Brain Fact Friday "Recovery Strategies to Build Resiliency Against Physical, Mental and Emotional Stressors"

Welcome back to the Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast, for Brain Fact Friday and episode #135 on my biggest AHA moment from EPISODE #134 with Kristen Holmes, the VP of Performance Science of WHOOP[i], a wearable personal fitness and health coach that measures sleep, strain, and recovery. To see the images in the show notes, and Andrea's Data, click here. In Today’s Brain Fact Friday You Will Learn: ✔︎ How the wearable health tracker WHOOP measures recovery. ✔︎ Why this data is useful for athletes, and humans in general, for mitigating physical, mental, and emotional stress. ✔︎ Strategies to improve recovery and decrease physical and psychological stress. ✔︎ See Andrea’s data and how she achieved her highest recovery rates using these strategies. ✔︎ How you can measure your own recovery to improve performance and resiliency. Welcome back, I'm Andrea Samadi, a former educator who has been fascinated with understanding the science behind high performance strategies in schools, sports, and the workplace for the past 20 years. If you have been listening to our podcast, you will know that we’ve uncovered that if we want to improve our social and emotional skills, and experience success in our work and personal lives, it all begins with an understanding of our brain. The purpose of this podcast is to bring the most current brain research to you, so you can make it applicable in your life whether you are a teacher in the classroom, or using these ideas to improve productivity and results in your workplace. As I am researching and learning new ideas, I’m also implementing them myself, and making connections to past speakers, so that we can all benefit from the research that is emerging in this new field of educational neuroscience. If you listened to EPISODE #134[ii] with Kristen Holmes, the VP of Performance Science with WHOOP whose Ph.D. work is in multilevel interactions of stress and circadian behavior[iii] or the impact of light on sleep optimization, you’ll know that I first came across Kristen while researching Heart Rate Variability for EPISODE #125[iv] where I started to see how important this one measurement was for tracking health, recovery, and resilience which is crucial to brain health and performance. After listening to the WHOOP podcast, with Founder Will Ahmed, I joined the community so that I could measure my HRV that I learned from Neurohacker Collective[v] is “the most important biomarker”[vi] --a measure that captures what’s going on in a cell at any given moment that can serve as an early warning system for your health.  As someone who has been working hard to make use of every second of the day, I thought, “I’ve got to know this number if I want to be operating at my highest capacity.” No one wants to intentionally leave anything on the table to chance or luck and staying on top of these metrics is a guaranteed way to take the guesswork out of human performance. Which leads us to this week’s Brain Fact Friday with a powerful AHA Moment I had during the interview with Kristen Holmes. After a month of measuring my data, and looking at the daily recovery score, I adjusted my behavior based on that number, and thought that recovery was based on the idea that I had to let my body recover physically after those days that I had high strain or exercised harder than usual. Even without measuring this data, we have a pretty good idea of days that we need to rest, based on how we feel.  I looked at the recovery score each morning, and it was never showing GREEN which would be 66%-100% recovered. My recovery score (that you can see a snapshot of in the show notes) was either yellow (recovering) or RED (not ready to take on strain) that I thought meant give your body more rest to prevent injury.  I even had a chart that told me that multiple days above my optimal strain targets (that averaged a score of 16) will promote fitness gains, but to dedicate time to rest if I continue this behavior,

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The Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast provides support for school leadership and the workplace with a proven approach for implementing social and emotional learning as it’s well-known in our schools today and emotional intelligence in the modern workplace, with a proven strategy to increase well-being, achievement and results, backed by the most current neuroscience research. Andrea Samadi, a teacher from Toronto, (now living in Arizona, USA) began working with success and social and emotional learning principles with students in the late 1990s. Her programs, and trainings, grounded in brain-based research and practical neuroscience, help parents, teachers, coaches and employees to optimize learning, well-being and achievement at home, school or the workplace. Learn more at https://www.achieveit360.com