Behavioural Science in Silicon Valley with Kristen Berman
Can you catch up on sleep? Big 5 Personality Traits, Performance medicine and AI
I have always been intrigued on how we can use human psychology to influence decisions. The documentary The Social Dilemma uncovered certain practices which showed that human behvaiour can be radically influenced by design which to some was very disturbing. It’s no secret that tech companies use behavioural science to get us hooked and increase engagement. We know there are 93 BCT’s in health and i recently completed a course in behavioural design for health by Irrational Labs and found it incredibly valuable and therefore am hosting her on Wednesday 27th September at 3 pm EST on the Human Behaviour Club. Make sure you RSVP for the recording on the following link.
RSVP below to attend-
https://www.clubhouse.com/invite/IKyDjpIY
Interested in behavioral economics, psychological biases, and behavior change?
Check out the Behavioral Economics Bootcamp from Irrational Labs! It’s an online program that will teach you to increase engagement and change behavior with proven methods & frameworks from the team that has taught these techniques to Google, Meta, TikTok, Aetna, Intuit, Lyft, World Bank, and many more.
HBC members and Newsletter leaders can also get a special discount: Insert code HUMANBEHAVIORCLUB for $50 off!
https://behavioraleconomicsbootcamp.com/
Can you catch up on sleep?
Having worked at 8sleep and then Crescent Health I’m a big advocate of sleep tech and that Sleep is the most important factor for health and performance. A recent paper published by The Sleep Foundation uncovered some interesting insights -
https://www.sleephealthjournal.org/article/S2352-7218(23)00166-3/fulltext
Consensus statement
• Daily regularity in sleep timing is important for health.
• Daily regularity in sleep timing is important for performance.
• When sleep is of insufficient duration during the week (or work days), catch-up sleep on weekends (or non-work days) is important for health.
Variability in sleep timing, such as inconsistent sleep schedules, is associated with adverse health effects, including increased mortality, inflammation, cognitive performance issues, metabolic indicators, breastfeeding difficulties, and mental health challenges.
While consistency in sleep timing is deemed important for health and performance, the review suggests that, when sleep deficiency accumulates, occasional "catch-up" sleep on non-work days (e.g., weekends) may be beneficial, possibly by extending sleep by 1-2 hours or taking naps. However, it emphasizes the need for further research to directly weigh the trade-offs between extended sleep and reduced sleep timing regularity. It also notes potential adverse consequences of sleeping in on non-work days, such as circadian phase shifts.
Performance medicine and AI
Currently I am Digital Health and Performance lead at Jeevn https://www.jeevn.co/ (sign up to the waitlist) where we are aiming to prevent burnout and optimise the health and performance of high impact individuals such as Corporate employees, Ceos and founders. Being a board certified lifestyle medicine physician and having been a entrepreneur and founding my own tech company for 3 years I realise the demands on entrepreneurship and how we can often ignore our health but how we can take certain actions to actually reduce the negative effects of stress, improve our mood, focus and cognitive performance. In traditional medicine we are often reactive and only looking at disease but I feel looking at athletes and navy seals we can see there is a need for more research into optimising health and performance. I have previously called for the need for ‘Cognitive athletes’ covering high performers in the non physical space.
At Jeevn we really believe in the power of Human Coaching for accountability and behaviour change. It was encouraging to see a recent article written about the power of human coaching being superior to AI for weight loss programmes. I do feel and we do think at jeevn AI, LLM’s and Machine learning models can play a large part in augmenting human coaches. We believe in gathering as much data from bloods, DNA, CGM, Wearables and nearables such as body scanners. We also think that we can deliver personalised predictive insights based on all this data using these machine learning models to make links between areas such as stress and sleep and ultimately deliver this through experts humans. At Crescent Health I learnt that health isn’t a one size fits all model and what may work for one person may not work for another and that is why we need a personalised approach.
As we launch our pilot we hope to keep you in the loop as we have had a lot of interest from investors and users for our first cohort. I was once quoted saying we that we should all embrace therapy as we need to look after our mind like we look after our body. Now we are building this.
Big 5 Personality traits?
In the Pandemic I built a relationship wellness app around mental health called AMELI and incorporated the Big 5 Traits as a personality test to see if we could increase compatability. I think loneliness is an interesting modern day problem and we know the strong links between social connection and health. However, dysfunctional relationships can have a negative impact on mental health. As Clubhouse a once breakaway app focused on broadcast and at the centre of many greta connections I made with 500 k plus strong community with stellar guests pivots towards increasing social relationships I wonder why friendship apps have by in large failed.
The big 5 traits- Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreableness, Neuroticism
A study done in the pandemic found the following-
Diet and nutrition were positively predicted by extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness, and it was negatively predicted by neuroticism.
Substance abuse was positively predicted by agreeableness and conscientiousness, and it was negatively predicted by extraversion.
Physical activity was positively predicted by extraversion and conscientiousness, and it was negatively predicted by neuroticism.
Stress management was positively predicted by extraversion and conscientiousness, and it was negatively predicted by neuroticism.
Restorative sleep was positively predicted by extraversion and conscientiousness, and it was negatively predicted by neuroticism.
Social support for healthy practices was positively predicted by extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.
Environmental exposures were positively predicted by extraversion, and neuroticism was positively and negatively predicted by conscientiousness.
Does that mean that people high in conscientiousness, agreableness, extraversion and low in neuroticism are more likely to be healthy?
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