Don’t feel like crap on Monday and using biohacking metrics to create useful change with Dr. Erik Korem

This week on The Less Stressed Life Podcast, I am joined by Dr. Erik Korem who is a  sports scientist with a passion for solving the data-to-action gap that exists in the wearable technology. In this episode, Erik tells us about his incredible accomplishments of helping athletes improve their performance with biometric data from wearable technology. His passion is helping you figure out how to USE the data you receive from your wearables to improve your quality of life.

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• How to not feel like crap on Monday
• What is adaptive reserve?
• What is the glymphatic system?
• How to improve glymphatic clearance outside of sleep
• Build better sleep habits
• How accurate is wearable technology?
• What is AIM7?

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ABOUT GUEST:
Whether fueling the feats of NCAA athletes or the U.S. Dept. of Defense, implementing one of the NFL's first sports science programs, or coaching Olympic gold medalists, Dr. Erik Korem has always been driven by a relentless pursuit of high performance. As time progressed, that drive became a new purpose — to translate the science enabling elite performers into actionable recommendations for anyone with a desire to improve.

Dr. Erik became the Founder and CEO of AIM7 in 2020, pouring his expertise into an app that analyzes users' data and provide custom recommendations for enhancing the mind, body, and recovery process. Leveraging the science of adaptive capacity, Erik and his team are unlocking a new level of human performance for anyone with a wearable device — so they can be their best without burning out.

The blog article on the accuracy of wearable devices that Erik mentions in this episode can be found here: Accuracy of Wearable Technology & Smart Watches

WHERE TO FIND:
Website: https://www.erikkorem.com/
Website: https://www.aim7.com/
Instagram: @erikkorem
Twitter: https://twitter.com/erikkorem
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erik-korem-phd-19991734/
Podcast: The Blueprint

WHERE TO FIND CHRISTA:
Website: https://www.christabiegler.com/
Instagram: @anti.inflammatory.nutritionist
Leave a review, submit a questions for the podcast or take one of my quizzes here: https://www.christabiegler.com/links

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[00:00:00] Christa: Stress is the inflammation that robs us of life, energy, and happiness. Our typical solutions for gut health and hormone balance have let a lot of us down. We're over medicated and underserved. At The Less Stressed Life, we're a community of health savvy women exploring solutions outside of our traditional Western medicine toolbox and training to raise the bar and change our stories.

[00:00:26] Christa: Each week, our hope is that you leave our sessions inspired to learn, grow, and share these stories to raise the bar in your life and home. 

[00:00:42] Christa: All right. Today on the Less Stress Life I have Dr. Eric Corrum. And his bio goes like this, whether fueling the feats of the NCAA athletes or the US Department of Defense, or implementing one of the NFL's first Sports Science programs or coaching Olympic gold medalist, Dr. Eric Korum has always been driven by a relentless pursuit of high performance.

[00:01:05] Christa: As time progressed, that drive became a new purpose to translate the science enabling elite performers into actionable recommendations for anyone with the desire to improve. So big topics. All these things bring up different feelings in our own brains. And today we're gonna talk a little bit about glymphatic.

[00:01:21] Christa: Welcome, eric. 

[00:01:23] Dr. Erik Korem: Thank you so much for having me. It is a pleasure to be on the show, to talk about some nerdy stuff that is going to, I think really intrigue some folks. 

[00:01:32] Christa: Yeah, so Eric currently lives in Texas, which is one of my other favorite states. I think I always, I just telling him, it always feels like home when I fly to Texas from here.

[00:01:42] Christa: And so, Give us a little bit of how did you even get into this topic? Cuz you said you played, I think, pro football for quite a while and here we are talking about the detoxification system of the brain. So why don't you give us a little bit of the background on how you decided to get into this?

[00:01:57] Dr. Erik Korem: Yeah. So I wish I would've prayed pro football. I played at Texas a and m, but I worked in the N F L and with college athletes For quite a long period of time. And in 2011, I pioneered the use of athlete wearable tracking technology. 

[00:02:13] Dr. Erik Korem: So if you've ever seen an, a sporting event or a football game where they're like, so-and-so's running down the field at 20 miles an hour, and they'll have like AWS NextGen stats.

[00:02:21] Dr. Erik Korem: I brought that technology to the US 2011 and it really changed our understanding of what was happening with athletes from an objective standpoint. I then went a step further and was like, okay, it's really nice to know how fast they run how much distance they cover these things. But I really wanna understand how their bodies are adapting to stress because I worked also with Olympic gold medalists and the sprint events.

[00:02:46] Dr. Erik Korem: A lot of Jamaicans, amazing experiences there. And no matter whether they were a sprinter or a football player, it didn't matter. They all had the same capability. Being able to adapt to tremendous amounts of physical and psychological stress and bounce back really quick. And then we started being able to measure this.

[00:03:05] Dr. Erik Korem: We measured it, directly from the brain using something called a slow cortical potential or a DC potential. And then we were pairing that with H rv. Now this is like 12, 13 years ago. And so it was at the early days of all of this stuff, and we were actually able to identify, specific ranges that people were in an optimal state of adaptability.

[00:03:27] Dr. Erik Korem: The next question then in my mind was, how do I bring this capability to anybody? How do we help them become more adaptable to stress? So I had the crazy idea, while I'm working a full-time job, I'm also gonna get a PhD. So I was like, if I'm going to beat myself doing this, like I want to go study something that's of value and something that like you can't survive without food, water, sleep. 

[00:03:52] Dr. Erik Korem: So I wonder how sleep impacts our ability to adapt to stress. So I went down that rabbit hole and we looked at these brain bio potentials and we could literally measure a millivolt potential of the brain and we could find these optimal ranges where athletes could adapt to mental and physical stress, and it was exactly the same sleep duration ranges that are recommended for the general population. 

[00:04:20] Dr. Erik Korem: And so this was 2015. And so I just started wanting to understand not only like how much sleep do we need, but what are the other behaviors associated with sleep that are gonna help? Does timing can matter? Does consistency matter? And then probably most importantly, great. Thanks for telling me I need to sleep more. How do I do that? 

[00:04:41] Dr. Erik Korem: And so that I went on that journey for several years. So really kind of unpack that. 

[00:04:47] Christa: Oh yeah. There's gonna be a lot of here to unpack. So first of all, someday I'm vying for Guy RA's job, like how it works.

[00:04:52] Christa: As soon as you were like, I brought this technology to this sector in 2011, I'm like, oh, how did you do that? What made you decide, I'm gonna figure out how to make wearable tracking technology? Or did you like contract with people? I'm just really genuinely curious on how did you do that?

[00:05:05] Dr. Erik Korem: This is a great question. So I was at Florida State. If anybody follows college football, there was a gentleman named Bobby Bowden. He was the head football coach previously. He was a living legend. He literally had a statue of this guy in front of the stadium stained glass window. He'd want two national titles, eight conference championship.

[00:05:24] Dr. Erik Korem: He was amazing. He retires. New head coach comes in. I'm with that coach. I'm quickly promoted to essentially the general manager role. So I'm in charge of running a 300 million football organization. I've never done this before. I just turned 30. And I told the coach like, I will do this. I have a science background.

[00:05:41] Dr. Erik Korem: I'm like, but name me, director of Sports Science. You can call yourself whatever you want. The job didn't exist at the time, so this was just a stroke of luck. The high performance director for a new startup, Australian Rules football team comes to florida State with the general manager. Now AFL and Australia is huge.

[00:06:02] Dr. Erik Korem: A hundred thousand seat stadiums. It is enormous billion dollar TV contracts. They're like, look, we're about to get the equivalent of like 10 or 15 first round draft picks, but these guys are not gonna be any good for six or seven years and we don't wanna lose in a free agency. Would you come here, help us create a collegiate environment in return, we'll teach you everything we know about sports science.

[00:06:25] Dr. Erik Korem: So I literally lived there for a month. And I learned about how they structured their high performance department sports height. And then I saw that they were tracking these players in games and in practices and how they were using this. And I was like, wait a second. Nobody's ever really quantified what's going on the field.

[00:06:42] Dr. Erik Korem: I brought back 12 tracking units. This company did not exist , none of this existed. And I'm literally duct taping these to the pads of our players. They're connected to satellites. I had to hire a former NASA propulsion engineer to help me organize the data. Long story short, we were able to use that to drive actionable recommendations that reduced injuries.

[00:07:05] Dr. Erik Korem: We had an 88% reduction in injury the next year. We went from nine to 12 wins, won a championship. The NFL flies in after that season, like what is happening? And it literally opened a multi-billion dollar market for wearables like sports wearables in the us and so that led, we can talk about later, but led to a career shift for me and what I'm doing now in the general population, but I wanted an advantage, like how do you know what to change if you don't really understand what needs to be changed if it hasn't been quantified?

[00:07:35] Dr. Erik Korem: It's your word versus mine, where if we at least have some understanding of objectively what's happening on the field. Then we can say, okay, are the way that we are training these players specific to the demands . Are the way that we practicing them. It's like saying, I need to go run a marathon, but I don't know how far a marathon is.

[00:07:52] Dr. Erik Korem: Is a marathon a hundred meters or is a marathon? 26.2 miles? I don't know. You're just throwing darts and hoping it hits the dartboard. 

[00:08:01] Christa: When you talked about wrapping this on their pads, I got this image because one time I was helping kids do research on pigs and they wanted to measure what they were doing.

[00:08:09] Christa: So they were wrapping them in a diaper and the wrapping them around, the pigs taping 'em on. And this is probably a bad visual, a bad parallel, but it made me laugh a lot inside. So I wanna hear about some of the biometrics that were being tracked. What kind of data were you getting from those players? Real time, that you were shifting? 

[00:08:27] Dr. Erik Korem: Yeah. So we could get speed. So if with GPS satellites you can measure velocity, you could measure distance. We had accelerometers in there, so we could measure acceleration decelerations at gyroscopes and magnetometers so we can measure positioning in which direction they're facing.

[00:08:45] Dr. Erik Korem: Literally anything you could ever imagine. So you don't have to be a football fan to understand this, but like you got Tom Brady, who's a quarterback, right? And all he does is drop back a few feet and throw a ball versus a receiver that's running thousands of yards in a game, sprinting 750 to a thousand high speed yards and Tom Brady and this receiver are training exactly the same.

[00:09:11] Dr. Erik Korem: Makes no sense. It'd be like, I have a business and the marketing person's gonna do exactly what my person in HR does. They're gonna need the same education. You're like, no, no, no, no. They just do different things. Nobody ever innovated on that. And then, Once we were able to understand what was happening in the game from what's called a biodynamic perspective movement, and we measured their heart rates so we could understand the energy systems being used.

[00:09:37] Dr. Erik Korem: And that was a mindblower, which was, American football is a aerobic, a lactic power game, and most of the training was anaerobic alac, meaning they were doing a lot of like. Gassers and things like that. That's not the energy system that you use predominantly. So we also realized like there was let's say you, cover X amount of yards in a sun in a game on Saturday.

[00:10:03] Dr. Erik Korem: We were covering up to like five to six times that amount during the week. So our players were just exhausted when they got to Saturday. So once we were able to quantify things, then we could say, let's create an intelligent plan to prepare and peak our athletes for game day. So, The parallel to what I'm doing now with my company, AIM seven, is it's like, think about this.

[00:10:24] Dr. Erik Korem: People have got all these Apple watches and or rings and that's descriptive data. It is not prescriptive. So what if I sleep seven hours and like we know that that's in the ballpark, but like, or walk 6,000 steps. Like what does that mean for me and how do I use this data to improve my health?

[00:10:44] Dr. Erik Korem: When we first started tracking, It caused a lot of friction cuz the head coach comes to me, he's like, Eric, what are we gonna do with this? I'm like, I don't know. And that did not sit very well. And so it wasn't until we could actually turn it into recommendations to make change that it was useful. Cuz data without insight is, completely useless.

[00:11:03] Christa: Yeah, yeah. That's the magic right there. Yeah. What are you gonna do with that? I'd love to hear about the most surprising information that you got from that time period. 

[00:11:13] Dr. Erik Korem: You are a wonderful interviewer, by the way. I'm really having to dig back in my brain here. 

[00:11:17] Christa: Well, what happened is, I'm sure you see some parallels in public too.

[00:11:21] Dr. Erik Korem: Yeah. I'll tell you what was very interesting is they're going back to the heart rate data. Our best athletes, their average heart rate. Now this is the game that's like power, speed, explosion, but it's repeated over and over and over again. Their resting heart rate, average heart rate during the game was never really higher than 1 30, 1 35.

[00:11:41] Dr. Erik Korem: I'm watching this real time. It would spike to like 1 75 and then drop down really quick. Why it was a quick burst or they were excited. I'm watching literally at a game and a kickoff on national television, and the guy that's about to receive the ball is just standing there and his hearts rates at like one 70. 

[00:11:57] Dr. Erik Korem: He receives the ball, runs down the field, and then he gets the sideline, he goes down. So our players that were more aerobically fit, tended to perform better. Because energetically they were more efficient. The aerobic energy system can churn out a lot more a t p. Now you also have to develop more power, speed.

[00:12:17] Dr. Erik Korem: You have these three systems, so it's aerobic, anaerobic, and anaerobic, a lactic creatin phosphate system. And they're all working together in concert. It's not sequential activation like I was taught 20 years ago, but if you're gonna concentrate your time, most of it was spent in this middle zone.

[00:12:35] Dr. Erik Korem: We started polarizing training more low intensity work, more super high intensity, explosive work with lots of rest, and guess what? They became way more fuel efficient. That was pretty surprising. 

[00:12:47] Christa: I like that. That's interesting to hear about. My brain can't help but think about where this applies to other people, because I think sometimes when you're looking at men, we've been primarily talking about a data set of men for the most part right now. Right? 

[00:12:58] Dr. Erik Korem: Yeah. 

[00:12:58] Christa: It can be a little bit different with women, which we don't have to get into yet. One more thing about athletes, from my perspective and how I sit seeing them , and the example I use. It was kind of these, the last few years, people would say, I don't know why these athletes dropped dead from this thing that's going on.

[00:13:15] Christa: And I was like, well, I have seen the athletes have a ton of inflammation. Very intentional inflammation, right? Because I would see their nutrient deficiencies looked like worse than most other people's nutrient deficiencies because they have a lot of intentional inflammation breaking down and building back up.

[00:13:29] Christa: I don't know if you would've been able to see that on the type of metric or the type of bio data you were collecting. Any comments on that? 

[00:13:35] Dr. Erik Korem: I think well, You would've seen inefficiencies in their outputs. You would've been able to probably see them not being able to sustain high levels of output.

[00:13:46] Dr. Erik Korem: If now that's objective. So there's two type in sports science. This is getting interesting. There's internal and external training loads. The external training load is what you did. The internal training load is how you responded to it. 

[00:14:00] Christa: Ah, nice. 

[00:14:01] Dr. Erik Korem: And then there's also objective and subjective.

[00:14:05] Dr. Erik Korem: So the problem with these devices is they're typically lagging indicators. Your perception of how you feel is a leading indicator. And so like if people wear an aura ring or something like this and they're like, oh, my aura says I'm 85% today, but I feel like I'm 20. I feel terrible. Why? It's a lagging indicator.

[00:14:28] Dr. Erik Korem: And so we used to run these crazy things. We'd like, oh, I wanna know if somebody's stressed. Let's take cortisol. I wanna see if they're sore. Let's take Creatin kinase. Then we realized if we just asked them, did the right math, and we were able to measure sensitivity of change, it was directly correlated to the biomarkers that we were looking at.

[00:14:50] Dr. Erik Korem: So, We combine what you did, how you respond to it subjectively and objectively. H rv, resting heart rate, dc potential of the brain. If you want to take biomarkers you can, but things that you can measure really quick and get a really good signal off of. I worked predominantly with female sprinters, which is pretty cool.

[00:15:15] Dr. Erik Korem: Some of the best. Of all time. Veronica Campbell Brown, eight time Olympic medalist, three time Olympic gold medalist. And I've got years of data on her and, without divulging any personal information like travel would impact her. 

[00:15:31] Christa: Of course, 

[00:15:32] Dr. Erik Korem: she'd be happy to talk about this. I mean, there was, she'd be in Europe, going to Middle East, going to wherever, and we're measuring all this stuff.

[00:15:41] Dr. Erik Korem: And we're like, okay, like you've just landed. We need certain amount of days to reboot the system, to get you oriented to that time zone. There were things that we would have to do to try to get her body ready to run, and we could measure like how her autonomic nervous system and her brain was adjusting to travel.

[00:16:01] Dr. Erik Korem: And then we would use different techniques to stimulate the nervous system so she could perform. And it was really cool to be able to track this stuff and me being all the way around the world and being able to look at how her body had just adapted to a 13 hour flight. Now she's eight time zones off.

[00:16:19] Dr. Erik Korem: What do we do? 

[00:16:21] Christa: I would expect that to translate to everyone right. And actually, did you ever become familiar with, at, in the eighties there were some researchers that came across, it's called like the Jet Lag Protocol. There's a book about this. It's a very ancient, ancient book, but essentially, we have a handout about this in practice, but I think the premise is that you start to start following the circadian rhythm of the place you're going.

[00:16:44] Christa: 24, 36, 48 hours in advance as much as possible. And then you do not deal with the jet lag stuff. Did you guys ever do anything like that? 

[00:16:52] Dr. Erik Korem: Yeah. With her, It was a little more difficult because sometimes she was moving, like she would go to Europe and stay in Europe. So she would go there, get there a weekend early, and then she would be adjusted, but then she would go to Africa.

[00:17:03] Dr. Erik Korem: But yes, and it's also different going east and west. But you're a hundred percent right. And if you're traveling different time zones, sometimes it's best to do nothing. Like, for instance, in the nfl, if we traveled on a Saturday and we would go from, let's say it's two to three time zone shift, you just wanna get there and play as quickly as possible. 

[00:17:24] Dr. Erik Korem: Now, if you're going to Europe like, if you're going from a lot of, like, Jacksonville seems to do this a lot, then you're gonna want to, they actually, a bunch of teams have looked at like, do we go a week early or do we just go the day before? And it's almost better if you just go the day before.

[00:17:38] Dr. Erik Korem: Or something like that. But you're exactly right. Like depending on like if once you land you want to eat on their schedule, you wanna get sunlight on that schedule and you wanna try to exercise as quickly as you can to re acclimatize yourself, if you don't do that, you're gonna be completely miserable.

[00:17:55] Christa: You just said there were things that you did techniques to stimulate the nervous system to help her perform. Will you talk a little bit about that, because that's fun topic. 

[00:18:03] Dr. Erik Korem: Yeah. So one of the things with exercise is you stimulate, you don't annihilate. Way too many people and way too many programs are designed around annihilation. And that is not how you see long-term changes in physiology. It's becoming more popular now, but we called it the minimal effective dose. But let's say this was interesting to me, first time I went to a world championship for track. The day before the track meet, she went on the track and she sprinted, like warmed up and did a few short accelerations in football.

[00:18:41] Dr. Erik Korem: It was like the historical way to do it was if you play on Saturday, your last practice was Thursday. You like did nothing on Friday. Complete rest. And then Saturday. Well, then we found out like, well, sometimes if your last practice was at Thursday in the evening and Saturday was the next time you did it, like an evening, guys would just be flat.

[00:19:01] Dr. Erik Korem: Why? The body has gone three days in a row of work, work, work, work. What does it do? It completely shifts the autonomic nervous system, and this is where wearables get it wrong. The whoops and the auras specifically whoop, will over index on an increase in parasympathetic tone. So your H RV spikes and they're like, yes, that's amazing.

[00:19:23] Dr. Erik Korem: No, that is not. Which you actually, that's also the body saying, I have slammed the brake on. It's gonna be much harder now to stimulate the body and get going. So what you'd rather do is keep a thread of work in. Micro dose it. so that's when I learned from track, I'm like, oh, this makes so much sense.

[00:19:42] Dr. Erik Korem: What we would actually would do is two days before the meat was a rest, The day before the meet was a shakeout and short accelerations to stimulate the nervous system. And you come in fresh. So we actually switched it in college football. We started practicing on thursday was off. We practiced Friday.

[00:20:01] Dr. Erik Korem: The players felt so much better on Saturday. And didn't feels sluggish. So people are listening. It's like, what in the world does this have to do with me? Keeping a consistent tone that we would look at like the tone of the autonomic nervous system or the parasympathetic tone. You wanna keep some type of work in the system at all times.

[00:20:22] Dr. Erik Korem: So even on a rest day. Maybe it's, a long walk, 15 minutes of mobility, stretching, moving the body. You're gonna feel a lot better if you go from work, work, work, work to completely shutting it down. You're gonna feel like a lot of people do this on the weekends, on Monday, they just feel like garbage.

[00:20:42] Dr. Erik Korem: Where if you consistently keep some movement in the system, the central nervous system and the autonomic nervous system like that, The body likes to be moving. Doesn't like to completely shut down. It's called active recovery. 

[00:20:57] Christa: I just slowly titling this. Don't feel like crap on a Monday. Don't mind me over here. 

[00:21:03] Christa: We'll get into glymphatic here in a second. 

[00:21:05] Dr. Erik Korem: Yeah. 

[00:21:05] Christa: But some people say that if you already know your sleep's a mess and some of this stuff is a mess, then tracking. Data, as you call it, descriptive and not prescriptive is not helpful because it's like, I already know I can't sleep.

[00:21:20] Christa: It's not really, he, it's more stressful for me to see data that tells me I'm not sleeping. What would you say about that? 

[00:21:26] Dr. Erik Korem: I would say it's true. If there's not a solution. It's like, Telling you you're bad at math when you're bad at math. 

[00:21:34] Christa: Yeah. 

[00:21:34] Dr. Erik Korem: Well, thanks. Thanks for making me feel worse about myself.

[00:21:37] Christa: Right? That's exactly what it is. 

[00:21:38] Dr. Erik Korem: Yeah. I'm gonna go find a calculator, right? So my company, AIM seven, is solving this problem. We pattern matched what happened in sports, all the friction and trouble that was caused with data. Then I started looking at the consumer market. Like you got all these people with wearables, they have really have no idea how to use it.

[00:21:55] Dr. Erik Korem: So we provide people with prescriptive recommendations for exercise, sleep, and mental health. Like for instance, we pioneered a technology, oh, almost eight years ago now, where based off of how your biomarkers are adjusting, we can manipulate the type. The intensity, how hard and the duration of your exercise and it leads to, I'm talking, we did this with athletes, 150 to 500% more improvement in, things like aerobic capacity, peak vertical power, body composition changes because if the body is ready to adapt to stress, hammer it when the window is closing. Let's say every day you've heard of these readiness metrics, right?

[00:22:44] Dr. Erik Korem: What that really is like, I'm gonna get really meta on you here for a second. There's something called adaptive capacity. It's your ability to adapt to stress, and that can be changed over time, but it's like your gas tank, okay? The size of your gas tank can grow if you invest in five specific things, but every day you wake up with a specific amount of fuel in the tank.

[00:23:06] Dr. Erik Korem: It's called an adaptive reserve. It's like your currency for adaptation and certain things can fill that tank or drain the tank. I've got three kids, let's say one of 'em was up all night last night, cuz they're sick. I'm an entrepreneur. I had to work really hard. And let's say, I don't know, my wife and I had a disagreement.

[00:23:26] Dr. Erik Korem: I'm not gonna wake up with a lot of gas in my tank. Right now if I have a really big adaptive reserve, I'm gonna have more fuel than you would. Or somebody else because I've built that capacity. But we need to match our stress with what is available. And then we also need to know how to refill that tank.

[00:23:46] Dr. Erik Korem: So the recipe for growth is stress plus rest equals growth. You need stress. That's, I mean, as is necessary, but you also have to know the type of stress that you need, and then how to, so we can provide very detailed recommendations on like, Today, if you're gonna hop on the elliptical, only go this long into this heart rate zone.

[00:24:05] Dr. Erik Korem: And then we noticed from your H RV and how you feel that you're really stressed, here's a specific breathwork tool right now to use to shift your autonomic nervous system or a gratitude inter the specific things for your current state. Same with sleep. So yeah, if you don't have a specific recommendation, it's like a description of your current state, which can be very demotivating.

[00:24:28] Dr. Erik Korem: And I would take the thing off. Personally

[00:24:30] Christa: right? Yeah. 

[00:24:32] Christa: Until you're able to correct the problem. I have some more questions about wearables and data that we can come up with, but first let's go talk about some sleep stuff's so we can kinda it dancing around that topic for a moment here. 

[00:24:43] Christa: So the glymphatic system we talk about when we think about drainage detox.

[00:24:48] Christa: First of all, I think drainage detoxification applies to absolutely everybody. Some of the more recognized drainage and detoxification systems might include the liver, the kidneys, colon, basically bowel moments, urine, sweat, respiration. But glymphatic are not discussed very often. So give us a little bit of glymphatic 1 0 1, Eric.

[00:25:10] Dr. Erik Korem: This is new science. Okay? So I'm gonna give you what I know from what we've gathered in the past 10 to 15 years roughly. 

[00:25:19] Dr. Erik Korem: So the rest of the body has a lymphatic system, one of the detoxification system. The brain does not. What it does is it has these unique paravascular pathways. So what happens is cerebral spinal fluid goes into the brain, mixes with interstitial fluid in the brain, and then at night.

[00:25:38] Dr. Erik Korem: Only when you are asleep does this glymphatic system flush out metabolic waste products that are located in the brain, of which one of 'em is beta amyloid, which is associated with neurodegeneration diseases like Alzheimer's disease, dementia, traumatic brain injuries. And so the really interesting thing is, We've always wondered like, why is it that when you get a really good night of sleep you kind of have this clear thinking.

[00:26:11] Dr. Erik Korem: It's like a very restorative feeling. You kind of feel bright and airy. You have a bad night of sleep. It's like you got brain fog. You literally have metabolic crap stuck in your brain. And so I started thinking about this. I'm Michael K. We have this glymphatic clearance that happens during sleep at night.

[00:26:29] Dr. Erik Korem: We are seeing a significant rise in cases of Alzheimer's disease, dementia, neurodegenerative diseases. I think 5.8 million Americans have this disease right now, and it's doubling every five years in people over 65. It's the sixth leading cause of death in the US By 2060, it's expected that over 14 million people will have this disease.

[00:26:53] Dr. Erik Korem: Well, why is that? Well, look at our sleep. Our sleep durations have been plummeting. 35 0.2% of US adults sleep less than seven hours a night. Now, research demonstrates that there is a U-shaped curve relationship between diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and even all cause mortality with the seven to nine hour window is ideal.

[00:27:19] Dr. Erik Korem: Okay. 32.6% of working adults report sleeping less than six hours a night. So if our sleep is declining and we understand that the glymphatic system is responsible for flushing out all this junk at night, and we know that one of those proteins that's getting stuck in there as beta amyloids, some of these other things, That's a indicator or that's a causative agent for neurodegenerative diseases. I can't say it's causation yet, but it's pretty strong. 

[00:27:52] Christa: So what are we gonna do about it? Right. 

[00:27:53] Dr. Erik Korem: Yeah. 

[00:27:54] Christa: so the problem is, is that we can talk about what's impacting sleep. We've got light issues, we've got all kinds of circadian disruption. But it's a big, I don't know the numbers right now, but when I see stats about people having sleep issues, I'm like, oh my gosh.

[00:28:09] Christa: So I think people would say, the person listening to this is like a generally health savvy person. It's interesting, right? How do you make this sexy enough to actually do the thing, right? So there's two camps of people. There is, I know I should, but I'm not doing it. And then the other camp of, but I'm having trouble sleeping, so we gotta talk about these two camps of people.

[00:28:32] Dr. Erik Korem: Yeah, I mean, look, it's, if you're in the know, you should and you can sleep, but you're not doing it. Let me take two of 'em off the table. I'm a night person, and number two, I don't need that much sleep. Number one, I can almost guarantee you don't have the snippet for not needing enough sleep. It's like a fraction of 1% of the population. It's the genetic polymorphism. 

[00:28:53] Dr. Erik Korem: Number two, there was a great study done by. M i t and Harvard. It's called the Broad Institute. It's a conglomeration between those two.

[00:29:01] Dr. Erik Korem: They're right next door to each other. And, university of Colorado. And they looked at over 800,000 people in the uk Biobank, and they used 23 and Me data. They had, sleep tracking. They use diaries and they wanna look at the effect of chronotype on depression. First of all, they found that genetically only 9% of people are actually evening type 9%.

[00:29:29] Dr. Erik Korem: Those of us that aren't really evening type and they're going to bed later, it's because of things like our phone. Social media, tv. We're stimulating ourselves when our body should really be going to sleep. Very interesting. They found that if you shift your sleep onset back by one hour, there was a 23% reduction in major depression.

[00:29:53] Dr. Erik Korem: Shift it back two hours, almost a 40% reduction. Why is that? Well, people that go to bed earlier and wake up earlier get more What? 

[00:30:06] Christa: Deep sleep? 

[00:30:07] Dr. Erik Korem: Sunlight? 

[00:30:08] Christa: I'm not sure. Sunlight. Okay. Got it. 

[00:30:10] Dr. Erik Korem: When you view sunlight, it kicks off a cascade of hormonal and neurological events that directly impact your mood and your risk of depression.

[00:30:20] Dr. Erik Korem: So if you know you should be doing it and you're not doing it like. I can't help. I mean, it's like if you want to perform at your best, if you wanna make great decisions, if you wanna set yourself up for success, if you're exercising, you know what I would do is I would link sleep to something that's of value to you.

[00:30:43] Dr. Erik Korem: A value like self-care, a value like excellence, a value like maybe family, whatever it is. And if you can connect, if it's sleep or anything else to something that's of value to you, that's core to who you are. It makes it easier to take action when emotion enters the equation. When like, I could stay up and watch such and such, or, you know what?

[00:31:08] Dr. Erik Korem: I really value my family and I know when I don't get enough sleep, I'm grumpy. Or I really am pushing hard at work right now and I want to get this project across the line. I value excellence, so I'm gonna go to bed. So that's like camp one. 

[00:31:23] Christa: Yeah, I really, I wanna underline that a little bit just because these are often very brilliant, smart people that do this, right?

[00:31:31] Christa: We all do things sometimes that we know we shouldn't do, but we want to do. And it's this damn subconscious, the other 95% of us, it's a little bit self-sabotaging. So, You're gamifying it, which doesn't surprise me at all. If you have an app that makes prescriptive data, of course you gamify everything, right?

[00:31:46] Christa: So it's very natural for you to recommend a gamification, which I think makes sense because we are humans, so we love, whatever we can link to immediate gratification, that is all we care about, right? As humans, we're like, okay. Oh, yep. I love my grandkids. I know that this causes this. Okay.

[00:32:02] Christa: I'm back on track, you know? So I don't know. I just think whatever you can do to be tangible is helpful. Cause for me, some of this is just, this is like your subconscious, it's your emotions. This is like the life coaching stuff. Right. That's kind of tricky, but I liked your answer.

[00:32:16] Dr. Erik Korem: I appreciate it. It's something that we have a lot of really amazing performance psychologists on our team and we really thought about like, How do we help people take action for their own best self-interest?

[00:32:28] Christa: It's the usual question. 

[00:32:30] Dr. Erik Korem: Yeah. And in long-term goal pursuit, I mean it's in the literature, a lot of this has to do with psychological flexibility.

[00:32:37] Dr. Erik Korem: When you can link actions to values, people will take action, especially if it, the values is really core to who they are. But thank you, I mean, We're trying to just help folks and like, you gotta dig in deep, right? 

[00:32:48] Christa: Yeah. How do you make this attractive enough that I wanna do it 

[00:32:52] Dr. Erik Korem: right, 

[00:32:52] Christa: always right. Like what emotion can you press on that I actually care enough about? Ooh, spoiler alert. You get to pick the emotion. That's the best part. 

[00:33:01] Dr. Erik Korem: You are super sharp. I love this conversation Is. Awesome, because I love the fact that you are pushing back and touching the right buttons. There's a reason why you're successful. I can only imagine being one of your clients. 

[00:33:14] Dr. Erik Korem: For the other camp of people that are having difficulty sleeping, there's a lot of layers to unpack, a lot of which you probably have already talked about in the past. Circadian anchoring, sunlight, exercise, the basic stuff, food, not eating late at night.

[00:33:32] Dr. Erik Korem: Avoiding alcohol in the evenings, you know, really, it was really interesting. I had Sachin Panda. You know what Sachin Panda is? 

[00:33:39] Christa: Yeah. 

[00:33:40] Dr. Erik Korem: So he was on my podcast recently and he started talking about there's some emerging research with melatonin production and exposure to sunlight. During the day, meaning like the more exposure you get during the day, the more melatonin production.

[00:33:58] Dr. Erik Korem: Cuz melatonins isn't just excreted from the pineal gland, it's actually like I believe in the mitochondria as well. And there's receptors in your skin. And so I believe there's something to the fact that our bodies are not designed to be living indoors all the time. And if you wanna unhinging somebody like. Keep them inside. It's like when you go to a conference 

[00:34:21] Christa: Yeah. 

[00:34:22] Dr. Erik Korem: And you're there like day two and you're like, where am I? 

[00:34:25] Christa: Yeah. 

[00:34:25] Dr. Erik Korem: Like, what world are we living in? I'm in the Gaylord. I'm like, where is this thing? And I'm like, I deliberately have to go outside and be like, oh, the sun. Like, life exists.

[00:34:36] Dr. Erik Korem: People live their life. They get in, they go from in the house, into the car to work, back into the house, and that's it.

[00:34:42] Dr. Erik Korem: And I've had the opportunity to work with different special operations groups, and one of the things that I learned working with guys that had very traumatic experiences and couldn't sleep, they would go camping two to three weeks.

[00:34:59] Dr. Erik Korem: All of a sudden they were able to start sleeping six and a half, seven hours a night. Part of that is the green space. Part of it is their body is now anchored to their external environment. They're on a rhythm of waking up. When the sun comes up, they exercise, they hike, they move. So that, and then, , basic hygiene, when the sun goes down, everything in your house will start demming.

[00:35:22] Dr. Erik Korem: If you're following all the basic stuff, your room is cold, dark, and quiet like a cave. I mean, if you're doing all the things and it's still not happening for you, then I think that's the time you need to go see a doctor, and go see a legit specialist that has an expertise in this.

[00:35:37] Dr. Erik Korem: But I would check off all the boxes. Am I exercising adequately? Am I at least getting 150 minutes of heart rate elevated exercise a week? Am I doing some resistance training? The basics. Have I done anything for my mental health? Is it anxiety? Is it my thoughts that are keeping me up? What am I doing to brain dump before I go to bed so I can go lay in bed and rest?

[00:35:59] Dr. Erik Korem: Like journaling helps a lot of people. It helps me. I'll go do my whole schedule for the next day. So when I get into bed, it's like I have nothing to think about. You know? 

[00:36:07] Christa: I agree with everything you're saying there. I just wanna share another little story. I had a client, 

[00:36:13] Dr. Erik Korem: please 

[00:36:13] Christa: who was, really frustrated with her HRV on her aura ring, and there's a lot of things.

[00:36:19] Christa: Going Well, you know, but that just was like not doing its thing. And then it started shifting and we decided the main input was some breath work changes, right? Cause breathing dysfunction is big for all kinds of, like we're talking about sleep, which people know is important. Another thing we discount the most, I think is our breath and how we're breathing functionally, right?

[00:36:41] Christa: And so there's a lot. So just with some like more intentional breathwork practices that seemed to. Improve the H rv, which was kind of an interesting one, and I will say like the more severe the sleep issue. The more those sleep hygiene practices seem to be important because when I see clients, like I see gut microbiota issues being an issue because that's where a lot of serotonins produced, and that's a precursion of melatonin, so I find that's all useful.

[00:37:08] Christa: But if you're not starting with like circadian exposure, getting your super matic nucleus exposed to that sun, right? And then what do you do if you wake up and it's winter and, or you're one of those sh people who are in different shifts, right? Well then there's full spectrum light therapy, right?

[00:37:24] Christa: Like there are some cool workarounds, right? Even if it's like your life, you can't just go camping for three weeks. When you brought that up, it made me think of this book I just loved by somebody Florence somebody, but it's called the Nature Fix, and it just talks about all the nervous system impact from that.

[00:37:39] Christa: So cool. I think so often we discount all of those like trauma things in life, and there's just so much that's like rattling people on the inside and impacting their sleep. That's like, there's plenty of people that can make lots of careers out of sleep stuff. I mean, it is the most common issue it's a very, very common problem. 

[00:37:56] Dr. Erik Korem: I had, , a mentor of mine, Dr. Gershon Tenenbaum told me once everything is complex, multidimensional, and relative. And when problem solving, you have to start thinking what are all the things that could be inputting? And so, you're right, like I'm in a very stressful period of my life right now.

[00:38:12] Dr. Erik Korem: We're raising a seed round, we're scaling a product. There's a lot of things going on. And the other day my area I have to focus on is mental health. Or mental fitness, that's what we like to call it. And I hadn't really done a lot that week and I was like, okay, stop. Do five minutes.

[00:38:27] Dr. Erik Korem: I felt so much better. 

[00:38:29] Christa: Yeah. 

[00:38:30] Dr. Erik Korem: And I was like, honey, you know, usually for me 

[00:38:32] Christa: and there are a hundred times 

[00:38:33] Dr. Erik Korem: Yeah. 

[00:38:34] Christa: 10,000 times, 

[00:38:35] Dr. Erik Korem: just go sit in the closet for five minutes. 

[00:38:37] Christa: Yeah. 

[00:38:38] Dr. Erik Korem: And just be alone with your thoughts. 

[00:38:40] Christa: Yeah. 

[00:38:40] Dr. Erik Korem: And that alone, like these little things add up.

[00:38:42] Christa: Yeah, for sure. Well, and that is something that you said in different words earlier is like, looking at this parallel between kind of this semi-pro, athlete version and what parallels to us is that a little bit every day is actually more important than a whole bunch on one day. That's what I heard you say. 

[00:38:59] Dr. Erik Korem: Consistency always beats intensity. 

[00:39:01] Christa: Totally. Yeah. Apply that to circadian rhythm. Boom. Right. If you are normal circadian rhythm at least 80% of the week, then hopefully it can negate those couple nights you did the night shift. Right? That's always the hardest. That's always the hardest one, is like the night shift people. Right. 

[00:39:16] Dr. Erik Korem: I love it. You're so practical. I really appreciate that. 

[00:39:19] Christa: Hey, practical. Practical or die. Okay, so we're talking about glymphatic. You talked about how the brain does not have a lymphatic system.

[00:39:27] Christa: And we, require sleep. I actually kind of got stuck right there. So we were talking about when we don't have good sleep, we're getting too much beta amyloid buildup. This is a problem, that we see in these neurodegenerative diseases that are on the rise. You also mentioned TBIs, right? Dramatic brain injuries. 

[00:39:41] Christa: I'm so fascinated at what happens when people have concussions, even like things they don't even think about. And I'm sure you've seen a ton of this in the sports industry and what it does to their gut, to their immune system, to everything else. It's absolutely fascinating what comes out the other side.

[00:39:56] Christa: I am just like mildly obsessed with it. So talk to me a little bit more about like glymphatic if we're not getting sleep metabolic crap literally is getting stuck. So we talked about getting good sleep. Is there anything else we should talk about related to the physiology of the glymphatic system that helps make this even more sexy?

[00:40:16] Dr. Erik Korem: I could give you some things that research is showing is improving glymphatic clearance outside of sleep. 

[00:40:21] Christa: Love it. Yes. That's what we wanna know. 

[00:40:23] Dr. Erik Korem: Marine based fish oil consumption increases glymphatic clearance. Reduces inflammation and research points to the fact that it reduces cognitive decline.

[00:40:31] Dr. Erik Korem: How much? Two to four grams a day. 

[00:40:34] Christa: Yeah, that is four grams is kind of my preference. And that's gonna be usually at least twice as much of what, because often capsules are 500 milligrams. And so people don't think, people are like, oh, I take that. I'm like, well, how much?

[00:40:46] Christa: 500? Like that's not gonna do. You're not gonna actually see differences typically. Other caveat with this, It's not really a caveat, it's just quality matters so much, right? Because oxidation, 

[00:40:55] Dr. Erik Korem: yes. 

[00:40:55] Christa: So you cannot just go like pick up fish oil at like, if it's cheap, it's probably sucks.

[00:41:01] Dr. Erik Korem: It's rancid.

[00:41:02] Christa: Yeah. It probably sucks if it does smell rancid, it probably is. So that is where, if there's any negative research around fish oil, I think that's pretty much why it's trash, you know? And that's, The challenge that is actually the case with every supplement is like you must find something quality.

[00:41:15] Christa: And you can test this on your own. There's a company actually in my state that does finger prick tests for omega-3 index, and so it's like 50 bucks. You can go check your own omega3. Anyway, it doesn't hurt to try it though. Carry on. I just like to it to put the caveats in because sometimes people are like, I've tried that and I'm like, Hmm. Let's talk about the good way to try it, okay? 

[00:41:34] Dr. Erik Korem: Yes. And you probably have some recommendations for your audience on some companies that they could go towards on that one. But intermittent fasting. Now look, it is not a magic bullet. Dr. Chris Deday is a person that I would highly recommend listening to.

[00:41:49] Dr. Erik Korem: I just had her on and that was mind blowing. She's done more research in human models, not rats, but alternate day fasting. You have to be hard core to do this now. You don't eat anything or less than 500 calories for one day. Then you eat normal, the next day increases aqp four Aquaporin channel polarization.

[00:42:11] Dr. Erik Korem: And these channels are responsible for fluid flow. So it actually improves how much fluid is flushing out. Why? I have no idea. 

[00:42:19] Christa: I think it's cause the body wants to dump crap. It doesn't need under like that stress. That's how I perceive intermittent fasting and supporting things. It's like it improves autophagy and so it probably improves other.

[00:42:29] Christa: If your body's not busy doing other stuff, it's like, well, let me unload the freeloaders goodbye. 

[00:42:33] Dr. Erik Korem: There you go. Why not like it's not messing with, , caloric intake. Your sleep position. 

[00:42:38] Christa: Ah, fun. 

[00:42:39] Dr. Erik Korem: Gravity affects the movement of blood and cerebral spinal fluid through the brain, and therefore your sleep position can play a role in this.

[00:42:47] Dr. Erik Korem: Intracranial pressure and cerebral blood flow are influenced by body posture. Patients with dementia have been found to spend more time in the supine position or on their backs. 

[00:42:57] Christa: So what are we supposed to do ?

[00:42:59] Dr. Erik Korem: Side? 

[00:43:01] Christa: Interesting. 

[00:43:01] Dr. Erik Korem: I can't do it though. So I'm just throwing stuff out there. I did a deep dive on this recently and these were things that actually popped up in the literature that had some good studies.

[00:43:12] Dr. Erik Korem: And the last one, which I really like is aerobic exercise. We know that it improves B D N F, brain-derived neurotropic factor, which helps with glymphatic clearance. Also helps with neuroplasticity. It boosts memory and cognition. There was a study there, six weeks of running, reduced brain inflammation, increased glymphatic clearance, and amyloid beta clearance.

[00:43:35] Dr. Erik Korem: I think it was about 150 minutes a week. So aerobic exercise. It's like, it really all kind of goes back to the basics. 

[00:43:44] Christa: Yeah, go for a walk. In other words is what he said, 

[00:43:46] Dr. Erik Korem: eat healthy food. 

[00:43:48] Christa: Go for a walk for a walk in the sun and walk a dog. Your life is now solved 

[00:43:52] Dr. Erik Korem: while you eat, solved your salmon, 

[00:43:55] Christa: sleep on your side.

[00:43:56] Christa: Yeah, let's just have it stack all that stuff up. Improve the old lymph. But what I think the bottom line for me is like, hey, if you know you're not sleeping, if you know you could change some things around your sleep. If you can cool down your room, if you can get dark shades, I actually have to do this a lot and I don't always do it because I forget now, but I always think like, hello, let us talk about what does it look like to get eight?

[00:44:18] Christa: What time would you like to get up in the morning? Oh, this is what time you would like to get up in the morning. Great, let's work backwards. How long is it going to take to get eight hours of sleep? Okay, great. Now let's take 90 more minutes before that and say that is when you have to start to think about sleep.

[00:44:30] Christa: If you wanna have good sleep. Cause if you spike your cortisol from watching Yellowstone before bed, which I will not do, I'm not doing it. Not doing it, then you are 90 minutes awake and no one needs this stuff. So anyway, so it's like, wow, okay. I did the math on that and I was not doing that. No wonder I cannot sleep, right?

[00:44:47] Christa: Like start there. And also try not to roll over and look at your phone first thing. Now your brain says it's noon. Go look at the sun. 

[00:44:55] Dr. Erik Korem: That is something I've really had to, I mean, let's just be honest. Like that's a hard thing, right? And so like my phone wakes me up. I like to get up early.

[00:45:04] Dr. Erik Korem: That's just me. I like to go to bed early, wake up really early, like five o'clock. And I like to get up and walk before anybody else is up and to work early. And so I've been disciplining myself to just turn it off. Don't look at the stupid phone. Go get my day started. The messages will be waiting right. The emails, Give yourself some time to just be, and I think it's super helpful. Well, it's kind of like you said this earlier. You said, you know, I just was not doing, thanks for the term mental fitness. , cuz everything is about making something sexy, right? And like, okay, adopting mental fitness, as a term.

[00:45:45] Dr. Erik Korem: So you said, you were really like out of sorts. I mean, that was my beginning of May. My oldest graduated, all this stuff going on. We were doing a bunch of stuff with work and I was like, I am not good right now. This is not okay. Cuz what goes out the door first, all of your neuroplasticity work, all of your brain work, all of your mental fitness work, so to speak.

[00:46:02] Dr. Erik Korem: And before you know it, you're waking up, reacting, checking all this stuff. It doesn't work. And I would say at least once a year. I end up in a place without phone service for more than a day, you know? And man, that's the best. When you come back, you're like, oh, I broke the dopamine hit.

[00:46:17] Dr. Erik Korem: I broke the neural pathway because I didn't have anything to reach for. And of course we can always like, if we really want to, right? We can try to hack this, right? We could have an alarm clock that acts like a sunrise. We could do the thing with your phone where you turn the, color red before you go to bed, right?

[00:46:36] Dr. Erik Korem: Yeah. Night shift 

[00:46:36] Christa: right Night shift. There's a lot of options, which is cool. So like what you said earlier from Dr. Tenenbaum? Isn't he kind of like a famous mentor? Did you have him? 

[00:46:45] Dr. Erik Korem: Yeah, he was a kind of a giant in the field of sports psychology.

[00:46:48] Christa: Oh, okay. 

[00:46:49] Dr. Erik Korem: He was at Florida State, but, very lovely man, and he told me that, and it just like wrecked my world for a little bit.

[00:46:57] Christa: I know we always want them to fit in a one-liner, but it's like, Hey, if you think you've done everything, it's okay. Just write it all down. Someone else can point out a couple other opportunities. That's kind of my thing. It's like there's always an opportunity here for something else. 

[00:47:10] Christa: Okay. I know we need to wrap up here. So kinda my question a little bit about wearables, and I know you wanna maybe share a little bit more. You did a good job intermixing it there.

[00:47:18] Christa: But if one of the conversations is wearable data isn't always accurate. How do you take possibly inaccurate wearable data and turn it into a good predictive stuff? 

[00:47:30] Dr. Erik Korem: I've done 35 podcasts in the past three months. These are the best questions. Like if you're listening to the show, this is phenomenal. This is really good.

[00:47:40] Christa: I would really like to be a professional podcaster, which is just a made up thing, right? I would really like to ask questions of everyone for a living. Carry on. 

[00:47:47] Dr. Erik Korem: It's great. You just need a trend line . Like if it's consistently inaccurate. So actually this is, you're gonna love this one. You should put this in the show notes, cuz I think people will find this fascinating. 

[00:47:58] Dr. Erik Korem: I had a graduate student at the University of Kentucky's doctoral student and he spent three months. I'm like, here's all the things I wanna know about all these wearables on my website. It's aim seven.com/blog. And I'll send it to you.

[00:48:09] Dr. Erik Korem: It's like this, the accuracy of wearable technology. And we went device by device for the things that people are most concerned about. Caloric intake, caloric burn, massively off, steps. Sleep, by the way, sleep phases, total bologna. Don't even look at it. Don't waste your time. Just look at duration, onset and awakening is pretty good. Activity, heart rate, all this stuff. We act and stacked 'em all. 

[00:48:38] Dr. Erik Korem: If it's consistently inaccurate, but it's always off by 7%, that's totally fine. Or even 8%, we're looking at a trend line of change. It's just like these body comp assessments, none of them are a hundred percent accurate. You need a multi, like a, oh gosh.

[00:48:54] Dr. Erik Korem: It's like a multimodal model. Like you even, like the dexa can be off by five, 6%. So like, If we know it's off by five or 6% and the next time I go in, it changed 2%, but I know it's off by five or 6%, guess what? It's just a trend line. So what we do is we're looking for the signal and the noise, and we have very specific ways that we do some advanced mathematics in the back end to know is this a true signal, is it a big deviation from your standard and norm?

[00:49:26] Dr. Erik Korem: So we do a lot of really cool things because we spent like 12 years in sports solving all of these problems. We are like, we can bring this into the consumer space. We make it hard for people to dig in. Like you, all the graphs and stuff are in the app, but that's not what people really want to know.

[00:49:42] Dr. Erik Korem: They just wanna know, what do I do with it? 

[00:49:44] Christa: Yeah. 

[00:49:45] Dr. Erik Korem: And so you can dig in and we got all the graphs, but nobody, most people don't have time to go download their Excel spreadsheets and like run aggression analysis on it and all that kind of stuff. They wanna know. 

[00:49:54] Christa: So just certain profiles of people that would like that.

[00:49:56] Dr. Erik Korem: Certain profiles, it's like that 10% outlier and they'll love it too. We give em all that stuff, but it's like if my HRV is off, What do I do and how does that impact my exercise? How does that impact my mental health or mental fitness? What should I be doing in these areas when I see these signals? We give all that stuff.

[00:50:13] Dr. Erik Korem: We built this for busy people that are time poor. They care about their health and wellness, they just wanna be told like, From a trustworthy source, like what do I do today? I've got a limited amount of time I wanna move the needle on my health and wellness. Is today, today for me to really go crush it in the gym?

[00:50:31] Dr. Erik Korem: Or is today, today that I should go for a 20 minute walk, spend five minutes breathing, pat myself on the back and be like, you know what? You did a great job. That's what people need to be told. 

[00:50:39] Christa: This is good. 

[00:50:40] Dr. Erik Korem: Thank you. 

[00:50:41] Christa: I'm curious about this as a recent new Apple Watch person and guess why that I did?

[00:50:46] Christa: Guess why I did this? Because I can now forget where I put my phone all the time and my kids can get ahold of me. 

[00:50:52] Dr. Erik Korem: You can swipe up and it goes. 

[00:50:54] Christa: It doesn't really do much, , it doesn't like do a lot. It has a bunch of stuff there, but I can't really access it. So it's like kind of broken a little bit of a, grab your phone to see if you have any messages issue. 

[00:51:04] Christa: So that's interesting. I will not wear sleeping cuz I don't want to have a device on me when I'm sleeping. But I broke up with the aura ring because, , they don't really have any customer service so congratulations. Or it ring. I'm gonna say that, but it's 

[00:51:18] Dr. Erik Korem: kinda like Google if you ever need them, they're never there.

[00:51:20] Christa: Yeah, that's probably, that's actually very true too. I remember one time I got locked outta my professional accounts. It was very exciting. Very exciting. 

[00:51:28] Christa: I'm just so curious that there hasn't been like a new ring wearable. So there are some new ones. I have one coming. So anyway, Getting back in when my aura ring stopped working because I got a new phone. Cute. I was like, well, I'm good on data tracking.

[00:51:41] Christa: I think it's like really nice to go through some phases of life. Depending on where you're at with things. And it's like, eh, I'm ready to get back on the old, curiosity train on what kind of biomarkers I have going on. So I'm gonna give this a try.

[00:51:51] Christa: I have no idea how it's gonna work. I should have checked it out before I interviewed you. It'd be more interesting for everyone. 

[00:51:56] Dr. Erik Korem: It's called AIM seven. I'll tell you what. 

[00:51:59] Christa: Yeah, please, please tell us about it for you. 

[00:52:00] Dr. Erik Korem: You have a lifetime membership, and I would love your feedback, but it's in private beta, which means you can only get access to it on our website.

[00:52:08] Dr. Erik Korem: We have about 3000 people on our waiting list, when you sign up, if you say, I heard you're on the podcast here, we will move you right to the front of that list. We let people in every couple weeks and, we'll be in the app store probably this fall reintegrate with all the major wearables.

[00:52:24] Dr. Erik Korem: But really what it is, it's like, what do I do today for my mind, body, and recovery to help me look, feel, and perform better? And then after a week we analyze your data and we're like, oh, here's the specific area you should focus on. Then we create a realistic goal. We wrap that up. This is really neat behavior design model.

[00:52:43] Dr. Erik Korem: So the first week you're actually gonna learn how to create lasting habits that are tied to your values, like we talked about earlier. And then we create a goal for you. Then we have a masterclass library from some of the best in the world in there. I went and got the, like I said, former senior sports psychologist for the US Olympics, the former, the head of Director of Wellness and Development for the Toronto Raptors.

[00:53:04] Dr. Erik Korem: We've just brought on some amazing folks with very short educational videos and audio messages that are less than two minutes. So this is built for busy parents, busy people. They're like, Hey, well I'm having my coffee in the morning. I wanna learn about this while I'm moving towards my goal. 

[00:53:19] Dr. Erik Korem: We're about to release a bunch of new features here in the next couple weeks that I'm super psyched about.

[00:53:25] Dr. Erik Korem: Like, my HRV is off. What exactly do I do in these specific areas that we already have that wrapped into our recommendation layer. But we're gonna give you like very granular details for people that are just that wanna scratch that itch. 

[00:53:38] Christa: I know my exact clients that want this, so this is cool. But for everyone else listening.

[00:53:43] Christa: Who also loves their health, cuz those are the people that are listening. I maybe there'll be a special link in the show notes or can they just go to aim seven? 

[00:53:50] Dr. Erik Korem: Go to aim seven.com, we can link something up for you. We'll connect afterwards. Free seven day trial. And it's just 15 bucks a month. We're not trying to gouge people. We want to provide a ridiculous amount of value. For a laughable price. I'm serious, like we're on a much bigger mission here than to go out and make, yes, we want to have a living, but I don't think there is tremendous power in this data if it's actually used.

[00:54:16] Dr. Erik Korem: Otherwise, take the darn thing off and throw it away. It will end up in your sock drawer cuz it's gonna cause more problems than good. But if you can use it to actually improve your life, it's not shaming you and it's actually helping you feel better, be a better person then. I think it's a value.

[00:54:31] Christa: Yeah. No one likes a shaming device. 

[00:54:34] Dr. Erik Korem: No. 

[00:54:36] Christa: Alright. Eric. Dr. Corum. Thank you so much for coming on today. I can find [email protected], aim seven.com. All of that will be in the show notes. 

[00:54:45] Dr. Erik Korem: Yes. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure to be on for the best questions I have had all year long. This is phenomenal. 

[00:54:51] Christa: Greatest compliment. Love it. Thank you so much. 

[00:54:54] Christa: Sharing and reviewing this podcast is the best way to help us succeed with our mission to help integrate the best of East and West and empower you to raise the bar on your health story. Just go to review this podcast. com forward slash less stressed life. That's review this podcast. com forward slash less stressed life.

[00:55:15] Christa: And you'll be taken directly to a page where you can insert your review and hit post.