control, I have really thought about and meditated on for years and, and I'd welcome your view on this. The way I see control is internal control versus external control. So I can't control the external world, whether it's going to rain or sun, you know, or whether someone's going to cut me up on it. I can't control that.

• 15:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  But with enough intention and with enough work, I can actually learn how to control my internal environment. Right? That's what you're talking about.

• 16:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:09Rangan Chatterjee?

  Have you got control of your autonomic nervous system? Basically another, put it another way, are you able to exercise control over your internal environment or not? That's kind of what it comes down to, doesn't it?

• 16:21Speaker 00

  For sure. Yes, exactly. And, and I think when you have control of your internal state and you can bring yourself back into balance, it, it changes how you move through the world. Right? It gives you a sense of agency, I think is maybe, is, is I think the synonym to kind of control in a way. And I think control comes with a lot of baggage.

• 16:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? For sure.

• 16:44Speaker 00

  It certainly does for me. I use it in the, in the book, but, but I, but I think I'm careful to, to make sure people understand that this is really, at the end of the day, about agency.

• 16:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 16:53Speaker 00

  Having agency over your internal landscape, you know? And I open that chapter, Trust and Fear, with a poem that I wrote called Relinquishing.

• 17:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  Beautiful.

• 17:01Speaker 00

  And thank you. And I, but, but I, you know, I, I wrote that because of this tension I have in my own life around uncertainty. And that, and, and I write in that poem that that's, that's probably the, the price or the, the cost of the beauty, right? Is, is this uncertainty? And when we shift our lens, that uncertainty is kind of a gift in a lot of ways. It's, it brings spontaneity, right? It's, we don't know what's going to happen next.

• 17:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 17:30Speaker 00

  Right? So all we can really do is focus on the here and now. It, it releases us, it relinquishes, it relinquishes us of that pressure of thinking about what's happening next. Right? And then you're left, all you're left with is just right now. And I, I don't know that there's really anything more freeing.

• 17:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I love it. I'm, I'm, there's so many rabbit holes I want to go down because, you know, that thing there, you know, you just mentioned then that you have this time framework later on and E is expectation. And I've been thinking a lot about how much expectations can sabotage our lives and get in the way. You know, you go to, I don't know, simple example, you go to the restaurant once and you have a great meal. It genuinely is almost never as good the second time because what's changed? Well, even if they cook it in exactly the same way, which is probably impossible anyway.

• 18:24Speaker 00

  It's the ambiance, it's the, the smells, it's the, where you're sitting.

• 18:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  You're going in now with an expectation, oh my God, that spaghetti bolognese was phenomenal. Like, hey, guys, come along.

• 18:34Speaker 00

  I know.

• 18:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  You can't wait, right? So let, let me just park that because I, I want to go there. But I want also ground people in some, some kind of simple things that they can think about, right? So so far, we're talking about this fact that the health of your autonomic nervous system, the integrity of it is really important for health, longevity, performance, whatever you want.

• 18:57Speaker 00

  Right.

• 18:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  And your relationships. Right? And we've said that you can enter to improve the function of the A and S, your autonomic nervous system, through physical health or through mindset and psychology. Right? You published a paper, I think a couple of years ago about these four key behaviors that help us to help our autonomic nervous system.

• 19:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. It increased parasympathetic tone.

• 19:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yes. Tell us about that. Tell us about that paper because I think what I love about these four behaviors is that they are completely free of charge of people.

• 19:31Speaker 00

  Democratically available and free.

• 19:32Rangan Chatterjee?

  Exactly. So let's talk about that.

• 19:34Speaker 00

  And this paper, it was published in Sleep, which is a, you know, a premier journal in, in the, the field of sleep medicine. And so it's, it's really exciting. It was received, I think, really well and because that these were just free behaviors, you know? And I, and to be able to kind of quantify the impact of the behaviors was, was exciting. And basically what I did is I put out a challenge to all the members on the Woot platform. I said, you know, if you're interested in improving your autonomic nervous system and if you're interested in maybe improving your sleep, I want you to give these four behaviors a try. So it basically invited them into this challenge and we had 39,000 people sign up for this challenge.

• 20:16Speaker 00

  And I just basically gave them the protocol for each behavior. And I said, you can do all of them, you can do one of them, try to do it as consistently as possible. And one was time restricted eating, which is basically just consolidating your calories during the daylight. So I said, just pick 12 hours where you can eat all of your food and just try to do that consistently.

• 20:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  So not even 10 or 8 hours, very manageable for most people, that 12 hour eating window.

• 20:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, that's, you know, seven to seven, that's, you know, that really gives you a nice chunk of time to get your calories. And most Americans are eating around 15 hours across the day. Right? Usually right up to bedtime, which has, you know, there's a thermoregulatory effect of food, but there's also a circadian component. So there's kind of two competing issues that end having, end up having impact on your sleep and recovery. But yeah, so basically 12 hour window you want to give yourself, I recommended a two to three hour buffer between your last calorie and when you intend to sleep. So if it's eight to eight, you know, just kind of thinking about that in, in context of your bedtime. And then the second behavior was morning sunlight. So just getting out, I said a minimum of five minutes.

• 21:27Speaker 00

  So again, really doable, but just getting outside.

• 21:30Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's up within 20 minutes of waking up.

• 21:32Speaker 00

  Within 20, that was the protocol. Yeah. So within 20 minutes of waking up, getting outside for at least five minutes, but if you could swing 20.

• 21:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  Can I just clarify something?

• 21:40Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 21:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  Sorry to interrupt. Initially, you said five minutes of sunlight, then you said outside. And I know people will be thinking, especially, you know, yes, in the UK, we've had a phenomenal summer, but autumn is

• 21:52Speaker 00

  It's about to get dark for us.

• 21:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  Is well and truly here.

• 21:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  So is it sunlight? Is it natural light?

• 21:58Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 21:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  Is a cloudy day okay?

• 22:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Thank you for clarifying. Natural light is what the protocol recommended. So just, it doesn't need to be sunny, cloudy, like just getting outside, feeling the temperature on your skin, letting your eyes kind of look up at the, the sky, you know, just really just basic, simple stuff that helps set our circadian rhythm. And that basically then, you know, it just cortisol, like all the hormones that are associated with being awake, kind of then know what to do, right? You're giving your body information and light is one of the strongest cues that we can, that our body is so desperate to have, so it understands what it needs to do, right? It basically reduces the confusion in your body when it gets that signal within 20 minutes of waking up.

• 22:45Speaker 00

  It knows it's time to be alert, it's time to be awake. It also then will help your body understand when it needs to release melatonin. So a lot of folks don't associate that morning sunlight with actually what's happening maybe 16 hours later, which is that, that release of melatonin, which is also so critical for health, absolutely for sleep, but also has a really powerful antioxidant. So that morning sunlight was really huge and, or morning light, I should say. And if it's, if it's still dark out when you wake up, which for a lot of us in these northern latitudes, that's the case, bathe yourself in artificial light. It's just that light signal is, is really what we're after here.

• 23:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  Interestingly, one thing I've changed over the last year, and this is probably since I spent five days in, in Washington state with, with this functional optometrist called Dr. Bryce Applebaum. We did five days of intense training and I improved various aspects of my eyesight and vision. It was, it was just incredible.

• 23:45Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 23:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  But one of the things I really understood from talking to him is, you know, good practices when, when reading, you know, and all kinds of things. And I, I, because I get up so early and in the autumn and winter, it will be pitch black.

• 24:02Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 24:03Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I'll keep it nice and dark, right? I'll keep a nice little side lamp on, make my coffee, I'll sit there, I'll read. And I like that, but one thing I did change is I thought, actually, I'm not sure this is the best thing for my eyes actually in the morning. So now when I come down into the kitchen, everyone's asleep upstairs, so it doesn't affect someone. I just shove on all the lights and I'm, I've got real bright light. So that's kind of interesting.

• 24:24Speaker 00

  I've had it too, because I love that cozy morning too.

• 24:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  Me too.

• 24:28Speaker 00

  But I, it isn't great. Yeah.

• 24:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay.

• 24:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. So definitely bright light, yeah, and, and turning on even if it's dark, but that's when you want to wake up.

• 24:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  Time of shooting, eating, light exposure, number two. What's number three?

• 24:38Speaker 00

  And the other one was.

• 24:45Rangan Chatterjee?

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• 25:29Rangan Chatterjee?

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• 26:13Rangan Chatterjee?

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• 26:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  One of my listeners who started using The Way, following my recommendation, contacted me to say, I have tried so many meditation apps in the past, but simply could not make any of them work for me in the long term. However, using The Way has been a complete revelation. I've been using it almost daily for the past three months now, and it has had a transformative effect on my life. Now, I personally have been using this app for over six months now, and I absolutely love it. In fact, I love it so much that I have invested in the company to join them in their mission to get more people meditating around the world. For listeners of my podcast, The Way is offering 30 free days to establish your own meditation practice.

• 27:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  All you have to do is go to thewayapp.com/livemore to get started.

• 27:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  Time of shooting, eating, light exposure, number two. What's number three?

• 27:54Speaker 00

  And the other one was breathing. So, so the idea that, so basically I was trying to create conditions that would allow people to get to a more stable sleep-wake time. Okay. So that's kind of in the background, what I was really trying to do with these behaviors is, will this actually help people fall asleep at a more regular time? That was my hypothesis going in, that if they could engage in these kind of circadian type behaviors, sleep facilitating type behaviors, would that actually help stabilize your sleep-wake time? So I'll come back to that, but, so breathing. Negative stress accumulation throughout the day is one of the biggest problems with regard to sleep onset and being able to stay asleep.

• 28:35Speaker 00

  When we are exhibiting or experiencing a lot of, I call it kind of unanswered stress throughout the day, that will negatively impact our sleep, right? And I, we've all experienced that, right? When we are appraising, and I have another paper published in Emotion, where we looked at threat and challenge. If you appraise your day as threatening versus challenging, your sleep quality will be impaired.

• 28:58Rangan Chatterjee?

  Mindset affecting physiology.

• 29:01Speaker 00

  Oh, this is the first paper in the show. Yeah, we published in Emotion. It is a phenomenal experiment, so I'll go, I can go back to that if you want. But slow-paced breathing is throughout the day. So basically just said, you know, throughout the day, after you experience a bout of stress, good or bad, you know, don't worry about labeling it, your body doesn't even know if it's good or bad, really. It's, stress is stress, right? You're activating the, the autonomic nervous system. So I said, anytime your heart rate is increasing, you're activating the nervous system, you want to map that with appropriate levels of rest. So just engage in some slow-paced breathing, bring your heart rate down actively, in through the nose, out through the nose, and just do that for a minute or so. I also gave them the physiological sigh, which we know helps reduce anxiety up to five hours after the protocol.

• 29:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  Can you just explain what that is for people who are not familiar?

• 29:48Speaker 00

  Yep, is basically a double inhale followed by an extended exhale.

• 29:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  Nose or mouth, does it matter?

• 29:55Speaker 00

  In through the nose, double in through the nose, out through the mouth. Exactly. You let the breath just fall out and you can do, you know, the, the published work is five minutes of the physiological sigh, but it's a very long time. I tell folks, I'm just like, even 30 seconds, a minute, 90 seconds, whatever you can do. The protocol, I said at least a minute, up to five of just this slow-paced breathing. And I said, if they can prioritize one of this, the slow-paced, right when they get into bed, to bring the heart down, that's also a great signal that your body feels safe and it can drop into those deeper stages of sleep faster. So that was the second, the third one. And then the final one was zone two.

• 30:38Speaker 00

  So the reason why I put zone two training in, and you can row, you can swim, you can walk, you can jog, depending on your fitness level, whatever zone two is for you, engage at least 30 minutes, up to an hour. And what we see in the data, and I put this in the book too, is that I don't even call zone two exercise. I call it, it's a recovery modality. Bonus if you're outside, because that contrast between day and night is so, so important. So those are the four behaviors. And indeed, what we ended up seeing is that the folks that engaged in these behaviors saw improvements in sleep-wake consistency. And then which, so that was the mediator.

• 31:21Speaker 00

  And, and then, and basically, so for those folks who improve their sleep-wake consistency, they, we saw improvements in their cardio respiratory fitness. And that was measured by their resting heart rate. And then we also saw improvements in heart rate variability, so their, their parasympathetic tone. So they had improvements in our HRV, improvements in resting heart rate, and that was mediated by sleep-wake consistency. So my hypothesis kind of held true in that these four kind of circadian-ish sleep behaviors helped actually regulate the, the system to a degree that it helped facilitate sleep-wake consistency, which is a really hard behavior. Feeling sleepy at a particular time is hard in the modern world.

• 32:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right.

• 32:03Speaker 00

  And that's what, based on these data, that's what we helped to facilitate. It's exciting.

• 32:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay. A lot to unpack there.

• 32:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  I just want to make sure everyone understands those behaviours.

• 32:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  Zone two is, I guess, a relatively common term in the, in the kind of online health space.

• 32:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  But I never want to assume that everyone listening knows what zone two even means. Could you just sort of expand on that a little bit?

• 32:27Speaker 00

  So if you do not have access to technology, so it's, you know, generally 50 to 60% of your maximum heart rate, but if you don't have a way to measure that, it's basically just an activity where you can comfortably talk. So you can imagine doing a power walk with your friends, as long as you can talk relatively comfortably, you're in zone two.

• 32:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 32:52Speaker 00

  You don't want it to be so comfortable that like, you know, it's just you and I kind of sitting here. You want it to be, you know, not, not even like challenge, just below challenging, I guess, you know, for me, it's just a slow jog, you know, and I just, I'm able to, you know, talk comfortably and.

• 33:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  But it could be a brisk walk for some people.

• 33:10Speaker 00

  It could be a brisk walk with a vest, a weighted vest or something, who knows? Yeah.

• 33:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  So, so what, what I like about those four behaviours is if I think about them through the lens of what I've been talking about for many years, which is these four pillars of health.

• 33:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, I love it.

• 33:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I kind of feel each one speaks to a different pillar. Nutrition is dealt with with the time structure to eating. Eat all your food within a 12 hour window. Movement is addressed with your zone two recommendation for, was it at least 30 minutes?

• 33:38Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 33:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right. Relaxation or stress reduction is addressed through your breath work, right? And then sleep is kind of addressed counterintuitively in some ways by morning light exposure, which helps you.

• 33:51Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 33:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  Sleep better at night. So we're dealing with these core four pillars, which I think is a really empowering message. What I love about those is they're free behaviours.

• 34:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? Most people, whoever they are, wherever they're listening to this, at the end of this episode could go, hmm, I wonder if I could bring those four free behaviours into my life. Now, I framed it around the autonomic nervous system. But of course, you also mentioned that you had this hypothesis about the sleep wake cycle. So I think we need to just unpack that a little bit. Okay. Why is the sleep wake cycle important? And what's it got to do with the autonomic nervous system?

• 34:28Speaker 00

  Yeah. So sleep wake consistency is a driver of sleep quality. And sleep quality is really the only kind of metric inside sleep that's linearly correlated with heart rate variability, which is a proxy measure of the autonomic nervous system. So heart rate variability is basically the time interval between heartbeats. Your heart rate variability is a measure of that. So your heart doesn't beat on a metronome. It has, you know, it's very, you've got, you know, it's over a course of 60 seconds, you know, your, your first beat will maybe be, you know, 0.44 milliseconds. The next one will be 0.792 and the next one, you know, so that

• 35:12Speaker 00

  variability is actually an indicator of your autonomic health. The more variability, the higher your heart rate variability, the better.

• 35:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  So we all want higher HRV, basically.

• 35:25Speaker 00

  Relative to your own baseline, it's modifiable. You know, I talk about this throughout the book, you know, that when we kind of go back to the world's divided into two, you know, the heart of variability is just a good measure of where you sit on this, you know, on this spectrum, right? Do you have control of your autonomic nervous system? Are you able to respond and adapt to stress in a functional way?

• 35:47Rangan Chatterjee?

  In fact, can I just interrupt there and ask a question which just came to me?

• 35:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  If you could only, okay, measure one metric on an individual, right, to get a snapshot of their health and wellbeing, would it be HRV?

• 36:09Speaker 00

  Well, I'd probably, I'd probably do VO2 max.

• 36:12Rangan Chatterjee?

  Really?

• 36:13Speaker 00

  Because that, like, that's also highly correlated with heart rate variability and resting heart rate, which is, basically gives you a snapshot of your cardio respiratory fitness, right? So it's, so I think with, HRV moves around a ton, right?

• 36:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right.

• 36:29Speaker 00

  It's super sensitive. So it's, it's, um, you know, and, and VO2 max, obviously not something you're looking at every day. You could argue HRV, you're looking at as a snapshot.

• 36:40Speaker 00

  But I would say VO2 max because that would give you a better, more specific way, you would know what you need to do in order to improve your VO2 max, right? So if your VO2 max is trending down, like, all right, I need to run harder, essentially. I need to work my heart harder in order to improve my VO2 max.

• 37:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay. So.

• 37:01Speaker 00

  So yeah, VO2 max.

• 37:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  That's interesting. I wasn't necessarily expecting that. So that's, again, problems with expectations, right?

• 37:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 37:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  So, okay, that's super interesting because I actually thought you might go for HRV and go, well, actually, this is a, one of the best markers of the overall functioning of our nervous system, which of course it is.

• 37:17Speaker 00

  It is.

• 37:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  But I think, again, we're going to have to explain what VO2 max is to people who don't know. And then additionally to that, if someone has got a good VO2 max, you know, and we can discuss what good might mean for someone's age, can we then assume that lots of other things are happening?

• 37:41Speaker 00

  I guess that's what I'm saying.

• 37:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  Like, you're gonna have a good function, a well-functioning nervous system, otherwise you wouldn't be having a good VO2 max.

• 37:48Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 37:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  So it's almost higher root cause sort of thing.

• 37:51Speaker 00

  A hundred percent. Yeah. And I think it's just, um, it's, it's, uh, it's very actionable, you know, and not to say that heart rate variability is not, but, um, but I just think, yeah, VO2 max just is a, it just gives us that really great overall snapshot of your overall health. Yeah.

• 38:12Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, that's, I, that's made me think because.

• 38:14Speaker 00

  And it's really well studied.

• 38:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  I went to Salford Sports Science Lab, two, maybe three years ago and did it. It's quite hard to do, right? You know, for.

• 38:24Speaker 00

  Oh, it's super uncomfortable. Yeah, yeah.

• 38:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  But I haven't done it for a while and I'm feeling as fit as I've felt in ages. So that's a good.

• 38:30Speaker 00

  Need to give it a try. Yeah.

• 38:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  I think I'm gonna go and get it done.

• 38:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, I like keeping, I like keeping track of, of mine. You know, we, we measure it passively on Whoop and I get mine tested, you know, a couple of times a year usually.

• 38:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  Do it twice a year.

• 38:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Usually, so November, actually, I haven't been, um, so I, my last VO2 max in a lab was in November. So I, I didn't, I didn't do it, but yeah.

• 38:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  And can you just explain exactly what VO2 max means?

• 38:57Speaker 00

  So it's basically is, you know, how much oxygen you can take in during the most intense exercise. So it's, it's a measure of kind of your oxygen consumption during intense exercise. And VO2 max, um, you know, for folks who aren't aware, it's, it's, it's probably our, one of the greatest predictors of longevity. It really, you know, it's, it's, you've got a high VO2 max, it's very hard to get sick, it's very hard to die. So it's, it's a good, it's, it's good to be aware of your VO2 max. And I think it's, it's a great, you know, if you're looking for maybe metrics to, to track, obviously heart rate variability, you wanna, it's modifiable, you want it to improve, it moves slowly as you engage behaviours that build a more robust autonomic nervous system. VO2 max is a path to improving heart rate

• 39:42Speaker 00

  variability. But yeah, VO2 max is, is great. Yeah.

• 39:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  And as a slight aside for, you know, you're, you're an athletic individual, right? You've, you've always been sporty. You like, well, my understanding is you enjoy working out, you enjoy sports.

• 39:59Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 40:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  There will be people listening to this show who probably don't identify in that way.

• 40:04Speaker 00

  For sure. Yeah.

• 40:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? So for them, they want to be learning things that they can then do. They go, oh, wow, right, okay, I get it. I get a 45 minute walk is really important for me to find time for each day, right? Is VO2 max, in your view, still important for someone like that?

• 40:20Speaker 00

  Yes. It's, I think for all humans. You know, if you want to pay down the burden of chronic disease, certainly cardiovascular disease, you want to be paying attention to your, you don't even need to pay attention to your VO2 max, but you want to engage behaviours that allow you to improve your heart health, right? And getting out of breath a couple of times a week is a path to that. So in addition to, you know, the 45 minute walk, if you can just, for some folks, it's just as hard as you can walk for 15 seconds, right? Or get on a bike, bike as hard as you can for 30 seconds and then take a two minute break and then try it again. And you just want to repeat that, you know, and that's

• 41:03Speaker 00

  called just interval training, high intensity interval training. And we know that that can, you can improve your, your, your VO2 max by engaging in these kind of higher intensity trainings.

• 41:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  One of the sections I really like in your book is about intelligent training. And it made me think of something that I've changed quite significantly in the last year. So, you know, it's, and really you highlight the importance of variety.

• 41:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:32Rangan Chatterjee?

  In your movement, right? You, you need a selection of different things. You need mobility, you need low intensity, you need high intensity.

• 41:39Speaker 00

  Strength training.

• 41:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  Strength, right, which is really interesting. And so I would say I've kept myself in pretty good shape for many years, right? But I would say the last few years, for a variety of reasons, I have prioritized low intensity stuff. I've done a ton of low intensity work, lots of nasal breathing.

• 42:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:03Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, sometimes I would get, I wouldn't say obsessed, but I would get my heart rate monitor on and, you know, I'd got my zone two measured at the labs and kept it there, right? Done all that. And it's great. And I used to be a very competitive squash player in my teenage years, right? But I think in my mid twenties when I had some baggage, I haven't really played since then. I took up paddle, which is the fastest growing sport in the world, about a year ago.

• 42:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  Oh my God, like within weeks, my resting heart rate was starting to drop. And I thought, wait a minute, I'm already fit and well. But I realized that the sort of movement paddle was giving me a bit more of intensity, bit more sprint here, you know, sudden movements.

• 42:48Speaker 00

  Short bursts, change of direction.

• 42:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  Which I love.

• 42:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  I was like, oh, wow. I have been missing this input to my physiology. Now that's to be clear, I play paddle because I love it and it's fun, right? So I wasn't playing it for a health reason. I was playing it because I took it out with my son.

• 43:06Speaker 00

  And that is ideal.

• 43:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. So and we've literally played five times a week in August. I mean, it's just been phenomenal.

• 43:12Speaker 00

  I love it.

• 43:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  And so that's the dream for all of us, right? We do something that we love.

• 43:16Speaker 00

  Oh, my gosh. Yeah. And it has the second order.

• 43:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  But the second order side effect has been quite remarkable. My resting heart rate, the lowest I've ever seen it. And so somebody will say, oh, paddles to get you fit. I'm like, well, hey, it kind of, again, it's like it starts with food. It depends who you are. It depends what your current tapestry is. I was missing that. So adding it in, I got a really phenomenal and very quick response.

• 43:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, I love that. Yeah. And I think that I think the takeaway for folks who are listening is that you don't need to do, you know, I talk about five domains of intelligent training. You don't need to do, well, one of them is, is recovery is a big piece of that. And, you know, that needs to be baked into our daily lives, I think, very intentionally. Mobility is another one that I think is really important. But just pick one and just start there. You know, like, you don't have to, and guys, you wrote a whole book about behavior change, you know, like, you don't have to, to start with a gazillion things at once. Just think about your values, you know, and when I think about behavior change, and this is how I think about it myself, I'm constantly auditing my, making sure that my behavior is aligned with what I say I value, right? Like, there's

• 44:19Speaker 00

  nothing worse than like, being a phony, right? Like, and like, you know, to yourself, right? Like, you want to build integrity within yourself. That's the most important thing. That's the only scorecard that matters. Right?

• 44:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  And not the truth.

• 44:32Speaker 00

  So you think about what is that you value? And I think about this, I think of a beautiful exercise. I call it the principle of non neutrality. And we'll get back to sleep, wake, timing, but the principle of non neutrality. So you basically think about your life in, in, in the way that there's no neutral actions. Every action that you deploy across the day is either going to support who you want to be in the world or not.

• 44:57Speaker 00

  And if you, if you just, and that sounds harsh, maybe for daily living, but if you just do that for 72 hours, you make a list of, you know, every time you think about your behavior that you're going to engage in, does this support who I want to be? Or does this sabotage who I want to be? And then you start to realize, you, you get an audit of like, what is actually supporting who you want to be? And then you start to back into actually, who do you want to be? You know, you're like, ah, does, you know, sometimes, you know, just how you treat the person at the CVS counter at the pharmacy? Like, you know, like, did that align with who I want to be? You know, just like, if you think about it super tactically and like, on a really micro level, you can start to

• 45:41Speaker 00

  paint a picture of the person you actually are.

• 45:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. Oh, my God. I, I just love that so much. And you said, maybe it's a bit harsh. I don't think it's harsh at all. Like, I really don't. You want to change your life. The first thing you have to do is become radically honest with yourself.

• 46:02Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 46:03Rangan Chatterjee?

  Once you start lying to yourself and kidding yourself, you are literally trying to build change on a foundation of sand. And I know that because I've tried to do that in the past. It doesn't work.

• 46:13Speaker 00

  I know. Same, same.

• 46:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  You have to be able to be honest and go, and I love that, you know, oh, yeah, you're great to your colleagues, you're great to your boss, but are you great to the person who can't do anything for you in the shop?

• 46:26Speaker 00

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 46:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? Because that really does show you who you are. And again, it's, again, we can't fall into the trap of beating ourselves up, right? It's not about, for me at least, it's not about.

• 46:34Speaker 00

  And that's why I think I caveat with the harshness, you know.

• 46:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  But it's like, but you can be kind to yourself and go, wow, yeah, you know what? What, why wasn't I nice to the, I think you said the lady at CVS, you know, did I have a, did I have an ego? Did I think I was, I was better than her? Did I feel entitled to something that, whatever it might be?

• 46:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's that self inquiry that gives you the gold that allows you to properly change your life for good, doesn't it?

• 47:02Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I think that's the most radical form of self-love.

• 47:05Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 47:05Speaker 00

  Is when, and when you are kind of living in alignment with who you say you want to be.

• 47:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. Well, I want to get back to that word alignment. I'm gonna, I'm gonna try and discipline myself to get us back to close off the loop.

• 47:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, sleep, wake consistency.

• 47:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. And it's, it's, so the four behaviors that will help us with our sleep, wake consistency, which will then also help us regulate our autonomic nervous system. Okay. So where, where were we?

• 47:31Speaker 00

  So basically, I was saying how sleep, wake consistency, which is quite literally the time you go to bed and when you wake up, you want to make that as stable as possible.

• 47:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 47:40Speaker 00

  Okay, this helps improve your menstrual cycle regularity. It helps improve, you know, from the very, from the Tare Pogaches in the world, of the world who won five Tour de France's physiological stability is one of the greatest predictors of his performance levels. It's also predicts cycle regularity. It also predicts symptoms associated, symptom severity and frequency during perimenopause and menopause and menstrual cycle.

• 48:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  Just to make sure we've all landed that. So you're basically saying sleep, wake consistency. So going to bed.

• 48:13Speaker 00

  Brings about physiological stability across heart rate variability, resting heart rate, sleep.

• 48:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  But sleep, wake consistency in and of itself, you're saying is helping our

• 48:23Speaker 00

  That behavior is helping.

• 48:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  Performance and for women.

• 48:26Speaker 00

  Health.

• 48:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  In perimenopause or, or through menopause.

• 48:30Speaker 00

  Symptom reductions.

• 48:30Rangan Chatterjee?

  It helps reduce symptoms.

• 48:32Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 48:32Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? So, and again, this gets to real root cause approach.

• 48:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, this isn't causal, right? But these are correlational.

• 48:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  And you're not, of course, saying that women shouldn't be taking hormones or anything like that.

• 48:45Speaker 00

  There's something here. Yeah, yeah.

• 48:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  You're just saying, as well as anything else you might be considering.

• 48:50Speaker 00

  Right.

• 48:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  Don't forget about sleep, wake consistency.

• 48:54Speaker 00

  What it shows is that if there's an amplification of symptom severity and frequency in the absence of this stability that I'm talking about, this consistency.

• 49:05Rangan Chatterjee?

  And stability, right?

• 49:08Speaker 00

  How much variability can you get away with?

• 49:09Rangan Chatterjee?

  Within half an hour each night?

• 49:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, roughly. You know, I think the older you get, the less, the more sensitive our circadian rhythms are, the less robust they are. And there's lots of variation between people, like, within people, like, it's, you know, so it's certainly not one size fit all. You might have a more robust circadian system. I might be more sensitive. I have to have that window be narrower. And people, when they start to self audit, they'll recognize who they are. And then you got to just create boundaries to protect that, right? Knowing that it impacts your health, how you show up the next day, whether or not you can live your values with joy and energy, right? Like, these all kind of tie together, right? So, yeah, so sleep, wake consistency drives quality, which is really, you know, the timeframe

• 49:54Speaker 00

  during sleep where you're restoring and regenerating. And that is correlated, the extent to which you get sleep quality is correlated with your autonomic nervous system health. So sleep quality really matters. Sleep consistency is the behavior that drives it. All the stuff, the four core behaviors we talked about can help get you to fall asleep and stay asleep at a more consistent, you know, more consistently.

• 50:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  So in essence.

• 50:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  Trying to lock in those four free behaviors has probably zero downside and a hell of a lot of upside.

• 50:32Speaker 00

  If people are starting from scratch, that is a great place to start.

• 50:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 50:35Speaker 00

  You know, it's evidence based, it's, you know, it's in what was really cool in the study is we were able, people continued with these behaviors after the study was over.

• 50:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. Well, then they're not, they're not difficult. Once you've locked them in.

• 50:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. And you start feeling good. You start to see the benefit.

• 50:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. One of the things I love about time restricted eating and always have done since Sachin Panda's early papers, and I think, I think 2014, his first mouse study came out from recollection, is although he and other researchers are not saying, eat whatever you want, actually, in some ways where people find it sometimes hard to make the right choices, some people say, I can't afford healthy nutritious foods. And I totally recognize that is the case for some people, right? Time restricted eating is available to everyone.

• 51:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:24Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? You don't have to change what you eat, you're just changing when you eat.

• 51:28Speaker 00

  Definitely, definitely. And it can get you, you know, is it going to totally transform your metabolic health? Probably not, but it can get you some other way there.

• 51:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 51:37Speaker 00

  You know, like, there, there's no question that I think in the, in the data, I think the literature support, there's some good RCTs that support randomized control trials, where we see eating earlier in the day.

• 51:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 51:51Speaker 00

  We're just more primed metabolically to digest the food. We're more active, right? We're using those nutrients, right, in our daily activities. And so, and as the day goes on, we also know that we become less, we become more insulin resistant.

• 52:06Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 52:06Speaker 00

  Right? We're just not as capable of using those nutrients in the way that is helpful for our body, our nutrient sensing, all of that kind of changes across the day.

• 52:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  Which goes back to one of your central ideas in the book, that the body runs on timing.

• 52:20Speaker 00

  It does. Not on willpower, folks, on timing.

• 52:22Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. So there's a time to eat more food. There's a time, you know, and again, I always think about these traditional healing modalities like Ayurvedic medicine or traditional Chinese medicine. And they've always understood.

• 52:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  Concepts like personalized medicine, which is the rage now.

• 52:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  They got it two, three thousand years ago. They were all different. They were, you know, in, in Ayurvedic medicine, they, they'll put you into, they've got these three categories. This is very crude, very broadly, you know, you know, there's a lot more specificity, but oh, if you're this type of person, you need to eat more of these sorts of foods. If you're this type of person, you need to eat more of these types of foods. And of course, the scientific process, as great as it is, for much of the 20th century, it kind of ignored that and tried to put everyone in the same box.

• 53:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, so true.

• 53:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  And now we're moving back to.

• 53:12Speaker 00

  I think so.

• 53:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  Oh, we're all responsible slightly differently, but there, but there are these core.

• 53:16Speaker 00

  Principles.

• 53:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  Core principles and not eating for 16 hours of every 24 hours is a good thing for most humans.

• 53:23Speaker 00

  Exactly. And there's so much debate online about like, I'm like, guys, we're losing the plot here. Like, you raised such a good point that as the day goes on, we just, our willpower decreases, right? We've made 2,000 decisions over the course of the day and now we're gonna, do we have to decide, okay, am I gonna have the ice cream before, better or not? Well, if you have that 12 hour block and that your last calorie is at seven, you take that decision off the table.

• 53:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 53:49Speaker 00

  And if you're distributing your macronutrients throughout the day, you're getting enough calories, you're not gonna need or you're not gonna be hungry.

• 53:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 53:56Speaker 00

  You know, so it's just, it's kind of like, all right, like I can do this, you know, I can eat over a 12 hour, you know, period, and then I can let my body rest, regenerate, heal over the course of the 12 hours. And I will say the data is wildly supportive of this 12 on, 12 off.

• 54:12Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I mean, you've got, just to be clear, I mean, I've heard you talk about this, but you have access to all the whoop data, right?

• 54:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  So you, I'm pretty sure that study, was it 38,000 people?

• 54:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, 39,000 people.

• 54:24Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, so these aren't small, you know.

• 54:26Speaker 00

  TRE had independent effects on cardio respiratory fitness, so in, in parasympathetic activity. So last night's a really good example.

• 54:38Rangan Chatterjee?

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• 55:21Rangan Chatterjee?

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• 56:04Rangan Chatterjee?

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• 56:47Rangan Chatterjee?

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• 57:25Rangan Chatterjee?

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• 57:44Speaker 00

  I started my fast pretty early yesterday because I was traveling. I was trying to basically, I need to maximize my sleep and recovery tonight. I wake up with a 47 resting heart rate.

• 57:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  Wow.

• 57:56Speaker 00

  And minus 51. So it's not, it's not like it's huge, but when you extend your fast, not a lot, but when you are really trying to recover from travel, when you're trying to kind of get yourself in a place where you are, you know, allowing that healing to be maximized over the course of the night, not forcing your body to have to digest food is really good strategy.

• 58:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I think I mentioned this a few months ago, but that is one thing I've changed. Like I, you know, if I ever had an evening event, which I rarely do these days, because I try and align my work around my design schedule.

• 58:30Speaker 00

  You just have earlier, yeah, actually.

• 58:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, so well, actually, this November, I'm doing seven live shows in various spaces around the world.

• 58:37Speaker 00

  That's amazing.

• 58:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  But five of them are on a Sunday.

• 58:40Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 58:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  And you know what? I'm doing it at 4pm.

• 58:43Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 58:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  I'm like, I'm not gonna, if I can choose, if it's, if it, I know some people work on a Sunday.

• 58:49Speaker 00

  People are coming to see you. You can say what it is.

• 58:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  I don't wanna go home better midnight. I don't think my audience do. So it's gonna be like four till seven. So we can all get home and get our nights, which is, which is super interesting, but.

• 59:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, I love it.

• 59:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  For, for concepts of people, you flew from Boston to the UK yesterday, right?

• 59:08Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 59:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's a five hour.

• 59:09Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 59:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  Time difference. You've also got a two hour train up this morning to come and see me.

• 59:14Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 59:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay. And, you know, I know you slept well last night. Your data's all really good this morning. It's pretty remarkable to see how cognizantly sharp you are on the back of all that. And it's really interesting to hear that you, I'm sure you were hungry and could have quite liked a little something last night, right? But you've, you've learned enough about your body to know, actually, it's better for me not to eat at the moment. I'm gonna be much better tomorrow and more resilient and I'll recover more. That's what we were talking about before. That's knowing yourself, isn't it?

• 59:47Speaker 00

  Yes. I think, I think so. And I, and I do think there's also this idea, we were talking about it earlier, like just that belief in that, like I like imagine my body recovering. I imagine my body and my mind, you know, feeling safe and, you know, like I kind of put myself in that, I guess, I create the kind of mindset and conditions where I'm like able to drop into a really restorative sleep in a hotel I've never been in, after a day of travel. Like, I kind of have got to a point where I can like, kind of talk myself into that future in a, in a way.

• 1:00:22Rangan Chatterjee?

  That, that's really beautiful because there is this sort of tension sometimes between, you know, routine and resilience, right? You know, that, that, you know, when you're at home, you can lock in these four behaviors probably because you've set your life around it, right? But can we adapt and be resilient when we're not in our environment?

• 1:00:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:47Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? Which is, which I think is important as well.

• 1:00:49Speaker 00

  I think so, yeah.

• 1:00:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  With the best will in the world, this consistent sleep wait time, you know, you might be able to do 70%, 80%, 90% at a time, but you're gonna, you know, depending on who you are, there may be times when you're working a late shift at work.

• 1:01:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:05Rangan Chatterjee?

  Or you have an evening concert you wanna go to and you come back late. But you know what? You had such a blast at the concert. It was worth.

• 1:01:13Speaker 00

  A hundred percent.

• 1:01:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  The impact.

• 1:01:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  Like me, I literally, I'm, I'm on a, I'm on a high at the moment because my all time favorite band, Bon Jovi from a kid, and I've seen them.

• 1:01:24Speaker 00

  I have talked to Bon Jovi before, his team. Yeah.

• 1:01:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  There you go.

• 1:01:28Speaker 00

  I think I can say that.

• 1:01:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  I've seen with a weird band before.

• 1:01:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. He wears a whoop. Yeah.

• 1:01:30Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, he came on the podcast last year, which was.

• 1:01:32Speaker 00

  Oh, my God.

• 1:01:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  A certain moment for me. I don't think I've ever been that nervous with anyone because he was like my boyhood idol.

• 1:01:38Speaker 00

  Oh, my gosh. He is just a legend.

• 1:01:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  But I went to Dublin on Sunday to watch them at Croke Park, which was phenomenal. 80,000 people, sellout. It was just utterly phenomenal. And I'm still buzzing today, four days later from that. Yeah, you know what? I got to bed really late. I think I went to bed at half past midnight. That time I walked home to the hotel.

• 1:01:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  But I think that's okay as well.

• 1:02:02Speaker 00

  It is.

• 1:02:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  Do you know what I mean?

• 1:02:03Speaker 00

  And I, and I say this in the book, you know, I, for the way I live, I'm probably 90, 10, you know, I, 90% of the time, you know, I have a relatively boring life in the sense that the people I hang, hang out with kind of have the same view on life as I do. But, you know, 10% of the time, I, I go off the rails, right? Like, and, you know, and sometimes, sometimes it's more like 20%, right? But I think if we can, 80% of the time, create these routines, we can, we create some buffer in the system to be able to handle these moments where, you know, you don't wanna get sick on, getting sick on vacation is, I think, a great. Indicator that you don't have this 80/20 balance in your day to day.

• 1:02:48Speaker 00

  It's called the letdown effect and it's a very kind of common phenomenon. Basically, when you are, oftentimes like life, especially you're kind of getting ready for a vacation. Like you're trying to meet deadlines, you're trying to get everything buttoned up. And so your body's marshaling these defenses, right? And it's infinite wisdom to kind of increase your immune, get your immune system increased and cortisol and epinephrine. You've got all of this, like, you know, these energy hormones, like, you know, kind of mobilizing. And then you go on vacation and invariably your system lets down and you get sick. Right? That is, to me, an indicator that you don't have the right sense of balance and proportion across your kind of day, week, month.

• 1:03:33Speaker 00

  So that's a good, just kind of like gut check. Do I get sick on vacation? When I let down after a big project, do I get sick? And if the answer is yes, you probably need to rethink your day to day. It doesn't mean you need to cut down your ambition, doesn't mean you need to cut down your obsession for like the thing that you're doing. But you want to also be able to not have to deal with these setbacks, right? And sometimes those sickness can actually be a disease, right? If this is a chronic kind of scenario where you are constantly in the state of demand mismatch. Right? You've got your energy output and the demands on your time.

• 1:04:13Speaker 00

  When you are basically in a scenario where your demands exceed your capacity, right? You end up getting sick.

• 1:04:22Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  You mentioned in the book that you have pretty much not been sick for eight years now.

• 1:04:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  Touch wood, yeah.

• 1:04:34Speaker 00

  Going strong.

• 1:04:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  Of course, there's multiple factors that are at play.

• 1:04:41Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:04:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  In terms of whether someone gets sick or not. But in your view, why do you think you have become so resilient to, I guess, illness?

• 1:04:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think sleep-wake consistency. I kind of go back to that. That's the one big change. The last time I was sick was February 2017. I remember, yeah, I traveled to Penn State with one of my colleagues, Mike Lombardi. And we were working with the ice hockey team. And yeah, and I was like, I said to Michael, I'm like, oh, man, I'm getting sick. And sure enough, yeah, I ended up with a head cold. And then that summer, Andrew Phillips came out with a paper that basically was looking at what predicts GPA in Harvard students. And the greatest predictor of GPA was sleep-wake consistency. And he calls it sleep-wake regularity.

• 1:05:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  And for people in the UK who don't know, GPA is your...

• 1:05:38Speaker 00

  Oh, sorry, your grade point average. Sorry. So your grades.

• 1:05:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  Your grades, basically.

• 1:05:42Speaker 00

  Sleep regularity was the thing that predicted GPA.

• 1:05:45Rangan Chatterjee?

  That's incredible.

• 1:05:46Speaker 00

  I know. So I started, at the time, I was working with tons of athletes. So I had about 230 athletes at the time that I was working with really consistently. So I started manually tracking sleep-wake consistency. And sure enough, over the course of six months, the athletes who got injured less, sick less, and kind of performed, you know, by the subjective kind of appraisal of their coaches, performed better, were the ones who had more stable sleep-wake consistency. So I was like, damn, there's something here. And then we started tracking it. And then we started, it started bubbling up in every single research. We started including, in a piece of research that we did, we started including sleep-wake consistency as one of the variables, sometimes an outcome measure. And sure enough, it was predictive of everything.

• 1:06:31Speaker 00

  And then separately, Daniel Windridge and his colleagues, a researcher, I think it's Adam Manash, he's brilliant, he's so young. I looked him up like online and I thought he was going to be like 70 years old. He's like 25. I'm like, good God. But he is just a machine. But basically, what he and his colleagues published in January of 2024 is they saw that sleep-wake regularity or consistency was a greater predictor of all-cause mortality than sleep duration.

• 1:06:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  Wow.

• 1:06:57Speaker 00

  And they also, then they found too, and this is with the UK Biobank, I think it was like, you know, 79,000 folks kind of in this sample. And then the other one that they just published pretty recently looked at disease. And again, sleep-wake regularity was a greater predictor of disease than sleep duration. So sleep duration matters, but this consistency is just so stabilizing.

• 1:07:22Rangan Chatterjee?

  And from what you've seen, presumably it doesn't matter too much what it is, as long as it's consistent. So I know I am the best version of me when I'm asleep by nine and I'm up by five.

• 1:07:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? I just know that.

• 1:07:38Speaker 00

  Boom, yeah. You've got it.

• 1:07:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  I'm just on fire all the time. Energy, inspiration, whatever it is, I'm the person I want to be. Whereas my wife would probably be, I guess, 11 till seven, I guess.

• 1:07:51Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:07:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  Probably push that seven a bit later. But just help us understand how that changes between individuals.

• 1:07:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, so basically, we know generally, you know, if we're to put a bunch of humans who identify as morning larks and night owls on a mountain with no electricity, they would all fall asleep, you know, within 48 hours of being in that environment, they'd all fall asleep about 3.3 hours after the sun sets, within 30 minutes of each other.

• 1:08:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  Irrespective, in inverted commas, chronotype.

• 1:08:23Speaker 00

  Yeah. So it's not that there aren't chronotypes, but I don't know, I don't think there is egregiously different than, I think a lot of that is just modern life.

• 1:08:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, it's environmental in terms of...

• 1:08:33Speaker 00

  I think it is.

• 1:08:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  I think a lot of it is.

• 1:08:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, and you know, there's lots of debate in this kind of sleep and circadian sciences. And I obviously very much respect that. But I think there is, I think the environment plays an enormous role. And not just when you're an adult, but the environment that you have as a child, right? Do you have a lot of noise in urban environment? Do you have, you know, four siblings in the same room? Like, you know, I mean, gosh, you know, all of that has an impact, I think, on how you end up being, how you sleep as an adult, right? So in the habits that you create, I think the profession that you end up going into, you know, like back in the savanna, like you didn't have, you couldn't be the, you know, if you're a musician, artist, like you're doing it during the daylight, right? Regardless, right? We have the opportunity now to be awake at all hours, right? And because that's when people are going to concerts.

• 1:09:18Speaker 00

  And so I say all that just so people, for folks who do want to try to shift earlier, for whatever reason, you know, to just kind of get, create a little distance from that midnight hour, you know, to kind of take advantage of kind of that sweet spot before midnight. Because we know there's other data that suggest, that show, basically, when you go to bed after midnight, you have a higher fasting glucose the next day. Okay, independent of everything else that's going on. So this is a very well-designed, well-controlled study. So, you know, there is something, there is some magic before midnight, right? That we want to try to leverage. I think when we look at circulating melatonin, same sort of thing.

• 1:10:00Speaker 00

  I think the bottom line is you don't want to bypass your natural pressure for sleep. Whatever that is, for you, it's nine, your wife, it's 11. You know, for me, it's usually like 10. You know, like I definitely want to prepare and be ready to sleep at 10. And I kind of same thing, I wake her up around six. So I think like it's worth the experiments in your own life to figure out what is my natural pressure for sleep? And the way to begin that experiment is to wake up at the same time every single day, get the morning natural light, get as much daylight as you can, as you can manage, have a dark night, like so create contrast between your day and night. And sure enough, as long as you don't have caffeine after two or kind of falling asleep

• 1:10:44Speaker 00

  on the couch at 7:00 PM, you should be in a scenario where you start to feel when you naturally are sleepy, right? And I think that is one of the most important human experiments someone can run right now in modern society.

• 1:10:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:58Speaker 00

  Because you go to people in the street, they don't even know when they would naturally feel sleepy because they're constantly pushing past that natural pressure for sleep with an extra, you know, show on Netflix or, you know, that Slack message that they got from a colleague or that email that they're sending out, you know, whatever it might be, right?

• 1:11:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's not just the light. I mean, of course, the bright light exposure that we might be looking at in the evenings, yes, that has an impact, but it's also the constant stimulation.

• 1:11:25Speaker 00

  For sure.

• 1:11:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  So we're not allowing that natural lull to fall into that. We're still trying to answer emails, whatever it might be. Of course, you can't sleep.

• 1:11:33Speaker 00

  Right, right. Like your heart rate is going to be activated, right? You're telling your body that it is time to be awakened, time to perform. As a result, you end up, those chemicals end up circulating in your body, right?

• 1:11:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  The thing I was mentioning before, that one of the big things I've changed over the last couple of years is if I, which I don't very often anymore, but if I do have an evening event or a show that I'm doing or a live talk... I would, I used to eat when I got back to the hotel room. And it'd still be, you know, healthy food, in inverted commas.

• 1:12:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  But I felt like I had a hangover the next morning, even though I hadn't been drinking any alcohol. And I, I've, I've run the experiment enough on myself to know, hey, I am generally better off going to bed a little bit hungry.

• 1:12:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  In that scenario.

• 1:12:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  Than, than eating something.

• 1:12:22Speaker 00

  Plenty of glycogen in my muscles, like, you know, it's no problem. Yeah, I'm gonna be fine. I'm not gonna.

• 1:12:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  The truth is, once you're asleep, it's fine anyway. It's just in those, you know, before you fall asleep. So that's, I kind of think is really, really interesting. The other thing I was, I was just gonna share is one of the most important behaviours I do each day, which I don't even think about anymore. It's automatic. At least one hour before bed, if not 90 minutes, I'm not working.

• 1:12:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  I mean, I know it sounds just so obvious, but I have disciplined myself that laptop is off. I'm not gonna work. Actually, it's really two hours, but I, I don't do work.

• 1:13:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  And for me, that I think has had some of the biggest impacts because, you know, we can talk about caffeine and alcohol and all those things. And of course, there are biological consequences of having stimulants. And I get all that.

• 1:13:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  And, you know, for many years, I don't have caffeine after 12 o'clock. So I know it affects me at night. But I really felt that, you know, just, I'm just sending different inputs to my brain. I'm like, oh, the day is over. We're now on relaxation time. That has been game changing for me.

• 1:13:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, like I said, I mean, it, it, we kind of go back. Like when we think about the circadian system, right? And you've got, you know, basically the photic inputs, that's the light, right? That's telling. So anytime your eyes are open, right? You're sending a signal to your suprachiasmatic nucleus, which is the control centre of your brain, what kind of time of day it is, you know? So if you are basking in bright lights at 10:00 PM, your body is gonna think that is supposed to be awake, right? So it's gonna be sending all of those kind of signals.

• 1:14:03Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, and then you think you're a night owl.

• 1:14:05Speaker 00

  And you think you're a night owl.

• 1:14:06Rangan Chatterjee?

  Which you might be, but you might not be as well.

• 1:14:08Speaker 00

  You might not be, right? So that, but that, that signal, when it, when your body, but your body still is craving darkness at that time. It's, it's expecting darkness, but now you're giving it light, right? So now what you're doing is creating some confusion in your body. And if you're curious about the basis of aging and disease, it's confusion at a cellular level. So when you're bypassing these kind of natural, the natural light, dark cycle, you create endogenous confusion. So if you get sick a lot, if you are struggling with symptoms

• 1:14:50Speaker 00

  related to your menstrual cycle, perimenopause, menopause, like you just feel like you can't get, start with your light diet, right? That's just a great place to start. Like, our body craves contrast. We want a lot of activity during the day. We want a lot of light during the day. We want food during the day. At night, we don't want light, we don't want food, we don't want activity. It's that simple. And there's a paper that was just published, looking exactly at this contrast, right? Individuals who have really bright nights and dark days struggle with their mental health, right? Like, this is not a secret, right? It's, but what's crazy is I say this online, it's like heresy. I am being heretical, right?

• 1:15:32Speaker 00

  Like, people are, they come down to me like I'm, I'm suggest, like what I am suggesting is off the rails. And for me, that's a comment of actually how far off the rails modern society is.

• 1:15:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  Because the 99.9% of our evolution, this was the norm.

• 1:15:47Speaker 00

  If you look at, if you look at any time scale that matters, right? If you look at biology on the X axis, the Y axis is just technology and just electric light, food access, like all of that, right? The delta is, biology is flat. There's no change. We have not adapted or evolved to any of this technological change. So there's a gap between our, the technological advancements and our biology. And that delta is here. And how we regulate our nervous system, to bring this full circle, determines kind of how we manage modern life.

• 1:16:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. But even if we go back to those four behaviours, right? Now, you could argue the, you know, reducing stress through breath work may not have been required for, for lots of cultures, let's say 10,000 years ago. I don't know that to be true, but perhaps, perhaps they were naturally mostly in parasympathetic, so relaxation state punctuated by a little bit of sympathetic stress now and again. The other three, they probably all had, right?

• 1:16:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:16:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  They weren't eating 15 hours a day. It was probably less than 12, right? Whether we call it zone two or low intensity movement.

• 1:17:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:17:06Rangan Chatterjee?

  They were 100% moving their bodies every day.

• 1:17:08Speaker 00

  Women, seven miles, men 10. Yeah, kilometre, sorry.

• 1:17:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right. And then they were getting morning light. They're not sitting around in the cave like, you know, scrolling their phone. But like, it's time to get up and actually crack on with gathering or hunting or whatever you might do, right? So that's the crazy thing, right? We're now having to teach people, and yes, you've got the data to prove it, but fundamentally, those four processes, they're just basic inputs that our physiology needs to run.

• 1:17:40Speaker 00

  There's no, I mean, there is not a mental health disorder where circadian misalignment is not present.

• 1:17:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:47Speaker 00

  You know, I, I think you, like, that is the place to look.

• 1:17:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  You start there if you can, yes. And if someone's got severe depression, they will struggle to do that. But the amount of people whose mental wellbeing improves dramatically when they engage in these quite simple behaviours.

• 1:18:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. The suggestion isn't that we go back to the savanna, right? Like, that's not what I'm suggesting, but, but I am suggesting we need a strategy. And if you think you don't need a strategy to deal with kind of the traps of modern life, you're crazy. Like, modern society is set up for us to fail.

• 1:18:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:19Speaker 00

  It's just, we, it's set up for us to fail. And I think all we have to do is look at the global health data to understand that we are failing.

• 1:18:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:29Speaker 00

  And, and we just have to, we have to get into cahoots with one another and figure out, okay, how do we get back to a schedule that is more aligned with the natural light, dark cycle at a very basic level? And I say that in it, everyone, I know it sounds crazy, but our mental, physical, emotional, and I would argue our spiritual wellbeing is what's at stake here.

• 1:18:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. There's so much more about, in inverted commas, physical health we could talk about. But I wanna pivot a little bit to my favourite part of your new book. It's the, the middle section, which you call the architecture within. And as I said at the start, I love the way that you demonstrate beautifully how they each affect each other, right? So it isn't one or the other. They're both important. And, you know, you start where you need to start, right? Some, some people will go in first, some people will go for those external behaviours first. But I, but I, I was sharing to you in my kitchen before we started recording,

• 1:19:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  how much I love the title, aligned. So I think the secret to life is alignment, frankly. And alignment can be, you know, you can be aligned with your circadian rhythm. You can be aligned with your values, right? You can be internally aligned where your mind, body and soul are all going in the same direction. It's a beautiful word that evokes so much, I think. But I wanna read you a section from your personal readiness chat that I, I really liked and how it connects health and wellbeing to deep alignment. Okay, you wrote this.

• 1:20:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  "There is a growing body of research highlighting the connection between living deeply aligned with values and an extended health span, which is the portion of life spent in good health without chronic illness or disability. Our physiology even echoes our sense of purpose. Heart rate variability, which you've talked about on, you know, several times during this podcast so far, is consistently tied to purpose-driven living." I, I love it. It's beautiful because we, we treat these things as separate. Oh, I'm gonna sort my health out. Oh, and then a different, what's my purpose, right?

• 1:21:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  I mean, I wanna, I wanna live with more purpose, as if these things are separate.

• 1:21:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:21:05Rangan Chatterjee?

  So maybe talk to us about, you know, what alignment means to you and why living deeply aligned with your values has such a profound impact on our health.

• 1:21:17Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, everything that you just said is really, I think, a feature of an integrated kind of centre, you know? And that sounds like so woo woo, right? But it's, it's everything, the physical, the mental, the emotional, the spiritual, like, it's, it's all in us, right? In the, in the sense of like, it's there for us. It's like, we just have to tap it, right? We have to just say, all right, this is actually who I wanna be in the world. And I think to, purpose is, is very much related to your identity, right? So figuring out, who do I actually wanna be in the world? And I, and I take you in that chapter, I kind of take you through some exercises. And there's more in the workbook where people can kind of workshop on their own, like.

• 1:22:02Speaker 00

  But I think that's a really fundamental question, right? Like, I wanna, I wanna be a person who lives my values with joy and energy. That is my identity, right? And everything that I do during the day is gonna back into that identity. Now, identity doesn't have to be fixed, right? It's gonna evolve, especially like, you know, who my daughter is today. She's, you know, she's 18. It's gonna be very different than probably who she is at 25, but kind of the core of who she is probably doesn't change that much, right? And, but, but I think in order for us to come to a conclusion around what is our purpose today? And how is that influencing how the choices I make today? Is one of the most important, I think.

• 1:22:48Speaker 00

  Exercises that you can engage in consistently. I think about my values every day. And I ask myself at the end of the day, when I look myself in the mirror, did I live my values today? And sometimes, yes, sometimes, no. You know, and but that's like the scorecard I keep. And that's the only one that matters to me. Because if I can live my values, like, everything else is gonna pretty much work out for itself. You know, and my mental health matters, my physical health matters. So if I look myself at the end of the day, and I didn't like, move my body in the way that I needed to move my body, well, I know that I'm not living my values. I'm not being the person I aspire to be. I'm not creating the conditions to be the person I aspire to be. And that's really, I think, when we're designing our life, right? We only get one.

• 1:23:33Speaker 00

  We only get one. So when you're designing your life, you need to think about, what are the conditions that I need to engage in across the day? For whatever your value, whatever your identity is, for that to be true, what are, what do I need to engage in? And I go back to that principle of non-neutrality. Like, doing that exercise where you're really thinking about, all right, if if this is my identity, does this behavior support it, or does it detract from it? And then you start to see where you're sabotaging your own life. And so, you know, purpose, I think, is so powerful. And and but it's you gotta sit with it. And you need to figure out, okay, what does this actually mean? Right? Because that's gonna be driving your behaviors. It should be driving your behaviors.

• 1:24:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. It's so interesting, this stuff. Some people will no doubt, Kristen, be thinking, I don't know where to start.

• 1:24:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:24:30Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? What do you mean, my values? My, I've got a job. I need to go to my job. I need to, you know, earn the money so I can pay the bills. And getting through each day is a struggle. Is thinking about values important for that person as well?

• 1:24:48Speaker 00

  I mean, I think for everyone, right? Like, I think, I mean, you, we see it in the research, right? Like, our long-term health is very much tied to our sense of purpose and meaning. And the thing is, you don't just stumble upon meaning, you create it. You build it into your life. You know, what are the things that bring you actual joy? You know, and I think that's also one of the traps of modernity. Like, we don't actually have enough time with our own thoughts.

• 1:25:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:18Speaker 00

  Like, we're constantly pulling ourselves from the present moment. So I think a lot of these questions that I invite people to to think about are, I don't know if they're questions people are asking of themselves as intentionally as maybe we could or should, right? When it comes to like, living a purpose-driven life. So I think just just carving out 10 minutes to just think about, all right, what like actually brings me joy? And I think joy can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, right? But that, and that's a good thing.

• 1:25:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:52Speaker 00

  You know? And then what are, in order for me to experience joy, if that's something that's important to me, what needs to be true about my day? All right, well, what are the, who are the, what are the people? And the outlets, right? Do I have those people and outlets in my life that allow me to experience that joy? You know, so joy could be a value in of itself, you know? And do I have the skills and expertise? You know, maybe it's personal growth, right? Like, how do you, and when I talk about kind of the scaffolding around psychological health, right? It's peace, purpose, efficacy, autonomy, and connection, right? And the purpose, you want to discover your identity, right? Inside your purpose, like, who do I aspire to be in the world, right?

• 1:26:37Speaker 00

  And then that helps you back into your values, which helps you have a purposeful, meaning, meaningful life. Efficacy, do I have the skills and resources to do what's asked of me? Right? So if you are not able to live your purpose, right? What kind of skills do you need to build? Right? If you know that energy is really important to you, and you want to be able to be alert during the day and be in a good mood, well, what is that? What kind of skills do you need to build to make that happen? Maybe it's like, I need to figure out how to work out. I need, in order to have more energy, I need to get fit. Right? Or, you know, if you're getting sick a lot, or, you know, you basically, what are the skills that I need to build? What are the resources I need to build? And that could also mean creating some boundaries in your life.

• 1:27:21Speaker 00

  And that's where, to skip to the connection piece, do people support who you want to be in the world? You know, there's a lot of, I think, when we look around at the people in our life, there's a lot of people that don't actually deserve to be there. They're not worthy of us. They're not worthy of our time. Right? They hurt us in ways that keep us from our, living our purpose, right? And so the quicker you can kind of, I think, refine your circle, the better. Because that also, you know, impacts the quality of your life massively. Right? So a lot of what I'm talking about is probably not additional stuff. It's actually subtracting stuff.

• 1:28:03Speaker 00

  And, you know, there's a, there's a quote by Naval Ravi Kant, who I think is, it's great. And I think about it in the context of peace. Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. So it's not about more. It's about not having fuzzy desires. Right? Like, thinking about like, what do I actually need in my life to feel that sense of purpose and meaning? What needs to be true? And oftentimes, we'll find there's too much going on in our lives for us to actually focus on that. So we need to subtract, not add.

• 1:28:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  Some of the best books, I think, are written when we have a real deep, personal desire to to learn about things that have affected us and how to move on. And as you were talking then about how some people in our life don't deserve to be there. There was a really strong emotion there that I could feel. You mentioned at the start about some aspects of your childhood and your mom. And she struggled with alcoholism, I think you were saying. Is this a personal book?

• 1:29:29Speaker 00

  Very much so, yeah. I think one of the reasons why I wrote Chapter One, The Alchemy of Adversity, is, and I have gotten, you know, lots of messages from folks who are like, I just assumed your life was perfect. You know? And it wasn't. You know, and a lot of that struggle that was kind of the first half of my life, I think, gave me the ability to write this book, you know? Because I had to figure it out for myself. Or, you know, I was going down such a dark path that if I didn't figure it out, like, I would not be here today.

• 1:30:09Speaker 00

  And and so, you know, I had that own kind of moment of reckoning for myself, where, you know, I need to, you know, I mean, forgiveness is a big piece of this puzzle, right? Like, I had an abuse, you know, my grandfather abused me for 10 years of my life. You know, and I needed to figure out, how do I move on from that? How do I not allow this to define me? You know, and knowing that, you know, my mom's struggle, my mom's pain, that was not my fault, you know? But a lot of the coping mechanisms that I had developed in response to that were maladaptive as an adult. You know, I, you know, what was viewed on the outside as, gosh, you know,

• 1:30:53Speaker 00

  so ambitious, so, gosh, an athlete, and Olympian, and all of these things, you know? And I didn't have any joy. I could not access joy. And and so, I think for me, I, if I wanted to hopefully accelerate people's wisdom around some of this stuff, and to know that we are just in this together, right? And and I just think that this is, this is a short life, but it has the the opportunity to be a beautiful life. You know, if we understand where to focus our attention, you know? And and what I try to outline in this book is just the basic principles, right? And you can take it in any direction that you want to go. But these are the things based on certainly my life experience,

• 1:31:38Speaker 00

  but also a lot of the evidence that exists in the, in the, in the science, you know, around our physiology and our psychology. You know, I'm standing on the shoulder of of just incredible social psychologists, and Edward Deci, and Richard Ryan, and Albert Bandura, and, you know, Russell Foster, and, you know, all these just scientists, right? You know, people like yourself who bring me inspiration every single day. And and so this is an amalgam of kind of all of that work, too, on on top of this deep personal experience. So it's a long answer. Yes, it's deeply personal.

• 1:32:12Rangan Chatterjee?

  I mean, first of all, I'm, I'm sorry for what happened to you. And when you were a child. I feel listening to you, and, you know, I followed your work for a few years. We spoke on this podcast, you know, two or three years ago. Reading the new book.

• 1:32:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  You know, I think it's clear that this is something that really matters. And it's something that you've lived as well, which I think makes it a much more powerful book, actually, because it's one thing to measure data and say, well, the data shows this and the data shows that. Okay, great. And then on a human level, there's this other aspect, which is this is a lady who's been through it and I think has come out the other side and wants to share with people that you can also come out the other side.

• 1:33:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, you can.

• 1:33:05Rangan Chatterjee?

  You mentioned forgiveness there and I think about and I have spoken about forgiveness a lot over the years and I've always found it to be quite a divisive topic, understandably. Okay. Given what you just said about your childhoods, you know, how do you think about forgiveness?

• 1:33:25Speaker 00

  Well, I just, I think for me, it was associated with just feelings of anger, you know, and resentment and, and I knew that if I didn't let go of that, it was gonna just continue to haunt me, you know, and, and I don't have to forgive the actions, you know, but I needed to develop a perspective that allowed me to release the anger that I felt. And the only path to that was to forgive. And when I was working with, I was at the University of Iowa at the time and, and I was working with a psychiatrist and I remember,

• 1:34:11Speaker 00

  you know, he, he said to me that, you know, we don't, you don't have to excuse or, you know, it's, it's not, forgiveness is not about saying what happened to you was, was right. Like that, that's not what forgiveness is. It's releasing the hold that, that has on you, you know? And, and so that was, that was the, the project for me was like, all right, how do I actually get to a place? And, you know, and in those conversations, like it's stuff that I never talked about, but you know, my, my grandfather was, he's an Episcopalian priest, actually. But his whole life, he, he was adopted and bounced

• 1:34:54Speaker 00

  from foster home to foster home to foster home. You know, he was, he didn't have an easy life. He, and he probably went into the seminary to try to escape his demons, you know, and get, you know, who knows? But I, I just tried so desperately to look at that scenario from the lens of when he was a kid, what happened to him, you know? And, and that helped me a lot, you know? And, and I, and I carry that forward and I write about that in the book, just little things, like someone cuts me off on that, you know, like they're, like maybe they had a hard day. Like I just always put myself in someone's shoes to assume the best. And I, and I think in today's world, like we just tend to assume the worst. That's like our default, you know? And that's exhausting. Like if you just assume

• 1:35:39Speaker 00

  best intentions generally, and I'm not telling people to be naive, right? You need to keep your head on a swivel, of course. But, but, but also like, I think we're inherently good. And, and I have a wild belief in our capacity for good. And, and I, I just, yeah.

• 1:35:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  Thank you. First of all, thank you for sharing. It's really beautiful. Beautiful and empowering, I think, what you just said for people. It, it also links back to how we started this conversation about the autonomic nervous system, right? We think the worst of people when we don't have control of our autonomic nervous system. And of course, trauma, there's a whole chapter on trauma in this book, trauma leaves an imprint on the nervous system, right? So it's, the nervous system is more likely to be reactive. You're more likely to think that the person cutting you up was doing it intentionally, even though it literally had nothing to do with you.

• 1:36:37Speaker 00

  It's the prediction mechanisms in your brain even. Like it's just wild.

• 1:36:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. But, but even what you said about trying to understand your grandfather's life. Whenever I try and help people with forgiveness, and I totally get that this can be challenging for people, especially given some of the things that have happened in the world. I do believe, and I found this in my own life, that curiosity is the way to get there, not judgment. Judgment will keep you locked. It, it won't allow you to move on. And I understand where the judgment comes from, right? So I'm not saying I don't understand, I understand it. You're not, you ain't gonna move on if you, if you're judging. But if you can, just start to open the door to curiosity. Like, why did that

• 1:37:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  person act like that? I don't like what they did. Why? It just starts to soften the relationship with things. I'm not saying this for you, I would never, I would never dare to talk about someone's experience and how they found it. But since you've gone down that path,

• 1:37:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  what has the impact been on you?

• 1:37:42Speaker 00

  I mean, I think I, I look at, when I feel emotions bubble up, I'm like, is that an emotion of trust or is that an emotion of fear? And to your exact point, you know, and I talk about that in, in the fear and trust chapter is, you really wanna step back and like almost be like a third person, like observer, you know, and just be like, and get curious about it, you know? And why am I feeling insecure? Why am I defensive? Why? You know, like just you ask yourself that question. And that level of awareness will put you back into that parasympathetic state, back into feeling just a little bit of a sense of agency over that emotion. And, and be like, does this actually need an

• 1:38:24Speaker 00

  action or is this just something I need to let go? And like, you just try to like, it's, I think what, where people go wrong is you try to suppress it or ignore it. Or, and I think that, that is not the path. And I did that for 24 years, you know, until I decided, or I was forced to confront all the stuff that had happened in my life. And I don't think we have to wait. You know, I think in not, in your, when you're ready, it will happen for you. But I think just as a practice, thinking about our emotions as either trust emotions or fear emotions is like an awesome place to start, really empowering. It helps

• 1:39:05Speaker 00

  you understand, wow, I have a lot of fear-based emotions, right? I feel jealous. I feel insecure. I feel, you know, whatever the thing is, right? And, and get curious about it. And then think about, all right, how can I replace this with a trust-based emotion, right? And back to the autonomic nervous system, and there's good data around fear and trust, just generally, trust-based emotions, like are, they are growth-oriented. They open you up to the world, right? Like you have, and not to mention, you invite that energy in.

• 1:39:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, you really do.

• 1:39:36Speaker 00

  If you're afraid, like that's the energy you're gonna pull into your life, right? And it, it doesn't have to happen all at once, right? But it's just this recognition of how can I build in these trust-based emotions more often, you know?

• 1:39:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  I, I think it's a great framework to look at life. I've, I've thought and said for many years that all of our behaviors either come from love or fear, which is kind of trust or fear, right? Same thing, in a slightly different language. And that there are so many emotions that we feel, but they're actually downstream, right? So anger, as you say, jealousy, envy, anxiety, whatever it might be. These are downstream from fear. So that's one arm. That's a nervous system that is overstimulated, that is, you know?

• 1:40:28Speaker 00

  Hypervigilant.

• 1:40:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  Hypervigilant, right? On the other side.

• 1:40:32Speaker 00

  Bracing for the worst.

• 1:40:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, exactly. The other side, you know, it comes from love, love for ourselves, love for the world around us, love for other people. That's where joy comes in, empathy, compassion, curiosity, forgiveness. And, and I actually think it's a beautiful framework to look at the world through. It's like, and you know, let's say someone's tuning into this podcast for health, right? And they're like, yeah, I like what Kristen said about doing zone two exercises every day. I'm gonna do that now. Okay, great. And then they try for a few weeks. If they're not able to do that, right? And let's say that there's a capability there in their life, because we know that there's a big gap between

• 1:41:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  knowledge and implementation. Those people know what to do. They're still not doing it. I think a lot of the time, what fills that gap is love or fear, right? Are you making that change because you love yourself, because you trust yourself, because you know you deserve that? Or is part of you, is there part of you that doesn't like itself?

• 1:41:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:41:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? You don't like who you are. You're trying to beat yourself up with that behavior, whatever it might be. And I, I've genuinely found in my own life, my definition of success is, Rangan, how much of today did you live with an open heart?

• 1:41:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  That's it for me. I think at this point in my life, I've come to that conclusion, which is that's the only thing that matters. Wrong. And if you can live your life with an open heart, or notice when it starts to close, and go, wait a minute, I'm not going to let that happen. I'm going to keep it open here. Good things start to happen. It is amazing. Because I've been trying to edit, good things happen.

• 1:42:17Speaker 00

  David White has a beautiful essay on open-heartedness. Yeah, he's a kind of a poet philosopher from Ireland, and he's like just one of my favorite poets, I suppose. And he talks about this concept of open-heartedness. And I think what I love about it is he always reminds us that open-heartedness in the face of knowing that there's heartbreak, right, on the other side of that, right? When you give, when you open your heart to a love, to a work, right, the possibility of failure is there.

• 1:42:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:51Speaker 00

  Right? But you have to have an open heart anyway, you know? And I think that, to me, is like this whole project, right? Is how do we love in the face of that uncertainty, you know? And how do we kind of come to the day with this big heart, you know, that's kind and open and loving? You know, I think that can be a challenge, you know, for a lot of folks who've been hurt, you know, is kind of how do I, how do I just do this anyway?

• 1:43:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, it can be a challenge. And it's still possible.

• 1:43:21Speaker 00

  It is.

• 1:43:22Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's still possible. You mentioned David White. In this middle section, the architecture within, you basically made this case that if fear is overwhelming your nervous system, then this TEAM framework, T E A M, is a useful way to look at the impact it's having, right?

• 1:43:39Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:43:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  Time, expectations, attachment, and memory. In the memory section, you quote David White, you talk about this idea that tending to our memory is a spiritual practice, and a physiological one, which I found really, really interesting. And then you say, in his essay, nostalgia, David White writes that nostalgia is not an indulgence in the past, but a reaching back to something essential that has been lost. What does that mean?

• 1:44:12Speaker 00

  I think what he's saying is that it can be just when something surfaces from your past, it's kind of a comment on what matters to you in that moment. And it's, I think he's inviting us to just investigate, you know, and examine, hmm, why did that surface? Why, what, why do I need to pull that forward right now? And that, and it could be really useful for you in some way. Maybe it's a perspective on a current relationship you're in, or, you know, a learning from the past that you need to make sure that you don't repeat in the future. And so, memory can be really powerful, and isn't always, you

• 1:44:53Speaker 00

  know, I think it's the distinction, you know, of just, you're not living in the past, but you're using your memory as a gift to inform how you live more present. And, and I think too, like, when something from your past keeps surfacing, get curious about it, right? Is that creating fear? Is that keeping you from being able to move forward with your life in a way that is adaptive and functional and healthy, right? So, memory, while sometimes unnerving and unsettling, usually is a comment on what is, what matters to you, and something you probably need to think a little bit more about.

• 1:45:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I really appreciate hearing your perspective there. I actually was reading this section, I think on the plane back from Dublin on Monday, right?

• 1:45:48Speaker 00

  Oh, wow. Yeah.

• 1:45:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  And, you know, I touched on Bon Jovi early on in this conversation, but let's give you a bit of context on why I thought of my relationship with that band when I read that passage from, from David White's in your book, is because, you know, as a teenage boy growing up in the north of England, the son of immigrant parents, I don't know what it was, but there was something about that band that just spoke to me as a kid. Like, I was hooked. I would listen to everything. I'd buy every B-side. I had posters everywhere. I'd flags. I literally, I was just obsessed, right? I saw my mom the other day, she's like, are you still doing that whole Bon Jovi thing?

• 1:46:32Speaker 00

  Oh, my God, that's so cute.

• 1:46:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  You know, I've seen them over 30 times in concert, right? I've been all over the world to watch them.

• 1:46:38Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:46:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  And, you know, for the last years, I haven't listened that much, right? I started listening again last October, because, you know, I got offered the chance to speak to John on my show, which I was like-

• 1:46:54Speaker 00

  Just incredible.

• 1:46:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  And we had a beautiful conversation. And a big part of the story with Bon Jovi is that John has been losing his voice. He had an operation four years ago. He didn't know if he'd ever be able to sing again, let alone perform again. And he has literally done three hours of rehab a day, five days a week for many years, I think three or four years, right? And Sunday night was really powerful, because I think a lot of us felt nostalgia.

• 1:47:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:47:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  A lot of us, you know, we grew up with that band. We never thought we were going to see them again.

• 1:47:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:47:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  I never thought I'd see them again with John's voice sounding that good. I was like, thinking, what kind of work have you been doing to get your voice back there from nearly not having it? And what's really interesting is that throughout the concert, I started to feel this joy within me that I haven't felt in years, Kristin.

• 1:47:53Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:47:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  Like, I'm coming home, I think I said before, I think I'm driving my wife, not in the moment, because I'm literally singing Bon Jovi songs around, I'm getting my guitar out. I'm starting to sing Wanted Dead or Alive, and all this sort of stuff I used to sing as a teenager. And I'm going again to Wembley this weekend to see them.

• 1:48:09Speaker 00

  I love it.

• 1:48:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  I mean, I just can't get enough of it. But it's nostalgia. It's, it's like what he says, right? It's not an indulgence in the past. No, Sunday was not an indulgence in the past. It was a reaching back to something essential that had been lost.

• 1:48:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:48:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  There was a part of me that missed all that.

• 1:48:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And you need it in your life right now.

• 1:48:32Rangan Chatterjee?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:48:33Speaker 00

  You need it. Look, it's just energy.

• 1:48:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  I've got different energy this week. I'm like, I'm, I feel like a kid again.

• 1:48:38Speaker 00

  I mean, gosh.

• 1:48:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  I'm 49. I feel like a kid. I'm like, oh, my God, Friday night, Sunday night, I'm at Wembley. Come on, I can't wait.

• 1:48:44Speaker 00

  I love that.

• 1:48:45Rangan Chatterjee?

  And that's okay, right? So, trying to bring this back on to the topic of this conversation, you know, what, what does joy do for our nervous systems? What does joy do for our HRV?

• 1:48:58Speaker 00

  I mean, I'd love to disinviguate between kind of joy and happiness, you know? And Dr. Judith Joseph, I don't know if you ever talked to her, but she wrote a book called High Functioning Depression. And I interviewed her maybe a year and a half ago now, but she's brilliant, and someone you should have on the podcast. I just, I love, I love the way she approaches things. But, and she's so damn funny. She's hilarious. Like, the stuff she creates, I'm like, how do you even do all this? But, anyway, High Functioning Depression. So, that's basically like that anhedonia, like that feeling of just meh. Like, everyone on the outside, and I was a high functioning, I had high functioning depression, for sure, self-diagnosed, this is not in the DSM. But, but I think they're working toward that, because I think so many people can identify with this idea

• 1:49:42Speaker 00

  that you are able to function really well in your day-to-day life. You might be a surgeon, you might be a high-performing athlete, you might be, you know, one of the best coaches in the country, whatever it is, but you cannot access joy. You have high functioning depression. And so, I think, to me, happiness can be felt whilst being depressed. And happiness is through kind of things like, that are external to you, that bring you kind of that level of happiness. Joy, I think, is felt, from my perspective, it's something that's internal, that you're accessing. Like, it is something that is with you, that doesn't require actually

• 1:50:25Speaker 00

  anyone else necessarily. Like, it's kind of like this inside job of just this deep sense of peace, right? And I think that there's external things that can ignite that, like a Bon Jovi, a John Bon Jovi concert, right, can ignite something inside you. But that is lived experience in you.

• 1:50:45Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:45Speaker 00

  And it's, it's, so it's not John necessarily, right? Like, give yourself more credit, I guess. And that's where I think we outsource our joy and kind of say, oh, it's that thing that's giving me the joy. No, it's like, it's your relationship to that thing-

• 1:50:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:00Speaker 00

  -that you've created inside you, this, this internal compass, right, that, that is allowing you to access that joy, you know? And so, I feel like joy is just a fundamentally different lever, you know, than, than happiness, in that it's something that you own, and that you can cultivate within yourself.

• 1:51:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:20Speaker 00

  In ways that I think happiness is a little bit more elusive.

• 1:51:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. Oh, I love that. Yeah, I really like the way you put that. One of the other things I wanted to discuss with you is in the chapter before, so it's all in this middle section about the architecture within, but there's a chapter on trauma, you know, which you call the past is never past. And you write beautifully how, you know, loss of any sort is not just emotional, it's an injury to the nervous system. And you have this HEAL framework, right, to help people, you know, think about the impact trauma's had, and how they can move forward. H E A L, heart, energy, autonomy, and love. In the section

• 1:52:06Rangan Chatterjee?

  on love, right, it was, it was really peaceful. And there was something you wrote which made me wonder if you're spiritual. And I'm pretty sure I know now, that through this conversation, that you are. But in that section, you wrote, "We can search far and wide for love, but it should be of great solace to know that there is a wellspring of love and peace inside us." Are you a spiritual person?

• 1:52:33Speaker 00

  Very much so. I'm definitely a naturalist at heart. You know, I spend a lot of time outside. And, and so I feel like, you know, nature is God, you know, in a sense, like, and so, yeah, I think I'm very spiritual in that sense. I do go to church. So, I suppose I'm definitely, I have this firm belief that there's something much bigger than, than us out there. And that brings me a lot of, a lot of peace, I think, knowing that. But I think that, that passage in particular, really-

• 1:53:10Speaker 00

  Meant a lot to me because it's taken me a lifetime to get there.

• 1:53:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:16Speaker 00

  To really believe that, like to write that and believe that there's actually a wellspring of peace and love inside. And, you know, just for, I guess, your listeners, like a really practical way that I, that I have been, I've been doing for a very long time that helped me cultivate this is loving kindness meditation.

• 1:53:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  Exactly where I was gonna go next.

• 1:53:37Speaker 00

  I know, Metta.

• 1:53:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, go for it.

• 1:53:39Speaker 00

  It's like, I could say, oh, I love myself, but I hated myself for so long. Despite every marker of success that someone could look from the outside, like, I loathe myself. And like that, you know, and a lot of it was just like, you know, just trying to figure out like, who, who actually am I in this, in this world? Like, when I put aside my past and like, and figure out how to come to terms with that, like, what am I actually left with, you know? And if I were to take away all of these like external markers of success, what am I left with? And I hated that person. I had to like build

• 1:54:20Speaker 00

  myself basically from the ground up in my mid twenties. And, and that has been a project ever since. And part of that journey has been figuring out, okay, how do I actually get to a place where I can look in the mirror and be just completely just content, you know, with the person looking back at me? And it started with my values and really auditing that and like, looking more honestly at my behaviors and seeing where there was alignment, where there wasn't. And, and then, you know, one of the practices that the psychiatrist I was working with, looking back, oh my gosh, you know, he was like, I need to write him a note. He really helped me. But he got me onto this loving kindness meditation and

• 1:55:02Speaker 00

  also known as, as Metta. And, and I think what I love about it is it starts internal. You know, it's like, all right, how do I, what are the phrases that I can bring forth and meditate on that make me feel a sense of love toward myself? And then you kind of move yourself outward, you know, where you kind of go to someone close to you and then someone neutral and then to the world. And I think, you know, you said it, this open heart, right? Like, how do we get to that open heart? You have to love yourself first. Like, there's no other path to having an open heart. Like, you have to love yourself first. And, and I, this ebbs and flows. Sometimes I like myself more than other times, right? Which I think is totally normal. But I think, I think like, if we were to like zoom all

• 1:55:47Speaker 00

  the way out, that's the place to start. You know, and when you love yourself, you honor your body, you nourish your body, you make better choices with the food you put in your body, you, you attract people who are also loving and kind. And yeah, I just feel like it has, that's the place to start, you know?

• 1:56:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  Is your behavior coming from love or fear, right? And it's really beautiful. Thank you so much for opening up and sharing. I guess for someone non-spiritual who may not believe, you know, this idea that there is a wellspring of love inside us, or that it's not their belief system. Well, perhaps this is their belief system, right? In, you know, the final section of book where there's, it's all about recovery.

• 1:56:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. Autonomic nervous system promoting recovery behaviors.

• 1:56:32Rangan Chatterjee?

  Maybe there's nineteen, twenty different techniques.

• 1:56:34Speaker 00

  Twenty-two.

• 1:56:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  Twenty-two, okay. And, you know, sauna, cold plunge, contrast therapy, breath work, nutrition, like, it's all there with the data and practices around it, which is wonderful. And again, you make it like, you don't have to do it all. It's like a bit of a pick and mix.

• 1:56:49Speaker 00

  It's a menu, yeah.

• 1:56:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's a menu.

• 1:56:50Speaker 00

  Pick, pick some.

• 1:56:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  But on, on, you know, technique eighteen, which is loving kindness meditation.

• 1:56:56Speaker 00

  I can't believe that you have that earmarked. I just went there.

• 1:57:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, it's, it's synchronicity. It's hard to happen now, right? But you talk about loving kindness meditation, right? You say that it often begins with a quiet repetition of a simple heartfelt phrase, may I be safe, may I be healthy, may I live with ease, right? And you, you do it with yourself, then to people in your community. Then sometimes you can extend it to people you don't like, or you've had an issue with it. But it's really powerful.

• 1:57:23Speaker 00

  It's so, I can't even underscore how like.

• 1:57:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's wonderful. And then you, you write this, okay? This meditative focus, we're talking about loving kindness meditation, activates the parasympathetic nervous system, reduces stress reactivity, and improves heart rate variability. Frederickson and colleagues found that regular loving kindness meditation practices increase the tone of the vagal nerve, the body's primary pathway for calm and social connection. And you just keep going on. The point being, living with an open heart and loving yourself and others.

• 1:58:03Speaker 00

  Builds resilience.

• 1:58:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's good for you.

• 1:58:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's good for you. It really is. Yeah.

• 1:58:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  You don't want to believe any spiritual self, and that's what you think. It's good for your health to be that way.

• 1:58:13Speaker 00

  It is. Yeah. And, you know, I, I know that there's also, like, for me, just to lean on the spiritual side is just, I mean, I'm a, you know, I'm a scientist too, you know?

• 1:58:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. Well, you can be both, can't you?

• 1:58:23Speaker 00

  I sure can. I am. And yeah, I mean, that's what I really tried to bring to this book is I wanted, I wanted the evidence, right? Like, I wanted, you know, if we're, if I'm to outline twenty-two behaviors that help improve autonomic nervous system resilience, well, there's going to be some evidence behind them, you know? I think people, people want that, right? And, and I think that just protects me too from, you know, as a scientist, I guess. But, but I think too, like, just having, knowing that this stuff actually works.

• 1:58:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:50Speaker 00

  You know, like, it makes you a better person. But it also, you know, if you are, if you want to tap into that spiritual side, I think it really does, it does that too, you know?

• 1:59:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. Well, Kristen, we could, we could talk for hours. I mean,

• 1:59:05Speaker 00

  I think we have.

• 1:59:06Rangan Chatterjee?

  We've got so many topics and sort of so many shared interests. I really appreciate how much you've opened up today. I really love the varied nature of the book, right? I think if people are expecting it just to be Kristen Holmes, performance scientist at Whoop, there's that. And there's a whole other side as well, which I think is, is really beautiful to see.

• 1:59:31Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:59:32Rangan Chatterjee?

  In a book. So thank you for writing it. It's out now, of course. The book is called Aligned, The Data-Driven Guide to Performance Recovery and Human Potential. Who doesn't want better performance, recovery, and to fulfill our potential? So I think it's a book for everyone. To finish off this conversation, for someone who has been listening, Kristen, and does feel stuck, and perhaps there are elements of your personal story that they resonated with, but they're like, yeah, I know Kristen's done it. I can see that she's done the work, she's moved through it, but I feel lost. I don't know where to start. What would you say to them?

• 2:00:17Speaker 00

  I think having someone neutral to talk to was a big unlock for me. Cause I, I didn't really know what to do. I was the same, like, I could hear all these things, you know? But I think talking to a professional who can hear about the issues that you personally are facing, understands your constraints, can give you a place to start, you know? And maybe it's just, I mean, for me, it was just journaling. Like, that's where I started. He's like, I did it as a child. I write, I've always, he's like, what do you like to do? I'm like, well, I love to write. He's like, let's start journaling. And I just,

• 2:01:01Speaker 00

  and he gave me some prompts. I started journaling and I, my life started making sense. You know, and, and I would come to the sessions and I, and I'd have some revelations and we'd talk through it and we were just able to build from there. So everyone's starting point's going to be a little bit different, but I think if someone feels really stuck in their healing journey, feels really stuck in a trauma, or certainly is maybe, trauma isn't, is, does, trauma can be a precursor, kind of kindling for depression and anxiety. And so, you know, obviously, I don't know where, you know, wherever you are on that spectrum, I think getting help and support from a professional is a great place to start.

• 2:01:47Speaker 00

  And I, and I know not everyone has some, has the resources, but, but I think mental health support is more ubiquitous now. So I, to me, I think that that's a great place to start on your journey.

• 2:02:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, love it. Well, Kristen, thank you for everything you do and you continue to do. Thank you for the beautiful energy. And thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 2:02:08Speaker 00

  Thank you for having me. It's been just an absolute honor.

• 2:02:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. Do think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life. And also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else. Remember, when you teach someone, it not only helps them, it also helps you learn and retain the information. Now, before you go, just wanted to let you know about Friday Five. It's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness. In that email, I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else, including health advice, how to manage your time better, interesting articles or videos that I've been consuming, and quotes that have caused

• 2:02:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  me to stop and reflect. And I have to say, in a world of endless emails, it really is delightful that many of you tell me it is one of the only weekly emails that you actively look forward to receiving. So if that sounds like something you would like to receive each and every Friday, you can sign up for free at drchatgy.com/fridayfive. Now, if you are new to my podcast, you may be interested to know that I have written five books that have been bestsellers all over the world, covering all kinds of different topics, happiness, food, stress, sleep, behavior change, and movement, weight loss, and so much more. So please do take a moment to check them out. They are all available as paperbacks,

• 2:03:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  ebooks, and as audiobooks, which I am narrating. If you enjoyed today's episode, it is always appreciated if you can take a moment to share the podcast with your friends and family, or leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful week. And please note that if you want to listen to this show without any adverts at all, that option is now available for a small monthly fee on Apple and on Android. All you have to do is click the link in the episode notes in your podcast app. And always remember, you are the architect of your own health. Making lifestyle change is always worth it. Because when you feel better, you live more.