The wearable healthcare data you should actually pay attention to

In this episode, host Christine VanTimmeren is joined by Dr. Brandon Mancini and Ben Boudro, VP of Enterprise Partnerships at COYA, to discuss how wearable technology, sleep, stress management, and recovery are reshaping the way we think about health and performance.

From Apple Watches and Oura Rings to Whoop straps and HRV tracking, this conversation breaks down what the data actually means—and how people can use it to make meaningful, sustainable improvements in their health.

Ben shares how COYA works with:

Professional and collegiate athletes
Executives and high-stress professionals
First responders and law enforcement
Everyday people trying to improve their quality of life

Together, the group explores:
• Why sleep may be the ultimate performance enhancer
• What HRV (Heart Rate Variability) actually measures
• Why “small habits” outperform quick fixes
• The relationship between stress, recovery, and longevity
• How wearables can help—or hurt—your mental health
• Why relationships and community are critical to long-term wellness

If you’ve ever wondered whether your wearable data matters—or how to actually use it—this episode is packed with practical insights you can apply immediately.

00:00 Introduction & National Physical Fitness Month
00:47 What Is COYA?
00:56 The Police Officer Story: Stress, Sleep & Transformation
04:24 Using Wearable Data to Build Better Habits
05:44 Why Most People Don’t Know What To Do With Their Data
06:36 Wearables, HRV & What Actually Matters
07:47 What Is Heart Rate Variability (HRV)?
08:50 Sleep, Stress & Recovery Explained
09:40 The “Four Pillars” of Health & Cancer Care
10:53 Why Recovery Matters More Than Performance
12:01 Lifespan vs Healthspan
13:18 The Central Nervous System & Chronic Stress
14:11 VO2 Max Testing & Overtraining
16:09 The “Gray Area” of Feeling Fine But Not Optimal
17:39 Small Daily Habits That Improve Health
19:10 COYA & Professional / College Athletes
20:36 Why Sleep Is the Ultimate Performance Tool
21:21 The Downsides of Wearables & Overanalyzing Data
22:32 Relationships, Community & Longevity
23:14 Why Consistency Beats Perfection
24:38 How To Start Improving Your Health Today
25:37 The 3-2-1 Rule for Better Sleep
27:11 Journaling, Reflection & Sleep Quality
28:24 Circadian Rhythm & Why Timing Matters
31:06 Final Thoughts on Wellness & Wearables

Connect with the hosts on LinkedIn
Brandon: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandon-mancini-md-mba-facro-44646758/ 
Christine: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christinevt/

Connect with BAMF Health
Website: https://www.bamfhealth.com/
Our Podcast: https://www.bamfhealth.com/podcast/

Connect with the hosts on LinkedIn
Dr. Brandon Mancini
Christine VanTimmeren

Connect with BAMF Health
Our Website
Our Podcast

Transcript

Christine VanTimmeren 0:05

Welcome to another episode of the BAMF Health Podcast. We are coming to you in the month of May. The month of May happens to be National Physical Fitness and Sports Month. So whether you are a weekend warrior, you like to play tennis on the side, or you're a professional athlete, there's no question, all of us have more access to our performance datum and how we're doing on the field or on the court than ever before. We've all got watches and rings and all of the things. So what do we do with that data and how do we use it to improve our health? And that's why we have with us today Ben Boudro. He's the VP of Enterprise Partnerships for Coya. Ben, thanks for joining us.

Ben Boudro 0:45

Thanks for having me. This is fun.

Christine VanTimmeren 0:46

Absolutely. Okay. So what is COYA and how does COYA connect with what's on my wrist and what's on your finger and all of that?

Ben Boudro 0:56

Yeah. I'll give an example, a story. We had a guy come to us and he's a police officer. Okay, so high stress job. And when it comes to stress too, we all know that like stress doesn't know if you're running from a bear or if you're in a really high pressure meeting, right? So he comes to us and he's like, Look, I don't want to work out. Like, don't push that on me because physical fitness is a big part of his job. And it was pushed on him before diet plans, meal plans. He did all that. It just kind of like many fitness programs, they start off good, then they, yeah. So he tells us, I just need help, but I don't want to go to the gym. And we're like, Great. We're trying to get, you know, this is how do we exactly? Yeah. So we come to him, he has a wearable. I think he had a whoop strap, and we can monitor his HRV, his sleep, and we're like, all right, let's just start here. What we want you to do, like, just tell us where you're at. There's eight controls that Koya looks at. And the controllable that he chose was nutrition. He's like, I got night shifts, I got day shifts. I'm not gonna lie to you. I started going to fast food and then I kept going to that, fell in my bad habits. So we're like, okay, here's what we want you to do week one. We want you after your lunch just to go for a 10-minute walk. Can you do that? And he's like, kind of underwhelmed. He's like, okay, let's do that.

Christine VanTimmeren 2:09

Sure, I'll walk.

Ben Boudro 2:11

Yeah, exactly. Goes for a week and you know, 10 minutes does his walks. He's like, that was surprisingly pretty good. Like, I like this. You know, what's what's next? Then we swapped out, you know, his fast food with maybe a different meal, right? Adding protein shakes. Very, very small. But he kept doing that walk and he kept doing the habits, they were stacking on each other. Long story short, in the 12 weeks, which we typically work in a 12-week program, pairing up with his wearable, working on habits, 12 weeks, he loses 14 pounds. Not like, you know, it's remarkable, it's good. But what's more important in what COYA does is we got to know him as a person. We had human interaction, and we're driving him to the airport. Our co-founder Nick was in Texas at the time, driving, he was gonna ride back to the airport, and this guy's like, Look, this program changed my life. And you know, you hear that, it's like, oh yeah, it's great, man. You did great, just stick to the habits. And he's like, No, you don't understand. When I did this program, I would bring my stress home with me. I have a high-demanding job, and I it was hard for me to shut it off. And he's also in the service model, which when you work in that kind of industry, typically we find that when they end their careers, when they retire, life expectancy is five to seven years because of how much stress is just weighing on them. So what we find is more people just stay in the cortisol rich environments and they just get adapted to it. And he tells us, he's like, when I switched my eating, right? I looked at my kids and how they're eating, right? It changed how they approach nutrition. And then when we worked with them, we started with nutrition and we eventually got to sleep. My wife and I sleep differently, we have different environments, but the entire culture of my household has changed. But what he told us was that his wife and kids were actually like out the door. They were ready to leave him because of how he was coming home. But now because he's uh living a different life, living in a culture, he's actually going to the gym now because he has this newfound energy. And when you look at his career, it's the stress is still there, but his adaptability to that stress has changed. So the wearable was just a piece to use, like to show him like, hey, your sleep's actually increasing. He can see it subjectively and objectively. But in a nutshell, that's what we do. We work with high stress executives, we work with professional college athletes, but our main kind of bread and butter is any environment where you're trying to perform your job and you have high stress and you're not managing it well.

unknown 4:22

Right.

Dr. Brandon Mancini 4:23

I like the idea of control and the controllables because yeah, it you see all the time whether it's the commercials for GLP-1s or kind of the buzz of kind of major diet fads or certain exercise programs, sometimes it's too much or it's like a fad, right? People do it for weeks, months, and then it burns out. But it seems like your approach is kind of using information to point out things that could be improved upon and then empowering people to take action and get that feedback from the wearable to kind of build that snowball going down the hill in a very positive way for change over time. So over time is a key thing.

Ben Boudro 5:03

This is kind of like it's not a sexy way because we want to change some of your habits. Everyone's heard that before. The way we use, have you guys read the book Atomic Habits? Yeah. That's our framework for how we approach the habits. And if you want to do that by yourself, it's cool. But if you don't have a person holding you accountable, we've all heard that. But like you said, when they can see their data, like, hey, we want you to try this before sleep, and they come back to us. And we had a guy two weeks ago in Chicago, I was talking to him, bought his sleep, and then he showed me the stats. The next night he texts me, he's like, What did you do to me, man? My I had 40%. I slept the greatest I've ever slept. I'm like, it's a COYA effect, man. But it's just all we did was like, you know, just really simple habits that you can do that. But now that guy sees it and the likability of him doing it again is repeatable, right?

Christine VanTimmeren 5:43

That's awesome. So that's the key, right? Because I I have an Apple Watch. I don't ever look at my data, or even when I do, I go, I don't know what the heck to do with that. Okay, so it says this, I did this, great. Now what? And I think that's probably where a lot of people are. They say, Cool, I got the whoop, I got the Oura, I got the Apple Watch. Now what the heck do I do with it? And what should I be paying attention to and what maybe doesn't matter as much.

Ben Boudro 6:10

Wearables are great. I like them, they're easy to use, they're blowing up right now because so many, it's popular, right? But with it, the world doesn't need more information right now. Right. I think we need relationships, relationships, we need people holding us accountable. And and like you said, with wearables, I met so many, like including my brother, my mentor, just last week I talked to my mentor. He's like, Yeah, I took the whoop trap off, man. I just found out, hey, I don't sleep good. So what's the point of looking at it? It was stressing me out.

Christine VanTimmeren 6:35

Right.

Ben Boudro 6:36

Right. So if you don't have someone coming alongside you, and whoop does a great job. They have AI, they have you know, there's tons of information on how to sleep better, but they don't want to do it. You get this rock, the NASA-sized amount of data, you don't know what to do with it. So it's just like, you know, you get overwhelmed. What we do at Koya is we really look at some key metrics, HRV and sleep. Because what we found with the wearables, interesting enough, and that I don't know these exact stats, so but what we've really found is that wearing them for working out, they're not that accurate yet. They're probably gonna get there. But it can't really tell if you're playing tennis or you're raking leaves, and you know, so don't look too much into that. Uh the sleep, when it comes to your sleep stages, what I've heard is that they're about 65% accurate. My brother, for instance, he's had an Oura ring since the they came out, and he's like, I cannot get my slow wave sleep. I've done everything, I've done this, and it's like, don't look too far into that. But the metric that we found to be very accurate is HRV. And that's where I think a lot of people they don't know what HRV is, they don't know how what it means. But when you start tracking that, and it's your nervous system's response to physical and mental and all that, right? Yep. When you can start handling that and tracking that, then you'll feel real. I mean, when your HRV is good, you feel it.

Christine VanTimmeren 7:47

So what what is that? What is that?

Ben Boudro 7:49

Heart rate variability. Okay. Yep. More scientific doctors can understand this at a better level, but it's the variance between the heart rates that the the variance in the beats, right? So if it's good, for example, uh mine is at 55 today. And on Tuesday, it was about 41. So what we do at COI is we track a three-day window. What that tells you is like if you're at a 55, then you go to 40, then you're at a 29, something's going down. So you can tell, like, okay, I should adapt my training. I'm not gonna go do a marathon today because it's probably gonna break me down, right? That's how you can use HRV. But a key thing with HRV is this, and I hear it a lot. A lot of guys are like, man, my HRV just stinks. It's like like a 40. And this guy's like an 88. Well, the key thing is this we have pro athletes and we have even like guys high up in our company that have a 17. It's your thumbprint. You don't it's not like a scale of zero to one hundred where you can just be like comparable. It's your thumbprint and it's how you're adapting to your stress. Right. So your actions Yeah.

Dr. Brandon Mancini 8:49

So it's kind of like the agility, like how ready are you? Uh, how ready is your body to absorb stress, whether that's working out, whether that's a stressful job, whether that's various things. And it seems like from your experience, is sleep the number one, or at least the super high uh variable that influences that and the people you work with.

Ben Boudro 9:08

Yeah. And then you also have stress with your job and what's going on. That's this is why it takes like to get into a human, what they're doing, what their kids going through, you know. But yeah, sleep is often the one we can control the most. So that's why we look at that metric the most. What are the other controllables that you look at? Uh, we have sleep. My boss is gonna watch this, he said, you should nail this faster. But sleep, hydration, yeah, immune function, your environment, how much you're moving as far as like steps and your workouts, self-care is a big one, nutrition, if I didn't say that one. And then I I might have missed one there, but yeah, that's the eight controls we look at.

Dr. Brandon Mancini 9:40

And that's good. What's super interesting is obviously I treat cancer patients, um, and people come in, and not only do they want an effective cancer therapy, but these conversations come up all the time as far as what supplements should I be taking? What are the other lifestyle things? What should my diet be? Should I do keto or vegan or carnivore or paleo, you know? Um, and I mean, we go through kind of what I call the four pillars, which is sleep, exercise, nutrition, and stress reduction, um, and just simple, controllable ways to impact. And those sorts of things can impact anything health-related way more than any supplement or any infomercial or anything that we see on TV, right? Control the controllables, optimize those with coaching and/or with information. Um, but it even comes up each and every day with patients not only seeking cancer therapy, but trying to live their best life to improve their baseline health system and maybe tolerate therapies better or have less uh side effects, maybe have better outcomes as a result, which has been shown in various studies. Uh, but it's super interesting because it's very, very active and active discussion literally every single day in the clinic here as well. Yeah.

Ben Boudro 10:52

So that's interesting. Yeah. We have some clinics reach out to us if they do, you know, peptides or TRT and those kind of clinics, and they admit they're like, look, we're administering this stuff, but like their sleep is crap. So what we're doing is actually not working. Yeah. And I think it's just kind of everyone's like rushing to the new things. There's tons of supplements, there's tons of AI, tons of information, but it just comes back to the basics. And what's really cool about what we found and how Coya was really created was we look at those controlables, you look at high performers. Let's say like Tom Brady, it's not because he threw a ball so much different that he was just excelling, right? Tom Brady and even LeBron James, who's playing basketball still to this day, they recover so much better. So when you show up, recover it every day, you show up at 80%, this guy's at 60% injuries, etc. But you last long in your career and you're actually excelling, you're doing good. But what's really cool and what's fascinating for me is that those same habits you're doing, like you said, sleep, all that, when you look at the regions of the world where people be the longest, blue zones, the documentary on Netflix, right? By doing that, not only do you perform really well in your career right now, but you actually live longer. So it's like, yeah, I'll invest in that, right? Yeah. And what Coya does, we try to put that on one umbrella and then deliver it.

Dr. Brandon Mancini 12:01

Yeah. And I think a lot of people are concerned maybe when they're health focused that way, like how long am I gonna live? But it's really the health span, not the lifespan. Like, how long can you lead a healthy, active, kind of meaningful life, right? If you lived 110, but those last 10 or 20 years, someone's more debilitated. Yeah. Versus extending the life. So I think, yeah, in the information era now, um, kind of empowering people to take control of that stuff is super awesome.

Christine VanTimmeren 12:31

So I mean, that goes to what you do, we do at BAMF, right? We have treatments that we say give you a better quality of life because that's what's important. All of us are trying to chase that better quality of life, or we should be chasing that over the longevity. It longevity is a billion trillion dollar business right now. Everybody's spending a ton of money on things that will extend their life. Um my guess is Coya approaches longevity a little bit different than some of these billionaires who are trying to sell us, you know, the next fad. Beyond, yeah, the life span or the health span like you talked about. What are some other ways we should be approaching longevity in a healthier, better way?

Ben Boudro 13:17

I think the missing piece for a lot of people that they will not stop to really realize is your central nervous system. I think a lot of us get in this cortisol. I got, I'm a founder, so I got to do this. I don't have time to sleep right now, right? And they get caught in this loop. I sleep six hours, I have the stress, and you just get adapted to it, right? But your central nervous system is out of whack. So hormones aren't functioning, they're not firing, and what it's doing to you long term. And a lot of people don't look at it. And the way a person, if they're watching, can look at it, I think is your HRV monitoring that. Like if you're using that over time, you're actually gonna win the long run, right? And how do you do that? I'll go back to another example. Uh, just earlier this year, my wife bought me a VO2 max test for my birthday. Yeah, it was at Grand Valley, my brother's there, so he set it up. It was awesome. And these guys at Grand Valley like came there with my brothers, they're like, You wanted this for your birthday, us to strap these hoses to you.

Christine VanTimmeren 14:09

Of course you did.

Ben Boudro 14:10

They had this, they they put up this happy, happy birthday sign for me. Like, we've been looking forward to this for months. I'm like, really? Like, yeah, no one does this, man. You're like one, okay.

Dr. Brandon Mancini 14:18

Yeah.

Ben Boudro 14:18

I wake up that morning though, and my HRV is shot.

Dr. Brandon Mancini 14:21

Wow.

Ben Boudro 14:22

Like a 19. But I don't, I'm like sick. Okay. I know I'm just coming on, but I don't want to let my down my wife, she paid for this. I'm like, all right, I'm gonna do this VO2 max test. So I do it, and it's like one of the hardest things you can do, right? You got to run to exhaustion. And I'm like, I did good on it. I'm like, oh maybe this is, you know, maybe it's not right. Three days later, I mean, I was sick for four days straight. Couldn't, like, I was bad, right? So it that's my central nervous system was not ready for that workout, right? And it a lot of people, I think, still maintain that training, right? Without monitoring and assessing where you're at. A typical thing, and I I came from the gym space too. So I used to actually, the most popular class for me was 5 a.m. We'd have 40 people rocking every morning. Loved it. But since I left that gym space, I can't tell you last time I worked out at 5 a.m. Because if your central nervous system is not firing, sleep, etc., a lot of people, I think their approach is okay, I'll go to ornamentary fitness three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, I get my hour-long workout. I know I sit and I, you know, I'm at my computer all day, but I get that hour workout in. It's a terrible approach. Sure. I would not recommend that, right? Because again, we incorporate things like daily walks, we incorporate really simple things that people just overlook because they're so stressed out. But when we get executives to stop, look under the hood, look what's going on, show them their data so they can't tell us like, no, I am sleeping. No, you're not, right? But when they do that, after 12 weeks, they're like, boom, like just I'm back, right? And creativity process starts happening again. And if you look at like famous people like Einstein, like a lot of creativity and a lot of great moments come from people like like Usain Bolt. I found out he woke up a half hour before he set a world record. Not saying like we should all do that, but like wow, that guy also sleeps 10 to 12 hours a day. Like sleeps there. I think the missing piece to answer your question is the central nervous system and how you're paying attention to it.

unknown 16:08

Yep.

Christine VanTimmeren 16:08

So people who are in this weird, I think Coya, you call it the gray area where you feel fine, essentially. You don't really know what you don't know, but you also know you're not at peak. That sort of space, that gap in between is in large part sleep.

Ben Boudro 16:26

Yeah. Large part sleep, but also like, what are you doing midday, right? What are you doing? How are you? A huge thing that people underestimate is relationships. Because what I found in this kind of biohacking space, you know, fast rewind three years ago, I drove a lot from my job. So I listened to all these podcasts nonstop. And like the way I looked at it was I don't know if you know the story of David versus Goliath, but he obviously throws the stone, takes down Goliath. What a lot of people, what I researched on David is that he actually was so bored in the fields, he would throw rocks constantly. Like that was his thing. So when I was driving these long rides, I'm like, why is why am I here? And I would why this is so boring. What is it training me for? But on those long rides, I got to listen to all these podcasts, everything. I just ate it up, right? And for me, what I found is that like they'd always recommend stuff and it was like super expensive. Yeah, and I kind of just I saw that need for that. I'm like, one guy in particular, I was like, I love this guy, I love what he's saying, and oh, cool. I'll check out this his changed his life, his nutrition, everything. And it's like a thousand bucks. I'm like, then he had a Christmas wish list, and every single one there was like, I was like, Am I that bad? Like, I can't afford any of this stuff, right? But like we're talking about going for a daily walk midday, what that does for creative process, what that does for letting sunlight in, and like just little things that we underestimate.

Dr. Brandon Mancini 17:38

Even like for people that do have desk jobs, like standing for a certain amount of time, right? Trying to adapt and have standing desks or climb stairs instead of taking the elevator to the seventh floor, right? So different things like that, where some people just need a little bit of push. And again, that feedback, right? Like I have Whoop, and Whoop has a journal, and you can select what's in your journal. And after you log a certain number of times, usually it's about 90 yeses and no's. I did this or I didn't do this. Like I had a late meal, I had a screen device in bed, I did a sauna, I read a book before bed. After you log at least some number of habits or uh instances of the thing that you did, it's able to analyze how it improved or decreased your recovery for the subsequent day. And so that's their version of coaching. It's not as uh intricate and in depth as COYA, but um, I think the ability to get the information that you might desire, but then the guidance on to what to do with that. And then, I mean, your example you led with is perfect. You start with one change and you kind of prove that to that person, and then they want to do the other changes. And it's a lifestyle, right? It's not the fad diet, it's not going on keto for a month, it's not intermittent fasting for a month, it's small, meaningful changes that lead to a lifestyle modification that is sustainable over time, and then you get long-term results and that health span increases 100%. That's cool. Yeah, that's a quick fix, but right.

Christine VanTimmeren 19:09

So being that it's National Physical Fitness and Sports Month, talk to us about what you're doing on the sports end because Coya works with athletes, sports teams, and things like that. So, how does it work when you're partnering with them to try to optimize their health?

Ben Boudro 19:25

Yeah, it's been an interesting space too with um with NIL and stuff going on too, because oh yeah, it's happening so fast. I'm I'm learning all this stuff, but like, you know, I there's a basketball player that I heard of. I'm not working with him yet, but he was making earn a big chunk of change, right? And if you get injured, that goes from like this is for simple numbers, you know, 200,000 a year to 2,000, right? So monitoring their health and central nervous system, like you can kind of tell, like, if something's going on right, like my VO2 Max, for example, if I could have got hurt and not use that data for like my good, and I, you know, was a player and lost kind of like that's how we're using the data to show let's monitor your sleep, let's take care of all these things. And then what's cool for us is this is what how Tom Brady and LeBron James trained. So why not train like that? Um, but another interesting thing just recently, because we work with uh Alabama basketball. So Nate Oates is there, and the trainer came to one of our guys at Coya and he's like, if I can get rid of every I'll sell every piece of equipment in the weight room, everything we this is Alabama, right? This is high-tech, right? He's like, I would give all we have away, every training protocol, every single thing, just to have this one thing for our athletes. And guess what it was? Sleep pod.

Christine VanTimmeren 20:35

Wearable, some sort of weight pod sleep.

Ben Boudro 20:37

He said, if I could get my athletes to sleep, I would trade everything for that because of how much of a superpower in recovery that is.

Dr. Brandon Mancini 20:44

Especially college kids, that's gotta be something, right? Yeah, I would balancing all the things, yeah.

Ben Boudro 20:49

Yeah, I mean, there's like you said, there's subjectivity, there's up to like showing them it works, but also you can't force people to do anything, right? They gotta want to do it. And like Brandon pointed out, the way you make people want to do it is they feel it and they know it and they can see it, right? When you become aware of things, it's hard to not pay attention to them. Like I you start paying attention to rings, right? Your reticular activated system. After I say this on a podcast, I guarantee people are gonna start looking for people, you'll notice a guy with a whoop. You'll notice people with aura rings, right? You become aware of it's hard to ignore.

unknown 21:20

Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Brandon Mancini 21:21

No, it's fascinating. And I think obviously we talked a lot about people that are wearing it. Just to circle back, you gave a great example of like the person that was wearing whoop, and then the data kind of was stressing them out seeing it. So can you talk about some of the negatives of the wearables? Because there's so many positives potentially, because information is power. But what are some of the negatives besides the potential anxiety or stress it might cause? Do you think?

Ben Boudro 21:45

Yeah, overthinking and then trying to do it by yourself, I'd say. Because AI is a good tool, right? But AI is, I mean, it's not perfect yet. So it could be steering you down the wrong path. I'm not against AI, I use it too, but like You get this data, you don't have to do with it, and then it could, if that leads you on a bad path, and then you're like, you know, screw this, I'm just throw it away. That's not where we want people, right? We want to use it for good. So that's where the data can be bad.

Dr. Brandon Mancini 22:09

Yeah. No, with Coya, it's the accountability, right? Like sometimes the buddy system, having someone that's checking in that you can go to, right? AI is not a person, it's not a support, right? Relationships to your point, and that comes up endlessly with longevity and health span is relationships and social interaction and community. So I think Coya kind of provides that too. Yeah.

Ben Boudro 22:31

We often tell athletes too, like, take your whoop off when you train, right? Because we don't want them overanalyzing that. There everyone's got different personalities, how much to analyze if they're analyzing too much. Some people need more, but you nail down relationships. We'll tell people, like, you know, executives, if you're on vacation, take your whoop strap off. Be present with your family because that's actually gonna do more for you. And they come back just, you know. So it's managing it. The wearable can help you, it can guide you, but it's not everything, right? Relationships, all and that's where I think the biohacking industry, the guys that are like, you know, going to bed at 6 p.m. and doing that, it's like relationships are a piece of this too. And it's one of the most actually, I think a Harvard study showed that it was like the number one predictor, right? So mortality, yeah, for sure. Yeah.

Christine VanTimmeren 23:13

Is there you also have to like resist the urge to constantly make changes? You're looking at the numbers and you're like, oh, I'm gonna change this to improve that. Oh, tomorrow, oh, this number looks like this, and now I'm gonna start doing this. Uh, my guess is there has to be an element of consistency over time with one thing and not doing everything at once. So it's resisting the urge to always change and always be trying to working the numbers.

Ben Boudro 23:40

A thousand percent.

Christine VanTimmeren 23:41

Yeah.

Ben Boudro 23:41

We work in 12-week windows, like that's a long time, right? It is, and like sometimes they're like, it's kind of underwhelming, I need more. But then 12 weeks go by and they're like, we ask the best people we have. We always ask like the end, if they have, you know, people increase their HRV by 40%, or some people increase their sleep by 77 minutes a night. And we get there, and it always the best when we ask them, like, so what'd you do? And they're like, I mean, I it I don't know. Like, I guess I just did these little things, right? That's always the best response we get because this small pebbles move in mountains, right? But it's consistency and you can't do everything at once. Yeah. And I think what we do is we have a nutritionist, a sleep coach, a mental coach, and a straight the edition coach all like in one pod. So the individuals we work with, they're all communicating with each other. Whereas like if you go shop that out, it's a lot, right? So I'm gonna go down the street, find a sleep coach, find this. So when they're talking to each other and communicating with your data, it makes things a little bit easier.

Dr. Brandon Mancini 24:37

So if someone was sitting at home now listening to this and getting motivated to uh kind of consider tracking or monitoring their health, what are some things that they can do or that you would suggest? Say they don't have a wearable, but what's something they can do to track or monitor their health if they want to take that step forward?

Ben Boudro 24:55

Yeah. If you want to do I honestly think doing the audit, and this is not sexy, and everyone's gonna be like, dude, I'm not doing this.

Christine VanTimmeren 25:00

But an audit.

Ben Boudro 25:02

Yeah, I know that word is not sexy at all. But if you just wrote down sleep, hydration, immune function, your environment, uh, how much self-care, like vacations, right? And just rate yourself one to ten. How am I doing these areas? Right. There's always a wheel, you know, you could put finances in there, how you're doing, but really just ask yourself how you're doing it's just you versus you two, and then just pick one of those areas and then try to work on that for one week. And really look up the good habits that you can actually do in your life, right? Um, an example, I love talking about this one, but have you guys heard of the three, two, one rule for sleep?

Christine VanTimmeren 25:36

Maybe.

Ben Boudro 25:37

Okay.

Christine VanTimmeren 25:39

You probably have.

Ben Boudro 25:41

What we found with good habits is if you don't eat three hours before bed, I'm mad at that. Me, me too. I'm with you. Yeah, it's tough. I can't I rarely do it too. Two hours before bed, no work. One hour before bed, no blue light. But if you could just try that at home and like maybe sleep is an area where you need help with, and just try that and see how you feel the next morning and write down a scale one to ten, ten being great, I feel great. One, I don't feel any different. Try it for three days, see what happens. The three, two, one rule has been the most popular for us because when you have the data, people are like, holy crap, this has made a big difference. Yeah.

Dr. Brandon Mancini 26:16

No, that's perfect. That gets reflected a ton. The no blue light, that's hard, right? Like before electricity was invented, when the sun was up and the sun was down, like it naturally set off the whole chemical reaction in our brain to make us sleepy and you would go to bed. Kind of like animals do, right? They're if you're not nocturnal, you're gonna just be going around when the sun's up. But blue light, it's like infinity uh light if you need it, but it tricks your brain where your quality can't be that good. Um, there's mixed data, I think, on like blue light blocking glasses. Some of them do a great job, but it's still probably the stimulatory effects. If it's scrolling on the phone or watching a TV or something, it's still like stimulating, even if that blue light's blocked. Yeah. So yeah, I think tips and tricks. I think for some people, it might be reading a book for 10, 20 minutes. Sometimes they get naturally sleepy, maybe just read something boring or something. Human element comes in though, too.

Ben Boudro 27:11

It's like like you said, like the 3-2-1 rule. When I first heard it, me personally, I'm like, what am I gonna do an hour before bed? I watch TV with my kids every night and I relax on the couch, often falling asleep with them. So what the heck do I do? And he's like, okay, let's break it down in 20-minute chunks. 20 minutes, I just want you to lay out your clothes, lay out your stuff for the next day. If you journal, like put that out, and okay, I'll do that. Even my vitamins, etc. And 20 minutes flies by. The next 20 minutes, he's like, I actually just want you to talk to your wife and try not to talk about scheduling or like what's coming up, just talk to her. I'm like, oh, okay. All right. Yeah. All right. Uh no, that's what everyone always laughs about. Yes. The third 20 minutes has been the most impactful for me, and it's the very simple thing anyone could do. But 20 minutes of journaling. And for anyone that's heard the word journaling, they're sounding me out, just ride with me real quick. You don't talk about what you want to do or anything. You just lay out your day. What happened? It could be bullet points. I went to school, I did this, I did that. But all you're doing is instead of having input come into your brain, you're reversing it, right? You're reflecting over then reception, reception, right? So you do that, and I'm telling you, my sleep is always the best the nights after I do that.

unknown 28:23

Yeah.

Christine VanTimmeren 28:23

What's the not eating after how do you say it? Don't eat three hours after three hours before bed. What is that about?

Ben Boudro 28:32

Melatonin produced in the gut. So when you s eat, you're kind of decreasing the melatonin production in your body. But the big thing I think with melatonin that I found is circadian rhythm. And if you you guys know Dr. Matt Walker, right? Yep. The guy who wrote Why We Sleep. I was able, fortunate enough, to talk to one of the guys who works with them at UC Berkeley. And I just said, hey, with the studies, since the book has come out, like what's the biggest thing you guys have found? He's like, it's circadian rhythm. Yeah. And what I found with that is just think of this. When you go to bed and wake up at the same time and a rhythm, your body likes rhythm, your brain likes rhythm. Right now, our cortisol midday should be going, right? But then we want to shut it off, and then melatonin should go up. But what most people are doing is that cortisol is going, it doesn't stop, and then melatonin's going, they're competing with each other. They're waking up in the middle of the night, they're thinking, you know, yeah. But when you get on a circadian rhythm, it goes here and you keep it here and you keep it, and it gets stronger and stronger. Like you said, with you know, before we had electricity, they felt the ground, it would be warm or cold, and they that's when they'd wake up.

Dr. Brandon Mancini 29:32

Yeah. And I think things I've noticed on my end are like sleep consistency is super critical for circadian. And it's usually 30 minutes of your normal bedtime. The hard part for me personally is like the weekend. Yeah. If I mean, like during the week, you're getting up at 5 a.m. Like on the weekend, like that's your time to maybe get an extra hour or something. Your bed's stuff control on the weekend. Yeah. And it's also competing because there's different viewpoints, which I don't think there's an exact right answer. But some sleep experts say no matter what time you go to bed, get up at the same time every day. Cause that starts the whole melatonin cortisol uh cascades. Um, and so that can be tough because that's competing with I should get seven to nine hours or sometimes more, right? And so there's a lot of right answers, but it's probably um journaling or using your wearable or figuring out little hacks to see if something impacts you personally different. Sometimes during the week, even that extra hour for me personally on the weekend is kind of just you feel actually more recharge recharged because maybe you have gotten a little sleep debt that has added up throughout the week, and you kind of have a reset button more or less.

Ben Boudro 30:37

But yeah, you also gotta, it's you can't approach this with a perfection attitude, yeah, right? Because if you want to have relationships, like Brandon and I coach a high-level baseball team, not the burger boys, yeah.

Christine VanTimmeren 30:48

Your team looks like real legitimate.

Ben Boudro 30:50

But you know, there's nights it could be baseball, like last night we got back at 9 p.m. Right. So like you don't want to be like, it's 9 p.m. I didn't do my journal. I'm not gonna sleep tonight. Like that's the opposite of what you're doing. You gotta approach it with like, okay, life happens, yeah, right. And that's why it's always a long journey. Yeah.

Christine VanTimmeren 31:05

I mean, hey, in this this sort of wellness space, we all want either the quick fix or the easy thing, or the I want exactly to follow this schedule and exactly this. And that's not how it works. That's not how disease works. Things, you know, don't follow a typical path or a schedule. And so it's just about doing what you can, control what you can, the easy things, take it slow. And I think that's all we can do.

Ben Boudro 31:34

Yeah. See what's in front of you that day and work from there. Absolutely.

Christine VanTimmeren 31:38

Well, thanks so much, Ben.

Ben Boudro 31:39

My pleasure.

Christine VanTimmeren 31:39

This was great. Hopefully, we all learned a little bit about wellness and taking care of ourselves and how to use the data that's coming at us from all our various wearables and things for good. So appreciate it.

Ben Boudro 31:50

Thank you.

Christine VanTimmeren 31:51

Thank you. All right, we'll see you next time.