Menopause Sleep Reset: A Recovery Plan You Can Start Tonight with Dr. Kristen Holmes

**Kristen Holmes** (0:00)
There is so much science around setting your circadian rhythm and the cascade effect that that has across every cell in your body. It will impact circadian pattern, things like insulin, for example. So you get your circadian rhythms aligned, you start eating during the daylight, your insulin starts working more effectively, more appropriately. Now, all of a sudden, you have less inflammation, you start sleeping a little bit better. So maybe it means like 10 more minutes in deeper stages of sleep, eight more minutes in deeper stages of sleep. That will have a compound effect. So it's just understanding that all these little behaviors, maybe you're getting two more minutes of deep sleep here, three more minutes here. Now, all of a sudden, you've got 20 more minutes of deep sleep. It's going to have incredible impact.
Now, maybe you're doing 15 minutes of like brisk walking and with some weights, and maybe you get two more minutes from that.
So while some of these little behaviors maybe elicit a small effect, but when you add them up, they really start to compound and this is where you start to feel less under threat. In your body and not just in your mind, you got to talk yourself into a better future for a little bit, but your body actually starts to change.

**Mary Claire Haver** (1:21)
The views and opinions expressed on unPAUSED are those of the talent and guests alone, and are provided for informational and entertainment purposes only. No part of this podcast or any related materials are intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.
In part one of my conversation with Dr. Kristen Holmes, Vice President of Performance Science at Whoop, we talked about something I wish I'd understood much earlier in my career. Good sleep is more than just getting eight hours. It's about timing, regularity, light exposure, circadian alignment, and what all of those things are doing to nearly every system in your body. Kristen has spent years studying what physiological data can tell us about human performance and health. In this episode, we go even deeper as she shares research showing that for every 45 minutes of sleep depth, executive function can drop five to 10 percent the next day. When the leaders slept poorly, the people who worked for them actually reported feeling less psychologically safe.
How you sleep can change how you think, how you work, and how you show up for the people you love. We also get practical about what women can do with this information. We talk about maintaining muscle as we age, what Kristen would prioritize if you only have 30 minutes a day to exercise, and why movement, meal timing, and morning light can have a powerful cumulative effect. We'll talk about wearables, alcohol, marijuana, magnesium, melatonin, naps, caffeine, weighted blankets, cold plunges, and even sleeping separately from your partner. We discuss why women need infrastructure, not willpower, to take care of themselves, and what it means to build a life that supports the woman you want to be decades from now. Because the goal is to have energy, strength, and health to keep showing up for the life and the people you care about for as long as possible. I'm Dr. Mary Claire Haver, a board certified obstetrician and gynecologist and certified menopause practitioner and adjunct professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Texas Medical Branch. Welcome to unPAUSED, where we cut through the silence and talk about what it really takes for women to thrive in the second half of life.
You've said that for every 45 minutes of sleep debt, there's a 5 to 10 percent decline in executive function the next day. Yeah. Talk about that.

**Kristen Holmes** (4:04)
Okay. Yeah. So this is with a study we did with McKinsey. We had 79 individuals, half women and the other half were men. So these are really hard charging folks. And we looked at basically just their sleep over the course of six months. And three times a week, they were kind of getting a stupor and end back. So we were able to measure, objectively measure their executive function. And we saw with every 45 minutes of sleep debt, they had a 5 to 10 percent decrease in executive function next day. So 45 minutes seemed to be the sweet spot. We actually built on this study. So in the second year, we added psychological safety measures. And wonderful scientists out of Harvard, Dr. Amy Edmondson, we used her measures and she actually joined us on this study. And so what we did in this study is actually, we looked at the direct reports.
And what we saw is that the psychological safety of the direct reports was associated with the quality of sleep of the boss essentially.