Your sleep score: help or hindrance?

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Good morning, 66.1ers.

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As promised, more on wearables today.

I’ve been coaching hard lately. 
Working to take my Mayo Clinic skillset to the free market.

And I’ve learned a few things in the process.

A main theme I’ve seen lately is that people are overly reliant on their wearables. 
They check their sleep score and their body battery, waiting for permission to work out.  
If their sleep score says they slept poorly, they go easy at the gym.  

That’s not wrong, but…
It’s incomplete. 

And, frankly, it’s probably setting you back. 
Lets you off the hook WAY too easily. 

Because, if you missed on sleep, it may have been a result of bad luck. 
More likely, though, is that you sabotaged your own sleep. 

That could take the form of: 

1. Drinking (which we know ruins your sleep)

2. Late night snacking (also ruins your sleep)

3. Phone in bed (I did this last night. And I slept poorly)

4. Late-in-the-day caffeine

There are a dozen other ways to ruin your sleep. 
And none of them means you should take a day off your training regimen.
But we’re here to build your health, not just to rant. 

So. 
Here’s my solution. 

An anti-tech approach to life is ignorant and incomplete.
As Chase shared in response to Wednesday’s newsletter, wearables are plenty valuable. 

With that in mind, here’s my approach with coaching clients:

We’re going to leverage all the tech you want, but we’re not going to start with the tech.
We zoom out and get a “baseline”.
What are you eating, how are you sleeping, how do you feel?

We track it.
Every day for a week. 

And during that time?
No wearables. 

No body batteries, no sleep scores. 

You’re going to log all your most important metrics in this Google Sheet. 

There are columns for stress, exercise, food intake, sleep, and relationships.
You might add columns for “work”, “kids”, or other, more specific areas of life that are particularly relevant for you. 

Make some comments as to why you might have felt how you did. 

And then?

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