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

00:03you developed lifestyle hacks to help you disassociate we talked about meditation which was a big one um exercise big one uh i got into hot cold transitions gratitude's a big one so take me through your day then because i think this will reveal a lot of your habits Sure. So let's take a given day in Boston. The day actually starts for me a little bit the night before because I'm getting into a framework for the next day. A few days a week, I work out with a trainer early in the morning. So I'll actually pack everything up for that. Well, I've got my my workout clothes out. I'll have the, what I'm going to wear to work the next day. Uh, I'll, I'll probably have written down like two or three things that I'm going to focus on the next day.

01:07And, and then like sleep because, you know, building whoop, you think a lot about sleep. I, uh, you know, I sleep in a really cold bedroom, a really dark bedroom. Why cold and dark? It's just shown to give you higher quality sleep. Yeah. And I try to go to bed at a somewhat consistent time. This is a little trickier because my wife's kind of a night owl and I like to go to bed a little earlier. So I'll probably go to bed between, I don't know, 11.30 and midnight.

01:39And then I'll wake up at around 6.30. Controversial question about your wife then. Does your sleep deteriorate with your wife in the bed? It doesn't because we've got good intimacy. Like we've got good bed cuddle habits, you know? It's like a- Cuddling time. Yeah, yeah. We've done a good job coexisting in a bedroom environment. Although that's an interesting thing you can track on Whoop. So if people really want to know whether or not they sleep better or worse with a partner, you can literally record that in the Whoop journal in the app.

02:16So in a second, I want to hear what's in your room. And what you're tracking. You can probably check. What you're tracking against. So cold room, consistent bedtime. Yeah, and then I wake up and I'm like out the door, really quick shower, workout clothes, got my stuff. I always give my wife kisses before I leave. That's like a nice relationship hack while she's sleeping. and then uh i work out for an hour with my trainer i'll do a steam room after that freezing cold shower um i do a breakfast that's mostly like egg whites it's mostly proteins like egg whites like avocado bacon that kind of stuff two points there so the first was working out in the morning yeah is there any like data or science around that being advantageous so back to being able to control the controllables. I like to work out in the morning in large part because it means I can then stay at work later if I need to. What I hate is when I go to work without having worked out in the morning and I'm supposed to play like squash that evening. And then a couple of things come up around 6 PM and all of a sudden I realized I'm not going to get out the door.

03:34And so then, you know, you know, you don't exercise. So the nice thing about working out first is like, okay, I've checked that box. And then the other thing was this, the cold water. Cold water. Yeah. Talk to me about why you do that and how that helps. So there's something I think to be said for doing things that naturally make you happy, even if in the moment they're a little painful. And for me, being in the cold is one of those things. Like I feel a huge jolt of adrenaline from it. It also forces me to breathe properly.

04:07and I think anything you can do that helps you breathe properly or forces you to breathe properly is good for you. And then I feel kind of happy after doing it, like this little injection of happiness. And so I end 100% of showers that I take cold and as cold as possible. The colder, the better. And then the steam room aspect or the sauna aspect, depending on where I am, is, uh i mean there's a fair amount of research that shows if you do a steam room or a sauna a few days a week it is likely to increase longevity i would say i like the cold more than the hot but anyway i'd say i'm the opposite my my girlfriend is a breath work practitioner oh okay coach so obviously you understand what comes with that and cold water is a big part of what she um encourages on me so she jumps in these ice baths and i'm like i'm trying not to feel i'm like putting my toe in and i'm like coming up with reasons but no she's got me into it so so what kind of breath work do you do um i don't even know the name of it she's got her own method she teaches classes she's doing classes in london at the moment big groups one-on-one sessions she's doing um she does sessions with lots of people that come on this

05:23podcast in fact oh cool because they end up getting getting to know her so but yeah i don't type of breath work it is, but it's an hour in a room like the, yeah, the double inhale. Yeah. Game changer. Just learning that we don't breathe properly. I think it's amazing. Yeah. That's a huge industry. That's, that's, it feels like a wave coming into shore because this word breath work showed up like 18, 24 months ago over here and now it's everywhere with like Wim Hof.

05:50That's a good point. I mean, Wim Hof. Yeah. I think Wim Hof pushed a lot of it, especially around the cold. And look, I think it's taking off for a good reason. In part, because again, back to controlling things you can control, you can literally control your breath in a second. And there's an interesting whoop hook to all this because one of the core things that led me to starting the company was discovering this statistic called heart rate variability.

06:20And heart rate variability is essentially this lens into your autonomic nervous system. it's the amount of time between successive beats of the heart. So it's a little confusing, but if your heart beats at 60 beats per minute, it's not beating every second. Like it might be 0.7 seconds, and then 1.3 seconds, and then 0.6 seconds, and 1.4 seconds. And it turns out that variability of time between successive beats is actually a good thing, because it's a sign that your body is able to regulate in its environment.

06:51and your autonomic nervous system literally consists of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity. Now sympathetic is activation. So that's heart rate up, blood pressure up, respiration up. Often it's what's happening when you're feeling a little bit of stress or you're exercising, right? Now parasympathetic is all the opposite. Heart rate down, blood pressure down, respiration down. It's what helps you fall asleep. But where this all comes back to breath work, is literally inhaling. That's sympathetic. That's parasympathetic. So just by controlling your breathing, you can decide whether you want to be sympathetic dominant, parasympathetic dominant. You can increase your heart rate variability. You can decrease it. And that's something that's in your control. And heart rate variability is one of the core statistics that we look at as a lens into how restored your body is. I noticed that because my friend Logan sent, he went up for a night out. He got drunk. It was a wedding. Yeah. And then he screenshotted his, his whoop dashboard the next day and put it into our chat and went, fuck, because everything was red. And, and he was trying to explain to me heart rate variability and why it was important,

08:11but I couldn't quite understand. Um, and I remember trying to, trying to read about why it was important, but I knew you were coming here. So I thought I'd ask you myself because you, I've heard you talk about the importance of heart rate variability. I understand now what it is, but why is it such an important indicator? And what are the things that we do that make it plummet? So the fascinating thing about heart variability is it's been measured since like roughly the eighties. And the physiology research that I was reading in college was showing that Olympic power lifters were using heart rate variability to determine how much they should lift. So based on whether they had a low or a high heart rate variability in the morning, and they'd get hooked up to an electrocardiogram, like this is an intense thing. And then they would go decide how much they were going to lift based on what their reading was. I was like, that's kind of interesting. Turned out cyclists were doing it in the 80s. The CIA was using heart variability for lie detection tests. Doctors, cardiologists were using heart rate variability to predict whether former heart failure patients were going to have a heart attack again.

09:14So I'm thinking to myself, this is a pretty powerful statistic that I've never heard of that feels like everyone should be measuring. And so that's really, that was one of the core insights in building WHOOP was that you need to be able to measure heart rate variability continuously. And in particular, it's going to play a huge role in helping us understand the status of your body's readiness and how well you're sleeping. So those are two ways that WHOOP is primarily using heart rate variability. You know, things that decrease heart rate variability, dehydration, bad diet, we just talked about alcohol, heavy exercise, you know, heavy psychological stress. Often people are surprised how just the wrong conversation with their partner the night before bed can totally throw their sleep out of whack or their heart rate variability out of whack. So it's a very powerful statistic. It's a fascinating statistic. And I'm mostly glad like a lot more people are measuring it.