Louisa Nicola - Enhancing Performance
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Bill: This episode features Louisa Nicola. The episode is a little different as it gets into health and sleep patterns. As always, draw your own conclusions. This is outside of my area of expertise, but my life has improved substantially since the conversation that Louisa and I had. I have since prioritized sleep, which may sound silly to some of you but it was something that was lacking a little bit in my life. I will say that there are some discussions of needing eight hours of sleep that are virtually impossible for this body to get. The kids don't help very much and I just can't seem to do it. But I hope that this episode is one that adds value to your listening experience...
In the episode, we mentioned that will be the Monday or Tuesday after the episode drops. I'm not quite sure that that's exactly what it'll be. But again, follow me and I'll make sure to communicate when the spaces and with that out of the way, I hope you enjoy the episode. So, Louisa, how you doing today?
Louisa: Hi, Bill. I'm really good. Thanks. Thanks for having me.
Bill: Thank you for coming on. I'm excited to have a conversation with you. I found you in Spaces, actually is how I got introduced to you. And then, I started reading some of your Substack, and then I watched a YouTube interview that you had with a very good-looking guy. He was in athletics. And I said, you know what? I like what this person has to say and hopefully, she'll come on my show. And then, you said, yes. So, thank you for that.
Louisa: Thank you. It's my hope that people click on my content, not because of what the audience looks like or what the interviewee looks like but hopefully for the content.
Bill: No, it was the content. I just looked at him and I said, he clearly works out more than I do. So, props to that guy. Anyway, I found your background super fascinating. So, would you mind, I guess, first of all, telling people what you do from a high level, and then, second of all, maybe we can start about with your time as an athlete and what got you interested in the brain? Maybe, that's a good way to frame this.
Louisa: Oh, 100%. So, it's a bit of a crazy story but right now, I am the founder and head coach of Neuro Athletics. So, Neuro Athletics is a full-service sports neurology company. We have two divisions. We have a consulting side and then we have a suite of digital products ranging from podcast to Substack to we've got courses, and they're all online and face-to-face, that's that sign. Then, in terms of consulting, so myself, and I've got three employees who are coaches as well. We go out and we advise to pro athletes and the hedge fund world. So, it keeps me quite interesting. If you ask, "Okay, so, what's the broad overview of what you consult on?" I say that we live at the intersection of neuroscience and high performance. We're basically teaching how to perform better, think faster, and live longer.
Bill: Yeah, I think that's something that I definitely need. Some of what you have discussed via your blog, via some of your conversations are things that I wish that I could implement in my life. I'm the guy that goes to bed and has his mind race nonstop for two hours, and then wakes up after five hours, and hopefully gets six hours, and I notice you're an advocate of eight hours. So, a couple of things I need to work on personally. My hydration is pretty good. So, I got that going for me. But curious to hear you tell your story of when you were an athlete and what got you interested in neuroscience, and then maybe we can get into some of the habits, and what you advise hedge funds to do, and things like that.
Louisa: So, no, that's great. I started off as a triathlete. So, originally from Sydney, Australia, which is why I've got this accent, but I moved to New York City back in 2016. I brought my company here. If you know anything about Australians, you know that we are great swimmers. We're being brought up in the ocean literally. So, I was always a great swimmer, and I took it upon myself to be a bit competitive, and trial a triathlon. Just by chance, I think it was at the age of 17, I won, I flipped it. So, triathlon is swim, bike, run. So, you have to be really good at all three sports. I was just really good at the one sport and that's swimming. So, I went out, I did this triathlon, ended up coming first, and I got picked up by a triathlon coach, and he said, "I want you to come and train for me, and hopefully, eventually, we'll get you to Beijing." I thought, "This guy's insane."
Bill: [laughs]
Louisa: But I was very competitive. 17 years old, that's just in my nature, I was very competitive. So, I started training. I was getting into the hang of it and I absolutely fell in love with the sport. I always say that it's my first love, triathlon. So, I said to myself, I want to be the world's best triathlete. My parents didn't agree with that. They said, "No, you've got to go to school." I went and did a-- this is obviously after high school. I went to university and I went and did a sports physiology or exercise science degree. So, I did that. That's where I was introduced to anatomy, physiology. I understood what was happening being a practitioner and learning at the same time. I was learning, this is what the body is, how you train, and I was actually implementing it into my triathlon training. That's where I learned everything.
I moved on. I ended up qualifying for Beijing, I qualified for London, I qualified for Auckland. So, training full time and it wasn't until 2011, I was three weeks out of racing at the World Championship Series, and I got hit by a car. So, I smashed my body in half. Literally, I woke up in hospital. Yeah, I had a car hit me and my two teammates and-
Bill: Oh, and your teammates. I didn't realize that.
Louisa: -it was a tragedy. Yeah. So, I was on the back, I was riding and they were-- We do this thing where you ride a mile and then you switch, okay?
Bill: Yeah.
Louisa: We keep just going like that. And this was on the bike, and we were going at, I don't know what, it was in [unintelligible [00:07:34], we were going at 40 kilometers an hour. A car had been-- it was an old guy, who was like about 85 years old, he had been riding. He had been driving for about two and a half hours. He veered off and he ended up hitting me. So, I smacked into my two teammates in front of me. Ended up, waking up in the hospital and I wasn't able to race, had a broken leg. So, I was absolutely devastated. I equate it to going through a divorce.
Bill: Yeah.
Louisa: It's like, I had to divorce the sport of triathlon, so very emotional, but something interesting happened. Six months later, I was able to get back on a bike and I said, "I'm going to re-qualify for Auckland in 2012." My coach said, "You're insane." The doctor said, "You're never going to run again let alone do a triathlon." We had this guy come from Colorado. It was Bobby McGee, he was back then-- he was Usain Bolt's running coach. He came to Australia and he said to me, "Louisa, the only thing stopping you from getting back on the bike is not your physiology. It's your brain." I said, "What are you talking about?"
I was 20, 21. So, I graduated, I had my sports science degree. He said, "The only thing stopping you is getting on the bike is your brain." He ended up taking me through a triathlon. But he connected these leads to my head. We call it an EEG. You've probably seen it. He showed me the data and he showed me that how powerful the brain was because what happened was, my brain mimicked what was happening in a triathlon and I wasn't moving. My metrics were the exact same, heart rate.
Bill: Wait, so, what did it look like? Just so, I get a sense. They hook it up and what was it just like a simulator or something?
Louisa: No. So, an EEG, electroencephalogram measures the brainwave activity in your brain.
Bill: Okay.
Louisa: We use it in hospitals, mainly hospitals on epilepsy patients and a number of different other neurophysiological conditions.
Bill: But what were you doing while it was hooked up? Were you doing something physical--?
Louisa: [unintelligible [00:09:39].
Bill: Oh, really? Wow.
Louisa: Yeah. It was absolutely unbelievable. I thought, "What is this?" That's when he introduced me. I only had access to him for two days. So, it was a very enlightening experience for me. I thought, "Okay, if I'm going to get back on the bike, and race and train, I have to understand what my brain is doing." So, I went through, I ended up going to med school, I studied neurophysiology in terms of majoring in neurophysiology, and I applied the aspect of neuroscience to my sports performance, and I qualified for Auckland the following year, I competed, I didn't come first, I didn't actually even come top 10.
Bill: It's amazing that you competed though.
Louisa: But I came 12th. It was amazing that I competed and I called it quits in 2012, and I decided to dedicate my entire life to understanding the brain.
Bill: You were told that you were never going to compete again, right?
Louisa: Yeah.
Bill: And did they say that you'd walk again or were they sure about that?
Louisa: I had a broken leg.
Bill: Okay.
Louisa: So, I didn't have any spinal cord injuries. Look, even now, this is 10 years on, I still have issues with the right side of my body, beside broken leg, I had two broken ribs, broken collarbone, broken arm, a lot of things were broken. So, yeah.
Bill: I would assume getting hit by a car is fairly traumatic. I'm glad that hasn't happened to me yet and hopefully ever.
Louisa: Yeah.
Bill: So, what was your first breakthrough with the power of the brain and what you had to get interested in or I'm just trying to put myself. I'm in your shoes. I'm feeling devastated. I've lost my sport that I love and here's some hippie from Colorado comes in and tells me, "Everything's going to be fine as long as I believe in the brain or whatever," and it turns out this guy is right. What is it that got you interested in the power of the brain and how did you start your pursuit, I guess, is really the question? Because I think at that point, sorry, I ramble sometimes when I ask questions, but in my head, it's like, some people break in that scenario and some people get stronger. And you seem like the type of person that got stronger from the adversity. So, I'm just interested to hear how you thought through that and what got you going?
Louisa: Here's the thing. I was reading back then, oh, meditation and visualization. I'm a scientist at heart. I believe in what has been proven in the scientific literature. So, when I started reading and when you go to med school, you're obviously getting taught the actual science. You're not getting taught something that is just made up. When I started to apply things, such as sleep physiology, understanding my sleep, understanding what I'm putting in my body, understanding my lactate threshold, really putting in hardcore data to my training. That was the moment that I realized, "Huh, everything is just science, everything is math." So, if I apply myself, if I become my own scientific experiment, I can just see how I go and it started to work for me.
Look back then, we're dating back, so that-- it was 2012, and I was training well and truly before then-- five years before then. So, we didn't have access to sleep metrics. We didn't even have heart-- We just got introduced to heart rate monitors. That's the only thing that we were guided of. I was lucky that I had-- my coach was a triathlon coach, but he was also a sports scientist. So, he was talking about the science behind what we're doing. But it wasn't until I understood it myself and became utterly obsessed, because I was-- I became obsessed with the sport and obsessed with understanding more about my brain and physiology that I was able to get myself to apply the things that I was learning and apply them on the bike, in the run, in the water.
Bill: I'm just thinking through what a young person, an 18-year-old you would be versus the person after you got hit by the crash, did you substantially change your diet and your sleep patterns?
Louisa: Yeah.
Bill: What started to happen in your life that began to create the change?
Louisa: Well, one thing happened and I started to understand female hormones. I'm actually about to write a big piece on this. I tweeted out two weeks ago, which went semi-viral. I pissed off a lot of people, but it also made a lot of people happy. It was about the fact that, if you are a coach and you don't know the menstrual cycle of your athletes, you're not training them well. So, it was a first thing. I was getting trained by a guy and most of my teammates was 80% men. So, I had to understand my own hormones. As a female I had to understand when to taper, when to go hard, when to push back, that was the first thing that changed for me, hormone levels. The second thing that changed was sleep. Back then, we had this-- there was-- this saying was going viral and it is, "I'll sleep when I'm dead."
Bill: Yeah.
Louisa: We had to be at training at 6 AM every morning. If we were two minutes late, would get sent home. I remember I came once two minutes late. But we never got taught, "You need to sleep." We just got taught, "Go and have a powernap, get up, and just go and do your training." We never got taught the fundamentals of sleep physiology, what sleep does to your body, to your performance, to your decision making. So, it was another thing that changed. I started to sleep better, I started to understand more about sleep, and then, everything else such as what to eat for your brain. I started to implement nootropics, things that are like supplements for your brain, for your focus, for your attention. So, these are the things that came into play and that were really insightful for me.
Bill: Can we talk a little bit about what you found to help facilitate healthy sleep regimen and how to get yourself to be able to sleep? Because I think that sleep is something that a lot of people struggle with.
Louisa: It really is because I've built my method off of sleep. It pains me that people still really misuse sleep because in my world, I believe that sleep is the most underrated, high-performance drug that we have. People are going off and taking sleeping pills, and they're doing themselves a disservice. So, understanding sleep can be the biggest breakthrough to any barrier of performance, whether you're an athlete, whether you're in the finance world, whether you're a mother, whether you're a-- whatever it is, sleep is probably the most fundamental thing that you should be doing.
Whenever I start to introduce the topic of sleep, I remind people that just like you and myself, we live on this 24-hour cycle. We have these little clocks in our brains, in our bodies, and in a lot of our organs and it runs on a 24-hour circadian rhythm. If we disrupt this, if we dysregulate this process, we dysregulate a lot of the different homeostatic processes that happen in our body. So, we need to be understanding first and foremost, the sun comes up and we need to come up with it. The sun goes down, and we need to go down with it. This is how mother nature has really formed our life, and our sleep and wake cycle.
Understanding first and foremost that consistency with sleep, going to bed regularly at the same time, waking up at the same time, it's probably step one of the entire sleep process. I don't know about you, but I sleep almost every night at 10 PM.
Bill: Hmm. Interesting. And then you get up at six-ish?
Louisa: I get up at around 6:00, 6:30, yeah. People say to me, though, "Okay, well, Louisa, how many hours do I need to sleep?" That's really individualized. So, LeBron James needs to sleep and he does around 11 to 12 hours each night.
Bill: Wow.
Louisa: You may not need to sleep that many hours. However, I do have a threshold. I do say at bare minimum, you should be sleeping seven and a half hours. That's my bare minimum. Seven and a half to eight hours. Depending on your physical output each day, you may need to increase that to eight hours, eight and a half hours.
Bill: Well, you're talking to somebody who has a relatively sedentary lifestyle which I'm not proud of and I find myself sleeping four hours a night more often than I would like to it. It's a shame and I know that it's something that I need to change. But I guess, one thing that I have is, sometimes, I'll hop on a Space on Twitter or whatever at night because people can hop on with me and then-- or I'll record a podcast. Some people have to record at night and all of a sudden, I'm wired at 10:30 when that ends, and now, I don't know how to get myself to sleep, and then I don't get to bed till one, and then the kids wake up at six, and here I am trying to drink coffee through the day knowing that that's not ideal, but that's also reality, and I'd be lying if I said it wasn't.
Louisa: Yeah.
Louisa: Managing the schedule can be difficult at times.
Louisa: Look, I completely understand that we have a lot of new parents that come to neuro athletics. Here's the thing. Everybody has a different outlook on what success is and the science doesn't lie to an extent. So, we're dealing with high performance. When you look at the hedge fund world or you look at the finance world, we have a lot of people is like, "Louisa, I've got 50 million or 3 billion in asset management. I'm seeing declining results over the last three years. I don't know what to do." Then we'll do an assessment of the-- we'll do a brain scan for example with an EEG. We'll see that their brain is, their information processing speed is down. Their brain-- They're 50 years old, but their brain it looks like a 75-year-old. And we see that their visual acuity isn't working at its maximum.
All we do then is, we put in a number of different protocols but we start with sleep, because if you want to make a better decision, If you want to have greater output in your day, meaning, you want to work from 8 AM to 4 PM, or 8AM till 6 PM, and run at 100% of your maximum ability, you need to be working on sleep. So, we have people out there who are like, "Well, Louisa, I don't really need your services because I'm not looking at that. I just want to live a normal life." Well, that's fine. If you really want to take a chance and maximize your output, you need to take care of sleep and four hours like you said, unfortunately, I understand when you do have kids-
Bill: Oh, it's not enough.
Louisa: -I would never lie-- I would never say, "Oh, it's okay. It's the sciences there." And actually, just on this and not to scare you, but there was a study that was done in a fantastic journal PNAS. And it showed, what they did was they took a group of healthy adults, they took a group of 25 healthy men, they deprived them of sleep for just one week. They got them to sleep six hours every night. Six hours, that's more than what you want. And they only did this for a week and guess what they found in their blood?
Bill: Definitely some sort of increased toxicity and lower mental acuity is probably my sense.
Louisa: Yes, but from a genome perspective, what they found is, we have 20,000 genes in the human genome. What they found was they found a 3% change in their DNA. We have genes that are responsible for different things in our body. We have immunity genes, we have tumor prevention genes, we have tumor acceleration genes. What they found was these, they were healthy men, what they did was they upregulated the tumor producing genes, and they downregulated the immunity genes-
Bill: Yeah.
Louisa: -just from one week of sleep deprivation. So, what is that saying? Well, it's saying and this is obviously coming with a medical disclaimer. That sleep is a fundamental process in longevity, in disease prevention, and in immunity.
Bill: So, I call you up and we hook up this, what is the EEG, what did you call it?
Louisa: Yeah, electroencephalogram, EEG.
Bill: All right, good. I'm glad I didn't mess that up. It would have demonstrated my lack of clear thinking. You'd say, "Bill, you have a 75-year-old brain" and I think to myself, "Am I screwed in perpetuity or can I reverse this?" What is my diagnosis here? Am I lost human or do I have a chance?
Louisa: No. Look, there's always a good time to get on track with things like sleep. In saying that, sleep is not like a bank. So, you can't repay the debt. You can't go and have six hours each night, then on the weekend, hope to just bring it back up and top it up. It's not like that. But there is always a good time to get on track with aging in terms of brain health, in terms of longevity, etc. But it really takes careful consideration, it takes precision, and it really takes a commitment. So, yes, people come to us, and they see that they've got an aging brain, and over the course of six months, we can get them from having declining performance over three years to an increase in performance, you know, following. I really think it does come down to neuroscience. I think everything is-- I think everything is brain first, neurons first, everything comes second.
Bill: That makes sense to me. I find it interesting because at least, a lot of the culture that I think that exists in Wall Street at least at the lower levels is long, long hours or at least it was. I don't know if it still is. But long hours, late nights, do your work, come in, don't complain, and it's interesting to hear how much damage may be a result of that kind of a culture?
Louisa: Yeah. It's like this for athletes as well. Every athlete has an expiration date. Because your body can't keep up unless you're LeBron, how many years he has been going. He seems like, he'll go until you know he's 50. When I look a lot of athletes have an expiration date and my fear is, "What are you doing after you retire likewise with Wall Street?" A lot of traders may want to go, and work, and then invest in the stock market or in property, and eventually retire, and just live on their investments, right? But what are you going to do at the age of 50 or 60 when you retire? You can't remember anything, you can't pick up your grandchildren, or you can't even go for a walk because you have just run yourself to the ground earning this money. By the time you retire, you can't even enjoy it.
Bill: Yeah.
Louisa: And let me tell you, memory decline is a very big thing.
Bill: I guess, let's take a step back. If you decouple what you're interested in neuroscience, I've heard you describe, there's two areas of the brain or of the field, I'm not sure how to ask the exact question that I'm asking, but I hope I can trigger a thought for you. But there's different areas of the brain, are they impacted in the same way by a lack of sleep, are they impacted in different ways? I know you've talked in the past about fast decision making and slow decision making and just kind of, if you don't mind riffing on that a little bit, we'll see where that goes.
Louisa: Look, lack of sleep can go in and affect many areas of the brain. But let's start with neurology 101. We've got two hemispheres of the brain. We’ve got the left hemisphere, we've got the right hemisphere. We've got four lobes and all lobes are responsible for different things. One lobe or area that you've probably heard of and you're familiar with is the prefrontal cortex. It kind of sits here behind the forehead. It's been described as the CEO of our brain. This is where a lot of the fundamental decisions that you make throughout the day happen. If this area is dysregulated from lack of sleep, lack of hydration, poor quality lighting, no access to actual real lighting outside, you're going to disrupt that process. Then in turn, you're going to disrupt the decision-making process. You're not going to be making quality decisions. You're going to be making decisions based on a survival technique. Our brain was not-- It's not programmed to make good decisions. It's programmed to keep you alive.
So, if your brain, if you're listening, I have a glass of water here. Just say that every single morning, when you wake up after a restorative sleep, this is your brain, your glass is filled to the top with water. Every time you take a sip of this water, that's a decision. Every time you make a decision, you're taking away from the energy bank. You make another decision you're taking away. By the end of the day, what I'm seeing with a lot of athletes, and with a lot of traders, and portfolio managers is they need to make good decisions at around 4 PM as well, not just during the day. But what happens is because they're so undertrained, because their brain is so underdeveloped and they're not feeding it the right way, they're not sleeping well, what happens is, those micro sips that you take during the day, they actually are equated to having a big gulp.
The more athletic your brain is I call it, the more reserves that it has, the more fuel that it has each day, the smaller those sips as you can make better decisions throughout the day. You're going to have more energy reserves throughout the day. But if you're not training your brain, you're not getting good quality sleep, you're not hydrating well, you're not going out, and doing the work outside, and breathing in fresh air, and seeing natural sunlight, you're not going to have a lot of brain endurance I would say. So, that's what it's all about. It's-- How can we enhance your gameday performance? If you're an athlete gameday performance, if you're a trader, just daily performance, how can we enhance that? By working on your brain.
Bill: Yeah. And nutrition, I assume is a huge component of this.
Louisa: Oh, gosh, yes. There are a number of different nutrients that are good for your brain and bad for your brain. Sugar, we all know this is absolutely terrible for your brain and your body. Refined sugar, that is. But there are a number of different other things that are bad for your brain, that there are things that are good for your brain. I'm more interested in first and foremost eliminating what's bad.
Bill: Yeah.
Louisa: We know refined sugar is bad, we know caffeine after 3 PM can disrupt the normal sleep process. We know alcohol is absolutely toxic and detrimental to the brain. But what is good for it? Once we eliminate that then what's good for it. Well, we know that fish oil, omega-3 DHA and EPA is absolutely-- I think it's a crucial, crucial thing. Actually, when you come to athletics, everybody goes on an omega-3 protocol. There are other things that are really good for the brain. So, understanding nutrition, 101 brain nutrition is also part of it and fundamental.
Bill: So, I'm thinking, it's 2020-- March 2020, and I'm a portfolio manager, trader, and I'm all hyped up on adrenaline because the world is changing quickly, and I need to figure out what has changed within the portfolio. In theory is the suggestion, doesn't matter, it's nighttime, start to wind down, go to bed or are there times when you can push and not sacrifice? Can adrenaline ever overcome sleep deprivation is maybe one way to ask the question?
Louisa: Well, look, one night of sleep deprivation isn't going to cause massive amounts of harm. Two nights, maybe not. But an ongoing sleep deprivation process will. It's like your body, one day of having a fatty meal or a really bad oily meal isn't going to kill you. But if you do it over time, then you'll see your lipid profile change, and you may have increased risk of diabetes or cardiovascular disease. So, it's not about, "Well, is it just one day that's going to kill me?" No, it's about regularly doing it, which is why I said, 101 consistency really matters. Even if you can get six nights a week of consistency, one night a week if you need to go out and maybe be a bit inconsistent, and that's fine.
Bill: Yeah, that makes sense. Obviously, seven is better. So, when people are waking up, it seems to me that there are components in the American diet that people are not getting, I don't know about every diet, but I can speak to where I live. Are there supplements that people should be hyperaware of outside of fish oil that should really be a part of their daily routine or is it obviously body specific or whatever?
Louisa: Everything is specific, which is why we always focus on-- I don't think that anybody in terms of a medical disclaimer, nobody should be adding in or taking anything out of their diet. However, there's a really well-known saying in science and that is, "You can't optimize what you don't measure." Meaning, you can't add in anything really to your diet in terms of, "I'm going to go and have a multivitamin. I'm going to go and have a vitamin D supplementation." Why would you add something in when you don't know what your body is missing?-
Bill: Yeah.
Louisa: -which is why I really believe that everybody should be checking their blood, getting a comprehensive bloodwork done every six months. That's pushing it, maybe people may want to do it once a year and that's fine. But I personally like to see people do it every six months. Once you get that data, you can do a comprehensive lipid panel. Now, it's so easy. You can do a hormone panel, you can do a metabolic panel, you can do so many different things that tests what's happening in your body.
Once you have that test, you can then go in and put, "Oh, I am vitamin B deficient, I am vitamin D deficient." Then you can go in and think about, "Oh, what do I need to add in?" You'd be surprised what you may not be deficient in and what you may be. I see so many people having vitamin D because they just heard during COVID that this helps you with immunity, and I don't know what-- It's like, well, should you really be taking it? So, I'm under the belief that you cannot optimize what you don't measure. When you ask me, "What are the things that people should be taking?" Apart from omega-3, EPA, and DHA, and by the way, if anybody's listening, we have a protocol on our Substack that specifically deals with how much you should be taking.
Apart from that, it comes more to, okay, how much stress do you have going on in your life? Are you having trouble falling asleep, are you having trouble staying asleep? Because then we can start to think, "Okay, we can include some magnesium in your diet. We can include Magnesium L-Threonate as you're going to sleep," it crosses your blood-brain barrier to get you to fall asleep and stay asleep. So, I wouldn't suggest that anybody actually goes out and fundamentally takes anything other than omega-3s that should be taken every single day.
Bill: Yeah, and I'm not trying to put you in a corner where you're suggesting supplements to people that you don't know. But I am trying to get a sense of let's say that I, as a portfolio manager engage you to help me and my team. Maybe a better question for me to ask you is, what does that engagement look like and how do we start? As you said, it starts with sleep. I assume it involves some sort of blood test. What are we talking about in the onboarding process, and the initial engagement, and how does our relationship evolve, and how do we measure success?
Louisa: Let's take you as a single portfolio manager. A lot of people come to me when they're reaching their wit's end. They've assessed the market, they have gone through their strategies, they've tried every effort to perform better at work. It's still not working. What I see then is they having problems at home, and then that has, like this cycle problems at home, then problems at work, and then it keeps going back and forth, back and forth. I always say that it's this ongoing cycle when it comes to performance. So, you come to me you say, "Louisa, I want to engage in your athletics so I can just help myself get back on track." We would do a full assessment and that requires, we'll send you off to get a full blood panel. We get you hooked up to-- we have data that we use. So, I'm wearing a ring right now, which is a performance ring. It tracks and measures my HRV, my heart rate, how many steps I take, and my sleep metrics, and I have access to--
If you want one, I'd have access to yours, you can grant me access. So, every morning, I can wake up and be like, "Well, Bill had a really bad night's sleep or Bill's HRV, heart rate variability, which is an indication of how recovered your body is." That aspect is down. That aspect of your data is down. He's not going to be able to make a good decision today. He's under recovered. We can pick up on this data and we can then put in a performance plan for you. We just brought on an NFL player. He plays for the Chicago Bulls. Yes.
Bill: Ah, the Bears, I think, if he's NFL.
Louisa: Sorry.
Bill: No worries, no worries. It's just my hometown. So, I know. Can we drill into HRV real quick?
Louisa: Yeah.
Bill: Because that's something that I'm hearing a lot more about and I'd be interested to have you educate people on what HRV is and why it's important.
Louisa: Oh, I think it's such a great measure. I'm so happy that we have this available now for everybody to use. So, heart rate variability, it measures the variability of your heart rate. Meaning that your heart beats, it could beat 60 times per minute, it could beat 150 times per minute just depending on your physical activity. What it does is-- that's your heart rate, bom, bom, bom, that is your heart rate. We've always been able to really assess that with rings and watches, etc.
But the variability is, how much variation did you get in your heart rate? Did you have good variation? Meaning, that wasn't high variation, does your heart rate go up to 170 for 15 minutes of the day, and then come down to 58 for six hours of the day. So, more heart rate variability, so the higher your variability is more suggestive about healthier and better performing individual.
Bill: Oh, the more the variability is.
Louisa: Yes, the higher.
Bill: Ah, Interesting. Okay.
Louisa: So, everybody is different. I've got a very, very high heart rate variability. My highest was 210. A lot of people's highest is maybe at around 90. So, knowing that about myself, if I wake up and I have a heart rate variability measured as HRV, if I have a heart rate variability at 8 AM, I look at it and it says, "Louisa, your HRV is 90." I know very well that, "Huh, I'm not going to perform well today." So, if I was an athlete, I may not go out and do a really hard session. I may not go out and do a really hard task because I'm just not there. I'm just not equipped that day to be making the best decisions.
Conversely, we can also look at, if your heart rate variability is low, I can talk to you which is what I do. I talk to my athletes. I say, "Well, your high HRV is usually 150. Today, it is 80. Talk to me about what you did the night before." There are a number of different things that affect your heart rate variability. Alcohol is one of the biggest things. So, alcohol goes in and it really disrupts your REM sleep. That's the first thing it does, and it also lowers your heart rate variability like immensely. What do we know from-- [crosstalk]
Bill: I got to ask you a question because I'm an advocate of marijuana as opposed to alcohol. How bad is marijuana for you in this? I assume, not great.
Louisa: It's definitely not great.
Bill: Yeah.
Louisa: Yeah.
Bill: It's a shame.
Louisa: Yeah. So, well, no.
Bill: No, I mean, it's a shame from the advocacy standpoint. I know the answer. I would never make the argument that it's good for people. My argument is that it's less bad than booze.
Louisa: Yeah, so what you are doing-- A lot of people take THC, which is the active ingredient in the marijuana plant that gets you, you know, it's a psychoactive part of it that gets you high. I always ask, "Why do you take it?" Some people say, "It helps me sleep. The same way that wine at night helps me sleep." What you're doing is and that's a very big misconception. These things are not helping you sleep. They are sedating you.
Bill: Yeah.
Louisa: So, ethanol, which is the active ingredient in alcohol, it's a sedative. Just like when you go into surgery and the anesthesiologist injects you with propofol, it sedates you. It knocks you out. So, I think everyone needs to understand that there's a difference between sedating yourself and putting yourself into deep sleep. One is restorative, one is needed for the brain to function better. The first one, sedating yourself is just knocking you out. So, you basically, your eyes are closed but your brain isn't asleep.
Bill: Yeah.
Louisa: They are the two things we need to understand. So, that can also affect your heart rate variability.
Bill: Yeah.
Louisa: Now, we can measure that. If you were to come to me, like I said, and you were hedge fund manager and you want to increase your performance, these are the things that we do. We say, "Okay, great, we're going to measure your sleep, we're going to measure your heart rate variability each day, then we're going to build out a performance program based on your specific profile." We have your data, we know what's happening in your blood, we know your genetics, we do a DNA test, we know that. We do a sleep test. So, we know how well you're sleeping, how well you're not, and then we find out, what are you most interested in? Because you may be interested in something different than somebody else. "Louisa, I'm just interested in being able to run faster, or see better on the field, or react faster," or I always say, make better decisions because that's what everybody really, truly wants.
Bill: Well, definitely in finance, right?
Louisa: Oh, in finance, 100%. But then also, people want to understand themselves better. To understand yourself, you need to have the ability to practice these qualities. Sleeping better, eating better, that's going to get you to perform better.
Bill: Yeah, for sure. I would think the other thing that comes up in the portfolio management and certainly the trading game is how to stay calm under pressure, I would think is a common answer. I don't know.
Louisa: "How to stay calm 100%, how to stay calm under pressure?" That is not making or succumbing to mental mistakes. Staying calm under pressure is not just for the finance world, it's for everybody.
Bill: Yeah.
Louisa: You think to yourself, have you ever said something that you didn't mean just because you just reacted in the wrong way? "I'm guilty of that."
Bill: Often. I'm on a podcast a lot. I often hear myself and say, "Oh, that's not quite right."
Louisa: Yeah. So, taking one of our investors, he's not in the US, but he has said to me, "Louisa, I just need-- can you give me a protocol to calming myself down, so I don't react in the wrong way?" We give him that. We go, "Great. This is what you need to." He's been able to take that on board, and use that when he needs it. You may be different. So, yeah.
Bill: Do you develop systems for people like almost checklists to make sure, "Hey, this is my heart rate variability today, this is how much sleep I got last night, this is where my decision making might be flawed" because a checklist or at least an awareness of where the body is when decisions are being made?
Louisa: I'm that close with my athletes that they actually ask me for permission, "Hey, Louisa, I'm going out next weekend. It's my girlfriend's birthday. I'm going to have a glass of wine. Is that okay?" I'm like, "Okay, let's fully equip ourselves for that." Because we're talking about the difference between a $90 million contract and a $4 million contract. So, those 0.1% differences really matter. So, everybody has a different plan in place. Everybody has a different structure. And not to mention, I have people that say to me, "Louisa, I need to wake up at 4 AM because they're somewhere in the world where they need to wake up, and that's the timing that the market opens in New York City." So, they need that.
But then they have this big break throughout the day, and then they need to be awake at night again. So, everybody is different. So, we take into account absolutely everything. But I would say that the success of a Neuro Athletics program, which is literally the art and science of becoming mentally fit is sticking to the protocols that are given to you. You may not see it the first week. It's not like training your body. You're not going to go and go for a run, and correct your food, and lose all this weight. You're not going to see it first and foremost. You may see it six months later, you may see it four months later.
Now for all of our young boys, we have 16-year-olds that we coach as well. I do regular meetings with their parents. I think it's imperative to-- at that age to speak with the parents as well. And it's funny. I've got this one boy who's in Spain, and he is training with the 21-year-old originally from Australia, and he's absolutely wonderful. He's been with Neuro Athletics for over two years now. We're only just seeing the developments in his visual acuity, in his reaction time, and his ability to communicate effectively, which you know that the mark of a really great athlete is how intelligent they are. It's not just about athletes these days, it's not just about, "Okay, how fast can you run?"
No, because we've seen a number of different athletes who are absolutely athletically skilled and they're brilliant on the field, but then they go and they write themselves off on the weekend or you find out that they've hit their wives or you find out that a retired NFL player has killed--. He had got a gun one day and just killed his doctor and his doctor's family. So, there's a lot more to athleticism than just training the body. I'm going on a tangent here, but I really put out there are a lot. We have a training course for personal trainers and for athletic trainers because I really think that we need to be speaking more about neurology. How are you training your athletes brains, not just how far can they jump or how hard can they hit a ball?
Bill: Yeah, that makes sense. You keep saying neuro athletics. But the rhymes with finance in the finance profession or so-- it's so obvious to me. Do you have a neuro finance division?
Louisa: Yeah.
Bill: Are you unrolling like a different brand for financial products or is it all under one brand? How should people think about that?
Louisa: It's all under one brand. And I didn't choose to go into the finance space. It chose me. Gary Vee, I watched him many years ago, and he used to say, "You don't choose the market, the market chooses you." I chose to go into athletes and I wanted to perfect the brains of athletes. That's what I did. I was speaking at a large event one day, and I had a hedge fund manager come up to me and say, "Louisa, I have idea had like over 250 portfolio managers." He said, "Can you come and give a talk just about how to perform better by using your brain?" And I did, and that ended up getting me a contract. That was a very, very huge contract. I was like, "Well, you know what? You have a brain, I have a brain, this whole thing is about how can you make your brain better? So, then why wouldn't it be fit for the finance world?"
Bill: Yeah, no, 100%.
Louisa: Yeah. Should we really-- I don't want to confuse the market. Should we really go out there, and rebrand, and call it, I don't want to. It's always been Neuro Athletics becoming mentally fit.
Bill: Yeah, I agree with you. I want to close the loop for any listener that may keep hearing athlete and realize that, as a finance professional, I don't want to say that you're a type of athlete per se, that would do a disservice to those that have true physical skills. But I think the mental, the test of the mind is similar in different ways if that makes sense. I think that there's a lot of things that crossover which is why I was excited to talk to you.
Louisa: Imagine if you were getting up every day. You're on a strict performance program with Louisa-- with Neuro Athletics. You had your sleep, okay, down pat. You got up every morning, I looked at your diary and I pinned you a message. "Hey, great sleep last night. Great HRV. Keep going with your supplementation program. Keep going with your nutrition program and then you've got to train tonight," because exercise comes into play as well. Imagine if you were training as an athlete and you saw the results in your portfolio or you saw the results in your bottom line. That's all it is. How can we get you to train like an athlete?
Bill: This is a good question. So, what does it look like, I've paid you for an engagement, we're working together, what can I expect from that relationship? Is that level of attention what I can expect from you and your company?
Louisa: Yes. You will talk to me or one of our coaches once every two weeks. And that is an actual session. We'll go through, you have a strict protocol of what to answer on the phone and what we're going to talk about how well the week was, how are you assessing yourself? We have a shared document as well where you're filling that in every day. So, 14 days, I can see how good you're going every single day. When we get on that call, I know, "Hey, you had a really bad performance last week. Hey, this and that." So, that's the first thing.
You and I will meet once every two weeks. You will also be having a 14-day performance program to follow. Every time we talk, we will tweak that performance program. It may consist of waking up and doing a morning routine every morning. Get up, we'll have a specific routine for you. We will take into account three or four days a week, you'll be doing a specific exercise program that's fitted for you. Everybody's a different person. We will get you on a specific exercise program whether you want to lose weight or just become healthier, you have to include exercise into your brain health program. There is no 'ifs' or 'buts' with that.
I will never say, "Okay, you need to eat this" but I'll say, these are things that you should be having each day. I want you to have two milligrams of EPA in the morning which is one of fish oils, yeah and two grams at night. Now, you may be having four grams a day. I'll tell you which brand to go and buy, what to do. Then we do some Neuro Athletics training. So, we have certain training that we do, which activates the reaction time, so get your brain firing every morning. We may say five minutes every morning of your Neuro Athletics work. So, it's a very strict protocol but we get the best results.
Bill: Yeah, that's cool. Have you done any studies on what all of our beloved social media usage does to our brain?
Louisa: No. I don't want to go into that field because I unfortunately use social media so much. But I can tell you this. If you are using social media at night, you probably are doing yourself a disservice. And that's because at night, that's probably the most strictest protocol that you should be adhering to. How are you getting yourself ready for sleep? I always say that the moment you wake up, you're already preparing yourself to sleep. So, like I said-- [crosstalk]
Bill: I like that.
Louisa: Yes. So, your brain goes on a 24-hour cycle. So, the moment that your eyes see natural light, it's going to suggest, if you see natural light at 7 AM in the morning, at 7 PM your brain is going to start to wind down. If you see it the 11 AM first thing in the morning at 11 AM then, your brain is not going to start to wind down to about 10 or 11 o'clock at night. So, if you want to be really preparing for the following day, you want to start preparing for sleep at around 7 PM having your last meal, starting to dim the light, starting to get rid of social media, get rid of your phone all together.
For our top tier athletes, the ones that I travel to, so the NFL player that we just recruited, I would say we've got six of the world's best NBA athletes. I go with them-- When they travel, I actually go with them and optimize their hotel.
Bill: Oh, wow.
Louisa: Yes. So, I have a specific protocol, which they say to me, "Louisa, I have to be in Dallas next Wednesday." So, I will actually go through and I will go to Dallas, and I will set their room up for them.
Bill: Huh? That's cool.
Louisa: Yeah. So, that's a very important thing to take into consideration. Let's talk about what you can be doing to increase your sleep. Because we're speaking about this a lot. One thing that you can't replace when it comes to sleep, so sleep has many different-- We've got two different phases of sleep. We've got non-REM, non rapid eye movement, then we've got REM sleep. During the non-REM sleep, which is when you start to fall asleep, we go through different stages, and you end up in this non-REM sleep, you end up having going into your deep sleep. So, deep sleep happens the first few hours of the night. Now, during this phase, you get almost, I would say, 98% of your hormone secretion.
Bill: Oh, yeah, I remember this chart that you posted.
Louisa: Yes. So, you secrete testosterone and human growth hormone during deep sleep. These two things are absolutely vital and fundamental to your health, your wellbeing, and how you perform. That's the first thing we need to lay out. The second part of sleep as you go throughout the night, you end up going into REM sleep known as rapid eye movement sleep. This is also restorative as well. But this is where your brain is cleaning out all of the toxins and the debris that happens throughout the day. So, we go through this thing, our brain activates the system called the glymphatic system. So, it's to clean your brain. You literally clean your brain when you are asleep.
We also have memory, your memories are stored, and that's where your learning processes happen. So, sleep is not just about feeling good. We have so many things that happen. Human growth hormone responsible for protein synthesis and growth, muscle growth, repair, etc. If you're not sleeping, you're not getting these vital things happening. You're not activating the glymphatic system, you're not processing and storing memories, you're just going to feel like crap the next day. One thing that is key in getting into deep sleep, and staying asleep, and staying there is temperature. I speak about this a lot. If you follow me on social media, probably seen, I talk about temperature because it's so fundamental. I recently, I would say in the last eight months, I started sleeping on a performance mattress. Now, every single person that comes to Neuro Athletics has a performance mattress. What is the performance mattress? You lay on this mattress, and it cools up and heats up according to your sleep cycles. So, during REM sleep, during deep sleep, it picks up on that, the mattress it's a smart technology. It's like, it picks up how Louisa is in deep sleep, waiting to drop her temperature by two degrees. Because science says that to fall asleep and stay asleep, your core body temperature needs to drop at least two degrees. So, how can we do that?
Well, we can't drop our temperature when we're asleep. We have to have something controlling that. That's what a performance mattress does. So, I sleep on an Eight Sleep mattress. It's just so intelligent and so smart, and it's the only way that I know to manipulate thermal regulation during sleep. So, that's one thing that you can be doing to optimize your sleep.
Bill: Yeah.
Louisa: Yeah. And you're probably going to ask me, but can I just play around with the thermostat? No, you can't. Because ambient temperature, which is the air is different to thermal temperature?
Bill: Yeah, that is what I do. I just crank the AC and then get the bill, which is not great.
Louisa: Yeah. There you go.
Bill: It does help me go to bed.
Louisa: Yeah.
Bill: No, that's interesting. So, I've really enjoyed listening to this and I think it gives people a good sense of what questions to start asking themselves and they can obviously reach out to you. Where would they find you? If they've listened to this conversation, they're interested in reaching out, how can people contact you? I'd love to talk a little bit about starting your firm if you're open to that.
Louisa: Yeah, all my links, if you go to my Twitter handle, I've actually got one of those tap links where you tap one and it's got access to the podcast, to my Substack, to the newsletter, etc., My website, and that's where you can contact me and London-- London Parker, she takes care of partnerships. So, she'll call you and talk to you from there if you reach out. But how did we start this? Well, it was interesting. When I decided to start taking what I learned in medicine, which is very unheard of. People go and study medicine, and they want to go out and practice or maybe write books or something. I wanted to go out and show people that you can change the way you perform by understanding your brain.
So, I started working with one person and he was one of the best soccer players in Australia, and I started my company. I literally called it Neuro Athletics. And it was just a full-service sports coaching agency. We only wanted to work on that aspect. Then, it developed, we ended up getting 20 players, and then, it kept getting bigger, and I was thinking, "How can I scale this?" So many people want to understand this aspect of their brain. And I couldn't just keep doing one-on-one. I brought new coaches on. So, then we decided to go out and create the suite of digital products. So, we have under the umbrella. like I said, we've got the coaching and the advisory division, then we've got the Substack. So, if you go to the Neuro Athletics newsletter, you'll see that there's a free version, and then there's a paid version. So, this enables me to scale a bit more.
Bill: Yeah.
Louisa: It's $29 a month. You get access to a full report once a month, and you get a Q&A with me. So, we have so many people asking me questions. I get on and over a one-hour Q&A, I answer those questions. So, that's a really-- I love doing that. That's a way for me to get my content out there, but also a way for me to keep it very inhouse. So, there's a free version and then there's a paid version. So, that's that.
Bill: You know, it would be fun is if you and I hop on a Space like the Monday or Tuesday after this podcast comes out and you can ask some questions if you're willing to do that.
Louisa: Ah, I'm all for that. I love Spaces. We're going to hopefully-- [crosstalk]
Bill: All right. So, we'll schedule something. We'll do like a follow up on Twitter Spaces. That'd be fun.
Louisa: Look, I'd love that.
Bill: People can come up and ask.
Louisa: Ask me questions and anybody that's interested and doesn't want to pay a massive amount of money go through $29 a month. It's a very cheap way of understanding how we work. So, that's the first thing. We have a wonderful podcast. We actually started a podcast in 2017 I want to say.
Bill: Oh, wow.
Louisa: Now, we've got 200 episodes. Once a week, we put them out on Monday, and we just interviewed Denise Shull. She's a performance coach on Wall Street, one of the most well-known ones. But then we also go into various different topics around neuroscience and medicine. And then we have courses for athletic trainers. And this is also within the suite of digital products. So, we have a coaching certificate. It's a two-day intensive course. People come to us, a lot of coaches, and they're like, "Louisa, we need to understand the visual acuity, we need to understand the brain." That's my biggest thing. It's a systemic problem. We're certifying these coaches to go out and give this instruction, athletic instruction and programming to athletes, when they don't even know how the brain or body works. So, I'm very against that. I think that anybody who's an athletic trainer should be certified from a university. That's just my humble opinion. So, we go out and we do a two-day intensive course, and it's literally, it's called Neuro Athletics 101, understanding the brain. Understanding how the brain communicates with the body and vice versa, how the body communicates with the brain? We go into neuroscience, we go into visual acuity, we then give you protocols, and a fully equipped manual to go out, and do these assessments on your players or on your athletes. So, we have that as well. And I'm doing--, we've certified already a hundred coaches. I say certified because you actually get CME points, they get licensing points if you want to call that.
Bill: Yeah, so, how do you sleep with all this going on other than on your Eight Sleep mattress which helps?
Louisa: I do really well of shutting myself off at like 8 PM. I say, that's it.
Bill: Hmm.
Louisa: You have to have-- Because if I don't sleep, I will not produce the results the next day. It's a very big thing, what I'm doing, what I'm creating, I think it's not just a firm, it's literally a movement. I'm educating the audience, I'm doing so much, I'm trying to enroll people. I don't shy away from-- I'm very transparent. I'm trying to-- I want to have 10,000 coaches say that they've been certified by Neuro Athletics. I want people to understand that the brain is a fundamental resource to performing better.
However, there has to be a legitimacy behind it. I've gone into surgery, I've seen the brain, I've cut open brains, I've been there in an operating room with the neurosurgeon when he's performing surgery on a brain like I've seen it, I know what it is, I've dedicated my life to it. Now, I'm going to teach you as a coach or as a trainer how to use that. I think everybody can benefit from that. So, we have that as well in the firm.
Bill: Yeah. It's fun to hear you talk about it because I can tell that you're really passionate about it and I can tell that it's something that really drives you. I'm just saying that. I see your smile and it's nice to come across people that are driven by something that they truly believe are doing something better for the world and can help people. I have noticed when I listen to you and during this conversation, that's my interpretation of how you genuinely feel about what you do. It's inspiring.
Louisa: Thank you.
Bill: Yeah.
Louisa: Thank you very much.
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