The three surprising factors that led to my highest WHOOP recovery

I’d tell you the exact genesis of my WHOOP story if I could, but frankly, I don’t know when or why I originally bought my WHOOP strap, only that it was a little more than two years ago. All I can really say is that it’s been one of the best investments I’ve made in the last two years.

If you haven’t seen a WHOOP, or heard a commercial on the many podcasts it currently sponsors, it’s a wearable device, about the size of a watch, which measures, among many things, your heart rate and heart rate variability (hilariously, it does not tell time, which John Hyden found positively ridiculous when he asked me the time one day). Using those metrics, it calculates the overall strain on your body, calories burned, sleep quality and quantity, and how recovered your body is. I don’t know or entirely understand the methodology behind it all, but there have been a number of studies on the device, all of which have come to the mostly mutual agreement that it’s one of the most accurate fitness wearables on the market.

The most useful aspect of the WHOOP, to me, aside from the sleep tracking – I’d never tracked my sleep before – is the morning “journal” it has you fill out, a simple yes or no questionnaire inquiring about your activities from the day before. Each week, month, and year, WHOOP then provides an analysis of those activities and how they relate to your recovery.

Some are of no surprise at all. Alcohol, flying, and consuming added sugar are particularly debilitating to me, and probably are to you, too. You don’t need a WHOOP to tell you that. But it was the three most positively correlated activities that were surprising. To me, anyway.

When WHOOP delivered my yearly analysis, I expected the most positively correlated activities to include mostly unanimously positive habits such as ice baths, intermittent fasting, meditation, breathwork, stretching, sauna, magnesium, and reading before bed. All of them, to be sure, were positively correlated, averaging at least a five percent bump in my recovery, and I’d recommend you add a few of those to your daily routine.

But none were in my top three.

My No. 1 activity, by far, was, surprisingly enough, wearing blue light blocking glasses before bed. Maybe, upon further inspection, it shouldn’t be that surprising. The closest thing athletes, and human beings in general, can get to a legal performance enhancing drug is quality sleep. One of the best things you can do to improve your sleep – among many – is to limit the amount of blue light, which is light emitted from our screens, after the sun sets. As a writer, I’m on my screen all the time. Limiting the blue light via these glasses – I have the ANRRI Blue Light Blocking Glasses; they’re $25 on Amazon – allegedly improves the quality of my sleep, which should, theoretically, improve my recovery.

So yeah: I’m a believer in wearing blue light blockers, or just not watching screens before bed, as best I can.

The second and third biggest indicators of positive recovery, however, aren’t physiological, but psychological, for the most part. No. 2 for me was sharing my bed, which makes no sense at all. Dave Asprey, the founder of BulletProof Coffee, has gone on a funny and sort of weird campaign against sharing beds, since it typically results in both lower sleep quality and quantity. Indeed, sharing my bed was correlated with reduced quantity of sleep – I run very hot throughout the night, and sharing the bed with my wife, The Lovely Delaney, only adds to the temperature – but it was also correlated with a nearly 10-percent bump in my recovery.

I don’t really know how to explain that.

I’d say that this is merely a result of sleeping in my own bed, and not necessarily sharing it, but WHOOP isolates for that, as it does with dozens of other variables, and sharing my bed had a far more significant positive correlation than sleeping in my own bed did.

Delaney, of course, absolutely loved it, and is convinced that it is the power of snuggles that improved my recovery. She now has roughly two years of data to back that up.  

The third habit correlated with higher recovery is psychological as well: Expressing gratitude, which I isolated by only checking it when I wrote in my journal, an aspect of which is jotting down a minimum of three things for which I am grateful each day. By now, we’ve all read or heard ad nauseam about the power of gratitude, to the point that it just sounds hokey and bogus, and maybe it is. It makes sense, and is almost inarguable, that expressing gratitude is a fantastic habit to improve your mental state, but your physiological one? I don’t know.

I suppose, again, that the improvement of your mental state is likely a harbinger of improved sleep. The more grateful you are, perhaps, the less stressed you are; the less stressed you are, the better your sleep; the better your sleep, the better your recovery.

Whether you wear a WHOOP or not — if you want one, you can get $30 off here; I’d recommend it for athletes but not really for those who don’t exercise much — I cannot recommend the blue light blockers enough. I’ve long been a proponent of journaling, though now I have an added, performance-based incentive to continue doing so on a daily basis.

So rock some blue light blockers, journal away, and give your loved one an extra snuggle tonight.

Your recovery just might thank you for it.