Evening Workouts, Sleep, and Why Bryan Johnson Treats Pre-Bed Resting Heart Rate as His Most Important Number
Bryan Johnson
In this episode, Bryan Johnson, Blueprint co-founder Kate Tolo, and physician Dr. Mike Mallin cover two topics they describe as practical and free. The first is a large WHOOP study on whether working out at night hurts sleep. The second is Bryan's claim that resting heart rate before bed is "the single most important biomarker" he tracks, because, in Bryan's words, "all the efforts we've done basically collapse into this marker." The two topics connect. The study found that hard evening exercise raises nighttime heart rate and worsens sleep, and Bryan argues that almost every behavior that harms sleep works through the same mechanism.
Why a Wearable Study Matters, and Why It Took So Long
Mike opened with enthusiasm about the study. It offers large-scale data that, in Mike's view, the medical and longevity communities have wanted since wearables became common, and Mike expects this kind of publication to change how research on sleep is done.
Bryan asked why it took so long. Wearables have been part of the health world for more than a decade, so why had nobody published on such a basic question? Mike gave two reasons. First, the dataset took time to build: WHOOP drew on roughly four million nights of biometric data. Second, and more important in Mike's view, lifestyle research lacks funding. Mike said the NIH does not fund sleep studies of this kind, and neither pharmaceutical companies nor other financial institutions back lifestyle research. Studies like this therefore depend on companies or individuals who are motivated for their own reasons to produce them.
Bryan used this to make a broader complaint. Society does not teach people the basics of health. School covers sex education and people take driving lessons, but nobody learns the fundamentals of sleep or whether to exercise in the morning or at night. Bryan said that even after reading widely, they never found a practical guide to structuring a life around sleep. The hosts presented the episode as something listeners could share with friends and family who are new to health and wellness.
What the WHOOP Study Found
Bryan summarized the study. WHOOP analyzed about 4.3 million nights of sleep from around 15,000 members; Mike later rounded this to about 14,000. The question was whether working out at night hurts sleep. Bryan read out the headline findings:
- Strenuous evening workouts can delay sleep onset, shorten sleep, and reduce sleep quality.
- Higher nighttime heart rate and lower heart rate variability (HRV) followed high-strain evening exercise.
- Workouts that ended at least four hours before bedtime showed no negative effect on sleep.
Bryan's short version: working out too close to bed, especially at high strain, hurts sleep.
Bryan also cited more specific numbers. The highest-intensity exercise two hours before bed raised resting heart rate by 3.9 beats per minute (6.8%), and Bryan reported HRV dropping by 32.6%. Recovery was lower after any exercise between two and six hours before bed. So although the study highlights a four-hour marker, Bryan read the results as showing a two-to-six-hour window in which recovery drops, resting heart rate rises, and HRV falls.
What Makes the Study Different From Earlier Research
Mike was struck first by the scale. Earlier research on exercise and sleep relied on small studies and mostly subjective data, such as surveys asking whether someone slept well or exercised. The WHOOP data instead records how intensely people exercised, for how long, and when.
Mike also pointed out a detail that was not obvious at first. The study measured exercise timing against each person's habitual sleep time, not just against when they fell asleep that night. If someone stayed up late and exercised past their normal bedtime, the study captured that. Mike said this kind of information simply was not available before, and it expands both the breadth and depth of data on sleep and exercise.
Dose Dependence: Intensity, Duration, and Timing
Mike explained that the effect was dose-dependent. WHOOP uses a metric called "strain," which combines intensity and duration. Maximal strain close to bedtime disrupted sleep more than light strain did, and the harm grew as intensity and duration increased. According to Mike, the best outcome for high-intensity exercise was doing it six or more hours before bed, where there was virtually no change in sleep.
Mike added one caveat. Even in the maximal-strain group, there was a slight rise in resting heart rate when the workout happened that morning. Overall sleep metrics, however, followed a clear dose-response pattern.
Kate asked whether the effect was worse for people who don't normally exercise much, such as someone starting a new routine in the new year. Mike said the study found the effect across everyone, including professional athletes, regardless of gender or training history. Mike added that less-trained people may be affected more, likely because of sympathetic activation. Someone who rarely exercises may have a larger cortisol response to a workout, so their system takes longer to return to the parasympathetic state needed for sleep.
Kate then asked about gentle exercise, since Kate used to take long walks before bed. Mike said light workouts such as yoga or slow walking did not significantly affect sleep when done more than two hours before bed. Even within two hours of bed, the effect was minimal compared with strenuous activity.
The Practical Protocol and Whether People Really Differ
Asked what people should actually do, Mike said the takeaway Mike will give friends, patients, and themself is this: strenuous exercise should happen at least four hours before bed, and probably closer to six. Within four hours of bed, keep it light, like yoga or walking. No half marathons or hockey games right before trying to sleep.
Kate related this to a cousin who plays professional soccer at odd hours and constantly struggles to fall asleep. Kate also acknowledged that many listeners can't fit a morning workout in. Kate had to adjust too, going to bed earlier than came naturally so that exercise could happen in the morning. Kate also noticed in personal, anecdotal data that overall health metrics were worse on afternoon exercise days.
Asked whether this matched Bryan's experience, Bryan said the paper mirrored conclusions Bryan had already reached and had been recommending for years. Late-night, high-intensity exercise clearly raised Bryan's resting heart rate, lowered HRV and recovery, and made Bryan feel worse, which Bryan noticed early on.
Bryan used the study to push back on a common reaction to health advice, the assumption that "I must be different" and everything must be personalized. Bryan argued the opposite: people share far more biology than they don't. Bryan didn't know whether the overlap is 70%, 80%, 90%, or 99%, but said the goal should be to find the rule, "the power law," that applies to everyone, and only then look at exceptions. Starting from the exception is, in Bryan's view, a mistaken way to think.
The Trade-off: Late Exercise or No Exercise?
Kate posed a hard question: if someone truly can't exercise at any time except before bed, is it better to skip exercise or to do it anyway?
Mike first questioned the premise, asking whether there is really no other time, and guessed that true cases are probably fewer than one in a thousand. For those edge cases, Mike said the data points toward lighter exercise. But if that were true every single day, the person would only ever do light exercise, and Mike thinks that would be a mistake given how much exercise matters for longevity. Mike cited high VO2 max as associated with a 300–400% reduction in mortality risk. So Mike's answer was that on some days such a person should exercise hard and accept some cost to sleep.
Bryan offered a different emphasis. Bryan believes sleep deserves the top spot in everyone's life, above family, work, and everything else, calling it "the fuel source of existence." Bryan described a past pattern: overeating at night, feeling upset, then exercising hard to "work it off." The result was a double hit of a full stomach and a racing heart, followed by a hot, sleepless night, an awful morning, no desire to exercise, lower willpower, more bad eating, and a repeat of the cycle. Bryan said the only way out of that cycle was to prioritize sleep above everything, which in Bryan's experience improves willpower, exercise, and eating. Bryan acknowledged that some people, such as those whose work starts at 4 or 5 a.m. and who then have childcare, can't follow this for structural reasons. But when Bryan sleeps poorly, everything else falls apart: stress sensitivity, negativity, and mood swings all get worse.
Mike noted that exercise can also counteract a bad night. After poor sleep from international travel, a hard workout has reset Mike. Bryan agreed this isn't the only path; the point was that the gains from good sleep are easy to underestimate. Kate said the quality of the next day tracks directly with how well the night was set up.
Bryan's Hypothesis: Pre-Bed Resting Heart Rate as the Linchpin
Kate introduced the second topic by quoting Bryan: of everything Bryan measures, as "the most measured person in history," the one marker valued above all is resting heart rate before bed. Bryan noted that the hosts had never walked through this reasoning together and wanted Mike's reaction.
Bryan laid out the argument as a chain. Sleep is the most effective performance-enhancing drug available to every human, so high-quality sleep should be the top objective. The variable that most determines sleep quality is resting heart rate before bed. It serves as a linchpin because so many harmful behaviors raise it: a heavy meal, alcohol, a fight, worry, stress, stimulants, doom-scrolling, and screens. Bryan pointed out that most of society's vices appear on this list. Each raises resting heart rate, lowers sleep quality, and starts a vicious cycle of lower willpower and less exercise. A low heart rate starts the opposite cycle: good sleep makes exercise more likely, exercise makes good eating more likely, and good sleep and food bring more willpower to resist bad food, stimulants, and what Bryan called "debaucherous behavior." In Bryan's framing, the number is "a single number of record" that accounts for a person's behavior as a whole.
Mike agreed that resting heart rate is a good measure of autonomic nervous system balance, meaning the balance between fight-or-flight and rest-and-digest. Caffeine, nicotine, THC, stimulants, recent exercise, and digestion all show up in it, which makes it a simple and easy metric.
HRV and What "Resting Heart Rate" Means Here
Mike asked whether Bryan also tracks evening HRV. Bryan said the two move together: when heart rate is low, HRV is high, and vice versa. Mike explained for listeners that higher variability is better, reflecting more parasympathetic activity, while lower HRV reflects more sympathetic activation and stress.
Kate asked for clarification on what resting heart rate means. Mike explained that in medicine it usually means the lowest heart rate at rest, typically reached in the middle of the night around 3 a.m. Bryan's number is taken at a specific moment before bed. Mike said the two usually differ by only a few beats. Asked whether WHOOP's overnight resting heart rate matches the pre-bed reading, Bryan said they are the same.
Bryan's Nightly Ritual and What the Number Predicts
Bryan described the routine. After lying down with head on the pillow, Bryan opens the app, checks resting heart rate, and does about 60 seconds of breathing to settle down. The reading usually falls between 44 and 55 beats per minute. At 44, Bryan considers the day "perfect," reflecting the amount and type of food, stress level, and wind-down routine, and expects "a guaranteed perfect night sleep." At 55–57, Bryan expects a rough night. Causes include international travel, a disrupted meal schedule that pushed eating later, or evening exercise such as "a dance party." Having done this a few hundred times, Bryan says the pre-bed reading alone predicts REM, deep sleep, and HRV with "unbelievable accuracy."
Bryan also quickly clarified that the phone screen during this check is set to the dimmest possible setting with all blue light removed. Kate joked that Bryan was anticipating the comments, and explained the phone feature that switches the display to red with a triple tap.
Kate added a personal account. Early in doing Blueprint, Kate was skeptical of Bryan's claims and wondered whether they were one-off experiences that wouldn't apply to anyone else. Over time Kate found the same pattern: a higher-than-usual heart rate predicts worse sleep and roughly a 20% HRV drop the next day. You build intuitions about your own numbers, Kate said, and resting heart rate is one of the most important for making those predictions.
Resting Heart Rate as a Broader Health Marker
Kate asked whether fitness also lowers resting heart rate, beyond avoiding bad pre-bed habits. Mike said yes, and argued the medical community should use resting heart rate more as a measure of overall health. It rises with chronic stress, cortisol, and sympathetic activation, and it falls with physical fitness. Mike cited studies suggesting that each 10-beat-per-minute increase above 60 is associated with roughly a 10% higher risk of cardiovascular disease, and that a resting heart rate of 90 might mean about a 30% higher risk of cardiovascular disease or all-cause mortality compared with someone under 60.
Bryan described this as a reinforcing loop. Good sleep makes morning exercise more likely, exercise improves cardiovascular fitness and lowers resting heart rate, and a lower heart rate helps sleep again. So the marker captures cardiovascular fitness, bad habits, and sleep quality together, over both the short and long term.
Asked whether it is the most important biomarker a person can track, Bryan put that forward as the claim. Mike found it plausible and said it would be interesting to test formally how well resting heart rate predicts inflammation, body fat, and stress. The hosts then went through candidate relationships:
- Obesity: Mike said studies show resting heart rate rises with BMI in a linear relationship, recalling roughly five beats per five BMI points, though Mike was not certain of the exact figure.
- Stress: Both agreed a low resting heart rate under high stress is unlikely.
- Inflammation: Mike suspects a correlation but is not sure it is as close as the link to stress.
- Sleep amount: Mike described the relationship as running both ways. A high heart rate impairs sleep, and too little sleep raises heart rate.
- VO2 max: Mike agreed resting heart rate is highly predictive of it. Professional athletes often sit in the 40s or even the high 30s.
Bryan raised a possible exception: some ultramarathon runners have very low resting heart rates yet are prediabetic. Mike thought this reflects a separate, more complex relationship involving diet, fueling during exercise, training volume, and overtraining, not something resting heart rate captures. Bryan's conclusion was that for someone overwhelmed by conflicting diet and exercise advice, focusing on this one marker is probably the highest-value simplification available.
Asked how fast results come, Mike said "dare I say immediately," especially for people who are currently unfit, eat late, live under high stress, or sleep poorly. Mike estimated dramatic changes within a couple of months.
The Protocol, Step One: Eat Earlier and Lighter
For people with or without a wearable, Bryan gave the protocol, starting with food. Bryan eats the last meal of the day around noon, about eight and a half hours before bedtime, specifically to lower resting heart rate. Bryan says hundreds of experiments with eating two, three, four, five, and six hours before bed showed that noon works best for Bryan. For beginners, Bryan suggested this progression: if you go to bed at 10 p.m., start with an 8 p.m. last meal, then try 7 and 6, moving earlier step by step and watching resting heart rate fall.
Food type matters too, Bryan said. Pizza, lasagna, and other heavy, hard-to-digest foods make the body work harder than something like steamed vegetables, and people will learn which foods raise or lower their own heart rate.
Alcohol, Social Life, and the Croissant Argument
Kate asked about alcohol. Mike, who uses an Oura ring rather than WHOOP, said Oura shows population data suggesting alcohol raises resting heart rate by about 7%. In Mike's own experience, even one drink raises it by four to five beats, although Mike drinks rarely and only a little.
Bryan then played devil's advocate, sarcastically raising the common objection that a drink brings fun, community, and friendship, and that a life spent trying not to die isn't really living. Bryan noted that people defend drinking through beliefs such as "moderation in all things" and the value of social connection, and that some papers may suggest such trade-offs.
Kate said the first instinct is to be sympathetic, since society is built around these rituals. But once you learn how harmful something is, your relationship with it changes. A drink stops being pure enjoyment and becomes something you know is bad for you. Kate's advice was to educate yourself, because that knowledge is hard to unlearn. Mike framed it as a comparison of effects: it isn't clear to Mike that abstaining meaningfully reduces the ability to connect with others, while the harm to sleep is "definitively" clear.
Bryan told a story about a recent conversation with a doctor who argued that sharing a morning croissant with his wife strengthened their shared experience and relationship. Bryan pushed back from a biochemical angle: the body is about 35 trillion cells, a croissant produces a blood-glucose response and inflammatory effects, and "there's no law of biology" linking croissants to oxytocin or good health. By Bryan's account, the doctor conceded that a croissant isn't necessary for love. Bryan's broader point was that even doctors defend long-held habits strongly, but connection doesn't require alcohol, sugar, or croissants, and Bryan doesn't buy the idea that indulgence is the secret to happiness.
Measuring Without a Wearable and a One-Week Challenge
For people without a wearable, Bryan suggested lying down, breathing deeply, and calming down for about 60 seconds, then taking a pulse at the neck for six seconds and multiplying by ten. Skipping the calm-down minute will inflate the number, for example after walking around.
Bryan proposed a concrete challenge. If tonight's reading is 60, aim to lower it by 10%, to 54, within a week. Start with food, eating earlier and lighter and moving the last meal back gradually. Bryan warned that this may bring some hunger before bed and said, "I really enjoy that feeling." Kate and Mike both laughed, imagining listeners' reactions to being told to enjoy hunger, and gently suggested Bryan's preferences may not be typical.
Step Two: Screens Off and a Wind-Down Routine
Bryan's next rule is screens off 60 minutes before bed. Bryan acknowledged that this will feel like an eternity to most people and called phone use a full addiction, comparing the withdrawal to what people experience with crack, heroin, or meth. Scrolling, in Bryan's view, induces anxiety, FOMO, and negative social experiences. Alternatives include reading, a light walk, conversation, breathwork, meditation, or a hobby.
Mike called 60 minutes the minimum. Mike needs closer to two hours, reports an elevated cortisol response to work email in particular, and generally stops checking email at 6 p.m.
Kate's single most important lever is eating further from bedtime. Kate was initially doubtful. Kate used to skip breakfast and push meals later, but the data confirmed Bryan's claim. Mike said that when dinner can't happen by a certain time, Mike now skips it rather than eating late. Bryan agreed: going to bed full with a resting heart rate in the mid-50s means a headache, fatigue, and heightened emotional sensitivity the whole next day, so Bryan would rather not eat.
"Evening Bryan" and the Other Personas
Bryan described a wind-down technique that began while working through an eating disorder. Bryan used to overeat every night around 7 p.m. and nothing helped until giving that version of self a name: "Evening Bryan." Evening Bryan comes on duty after feeding, bathing, and putting the kids to bed, is exhausted by the stress of life, wants to "play dead like a possum," and soothes that pain with brownies, graham crackers, or whatever is in the kitchen, which then leads to sleepless nights, guilt, shame, and weight gain. Because Evening Bryan arrives after willpower is spent and "you can't negotiate" with him, Bryan made a flat rule: no eating between 5 p.m. and 10 p.m., the highest-risk window.
Bryan then extended the approach to other personas that disrupted sleep: Anxious Bryan, Ambitious Bryan, and Father Bryan, each with defined traits. When the wind-down starts at 7:30 p.m., Ambitious Bryan shows up first with a new idea about making Don't Die the most influential ideology in the world and helping humanity survive the AI moment. "Sleep Bryan" thanks Ambitious Bryan, writes the idea down, and promises to look at it tomorrow. Anxious Bryan worries that something said on the podcast sounded dumb and will draw mocking comments, and that worry gets acknowledged and addressed too.
Bryan's reasoning is that unaddressed thoughts lead to looping after your head hits the pillow: work, family, relationships, grievances. The result is a short, light night and the same stressed state the next day. So the one-hour routine means both being off the phone and talking yourself down from the day's anxieties. Bryan ends by holding a book for about ten minutes before sleep. Bryan said listeners can build their own version, but this sequence of screens off, working through the thoughts, then a book is what works for Bryan.
Light, Consistency, and Other Tools
Kate summarized the protocol as not eating late and doing everything possible to calm the body so pre-bed heart rate is as low as possible. Bryan added two points. First, avoid blue light: use red and amber lighting, turn screens off, or switch them to red mode, and Bryan recommended the app f.lux for computers. Second, keep a consistent bedtime, which Bryan says also lowers resting heart rate because the body settles into a routine.
Mike called consistency underappreciated and noted it applies to the routine as well as the bedtime. Mike also mentioned tools that have worked for others: journaling, a bath, or a sauna.
Targets: What Is a Good Resting Heart Rate?
Kate, a 29-year-old woman, asked what targets people should aim for. Mike said the data puts the best longevity outcomes below 65 beats per minute, which is the bottom of the risk curve. How far below depends mostly on fitness; some healthy people sit at 40, and professional athletes may reach 38. For both fitness and longevity, Mike suggested aiming for the low 50s. Women average about two beats per minute higher than men. Resting heart rate does rise with age, but Mike attributes this mostly to lost fitness rather than aging itself.
Bryan's current pre-bed number is about 50, up from around 46. Bryan attributes the rise to recently eating a little more and exercising a lot, and says the range over the past couple of years has been 46 to 50. Kate recalled that during Bryan's stricter caloric-deficit period, Bryan seemed especially calm and steady heading into sleep. Bryan said caloric restriction, at one point around a 25% deficit, produced a very low resting heart rate and high energy, and that eating more has dulled that "heightened experience." Bryan had to back off because of becoming too thin.
Bryan also shared 12-month sleep averages: 8 hours 35 minutes per night, 94% sleep efficiency, 3 hours 54 minutes of restorative (REM plus deep) sleep, 69% recovery, and an HRV of 48, which Bryan described as average for age. Bryan said an analysis by a colleague named Luke put some other metrics around the 90th to 99th percentile, though Bryan didn't have the exact numbers on hand. Bryan called it "elite level sleep performance."
The Face-Fat Problem and Other Biases
Returning to caloric restriction, Bryan said the main problem was the face. Losing facial fat made Bryan look frail, people associate thin faces with age, and that fat is very hard to regain. Bryan would point to good biomarkers, but people would reply, "You look like a skeleton. How do I believe you?" In Bryan's view, facial fat has become the entry price for being taken seriously about the heart, liver, or pancreas.
Mike called this a natural human stereotype, comparable to how hard it can be to take health advice from an overweight physician. Kate suggested the bias may be evolutionary: historically, being very thin often signaled undernutrition and problems such as low bone mineral density, so the intuition will be hard to override.
Resting Heart Rate as an Accountability Partner
Near the end, Bryan framed the number as an "accountability partner." On the couch an hour before bed with the munchies, one or two bites rarely stay one or two bites; they lead to the whole bag or a pint of ice cream. Remembering that even one chip will raise resting heart rate gives a concrete reason to stop.
Bryan said they wish they had a dashboard of friends' overnight resting heart rates, so they could call someone whose number jumped 7% and ask how they're doing and whether they can help. The hosts noted that Kate already exchanges screenshots of these numbers daily with a colleague, and that the numbers tell "a thousand-word story": emotional state, how the workday will go, and what to prioritize.
Finally, asked whether Mike's family follows these principles, Mike said they do. Screens go off well before bed for the children, and Mike's wife follows the same approach, because everyone has found it works. The episode's stated takeaways were to exercise earlier in the day and to make pre-bed resting heart rate a top priority. The open question the hosts raised but did not resolve is whether resting heart rate truly predicts inflammation, body composition, and stress as well as Bryan believes, which Mike said would be worth testing directly.
Does working out at night hurt your sleep? Is that really true? Is there truly no other time for you to work out? And this is interesting because I've been talking about resting heart rate as the single most important biomarker in my entire life as all the efforts we've done basically collapse into this marker. So to me, this was really cool to see that things that increase your resting heart rate before bed negatively impact your sleep. And exercise maybe counterintuitively is one of those things.
Today we're going to talk about two things which I'm really, really excited about because they're both incredibly practical and they're also zero cost. So a lot of people, if they're doing like saunas and cold plunge, great. Also, if they're not doing these basic things, they could be missing out and also starting their health off on a bad start. So I really, really am excited to talk about these two things. One is the WHOOP sleep study that got published and then the second thing is resting heart rate. So we're going to dive into both those topics today.
Y'all, I am super excited about this study. Like, this is just really exciting for me because this is like really great data that I think the medical community and longevity community has been waiting on since we, you know, started using these wearable devices. And to actually see this getting published is just super cool because it's in my mind going to change the way we think about research in a lot of ways.
I'm wondering why did it take this long to get a study? We've had this data. I mean, wearables have been really part of the health community for over a decade now. And you can argue that the quality was maybe on some kind of improvement trend, but why did it take that long to get a study out on this basic thing?
They had four million nights of biometric data. So, that took a little while to gather, I guess. But, you know, I think like there's not money behind this, you know, like when you look at like what NIH funds, they don't fund sleep studies, right? Like, you know, lifestyle studies are not backed by, you know, pharma or any other financial institutions. So you've got to have companies or people that are like, you know, inherently motivated to produce this type of research. So it's just hard to get your hands on, hard to get backed.
When I read these kinds of studies, I'm always reminded of the basic premise that we are not taught the basic elements of health in society. So in school we learn sex ed, great, we take driver's lessons before we get our license, but we do not learn the basics of sleep. We don't understand, like, is it better to exercise in the morning or the night? And so these really fundamental basic questions of life are just unanswered, and you can live an entire lifetime and never actually be taught how to sleep. And before I really went into this deeply, even in reading all the books I read, there was never actually a practical guide on how to structure your life around sleep. So, I think this study actually bridges nicely to these two topics; they pair nicely. The study on exercise and sleep and also resting heart rate. So, this will be an episode everyone can send to your friends and family and to those you want to introduce to health and wellness. Like Kate was saying, these are very practical tips that everybody can do and you don't have to spend any money.
So, the study that we're referencing, it's by WHOOP. This is the wearable from WHOOP. So essentially you wear it on your wrist, some people wear it on their bicep, but they analyzed 4.3 million nights of sleep, which is an insane amount of data, across 15,000 WHOOP members. And they were asking the question, does working out at night hurt your sleep? And so what they found was that, I'm going to read this list here: strenuous evening workouts can delay sleep onset, shorten sleep duration and reduce sleep quality. Elevated nocturnal heart rate and decreased heart rate variability were observed after high strain evening stress, or evening exercise, and workouts concluding at least 4 hours before bedtime showed no negative impact on sleep. So essentially the TL;DR is that if you work out too close to bed, especially high strain, it will negatively impact your sleep, which is such practical and useful information. What do you guys think?
100%. Like, the interesting thing for me about the study is, one, the size. So you know, 14,000 participants, I think anyone can realize that's huge. Four million biometric data points, or nights of biometric data, is also huge. So huge study. When you compare to the prior research we had, this area is really small studies and a lot of subjective data. So a lot of like survey: yes I slept well, no I didn't sleep well, yes I exercised, no I didn't exercise. Now we're actually getting like exercise metrics, so we understand not only how intensely someone is exercising but how long they're exercising, and then when they're exercising in reference to when they normally fall asleep, which is another really interesting aspect of the study that I didn't realize at first. But they're not just looking at when you exercise in reference to when you fell asleep that day, they're looking at when you exercise versus when you normally fall asleep. What's your habitual sleep pattern look like? So, if you stayed up later, but you ended up exercising past your normal bedtime, that was noted in the study. And this kind of information is things that we just haven't had access to before. So, it's really changing the breadth and depth of data that we've had on sleep and exercise previously.
Yeah. And some other data points from the study: the highest intensity exercise two hours before bedtime increased resting heart rate by 3.9 beats per minute, which is 6.8%, and HRV down was 32.6%. They showed a lessened recovery with exercise between two and six hours before bedtime. So even though they highlight the 4-hour marker, really it's a two to six hour window where you're lessening recovery, you increase resting heart rate, you lower HRV. And this is interesting because I have been, Mike, you can attest to this, and Kate, you can too, I have been talking about resting heart rate as the single most important biomarker of my entire life, as all the efforts we've done basically collapse into this marker. So to me this was really cool to see that things that increase your resting heart rate before bed negatively impact your sleep, and exercise maybe counterintuitively is one of those things. So even if you do exercise and you feel great, you're like, I don't think it affects me and it, you know, calms me down from stress, it really has widespread effects within the body. So to me I thought this was a really great... We never had data, actually large scale data that showed... I mean, actually there's a few studies, but this is a good one to show the correlation of resting heart rate and sleep quality and recovery.
And they found that it was dose dependent too. So the higher the intensity of the exercise, the longer duration. So they use this metric called strain, which is basically intensity and duration combined, and they call that strain. So maximal strain had a bigger impact on your sleep the closer it was to your bedtime as compared to like light strain, for example. So they actually found that the higher the intensity, the longer the duration actually led to worse outcomes the more we increase those two factors. So it really is dose dependent, with the best outcome happening if you basically exercise, if you're going to have high-intensity exercise, doing it, you know, six plus hours before bedtime. That's when there's, you know, virtually no change whatsoever. Although, one thing that was interesting is even in the maximal strain group, there was a change in resting heart rate even if you did it that morning. So, there was actually a slight increase in resting heart rate, but in terms of overall sleep metrics, very much dose response mediated.
Yeah. And this was actually, if I'm remembering correctly, worse for folks that weren't already exercising a lot. And so if you're like getting into a new routine, it's a new year and you're exercising a lot before bed, you're actually affected worse when it comes to your sleep quality. Is that right?
Yeah, they found it affected everybody though, even like pro athletes. So they did find that it didn't matter gender, you know, your experience with exercise, in terms of whether there was an effect. Granted, there may have been more effect if you are less trained, and that probably has to do with the sympathetic activation. And so the cortisol response: if you don't exercise very regularly, you're more likely to have a higher, like, you know, cortisol stress response to that exercise. So, it's going to take your system longer to relax afterwards so that you can get back into that parasympathetic state and actually get to sleep.
That makes kind of sense. And I was someone who was for a long time taking long walks before going to sleep. Do we know if you were doing a chill workout, would that still negatively affect your sleep?
So chill workouts, if they're done more than two hours before bed, did not affect sleep in any significant way. So yeah, like yoga, slow walk, things like that. And the actual effect if it was done within two hours before bed was pretty minimal compared to like strenuous activity.
Got it. Okay. So then what would be the protocol that someone should follow?
Takes over for me. But reading the study, what I would suggest, and I think like my takeaway, what I'm going to start telling friends, patients, myself, is that strenuous exercise should happen at least four hours before bed, probably closer to six hours before bed. So if you are going to exercise within that 4 hour window before bed, it really should be light activity. It should be yoga. It should be walking. But you shouldn't go for a half marathon. You shouldn't play a hockey game. You know, you shouldn't do anything super, super strenuous and then try to go to sleep immediately because it's just going to wreck your sleep.
Yeah. This goes back to what Bryan was saying about like the habits in society. Reading this reminded me of my cousin who's a professional soccer player, and he's constantly playing at like crazy hours of the day and that's just part of his profession, and he's always talking about how he can't go to sleep. And so it feels really practical, and also it's one of those situations where I'm sure plenty of people at home are listening to this and like, man, I can't fit a workout in in the morning, how do I do this? And I think that's something I had to adjust with my protocol too, is like, actually I need to go to sleep earlier, even though that's not my typical MO in life, so that I can do something in the morning, a workout, 'cause I also saw in my personal anecdotal data that my general health overall was worse when I exercised in the afternoons. So I love how practical this is. Bryan, have you noticed... I know you track your resting heart rate every single night. Have you noticed that days that you do higher intensity exercise, it's higher, or does it typically go back down for you?
Yes. Now, my life experience and conclusions basically mirrored this paper. I've been telling others to follow these protocols for years. And so, to me, it's really a great point of validation that a lot of people, when they talk about health protocols, they immediately jump to, oh well, I must be different and things need to be personalized to me. And I think the actual correct thinking is the inverse, where we have more in common than we do different. And I don't know, in certain areas maybe like 70% in common or 80% in common or 90% in common or even 99% in common. But we do share so much in common with our shared biology that we're really trying to find the exception more than the rule. And the rule here is late night exercise and high intensity. It did negatively affect my sleep. I saw in the data it was very clear. Increase my HRV, I'm sorry, increase my resting heart rate, lower my HRV, lower my recovery. I just wouldn't feel as good. And so that was very obvious to me early on in the game of doing this. And so you can also take these same principles and map them to every other part of life. The same rules apply. So I would just encourage people that, on topics of health and wellness, try to find the rule, the power law that applies to you and all of us, and then you can peel off the exceptions. But I think it's a mistaken thought process to find the exception above the rule because usually, again, we have more in common.
Okay. Okay, I'm going to ask a tough question. You might not have an answer, but what would you say is worse? Not exercising, if you can't fit it in, or exercising before bed? Like, what if someone's making a trade-off, what would you prefer they do?
You're going to ask this question. I was hoping you'd forget. Yeah, I'm interested to hear what your thoughts are on this, Bryan.
I guess my first, like, where I go to first is: is that really true? Like, can we challenge the notion that you can't exercise any time other than right before bed? I mean, I'll answer the question anyway, but my first thought is like, can we really challenge that thought process? Is there truly no other time for you to work out? And I'm sure there's people out there, there's edge cases where that's your only option. In that case, I would say that this data would suggest it's better to do a lighter type of exercise. But if that's true every single day of your life, that would mean all you would ever get to do is light exercise because you would be worried about messing up your sleep. And if that's truly the case, and this has got to be less than like one in a thousand, but if that's truly the case, then I would say there were some days that you need to just exercise harder and it's going to hurt your sleep some, because like we know that exercise has such a huge impact on longevity, where, you know, higher VO2 is having 300, 400% decreased risk of mortality. There's obviously a huge benefit to exercise. So, if there's truly a situation where you can only exercise maximally in the evening right before bed, then I would say some days you need to sacrifice sleep for that exercise.
Love it. Super practical.
Yeah, I would say an additional opinion, a contemplation for that, is that I think sleep deserves being the number one spot in everyone's life, above family, above work, above everything. It is the fuel source of existence. And the challenge, and I saw this in my life, is there were times where, for example, I would overeat at night and I would be so upset with myself that I would then exercise and be like, I now have to work this off, like I just can't go to bed because I'm really upset. Which of course is a double whammy, because now you're full, your body is... your heart rate's high, it's trying to digest the food, and you've exercised in a strenuous fashion. And then when that happens, you try to go to sleep, you can't. You're hot. Your heart rate's pounding. Then you wake up the next morning, you feel absolutely awful. You do not feel like exercising. And then you have lower willpower. And so now you're more likely to eat bad foods again and get in the same cycle.
And I was only able to break my bad cycles because I would prioritize sleep above all, which, when you do that, it increases your willpower. It improves your likelihood of you going to exercise. It improves your eagerness to eat well. And so I hear you, Mike. And there's certainly edge cases here where a person has a life circumstance where their responsibilities begin at 4:00 or 5 in the morning. They don't finish until 2 or 3 in the afternoon. Then they've got, you know, children responsibilities. So certainly there are people listening who cannot do this for structural reasons. I agree. But I just know that in my life, when I haven't been able to sleep well, everything else in my life falls apart.
I am more sensitive to stress, to negativity, to mood swings. It just throws me off entirely. So, I'm guessing most people feel the same.
But I hear you. It's a tricky trade-off because exercise does also counteract that in some ways. Like if you have a bad night's sleep, you can exercise and actually do yourself some good to get back on your two feet. I know like when I've had a bad night's sleep, traveling internationally, a really hard workout like reset me in a fresh way. So, yeah, it's not to say this is the only way. It's only to try to point out that you can never overestimate the gains of high quality sleep.
I definitely found that to be true for me, too. That like my day tomorrow is a direct correlation to how well I set myself up by going to sleep.
All right, you guys ready to move on to the second topic? Yes. Okay. So, Bryan, you've been investing years and years of your life, millions of dollars to try and figure out this longevity protocol, and you've distilled it into one thing. So, you say here, I've become the most measured person in history, and of all the things I measure, there is one marker that I value above all of them, which is high praise. So, this thing is resting heart rate before bed. What is that?
Yeah. And Mike, I don't think we've ever actually walked through this together. These are all my distillations. So I'd love to hear your take on this. Yeah, I can't wait.
Okay, so the hypothesis is this: that sleep is the number one most effective performance-enhancing drug available to every human. And it therefore warrants getting high quality sleep as your number one objective. And the most influential variable determining whether or not you're going to have high quality sleep is your resting heart rate before bed. And the reason why it's a linchpin to predict that is because if you eat a heavy meal before bed, your resting heart rate is going to increase and your sleep quality will decrease. If you drink alcohol before bed, your resting heart rate will increase and your sleep quality will decrease. If you are in a high stress state or, you know, in arousal, you got in a fight or you're worried about something, that too will increase your heart rate.
And so if you start listing out all the things in life that increase your resting heart rate, it's most of the vices we have in society, right? It's stress, conflict, overeating, alcohol, stimulants, doom scrolling, you know, screens. It's all these things that we know are not good for us. They have a direct relationship with increasing the resting heart rate, lowering sleep quality, which then starts this vicious cycle where now I have less willpower. I'm less likely to work out. And then it also has a bunch of these other positive effects where if I have a low resting heart rate, I go to sleep, I'm going to have high quality sleep, which means I'm more likely to exercise. If I exercise, I'm more likely to eat well. If I eat well, you know, I have much more willpower because I slept well and ate well. And now I'm not going to eat the bad food or take the stimulant or make this kind of debaucherous behavior. And so I can go through more detail, but basically it captures an entire person's life. It's a single number of record that is an accounting for all of their behaviors.
I like it. I mean, you're right. Resting heart rate is a good metric for autonomic system performance. So what is your sympathetic versus parasympathetic? What's your fight or flight versus your rest and digest? Right? Like it encapsulates your body's current physiology around that particular state. Whether you've been, you know, drinking caffeine or smoking nicotine or taking THC or on a stimulant or exercised recently or digesting, all those things are going to show up in your resting heart rate. So, it is a very simple and easy metric of that.
I wonder, have you looked at heart rate variability at all as an additional metric on top of resting heart rate in terms of like evening heart rate variability and sleep performance?
The same relationship. Every time my heart rate... So my heart rate is directly correlated with my HRV. When my heart rate is low, HRV is up. When heart rate is up, HRV is down.
And just for everybody who's listening, HRV, heart rate variability, you actually want more variability. More variability means more parasympathetic nervous system activation. And less variability means more sympathetic nervous system activation. So more stress, the lower your heart rate variability is. Just get everybody on board with that.
And resting heart rate, to clarify. So when you're going to sleep, this is the average number while you're at rest, while you're sleeping. Is that right? So overnight, what your heart rate is while you're laying down, asleep, not doing any kind of activity.
Yeah. Generally, resting heart rate, when we talk about it in medicine, we're usually talking about the lowest heart rate that you have at rest, which generally happens in the middle of the night, like 3:00 a.m., something like that. Bryan's talking about a resting heart rate measured at a particular time point before bed. Right, Bryan? That's correct. So, they might be slightly different, but they're not super different. I mean, like a few beats.
Bryan, do you find that your heart rate before bed is the same as... because WHOOP will give you a resting heart rate, which is while you're sleeping, if I'm not mistaken. So, do you find those two numbers are the same? Like when you're going to sleep, it's the same.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, I have a ritual before I go to bed. Right before I go to bed, I put my head on the pillow. I'll pull up the app and I'll see where my resting heart rate is at. And I'll do a breathing exercise for about 60 seconds. And that will settle me down. And typically I'll be somewhere between 44 beats per minute and 55. So 44 beats per minute means I had a perfect day. And I can walk through these things. That's related to the food consumption, like the amount of food and the type of food, my stress levels, my preparedness for sleep, my wind-down routine. And so when 44 beats per minute is on screen, I'm going to have a guaranteed perfect night's sleep.
Now I should clarify, on screen the light is... so all blues are out and it's the lowest possible light to be on the phone. So it's the least light exposure possible with no blues and everything is down. You almost can't see it. It's so dim, and that's a perfect night.
But if I do that exercise and I'm at 55 to 57, it's going to be a rough night. And so there's a few things that can cause that. Like maybe I've traveled somewhere internationally, maybe my food schedule got messed up because I couldn't eat in the morning because of something and I had to eat later in the day, or I exercised in the evening, like I did a dance party or something. And so now I know this so well, having done this a few hundred times, that I can predict with unbelievable accuracy REM and deep and HRV just based upon that alone.
Okay. Did you notice how quickly he clarified the screen light and everything? Like he's just seeing the comments coming right now. I'm just clarifying this.
Yeah. Which is true. When you switch it over to red, if you guys don't know this at home, it's such a cool feature. You can set up your phone so that you can triple tap and switch it and it really cuts out all light, which is great. So, that's what Bryan's referring to.
Yeah, that's so crazy. This is something that I experienced early on doing Blueprint. Like Bryan would say all these things and I was always very skeptical, like is that really... is he just, you know, experiencing something as a one-off, and is it going to apply to me? But I found the same thing across doing this. If my heart rate is higher than usual, I know it's going to impact my sleep quality. I know my HRV is going to have like a 20% drop the next day. So it's definitely true. Like you build up these intuitions with your numbers, and resting heart rate is one of the most important things to predict that.
And if I'm not mistaken, there's the bad things that you can do before bed, so like exercising, eating late, that kind of stuff, arousing yourself with a fight. But also you can drive resting heart rate down with better fitness. Is that right?
Yeah, 100%. So like one of the benefits of resting heart rate as a longevity health marker is beyond sleep quality. It's actually something that I think we should probably look at more in the medical community as a measure of overall health, because it is directly affected by overall stress. So how much stress you live in your life: the more stressed you are, the higher your cortisol response, the higher sympathetic activation, the higher your resting heart rate is going to be by a few beats. By physical fitness: the more fit you are, the lower your resting heart rate's going to be.
And there's actually been good studies that show that, you know, even like a 10 beat per minute jump above 60 is equivalent to about a 10% increased risk for cardiovascular disease. And the higher you go, the higher that increase. So if your resting heart rate is 90, that might be equivalent to about a 30% increased risk of cardiovascular disease or all-cause mortality, as opposed to someone whose resting heart rate is less than 60. So, it's a great surrogate for stress, physical fitness, overall health, which we don't really use enough.
That's why I love it so much, is that not only does it keep in check bad habits that could otherwise overrun your life, but also once you sleep well, the probability you're going to exercise the following morning after a great night's sleep is very high. And that of course has the double benefit, right? You feel good about yourself, but also it's improving your cardiovascular fitness and it's going to lower your resting heart rate. So it's this continuous cycle where great sleep leads to great exercise, which then lowers the resting heart rate again, which then contributes to, you know, continuously good sleep. So really it captures cardiovascular fitness, bad habits, high quality sleep. So basically, this is why if you can keep your resting heart rate before bed in check, it is the number one highest performing performance-enhancing drug in the world, because it's at the epicenter of all things you do in life.
Yeah. Both short-term and long-term. Yes. Like what are you eating? What's your lifestyle? What's your fitness level? What are your habits? What are your vices? It's all ultimately impacted by resting heart rate. Yeah. Show me your resting heart rate and reveal your soul.
Is it fair to say resting heart rate is the most important biomarker you can track on yourself?
Mike, that's what I would put forward, is that it is that.
I mean, this would be an interesting assessment to do. If you know somebody's resting heart rate, what is the relationship to inflammation, to body fat, to stress levels, you know, cortisol? Like if we just looked at that across the board, it may be one of, if not the most, predictive markers of everything else. It'd be interesting to try and figure out a way to test that.
Okay, let's just think through a few of these. It's highly doubtful that you're going to have a low resting heart rate and be obese. Correct. Yeah. There's actually good studies that show that. We do see an increase in resting heart rate based on a certain amount of BMI increase. So I think it's every five BMI increase, resting heart rate goes up by five or something like that. There's a direct linear relationship.
So let's just run through a few more. It's highly unlikely for you to have a low resting heart rate and be under high stress. 100%. So let's say, how does resting heart rate relate to inflammation? Do we think someone could have a low resting heart rate and high inflammation, or do you think that one wouldn't be directly correlated?
I think there's probably a correlation there. I'm not sure if it's as close as stress, but I would suspect there's also a correlation there.
Yeah. And then you've got physical fitness, which is clearly correlated. Yeah. Total amount of sleep is actually correlated. So the less sleep you get, the higher your resting heart rate. They're cross-correlated, right? Like if your resting heart rate's too high, you're not going to get good sleep. And if you're not getting enough sleep, then your resting heart rate is going to be high.
And you could probably also say resting heart rate is highly predictive of VO2 max, one of the best predictors of all-cause mortality. 100%. Yeah. I mean, like you see, you know, pro athletes regularly have resting heart rates in the 40s, sometimes even high 30s. Yeah. Which is crazy low.
Yeah. Although many of these ultramarathon runners, they have very low resting heart rates, but they're pre-diabetic. So, there may be some kind of blood glucose, insulin dysfunction that is not tied to resting heart rate. Would that be a possible theory?
Yeah, I think the issue we're seeing there has less to do with a relationship of resting heart rate to pre-diabetes and more an association with how you're eating, how you're fueling during exercise, the amount of exercise, are you overtrained? That's a different, more complex relationship, I think.
Okay, cool. So, it's a contender for probably the most knock-out-the-big-ones thing. Yeah, basically, if you have to reduce health to one marker, because let's just say you feel overwhelmed, you're not quite sure, the diet world has you confused with all the things everyone tells you to do. Exercise, there's a million different ways to do it. You're confused. If you focus on this one marker to simplify your life, this is probably the highest value thing anybody can do.
How long would you need to start seeing results in lowering your heart rate? Like someone listening at home, they're like, "Okay, I'm going to take on this challenge." How quickly do you expect them to knock out the increases in heart rate, and how quickly do you expect them to start to drive it down beyond just baseline?
Dare I say immediately. I think pretty quick, especially if they're coming from a situation where they're, you know, not currently cardiovascularly fit, if they're eating late meals, if they're in a high stress environment, if they're not sleeping well, I think you would see a response very quickly. And then, you know, dramatic responses within a couple months would be my estimation.
And if someone's listening, what would be the protocol? So, we all use WHOOP, but if someone else has a different wearable or they don't have any wearable, what would they be able to do? Right. I'm going to let you answer that one. You're the protocol master here.
Okay. There's a few really important things that are the power laws. One is food. So, I have my final meal of the day at around noon. And so, that's roughly 8 and a half hours before my bedtime. I do that with the specific objective of lowering my resting heart rate. And so over the years, I've run hundreds of experiments eating two hours before bed and three and four and five and six. And I found that eating at noon optimizes for my resting heart rate above all other times of eating.
So one is eat earlier and lighter. So if you're starting off, if you go to bed at 10 p.m., just begin at 8:00 p.m. as your last meal, and then try 7:00 p.m. and 6 p.m. Keep on working your way back. You're going to see a relationship where the earlier you eat, the better your resting heart rate. So, it's going to go down.
Number two is actually, and also on number one, the kinds of foods you eat matter a lot. So, some foods you eat will actually elevate your resting heart rate. So, if you have a big piece of pizza or lasagna or, you know, something
hard for the body to digest, your body's got to work harder to digest that versus something like steamed vegetables or something like that. So, you're going to understand and create a relationship that certain foods lower your heart rate and certain foods increase your heart rate. And so, I've dialed in this is the diet. These foods have the best evidence for longevity and they also are going to contribute to lowering your resting heart rate.
How about alcohol? Really quickly, how about alcohol? I know a lot of people just take—
Yeah, it's going to increase your resting heart rate for sure. I mean, I think Oura is really interesting. I think WHOOP does this too. I actually don't use a WHOOP, I use an Oura, but it shows you what the impact is across the population of alcohol consumption, and it's about a 7% increase, at least according to Oura, of resting heart rate, which I totally believe in my personal experience. When I do drink, even though I don't drink very regularly and when I do it's very little, even one alcoholic drink will increase my resting heart rate by four to five beats.
Come on guys, give me a break. You got to have fun in life. You got to have at least a drink. You're going to have social benefit. You're going to have community, friendship, love. You spend your whole life trying not to die. You're not living. You need to have a drink of alcohol. Give me a break. Bryan dropped sarcasm.
I mean, what do you guys say to that? I mean, so a person, you know, basically people hear this and it challenges their existing models of reality, where their models of reality say moderation in all things, right, is a good thing, or, you know, community is a thing that helps promote wellness, and being with friends and laughing and having fun and letting loose and winding down. So they'll argue through these various models that it ultimately is more beneficial than not, which I think, if I'm not mistaken, I think I've seen a few papers maybe suggest those kinds of trade-offs. How do you guys think about that in your personal lives?
My instinct when you ask a question like that is to be very soft, to be like, I can understand where they're coming from. Like, you know, it's really hard when our society is built around these social rituals. But then I remember what do I do for my life? And once you learn the information on how bad something is, it changes your relationship with the thing. So now if I think about drinking, it's not this clean line like I'm going to have this and I'm going to really enjoy it. It'd be like I'm going to have this and I'm going to feel like, you know what, this is actually really bad for me. So I would say that is probably the biggest thing: educate yourself on what you're doing to your body, because once you have that information it's really hard to unlearn it.
For me, I think the thing that comes up is what is the actual impact of drinking versus not drinking in a social situation. How much does abstaining impact my ability to connect and commune with others? And it's not clear to me that it does in an impactful way, whereas it is definitively clear that it impacts my sleep. Definitively. I mean, there's just no question.
I was talking to a doctor on Monday and he was making an argument to me that in the morning, if he wanted to spend some precious time with his wife, they would get a croissant, and that having a croissant together would increase their ability to have a shared experience. And I was like, I don't think that that is actually a correct hypothesis. I don't think a croissant is necessary in this equation. And he pushed back again, giving me the arguments of like, but it's a shared experience and it's love and all the benefits that flow from a loving, caring relationship. And so I was like, okay, let's just look at this from a biochemical perspective. We are a collection of 35 trillion cells. You take the molecular substrate of a croissant and you put it into the body. That's going to interact with chemicals. It's going to have a blood glucose response. You're going to have certain inflammatory markers in relation to that. There's no law of biology that says the molecular substrate of croissants holds the secret to oxytocin inducement and otherwise good health, right? Let's just break this down from a molecular perspective. He's like, all right, I concede the point that a croissant is not necessary for love in a relationship. I'm like, great. But I guess the point is even doctors maintain these robust defenses. But it's really, we're challenging something that has been part of people's lives for a long time. Alcohol is not necessary to connect, and nor are croissants, nor is sugar. You can connect with another human in the morning. You can connect with a human over healthy foods. But this idea that somehow getting down and dirty on the debauchery is the secret to happiness, I just don't buy.
But anyway, you were going through the protocol on how to get an incredible resting heart rate. So the three questions that I have left are: what do you do if you don't have a wearable? How do you measure resting heart rate? And then what are the targets that people can have? So, for example, are men and women different?
Yeah. So, if you don't have a wearable, then just simply put your fingers on the side of your neck and feel your pulse and count the beats for six seconds and then multiply that by 10. That's your baseline resting heart rate. Now, to do that, give yourself around 60 seconds to calm yourself down. Lay down, take a few deep breaths, try to calm your body down, and then take that, because if you don't give yourself that one minute, you're going to have an elevated heart rate because maybe you've been walking around or something. So that's your baseline.
So a practical thing we're talking about here is let's say you listen to this today and you want to take this challenge. So tonight before you go to bed, let's say you take your pulse and it's 60 beats per minute. Your goal in the next week, let's just say, is you're going to try to drop it by 10%. So you're going to try to get to 54 beats per minute by the following week. And so to do that, you're going to start with food. You're going to eat earlier and lighter. So start with two hours, move your way on back. As you move back, you may experience some hunger before bed. It's fine. I actually really enjoy that feeling. So just learn to get comfortable with a little bit of hunger.
Why are you guys laughing? I'm just thinking of the audience listening to this and being like, I'm supposed to enjoy being hungry? What Bryan enjoys versus what the average person enjoys. So funny, you guys both started laughing at the same time. Are you indicating that I'm out of touch? I don't understand. Perhaps. Perhaps. Maybe you just like different things than other people do. Feeling hungry. Feeling uncomfortable, you know.
So, the next thing you're going to do is you need to have a wind-down routine. So, the rule here is screens off 60 minutes before bed. And 60 minutes probably feels like an entire workday to most people. Like 60 minutes without your screen, you're going to go through withdrawal symptoms because everybody is addicted to their phone. And we just need to be honest. It is an addiction, full on. And so when you don't have the screen in front of you, you're going through these withdrawal symptoms, all the same stuff you would be going through with crack or heroin or meth, right? You're going through this psychological experience. And so you need to start creating a habit where screens are off and you're doing some kind of nighttime routine where you're reading a book, going for a light walk, having a conversation with a friend, breathwork, meditation, a hobby around the house, but anything other than scrolling on your phone, which is going to induce anxiety, create FOMO, create negative social experiences. And then you need to have some kind of wind-down routine.
I'll stop there first and come back. What do you think about that? Screens off 60 minutes before bed.
It's great. Love it. Yeah. Minimum. I figured this out on my own, as I think most of us do. That's my necessity. And for me it's actually more than 60 minutes. It's more like two hours. I seem to have an elevated cortisol response, especially to work email. So I actually, for the most part, cut that off at 6 p.m. Just no more emails. And so if I am on my screen, it's not looking at email.
Yeah. Kate, what about you? Agreed. So, if I had to distill the protocol into one thing, it'd be eat further away from bedtime. That is the number one thing for me that would impact my resting heart rate. So, yeah, totally agree. And that's just anecdotal data. I've tried, like Bryan, not as many experiments, but definitely he said this and I was like, I don't know about that, because I would be someone who doesn't have breakfast, and so I would push food later and later, but then, yeah, it really does, the data reflects it.
With the eating part, I've gotten to the point now where if something happens and I don't get to eat dinner by a certain time, I just don't eat dinner. At that point it becomes late enough that the solution is to skip dinner, as opposed to eating late.
Yeah, I 100% agree. There's not a worse feeling for me than having eaten late and going to bed with a full stomach and having my resting heart rate in the mid-50s. I just feel the pain the entire next day. My head hurts. I'm tired. I'm fatigued. My emotions are, you know, I'm much more sensitive. Yeah. So, I agree. I would rather not eat.
All right. So, yeah. The next thing is a wind-down routine that I do where I break myself out into various versions of Bryans. I figured this out several years ago when I was working on my eating disorder. I would overeat every night at 7 p.m. and I couldn't stop myself from doing so. And so I tried everything. Nothing worked. And the only thing that worked is I gave that version of me, Evening Bryan, a name, and I identified who he is, what his emotional state is, the problems he's dealing with in life, and the arguments he uses to say, "Let's do the thing." So, Evening Bryan shows up to duty at 7:00 p.m. having fed the kids, bathed the kids, put them to bed, told them stories, and then he's dead. The stress of life has just wiped him out. He wants to be like an opossum and just lay on the floor and play dead. It's too much. And the only thing he can do to soothe his pain of life is to eat food. And so, you know, brownies, graham crackers, whatever's in the kitchen, just devouring the whole thing. And then that process of not being able to sleep and feeling guilt and shame and being overweight. And so, Evening Bryan has a lot on his plate. He's very stressed. He is bearing the weight of the world. And he comes on to duty when other Bryan has spent all the willpower. And so, I basically just made a rule and I said, "Evening Bryan cannot eat food ever." So, from 5:00 p.m. to 10 p.m., which is the highest risk zone, he cannot eat food no matter what, because you can't negotiate with Evening Bryan. He's not going to be reasonable. He just wants his objective to be met of eating food. And so, that rule really helped.
And so, I started doing that with other Bryans that wrecked my sleep. So, Evening Bryan is now in check. He can't eat in those time windows. So, now I know that there's an Anxious Bryan, an Ambitious Bryan, and father and dad Bryan. And so I gave myself all these different names and I articulated the characteristics of each version. So, for example, Ambitious Bryan is a very dominant, a very prominent character in my life. So the moment 7:30 p.m. comes, my wind-down routine is meant to start. Screens off and trying to calm myself down. Ambitious Bryan is the first person to show up and is always like, "I have a brand new idea. How are we going to make Don't Die into the most influential ideology in the world, and the human race is going to survive this moment with AI?" And Sleep Bryan has to say, "Ambitious Bryan, we love you. You're really doing a great job in life. Good job. Keep it up. Also, right now, we're preparing for sleep. So, we're going to write down your idea. Then tomorrow, we're going to look at this idea because it sounds really promising. Let's think about it." But I have to systematically go through this process, and I have to talk to Anxious Bryan. Anxious Bryan's like, "Hey, today on the podcast you said that thing. You sounded really dumb. People are probably gonna hit you up in the comments about the idiocy of what your statement was." And so I have to say, "All right, Evening Bryan, thank you for the comment. I'm going to address this."
So that really helps me, because otherwise what happens if you don't address these various challenges you have within your mind before bed: your head hits the pillow and then you just loop through all these thoughts because they're not reconciled. You're thinking about work and family and relationships and what you're mad about and how you've been wronged and all these things, and then if you do finally go to sleep, you get an hour or two of sleep. You wake up and you're looping again. So now the entire night you're in this light sleep. You wake up the next day, you're stressed, you're worn down, you're not well rested, and you're in the same bad spot. And so this one-hour routine, you have to be off your phone and also walk yourself down off the anxieties of the day and calm yourself down. And so people can do other things. You can take your own nighttime routine, but to me that really works. And right before, like 10 minutes before bed, I'll just hold a book in my hand and do that for like 10 minutes before I go to sleep. It works so well. Screen off, talk through the things, book, and it just creates a great night's sleep.
Awesome. So, don't eat, and then do everything in your power to calm your body down in preparation for bed so that your resting heart rate is as low as possible. Is that a decent summary?
Yeah. Quickly, two other things. You want to avoid blue light. So, you want to use red light and amber light. Avoid blues. Those screens off, or if you do have screens on, turn to red lights. There's a great app called f.lux that knocks off blue on your screens, and you can change to red mode on your mobile phones, iOS or Android. And then consistency. So giving your body a consistent bedtime also lowers your resting heart rate, because you're doing the same patterns every single day and the body gets to fall into a routine. So if you make sleep your top priority, and by default resting heart rate, it really is the single highest value thing you can do for your health.
Consistency is underappreciated as an important tool as well, I would say. And then just a couple other things that I've seen work a lot for people: journaling, bath, or some people sauna. There are other tools you can use in your tool belt for creating that routine. But the consistency, not only in the bedtime but also in the routine, is super important.
Okay. And then what should people target? So, you know, I'm a 29-year-old female. Is that the same as Bryan? What are the targets that people should opt for for optimal resting heart rate?
So if we look at the data, the target for the best longevity is less than 65. And how far less than 65 is going to depend a good bit on mostly your athletic prowess,
Right? So how physically fit you are. Less than 65 is the bottom of the curve in terms of longevity. So that's where you can have the best impact. But some people are, you know, healthy at 40, or 38 for professional athletes. But generally I would say a good spot to aim for in terms of overall physical fitness and for longevity would be in that low 50s. Women are going to be on average about two beats per minute higher than men. So not a huge difference.
Yeah. Slightly elevated compared to men. Does it rise with age, your resting heart rate?
It rises, but it's mostly due less to aging and more due to loss of fitness. So, as we age, many of us lose our fitness and the predominant effect is a fitness loss causing the increasing resting heart rate.
That's awesome. And Bryan, what did you say your resting heart rate is? We'll make that our goal.
50 right now. Yeah, it's a bit higher. It was around 46 before. That was for the nighttime rest. It's now 50. I increased calories recently a little bit and also I exercise a ton. So those two things increase resting heart rate a little bit, but somewhere between 46 and 50 is where I've hovered for the past couple years.
Yeah. I will say when you were really in a caloric deficit, I felt like your entire, you were like, your before bed, it was like you were so steady and slow and like very, it felt like you were already so calm heading into sleep. So that doesn't surprise me.
Yeah. You know, I love caloric restriction so much. I mean, when I was doing, let's see, like 1,900 calories a day, thereabouts, that was like a 25% restriction. I got way too skinny and so I had to back off. But I love that state. My resting heart rate is incredibly low. I feel very high energy. So yeah, actually I find that as I have boosted calories, it has some kind of drawdown on my heightened experience. So yeah, I really love to be at the lower end of caloric intake. I think it really helps.
And on my sleep stats for the past 12 months, I've averaged 8 hours and 35 minutes per night. That's 94% sleep efficiency, 3 hours and 54 minutes average of restorative sleep. That's REM and deep. My recovery is 69% and my HRV is 48. So my HRV is average for my age. The other metrics, Luke did an analysis for me, and on some of the metrics, I forget, I don't have the data in front of me now, but it was like in the 90th, 98th, 99th percentile in some areas. I forget the actual numbers, but yeah, definitely it's elite level sleep performance.
Awesome. All right, you guys. So, the takeaways for folks: exercise earlier in the day and then make resting heart rate your number one priority in life.
Bryan likes being hungry.
And what did you say, Mike?
Bryan likes being hungry.
Yeah, Bryan, go back to that intense caloric restriction.
I mean, the main problem was when I lost so much weight, my face got really frail. You know, it got really skinny, and people associate really skinny faces with old, whereas, you know, they associate fat faces with young. And so I learned the hard way that when you lose a lot of fat in your face, it's really hard to get back, the hardest thing to do. And so, yeah, I wish I could be caloric restricted and still have the sufficient fat where it wouldn't ding the project, 'cause people, I would try to say like, "But look at my markers. Like, I'm, you know, healthy," but they'd be like, "You look like a skeleton. How do I believe you?" So, like, what do you do in that situation?
Yeah. It's the entry price to have the conversation about health, ironically.
Yeah. Like, unless you've got fat in your face, it's very hard to have a conversation about health. Like you can't talk about your heart or your lungs, your liver, your pancreas, because people, it doesn't pass their eye filters, like can I trust this conversation? I mean Mike, what do you make of that?
I mean, I think we're all human, so it's natural to have those stereotypes, just like I think it can be hard to listen to a physician who's overweight. You know, how do you take their advice seriously? I think similar sort of issue. It's hard to get past our own stereotypes when we're in our own intuition.
Yeah. What's interesting is it's probably a bias that's been built because folks that aren't eating enough probably aren't getting enough nutrition. So the correlation between super super skinny and like bone mineral density, for example, it's probably typically in the past not a great correlation. So these intuitions are evolutionary and they're going to be hard to fight.
Yeah. Yeah. Just to make this obvious is, if you treat your resting heart rate as your accountability partner, then it's really a beneficial thing for you. So, for example, when you're on your couch at night, it's an hour before bed and you feel the munchies and you think, "What do I have in my closet, you know, in the pantry, that I can just do one or two bites of?" In that moment, it's a high-risk situation because if you do that, you're not going to have one or two bites. You're going to probably have the whole bag and then a whole, you know, pint of ice cream or whatever. Like, it's going to lead to more debaucherous behavior. That of course is going to have these really negative effects. And so if you can keep in your mind and say, if I eat even one chip or one spoonful of whatever, my resting heart rate is going to increase, and that is going to be the accountability where, like, now I've messed this process up. And so it is your best friend.
I wish I could have a dashboard of my best friends in life and see their resting heart rate overnight and then be able to call them and say like, "Hey, Mike. Hey, Kate. I see your resting heart rate's up 7%. How are you doing? How did your night go?" You know, it's such an important indicator of someone's well-being. I wish I could do that and call all my friends all the time and say, "How's it going? Like, can I help on something?"
Well, he's not doing that.
I mean, Kate and I share that data like every single day. We'll just send each other screenshots of certain numbers and we both know it tells like a thousand-word story. I know everything behind the entire thing that happened. It tells me her emotional state. It tells me what she's going to be like working today. It tells me what to prioritize and what to deprioritize. It's amazing how much information we've been able to capture in these very small data points.
Yeah, it's true. Yeah. Hey, Mike, does your family follow this? Do they adhere to these kinds of principles, or is this something you do yourself, or do your children kind of have their different routines?
We adhere to these principles. I mean, globally, in terms of overall health, nighttime routine, all of those things. Yeah, we do adhere to those principles. The children, yeah, screens are off well before bed. And my wife's the same way. Yeah, we've just found it works and I think everybody's committed to it.
Okay, you guys. All right, thanks. Thank you.
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