Stress Is a Spark - Project GWR Week 5
Hi everyone, and welcome to week 5!
Hi everyone. This one was filmed at sunrise, before I headed downtown to give a speech, on a morning where there was more to do than there was time to do it. That's the week most of you are having too. This week is about the thing that decides whether all that hard work puts you on a growth trajectory or a burnout trajectory, and it isn't working harder. I'll show you the two numbers I track, the two tactics that move them, and the one hour I want you to defend tonight.
Watch time = 5 minutes.
These videos were filmed over the summer, so the countdowns you hear won't match today's date.
Stress Is a Spark
I filmed this one at sunrise with the city behind me, about an hour before I had to drive down there and give a speech. Work to do, a talk to deliver, and a training walk with Ingrid still to fit in. If that sounds like your week, we are in the same boat.
Most people work extremely hard, and they have to. The problem is not the work. The problem is what happens when the work never stops.
Here is the physiology. When you do something cognitively demanding, or when you train, you create micro-damage. That is not a metaphor. Loaded muscle sustains structural disruption, and sustained mental effort depletes the resources your brain needs to keep performing. Stress is the signal that drives you to adapt, and adaptation is the thing you actually want. But the adaptation does not happen during the stress. It happens afterwards, in the recovery, and only if the recovery arrives.
Take the recovery away and the same stress that would have made you stronger accumulates instead. You get tired, then chronically fatigued, then injured or unwell. Persistent mood disturbance is one of the recognised features of that pattern, which is worth knowing because people tend to read it as a personal failing rather than as a physiological state of fatigue.
So the whole game is alternation. Hard work, then deep recovery. Repeat. We call this the twin cycles of healthy high performance. Its an art and a practice!
The two numbers I track. Your autonomic nervous system runs the balance between effort and recovery, and you can see it. We want your resting heart rate, measured before you get out of bed to be low and trending lower (note this varies by menstrual cycle phase). We then want your heart rate variability, measured at the same time, to be high and trending higher.
One caution when getting these measurements from your wearable device is to not compare your HRV to mine, or to anyone's. HRV varies enormously between people with age, with fitness, with which device you wear, and with which metric that device reports, and a number that means excellent recovery for one person is unremarkable for another. Mine sits where it sits because of my age and my training history. What is useful is your own baseline and your own trend across weeks to months. A number that is drifting down over ten days is information. A number that is lower than someone else's is noise. You are your own laboratory.
Tactic one: get hot before bed, and get the timing right. A meta-analysis of thirteen trials found that a warm bath or shower, at 40 to 42.5 degrees C, for as little as ten minutes, shortens how long it takes you to fall asleep by roughly a third. But the effect depends on doing it one to two hours before bed, not immediately before. Get hot and then give yourself time to cool off.
The mechanism is that heating your skin opens your peripheral blood vessels, which lets you dump heat, which pulls your core temperature down over the following hour. That falling core temperature is what accompanies sleep onset. Your melatonin release is governed by your circadian clock responding to darkness, not by the temperature drop itself, so dim the lights as well if you want both working together.
Tactic two: treat sleep as the performance intervention it is. Growth hormone is released in pulses during slow-wave sleep, which is when a great deal of your physical repair happens. Your brain does its own maintenance overnight, and I want to note that the glymphatic story, the idea that your brain flushes waste during sleep specifically, is genuinely contested right now. A 2024 paper in Nature Neuroscience found the opposite of the standard account in mice, the original researchers have pushed back hard on the methods, and the field is still arguing. What is not in dispute is that sleep loss degrades memory consolidation, immune function, glucose handling and mood. You do not need the contested mechanism to justify the sleep.
Remember that stress + rest = growth. Let’s take care of ourselves and heal, repair, recover and regenerate.
Your 1% this week: defend your last hour. One hour before sleep, the work goes away. No email, no social media, and above all no news. Make it an if-then so it survives stress: when it hits 9 pm, my phone goes away and my laptop goes in the drawer. That hour is where we can downshift, deactivate and decompress. That way when we fall asleep we can stay asleep.
