Using Metrics to Measure Stress

That's a good question. So it's awesome now that we're in this awesome technological age where everyone has a, an iPhone or an Android phone or a Google phone or whatever, some type of smartphone. And part of it's really bad because the things always strap to people's faces. But if we can get them to understand that you got to get off the phone and get off the computer and actually experience life again, which we've gotten away from, and then you also have to teach them cool things that you can do with a phone that will help move them forward. Because there's a lot of things that you can use to measure that stress response. One thing that we'll use, we like to use waking heart rate and like these waking heart rate variability. So what we'll typically use as a standard is, we want someone to be in shape and have a low 50s on their waking heart rate. Meaning that most of the guys that we deal with, like I deal with a lot of guys that are coaches. Like, so for me, I only really train coaches now. Now I have trainers underneath me that they do train general population, but we do probably 80% of our clientele is other coaches and they come to us and man, they're just messed up. They're waking up and they've got an 85 to 90 beats per minute waking up. And what does that mean? Like, why is it good to have in the 50s and why would it seemingly be bad to be up in the 80s? So stress hormones create muscle heart contractions, specifically norepinephrine. So if you're waking up with a resting heart rate or waking heart rate that that's elevated, then that means your body's on a fight or flight mode and it thinks you're basically wrestling a bear while you're trying to sleep. So when people come to me and they say, yeah, I sleep okay. All right, let's measure it. So they wake up and they've got 90 beats per minute. You don't really sleep that well. Well, when we can, when we utilize certain training protocols and get their, their metabolism balanced and get their, their physiology balanced, they start waking up and they're, they're in the sixties or the high fifties and they feel amazing. They're like, wow, I've been sleeping like that for 20 years and I didn't even know that that's not okay. you know that you ask him how well do you sleep well I wake up a couple of times use the bathroom that's not normal that's common but that's not normal and they think that well I've always done that you know yeah and it's not normal it's a it's a stress response causing you to have to get up and use the bathroom yeah it's it's funny that you bring that up because I've just I've just recently actually since I took your course I've been I've been using you know that the sleep cycle app on the phone. So on the iPhones, it has a sleep cycle app and you put it in airplane mode, but it uses the speakers to kind of listen for movement and noise and stuff like that. So it tracks the times when, and I don't know how accurate it is, but what it also does is, so it tracks deep sleep and what's seemingly REM sleep and then the lighter stages of sleep. And we should be going in and out of these right throughout the night. But when you wake up first thing in the morning before getting out of bed, it does like a pulse heart rate. And so like three nights ago I did it and I was at, you know, like 58. And then it's, it was Halloween here in the States. So it was Halloween, you know, two nights ago. And one of my kids was up all night. She ate way too much candy and it was a nightmare. And, And, but I point is that I was like wound up. She was up all night, like, you know, back to sleep, then up. And my stress hormones were super high. Whatever little sleep I got, woke up in the morning, tested the heart rate. It was like 78. And it's just a perfect representation of, because I have nights like that when I can't shut off the brain and, you know, we're thinking about work or we're thinking about, you know, something's always distracting us and keeping our stress hormones really high. And so it's a really good example of how we're always wound up in this, you know, sympathetic nervous system state. Yeah. And that's the thing. And it's it's it's hell to get out of it, you know, and you have to be really diligent about it. But what's cool about using apps like that is it makes you cognizant that there's an issue and it also makes you cognizant of how certain things affect you. So we'll have people do the heart rate and also the heart rate variability. and they'll, even though a lot of the clients don't know what that means, we give them some parameters and they say okay I realize when I have this meal this is a meal I usually eat once a week And when I have that meal I wake up and I got a high resting heart or high waking heart rate and a low heart rate variability So they understand yeah I also didn sleep well last night. So it makes them more compliant. And ultimately the main factor of getting success with your client is making them very compliant and very consistent for a very long time. Right. So, and it's good to have metrics that they can, you know, for me, metrics are really big deal because I'm, I'm a very competitive person and I'm a, I used to be a video gamer. So when I want to set a goal, I'll set a metric and I'll work really hard and I get, it's probably not good because I get a little bit obsessive about it, but it keeps me on track. So then, yeah, so it helps establish more compliance. It helps establish more awareness around what they're doing because then they understand like, Hey, I had two glasses of wine with dinner and I guess I slept like shit because my heart rate in the morning is really high. And then they can start to track those things and understand those correlational relationships and everything like that. So what would you expect to see when you say first start working with a client with their heart rate and heart rate variability? What should people be looking for with something like that over time?