The Fitness Scientist: "Even A Little Alcohol Is Hurting Your Health!", "Late Night Screen Time Linked To Cancer!", "Working Shifts Kills You 15 Years Early!" - Kristen Holmes

**Kristen Holmes** (0:00)
What the research says is that people who are having sex within a few hours when they sleep have better markers of sleep and recovery.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:07)
So does masturbation have the same implications?

**SPEAKER_3** (0:09)
Well, what was so interesting about this research is that Kristen Holmes is the Vice President of Performance Science at Woo, who has access to health data from hundreds of thousands of people.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:19)
And her groundbreaking research will tell you the secrets of achieving perfect health and performance.

**Kristen Holmes** (0:24)
The key to your health is your circadian rhythm, which are physical, mental, and behavioral changes that happen in a 24-hour cycle. One of the most known circadian rhythms is being asleep during the night, and it has massive health consequences. For example, we know that shift workers, on average, are going to die 15 years sooner. But if you're awake for two hours between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m., two days per week for 25 days of the year, you qualify as a shift worker. You are putting yourself at increased risk for cancer, cardiovascular disease, mental health issues, can have trouble having children.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:00)
I mean, that's terrifying.

**Kristen Holmes** (1:01)
We know that we have adapted to blue light.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:04)
The light we get from screens.

**Kristen Holmes** (1:05)
Yes. If you're viewing light between the hours of 10 p.m. and 4 a.m., it actually has a pro-depressive effect. The list goes on and on, and a lot of people are like, I have to go to bed at 1 a.m. because I'm a night owl. Total BS. You're making a choice. And if you want to perform consistently, increase your tolerance for stress and take control of your life. You need to, we want to eat, and most importantly, we need to.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:39)
Kristen, why do you do the work that you do?

**Kristen Holmes** (1:43)
I am irrationally passionate about human flourishing and the frameworks, policies, basically determinants of human flourishing. And I've kind of dedicated my life to understanding how the physiology and psychology work together to help people take control of their health so they can understand how to apply their energy and attention in a way that's truly rewarding.

**Steven Bartlett** (2:12)
What is your job title?

**Kristen Holmes** (2:14)
I'm the Vice President of Performance Science, Principal Scientist at WOOP, which is a technology, a physiological monitoring technology company.

**Steven Bartlett** (2:22)
And what does that mean?

**Kristen Holmes** (2:24)
So I'm trying to make sure WOOP is a thought leader in human performance. So trying to see around the bend to understand what's going to be important for tomorrow in terms of understanding how we can take control of the direction of our health. You know, what are the markers that are important that we need to be tracking? What are the behaviors that we need to be engaging in, in order to move those metrics around in a way that is health promoting? I look at a lot of the high stakes, high stress environments. So professional athletes, frontline healthcare clinicians and, you know, military operators. So kind of understanding some of these extreme professions and crafts and what the physiology and the psychology looks like. We can then kind of abstract and I think in some ways generalize what that means for the regular population who are experiencing less extreme demands on their time and their energy and their cognitive bandwidth.

**Steven Bartlett** (3:23)
And do you conduct your own studies?

**Kristen Holmes** (3:25)
Yes. Yeah. So I'm a principal investigator on many studies, which means that I'm kind of leading those experiments from kind of A to Z. And I have a team that is kind of supporting that research in various aspects of expertise. But yeah, I mean, one of the studies that we published in May was looking at a thousand paratroopers in Army Alaska. So super extreme, you know, environments, you know, harsh. But the Army came to us. They were, you know, if you understand, Alaska in general has a very high suicide rate. This base in Elmdorf, Alaska, has a lot of mental health issues, a lot of suicide. And they're trying to understand, you know, what is actually going on here. And we were able to run a study where we showed that there's actually one behavior, one behavior that was surfaced, that was the most predictive of positive psychological functioning in these soldiers. And that one behavior was sleep-wake timing. So the more consistent and more stable the sleep-wake, the sleep onset and offset of these soldiers, the higher levels of positive psychological functioning. So workplace resilience, less homesickness, more feelings of control, more positive social networks. It bubbles up in every single piece of research that we do at Whoop. Sleep-wake timing, I think, is the mother of all performance optimization behaviors.