[00:00:02] Speaker A: Welcome, friends, to the heart rate variability podcast. I'm here with a very special guest today, Lehman Van Linden, who I met talking about heart rate variability, realized that we had a shared passion for this work. Lehman has a fascinating backstory. I remember leaving before our first call. I looked at your bio on the built for endurance website, and I just got like, I cannot wait to talk to this guy. We talked, and I immediately asked you to join the podcast. So I'm really excited to talk about your personal journey and your professional journey with heart rate variability, because you are a fascinating individual and I love how you think about this. So I love just a little bit of introduction for our audience. Let me just introduce yourself before we dive in.
[00:00:58] Speaker B: Yeah, great. Yeah. Thanks, Matt, for having me. It's great to talk with someone who's also so passionate about heart rate variability, because to be honest, I don't meet that many people nowadays who are already that passionate about heart rate variability. I try to share a little bit of the passion, but it's still somewhere under the radar.
[00:01:20] Speaker A: Well, all that passion could just flow out through the next hour or so.
[00:01:24] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So, yeah.
[00:01:27] Speaker C: Like you mentioned, my name is Leven.
[00:01:29] Speaker B: I live in Belgium. So Belgium, Europe. Very small, very small country.
[00:01:36] Speaker C: I am 39 years old.
[00:01:38] Speaker B: I'm going to marry in about one month.
Thanks. I was already married some years ago, so it's my second marriage.
So this time it's a good marriage.
I'm an entrepreneur. I have my own company. Like you mentioned, the name built for endurance is the name where the name originates from. My own journey of endurance races in life.
So, yeah, I'm an entrepreneur. I work with business leaders, with managers, people who try to make a difference in business life, but also in their own private life. And we use data, and often, of course, heart rate variability is in the center of the data that we use to help them understand their body in a better way, give them some insights about the impact of their lifestyle on their nervous system and on their heart rate variability, and then also give them the tools to help them to improve their health. But of course, not only their health.
[00:02:39] Speaker C: Also all the other areas in life.
[00:02:41] Speaker B: And business which improve when you improve your heart rate variability.
So that's what we do.
[00:02:48] Speaker C: And I'm also passionate about challenges in life.
[00:02:55] Speaker A: Let's talk about some of those, because like I said, they jump from out of your bio, like, wow, so what?
We haven't had this discussion yet either. I'd love to. Just what drew you to? I'll let you share what you've done.
But what led you to taking on some of these incredible challenges that I just can't even imagine what they must have been like. So I just love to. What got you into this endurance sports and share some of your highlights with our listeners.
[00:03:32] Speaker B: Yeah, sure.
[00:03:34] Speaker C: My pleasure. So I've been running indeed a couple of endurance races all over the world, these endurance ultra marathon races. So where you have to run for a couple of one, a couple of hundred kilometers, a couple of hundred miles across. Yeah, very, very challenging areas. I've run in the Morocco desert, I've run in Brazil, a marathon in the jungle, a la marathon, multiple marathons. It was 260 km divided over six.
[00:04:05] Speaker B: Days where you had to carry your.
[00:04:08] Speaker C: Own backpack, your food, your water supply. So it was a fully self sufficient race. Of course, water was given by the organizers of those races because you cannot carry water for six days in your backpack.
[00:04:23] Speaker B: So they had to support us a little bit.
[00:04:26] Speaker C: So, yeah, for some reason, and I think there are a couple of reasons why I started doing those endurance races, but, yeah, I always enjoyed, and I'm still enjoying the outdoors, the unknown challenge, because I think to grow as a human in life, we do not grow from staying in our comfort zone. We need to challenge ourselves a little bit once in a while and maybe a little bit hard once in a while to grow.
And that's what made me do this kind of endurance races, because actually I'm a soccer player, or I was, when I was still younger, a soccer player, but it didn't give me enough, enough challenge in life. So there was this one moment where I said, okay, I'm going to quit and I'm going to look for something else.
[00:05:19] Speaker A: What is it about you, though? Because some, like, there's a lot of people that might, hey, I'm going to run a half marathon, or I might run a full marathon.
You decide to go to the jungles of Brazil and run hundreds of, like, what was it to say? Like, yeah, you know, was it right off the bat you wanted to do these big endurance things or did something kind of click along the way that said, hey, I really want to do something out of the ordinary?
[00:05:52] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:05:55] Speaker C: It's not that I gradually build up towards this challenge. So there was this moment where after I quit playing soccer for one year, I was, I was partying, I was going out, I was gaining weight, and then there was this belgian tv producer who ran this marathon des Sable in Morocco, and it was, for me, like, wow, this must be amazing to do it. And I'm quite how you call it risk averse. So I'm not seeing too much of any risks in life. So I'm just like, yeah, whatever. I'm going to register myself for this race. I'm going to start training, I'm going to see a doctor who can support me a little bit along the journey.
And that's how it started. And then I did this one race in Morocco, and I finished 29 out of thousand participants from all over the world.
So I was this green guy, never ran another race before, who finished somewhere at the top. And I was like, maybe, maybe I'm made for this.
And that's when it all started and I started to run multiple races. And afterwards, also maybe a little bit driven by external motivation. Back then, I was always looking for meaning in life purpose. How can I grow working hard on my career? And I was always looking for these external big events that hopefully would give me enough satisfaction. So there was always also this sense of purpose which was linked to running these ultramaritals, because it's true suffering that you try to find meaning in the suffering.
[00:07:43] Speaker B: During these races.
[00:07:44] Speaker C: You suffer a lot.
[00:07:46] Speaker A: Yeah. I can only imagine what that went through. So was it during this training and these events, when did you find heart rate variability? When did that come off your radar?
[00:08:01] Speaker C: Actually, it's only for me, I think.
[00:08:07] Speaker B: Five, six years ago, right before COVID.
[00:08:11] Speaker C: Because when I was running these first races, I was just wearing, it was 2013, 2014. A regular wearable was not yet measuring heart rate variability. It was just heart rate that we're measuring while now.
[00:08:25] Speaker A: Bummer, because I would love to see your. What does a couple hundred kilometers do in the desert to your heart rate variability?
[00:08:35] Speaker B: Yeah, indeed.
[00:08:36] Speaker C: Maybe that's worth trying during a new challenge.
[00:08:40] Speaker A: There you go. You gotta do it again for me, because I want to see the dad.
[00:08:43] Speaker C: Nowadays, people who, these cyclists who train for the Tour de France, or who.
[00:08:49] Speaker B: Do at the Tour de France, they.
[00:08:50] Speaker C: Measure their heart rate variability and they see a big difference between the mountain races and regular races in their recovery abilities.
But, yeah, it was not yet there. When I discovered arteries variability, it was actually a little bit later. So I think 20 19, 20, 18, 20 19. When it became more popular already in standard wearables, because of my job as an entrepreneur with my company built for endurance, we helped business leaders to improve their wellbeing and performance. And, you know, when you want to help business leaders, they want to see data, they want to have science, they want to have it backed. And well being as a topic, it's still kind of fluffy in the business environment. So I'm an engineer as a background, so I'm always looking to find.
To find the science and the proof behind things and why they work.
And that's how I stumbled upon heart.
[00:09:53] Speaker B: Rate variability at first through the breathing.
[00:09:57] Speaker C: Techniques to improve your heart rate variability, like heart coherence, breathing. I discovered heart mat, and then I went into the rabbit hole and I found that heart rate variability is actually influenced by so many lifestyle factors that, yeah, I started writing a book on it. So now there's a book, okay, you cannot see.
[00:10:22] Speaker B: Yeah, fully charged there.
Yeah, yeah.
[00:10:25] Speaker C: Like this. So fully charged.
So, because I found out, yeah, for me, heart rate variability is a north Star metric if you want to track your performance, your resilience, your antifragility, however you want to call it.
So.
[00:10:42] Speaker B: So, yeah, that's, that's why we use.
[00:10:44] Speaker C: Heart rate variability now in our professional life. But also me personally, I track it not completely as a freak, or I try to not be a complete freak in doing so, but, yeah, I track it to see and to have supportive data to see how I'm doing in life.
[00:11:03] Speaker A: It's awesome. So how do you go about, we're working in the business world, because obviously it's something I've thought a lot about with my heartbeat of business book. And how do you, how do you think about, how do you introduce it to executives or other business people who may have not have heard of heart rate variability before?
[00:11:26] Speaker C: Yeah, at first instance, we ask them a question, okay, how do you monitor.
[00:11:36] Speaker B: Or track or what's your KPI?
[00:11:39] Speaker C: To track your own personal performance and how do you measure it? And there's no one who has a clear answer to it.
So that's already an entrance point to drop heart rate variability and show why it is of so important, not only for your personal health, but also for your thinking, your decision making, your behavior, and even financial results. So there are many reasons why to introduce and heart rate variability, often clients or potential clients, they come to us with the question, okay, are executive team is having a hard time, they're exhausted, they are suffering.
They want some tools to help them to perform in a sustainable way.
And that's where we then first come with this kind of assessments, where we give them insights about their nervous system, when they are in stress, when they are in recovery and relaxation.
These assessments, of course, they also measure heart rate variability or use heart rate variability to indicate whether you're in activated state or in a relaxed state.
And then we help them to understand when their body is activated and when is it relaxed and whether it's balanced or not, and how their sleep is. And then we dive in all these lifestyle topics and we help them to discover for themselves the relationship between their lifestyle and the signals that their bodies are giving.
[00:13:17] Speaker A: Very cool. So I'd be interested what led to the book. Tell us a little bit about fully charged.
[00:13:24] Speaker B: Yeah. So what led to writing fully charged? Yeah, actually I noticed over the past five, six, seven years, when I was working with different types of corporations and businesses, that this topic of well being, resilience, how you can call it that, it's always have been perceived as a quite fluffy topic.
So it was positioned in the HR department and they try with all the good intentions to help employees to improve their well being or their resilience. But I noticed that for many employees, these topics remains fluffy and people had difficulties to get engaged. So with my background as an engineer, because I'm a mechanical engineer, with that background and my experience as an ultra runner, and also my experience in working with corporations, I was thinking about a framework which could help people to understand what the relationship is between a good functioning nervous system and behavior on the outside and results on the outside. Because for many people in companies, having good results still remains a cognitive topic, and they do not understand the role of the nervous system in the results and doing business. So I wanted to make it more tangible. I wanted to give some explanation about the role of the nervous system and also give a lot of tools to help people in a scientific based way to improve the functioning of the nervous system. Also measurable, of course, with, with heart rate variability as the North Star metric. That's how I position heart rate variability in the book, a North Star Metric, to make it a little bit more tangible. When you work on your own, on your own health and resilience, I would.
[00:15:20] Speaker A: Love to hear some of the reactions that you have gotten, because I think here in the states at least, you know, self care, which is a term I don't use anymore, but it was like it was on the individual to sort of go home and take care of themselves and come back magically, if you think about it from a nervous system, magically come back to work the next day ready to perform at their best. And I wonder, as a leader who may been under not thought about this from a scientific perspective, how do you start to get buying? Because I'm assuming the leadership are probably the ones reaching out to you, at least initially, the ones approving the contract for you to work with them. So I would love to just get some coaching from you. And how do you help leaders to start to look at their employees and their workforce in a different way and connecting that to performance?
[00:16:21] Speaker B: Yeah, very, very good question.
If I look from a distance to current business leaders, and that's, with all due respect, but many of them, they're walking brains the whole day. They're in their heads making decisions, and people have forgotten that they also have a body which is giving signals to the brain and also in the other direction.
So people lost their awareness of having a body, which is quite important in also doing the brain work.
So, as with many interventions, the first step towards change is bringing awareness into the situation.
And that's where I noticed that to get people engaged in these type of topics, you have to meet them at the place where they are. You do not have to say immediately, okay, start breathing. Connect with your body. Feel the sensations, at least these fluffy words. It doesn't match with how they work. So you have to meet them where they are, and that's in their brain. So we use data then, and heart rate variability and stress measurements and these biometrical assessments as a way to show these business leaders what the signals are that they are receiving from their body, that when they are during the day having a lot of back to back meetings, that they are working late in the evening with a lot of blue lights, that it's really impacting their nervous system, their sleep. And that's when you get these aha moments like, oh, my God. Yeah, I knew that alcohol was completely destroying my sleep, but I didn't know the impact was so big. So it's a lot of open doors, but, yeah, you just create awareness. And because it's so personal, it's about the own physiological reactions of the body that they see on a graph, that they have something like, oh, my God. Yeah, this is real. I have a body. It's giving me signals. I cannot feel them anymore because I'm always in my brain. But now I see it, and now I start to believe it. And that's when you start to get engagement in to in these kind of programs that we run with companies and with leaders. So we meet them in their brain with showing them the data, the insights. We take them into these journeys where we use data and combine it with experiences. Cold baths, intense exercises, breath work, experiences like Wim HOF breathing, and the combination of data and experience, it's very powerful, we notice, in driving behavioral change.
[00:19:04] Speaker A: Awesome. So. So how do you. I'd love to kind of talk about how you set up that behavioral change, because one of the things that I spend a lot of time. How do we help people build healthy habits? So is that where kind of heart rate variability as a metric really comes into play, as well as like, showing them that, you know, whether it's like a cold shower or whatever, it might be different breathing exercises, that this can actually really improve HRV and that they can see it more tangibly over time.
[00:19:37] Speaker B: Yeah, it's really having the biofeedback and this device telling them that, oh, yeah, your HRV is improving, or your baseline is improving, you're doing well, or, oh, you have a downward strength. So you need to watch out because maybe you have too much stress and you're overloaded.
It's this continuous loop of feedback that's really helpful for people to change behaviors and to support them on their way. There are so many people who buy an Oura ring and a whoop after a workshop with us that they say, oh, my God, this HRV is so interesting. I'm going to start to measure it. And people buy all these gadgets, of course, and these wearables, although we know the accuracy is not the best in the market, but still it gives an indication, it gives a trend, and it gets them started.
[00:20:25] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. I'm wondering, because over here in the States, we have an epidemic right now of burnout.
Gallup just came out with 59% of the population says they're burned out, which is really a public health potential catastrophe for not just the work, the employers, but for everybody's health. I'm wondering if you're seeing, I'm sure you run across people who are potentially really struggling. And I wonder kind of how, you know, here you come in, you've run hundreds of miles through jungles and desert, and you maybe you may find someone like me who's just like, barely getting through the day. And if I get through the day at work, I'm not necessarily being, you know, maybe the parent or spouse I want to be when I go home. So I wonder, as a role model for, like, peak endurance performance, I'm sure you meet some people who might be really, really struggling in borderline mental health issues because of dysregulated nervous systems. How do you sort of approach those folks knowing they're not ready to jump up to sort of that maybe a high performing level, but kind of meeting them where they're at and getting a plan for them to, I like to call it a recovery plan to kind of get back to a healthy state.
[00:21:53] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, maybe to start with, of course, I'm not encouraging anyone to run multiple marathons in the desert or that's not the end, the end goal or the end destination.
[00:22:05] Speaker A: That's the plan package. If you want to get.
[00:22:09] Speaker B: I think it will do more harm to people. But yeah, what we notice is, of course, many people we work with, many of them are going towards exhaustion. The figures you're mentioning, Gallup, also in Europe, we see Europe and Belgium and Netherlands and France and the countries you work with, we also see the same trend. A lot of people going into burnouts, into exhaustion, having difficulties to manage themselves.
What we very practically do is we just look at their calendars and with the measurements that we do, the devices that we use, people need to register their behavior, their meetings, their whole schedule into this application, and they get this confrontation with how their nervous system is functioning. And based on that, we start with very small changes to see, okay, where in your routines, in your morning, in your evening, where can you just adapt your schedule a little bit, which can give you a little bit more headspace.
So it's about finding the sweet spot, because those people, they're over busy. It's from morning until the evening. There's always more work to do.
So of course, it's first thing.
There needs to be a willingness to change. And this willingness, you can get to that point by showing them the data about their own body. And once you have the willingness to change, we very practically dive into their schedule and see, okay, what are you doing from Monday until Friday? How are you managing your mornings? What do you do in the evening? Last hour before you go to sleep, 2 hours before you go to sleep. So very practically, we dive into their schedule and we're then going to see, okay, where's the disbalance?
What's going to take the least time to have the biggest impact? And that's how we try to see where we can drive change.
[00:24:17] Speaker A: Awesome. So I love to ask this question about people who've taken the time to write a book, because one of the things I love about writing the books, as you can see in my background, I just don't stop basically because I want to write them. If other people want to read them, it's just on top of it. But I love it because you have to think about things in a kind of a different way. If you're talking to somebody about something, that's one way I do a lot of presenting. So that's a different way. When you really put it down on paper, you know it's going to stay on that page for the foreseeable future, right then that you can't, like, go back and necessarily you don't want to go change it every week that you can do with how I talk to people, how I present, you know, my presentation two weeks later could be totally different if I wanted it to be, and nobody would be the wiser. So I wonder, as you went through writing the book, I just, you know, what insights kind of popped out to you? What were some of the things that you may have had to, like just kind of epiphanies or insights through putting all the knowledge you've accumulated in written form for maybe somebody who's just heard about heart rate variability or heard you speak or talk and wanted to learn more.
I'd love to just hear any. What your process was like in putting paper and writing the book.
[00:25:44] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Really, really interesting, because indeed I didn't. It's my first book, which I have written, so I didn't know upfront what I was getting into, which journey I started. So just with the blank page, I started to write, and then I noticed, oh, my God, there's so much information. How can I just bring it back to something readable for someone who doesn't know about an autonomic nervous system or heart rate variability? All these complex topics, how to make it more easy to read. It was really big challenge, but it's something I love because I've been a consultant before, strategic management consultant. So I always loved to have complex problems and try to conceptualize it into a framework or something, a one pager, which is understandable by people. So also for my book, I came up with this energy model. That's how I called it, which is actually, I tried to understand.
I've always worked in companies on process optimization. In a process, you have an input, you have a process, and you have outputs. It can be in a production line or anything. I also wanted to understand as a human being, what's our inputs, what's happening then inside of us that is causing the output. And with the output, I mean, our behavior and our results. So what's, in the end, causing a specific behavior. And that's how I approached it. And then I started to dive into, okay, we have a conscious partner of what we are doing, but 95% of what we do is unconscious. And then with the unconscious part of what's causing our behavior, what's the role of the autonomic nervous system in this? And so that's where I designed in this book.
I really like it. This framework this process where it comes down to, okay, if you want to change your behavior, 80% of this behavior is caused by your autonomic nervous system. So if you want to start at some point to change, start with your physiology. That was actually what I wanted to prove.
And then I make this metaphor between the nervous system that it's actually influencing your body battery. It's like Garmin is visualizing it, because I really love this way of looking at it. When you're activated, your body is draining energy. When you're relaxed, parasympathetic dominance, then your body is gaining energy. So this metaphor is really easy for people to understand. Okay, when you're active, can be positive, can be negative stress, it's draining your body, but your nervous system can also replenish energy. And that's actually how I divided my book. I have this chapter on, okay, when you have, let's say, 100% of energy level, how can you use it as efficient as possible? So this chapter is on focus, productivity, doing one task at the same time. So that's about energy usage. A second chapter is on, okay, if you have used your energy efficiently, how can you replenish it? It's about sleep breaks. What are things which can bring your nervous system into relaxation? And then the third chapter is about, how can you. If you have 100% energy now, how can you improve your energy level to 120%? So these are interventions on, yeah, improving your heart rate variability and bringing it to the next level. So this makes it really easy for the readers to understand a little bit what's happening in the body. It's, of course, a simplified version, but it's very tangible and practical to work with.
[00:29:36] Speaker A: I love it, and I love that you mentioned this is, I won't go down my own rabbit hole here, because this is kind of what I've been upset, obsessed about intellectually is, as you mentioned, the unconscious. And I think in many ways, in my fields of psychology, that Freud and all the focus on the unconscious, we kind of, we moved away from that with cognitive behavioral therapy and other more evidence based models.
And I've just been really fascinated, especially with the autonomic nervous system reacting and maintaining homeostasis, really independent of consciousness for the most part. Now, I think you and I both agree, if you can catch yourself and heart rate variability is a great metric to do that.
Getting stressed out, you can take conscious action to regulate, but. But so much of that is done. So a neuroception and am I safe or am I in danger? Adjusting to stress without conscious intervention that I, that's. I mean, I've just been so fascinated by that. So much of this is just under consciousness. And I kind of point, if you're listening, I'm kind of pointing the brainstem down.
[00:31:00] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:31:01] Speaker A: You know, and obviously it's one integrated system, but so much of that is unconscious. And I'm like, how do we bring this back into our thinking? Because it really is so scientific now. We just like, it's not necessarily id superego, you know, ego. We're talking about parasympathetic, sympathetic nervous systems, which are actually, I think, a lot more powerful than libido and other things that we were trying to label things we thought we were seeing. So I love that you bring that up because I think it's something that we need to talk more about, too.
[00:31:37] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, indeed, indeed. And then an important topic which I actually do not tackle in the, in this book, I will say maybe in the next one.
That's everything about trauma, because of course, trauma is having a lot of impact on the unconscious behavior. Important topic also when you talk about dysregulated nervous system. So, but let's say this is the first step, the superficial layer of health, which I try to tackle. But if you then talk about trauma, of course it's an all other world that you're opening up. And in a business environment, it's still like it's early stage that this is. Yeah, some, maybe more mature corporations, they also work about trauma in the organization, but there are not too many companies yet who are on that level of consciousness, I would say.
[00:32:31] Speaker A: Yeah. And I'm, and I'd love to get, I'm just going to use you as a coach for the rest of the podcast because I.
But I think what I've been doing, and I work over here in the states with the highest, with industries that have the highest rates of burnout. So we're in a burned out society right now. And healthcare, education, social services, you know, government, those, those are the industries I primarily work in, and they're the most burned out. I really want people to think about. And I use a scale for burnout. I don't think one bad day is traumatic, unless it's a really, really bad day, somebody gets hurt or there's a life threatening situation. It can be, there can be an event there, but over time, as people exist for weeks and months and years in burnout, that can be traumatic. We have something called chronic trauma. Um, that is, you know, not the traumatic event. Somebody pulls out a gun, you know, that's a traumatic event, but we know existing in high stress situations for sustained periods of time, which I think is a good definition of burnout, is traumatic for folks. If you look at the outcomes of burnout over time, you know, stroke, diabetes, cancer, anxiety disorders, all these different depression, you know, you put up trauma symptoms and they're almost a perfect match in that. So that's one of the ways, you know, and I don't start there with the conversation, but I think it raises the idea of burnout to a more important mental health issue than sometimes, oh, that person's weak. That's why they're burned out. It's like, no, this is an organizational phenomenon which can at times, I'm not saying everybody's traumatized, but can at times lead to a traumatic response which can be devastating for folks.
[00:34:27] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Indeed, indeed. And just to build on that conversation, I think the difficulty is that many organizations, they struggle with the question, okay, up until where do we have as an organization the responsibility to do something to help people with these type of topics? What is part of the, the personal life and what's part of the work environment? And of course, those two are not separated. And with COVID those two are just melting into each other. They've always been melted into each other, but now it's becoming really obvious.
And these are questions that many organizations struggle with. Okay, what's my responsibility? What should I do? And also the employee is often looking to the employer, as in, help me. But actually it's your responsibility, employer, and I'm not going to take the responsibility. And that's also a wrong idea. So it's, there's a lot this tension on, okay, who can do what?
[00:35:28] Speaker A: Yeah, and I love that. What you just mentioned perfectly sums up, like, what I'm trying to get people to talk about and is the dilemma of, you know, and I assume you're going to agree with me on this, but like, the number one thing you and I can do, probably to bring our best self to work tomorrow, is to get 8 hours of healthy sleep tonight. That sort of rises very quickly in the research and kind of stays number one for most people.
Your employer has nothing to do, hopefully, with you getting 8 hours of healthy sleep. Now, we could talk about sleep hygiene and other things, but really, that's the personal responsibility. But, like, things like burnout are a work phenomenon about something might be toxic within the work environment. And I think that gives us a great dilemma to talk about. That's what I'm encouraging leaders to do right now is talk about, hey, our ability to perform at our best and get the best outcomes for our business is a mix of that personal responsibility and creating, collectively creating an environment that is healthy and people can really thrive in supporting healthy habits at work as well. And I think it's that dilemma that if we have conversations around it, hopefully we find. We find both, is how do we train people on sleep hygiene like you're. I'm sure you do. Like, not everybody knows the importance. I think we're getting more there, but of 8 hours of sleep, or eating anti inflammatory versus inflammatory foods or getting movement. The zone two craze, which I. I don't think is going to go away. There may be something trendier come up, but I think that's the science there is so strong. So that's what I find is really important as we talk about this. And it sounds like that's what you're doing as well with the folks you work with too.
[00:37:16] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, completely, completely. And that's also the interesting thing. When we worked with these biometrical assessments, the device we use, it measures the autonomic nervous system in a period of four to five days. And it's day and night, so automatically, okay, every individual gets their own report. But automatically the topic of sleep gets into the conversation. And people see their own sleep scores, whether it's green or red, and they start to compare. So automatically, by showing them the data and the insights, about 24 hours or longer measurements, this conversation gets onto the table and gets into the discussion. That's really interesting because before people wouldn't start just talking about their sleep, they have something like my sleep. It's private. So, yeah, we bring all these things together.
[00:38:10] Speaker A: Yeah, I love it. So the final question I have, I love to ask thinkers like you about this is, let's look 510 years into the future. Technology is getting better and better. Awareness of the things you and I are so passionate about because your book is going to be translated into English. So that gives us a good second episode follow up. I can't wait to.
Well, what do you think? Where's this all going? If you kind of look in and you can also throw in here where you want it to go as well. But we weren't even able to have this conversation probably ten years ago because technology, it was just too expensive. You'd had to probably go do a sleep study at a lab.
All this stuff was really priced out or inconvenient. Where do you see us going now that we've got Garmin's and apple watches? And optimal and heartmath and all these whoops around.
Where do you see us? Where do you see 510 years in the future?
Where are we going to be?
[00:39:19] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like the question. And actually, I haven't thought into detail about it, but, yeah, I think, of course, technology AI, you cannot. You cannot think it away anymore. It will be there forever. So more and more, having a wearable, a whoop wearing technology or having a chip put under your arm to measure your glucose, it will only get more crazier and crazier, and it will get more accepted also by society. So you cannot think it away. And this is for sure not a bad thing, because I notice in the work that I'm doing that this technology can help to bring a lot of awareness. On the other hand, with technology comes a lot of addiction or dependency of. Okay, oh, my God. My wearable is saying that I have slept badly. Now I feel bad. This placebo effect is also there. There are a lot of studies showing that there's a placebo effect. So with technology comes also the responsibility of doing something or using it for your goods and not being dependent on it.
So I hope that as technology improves, that also the. The level of consciousness of we as human beings is going upward and that we use this technology for the good and not for the bad.
I think that's. Yeah. In companies also. And there are also some. Some recent research from Deloitte indicating that more and more leaders see themselves within three to five years using more and more biometrical data, biofeedback, even data from. With brainwaves, et cetera, all these kind of things. They see it more and more being integrated in company policies, processes, et cetera. So I think Deloitte has a paper written last year about the quantified organization and all the data which is being collected and to do something, of course, you have all these privacy issues.
So I think it's a positive trend if we use it in a good way, because there will be many companies using it to maybe say to a specific business units, okay, you're not performing well. We need to get rid of you. So, yeah, it will be a knife which is cutting on two ends. I don't know if you say it like this in English, but.
So you have this technology, which is rapidly improving. And then I also think it will be important to have enough time to deconnect and get away from technology, because that's actually also what we do in our programs. We use technology as a tool to support you in your journey, but on the other hand, we try to bring people out of their regular daily environment to take a step back and take the space to look at their own life and the work environment from a little bit more distance to increase the awareness about the retrace they're living.
I think having more space away from technology will also be important.
Stay aware about what you're doing with it. I don't know if it makes sense.
[00:42:52] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, it is sort of like the interesting spaces. I know for me personally sometimes, and I really like disconnecting and is heart rate variability. I hope for a lot of people. I noticed for me, even on vacation, I want to know, like, it's just part of my habit to wake up and see. And I know what a low score does now, and it's not the end of the world, but I've also been doing this for five years every morning. So, like, it is that, is it, is that another dilemma? Right. Is where we're asking people to be on technology to improve their health. While there's a lot of movement, I imagine around the world, around, like, things like social media and other things have a really detrimental impact. And then we work with executives, I'm sure you do, too, who won't stop checking their email, and if they stop checking it, their people are going to be checking it. And so there's this mix of, hey, we're trying to do the good with it in a realm of where technology can be really harmful to people's lives and mental health. You know, is everything. Like you said, that double edged sword, as we say over here, it plays both ways with this, which I think is, it's good to be, I think, on the good side of the force and not the dark side.
[00:44:12] Speaker B: So, yeah, indeed, that's what we should try to do.
[00:44:15] Speaker A: Well, we already got a second episode. When I get my hands on the book in English, we'll have to have you back. I can't wait to read it. But just, and we'll put information in the show notes about where they can learn more about your work. But just if somebody's interested and they're just listening to this, where might they find a little bit more about you and your work?
[00:44:35] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, for sure. They can connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm mostly active on LinkedIn, so that's where people can find me.
Awesome. And I hope, indeed. Yeah, yeah, indeed. And I hope, indeed, at the end of the year, there will be an english version available of fully charged of the book, because more and more people just start asking so, yeah, I think it will be work for over the summer.
[00:45:04] Speaker A: There you go. Well, I want to have you back when that happens. And once I, once I get through it, I'm sure I'll have a million more questions to continue the conversation. But it's been great to learn about you, learn about your work. Like I said, I can't wait to get the books in my hands. So. Yeah. Yeah. So thank you so much. And as always, thanks for listening. You can find show notes, everything
[email protected]. and we'll see you next week.
