How AI + Your Fitness Tracker Turn Data Into Daily Habits

Jeremy Grater: All right, welcome to Robots. This is the podcast that tries to help you be a better human by being smarter about the way you use your technology. And that's exactly what I've actually been doing for the last month or so. as of a few weeks ago, I was in a bit of a of a rough patch, ⁓ several months of ⁓ not really taking care of myself, ⁓ ignoring lot of the things that I know that work for me to ⁓ keep the the voices in my head from over and and keeping me ⁓ you know accountable for the the person I say I want to be. ⁓ ⁓ you know, things got dark. Things got pretty heavy in in my head. And ⁓ I got desperate and turned to AI to try to start sorting things out. ⁓ of that started, Jason, by your recommendation. ⁓ I've been wearing an Apple Watch for a long ass time, wearing an Oura ring for years, ⁓ these tracking mechanisms that I would sort of look at, see the vague numbers that they would come up with that weren't super specific and didn't really. offer a ton of guidance in terms of what to do with that number. And so you know I could wake up and go, look, I slept pretty well. Still feel like shit, but slept pretty well. Or, you know, slept like shit. Feel all right. That's weird. well, on with my day. ⁓ but you recommended actually I I I ran into a battery problem. Like the Oura basically died. The Apple Watch, like you need to charge it every single day. So you can't really consistently monitor. So I turned to you Jason and said, The hell? ⁓ and you recommended this little Garmin device that I've now been wearing for almost a month.

Jason: Right.

Jeremy Grater: And the the data is is incredible. There's there's a lot of you know ⁓ advice pulled from the numbers that kind of helps guide my decisions and what I'm supposed to do. And I've also been using it to you know feed AI until like here here's what this last week has been like, here's here's where things were, here's where I'm trying to go, help me get there. ⁓ so I wanted to just sort of share that experience because I I'm I'm by no means ⁓ healed, but progress is being made. It's only been a month. And just by changing some of the tracking mechanisms and and the things that I'm doing to keep myself accountable ⁓ been really helpful. And so I wanted to core to sort of open this up to to share my experience with you in hopes that maybe doing something similar ⁓ does the same for you. ⁓ Jason, I wanted to just share some some early numbers. When I first started doing this a little over a month ago, my heart rate variability, the the amount of time between heartbeats was around 24 ⁓ milliseconds, right? ⁓ in the last month, by making the changes that I've made based on what the watch tells me every day, I've seen it climb to 32. So

Jason: Mm-hmm. ⁓ wow, that's actually like in the in the decent range.

Jeremy Grater: It's like it's like hey, you're you're kinda normal now. We could we could be better, but kinda normal, which is really exciting because that is a an important number. I don't know, you I'm you've been tracking this stuff a long time. That's an important number. Why why is that number important?

Jason: Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. So typically when you're talking about the beats, the the di the distance and time between the beats of your heartbeat, it has to do with the steady nature by which your nervous system is reacting. So the fewer fewer amount of variation, ⁓ variability for lack of a better term, suggests that your ⁓ autonomic nervous system is not taking time to adjust. Like it's it's in engine mode. Go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go. And it's treating it that way, primarily because most people get into that state because they've either got stress or they've got physiological conditions that are making it difficult for them, you know, physiological stress or or psychological stress. Once you get those things lowered down and you get better sleep and you start feeling better and you get eating more exercise, those numbers start to get better. And HRV is huge because low HRV is a really good sign that you are stressed the fuck.

Jeremy Grater: But what's weird about that is, I don't know, you you know me. We've been did we've been friends for decades. I have never considered myself a very stressed out person. Like I definitely am an emotional person. Like things will happen and I will get angry. I'm I do have a bit of a short temper when it comes to just like stupid shit that annoys me. But I never I never considered myself someone who's walking around carrying a lot of stress. And that's another thing that this watch tracks is. What your daily stress levels are like. And you can see it on a on a graph. Like this is what it was. You can look back at your day in day and go, okay, yeah, I was at work. So it's a little stressful, or I was arguing with somebody. That's why that got stressful. But the amount of just sort of spike and stay and you know, l live in that zone all day. I was shocked at how much the watch, anyways, tells me that I carry stress pretty much all day, every day. And yeah, and and not only that, but ⁓

Jason: Yes.

Jeremy Grater: The other thing that I really love that I'm like obsessively hooked on because it's a new toy, but the body battery in in the watch. I love this thing because it's similar to the Oura ring where it gives you sort of a readiness score. But I like that throughout the day it's tracking like here's how much of your battery is left for the day. And it was just crazy because there would be days that I'm like, okay, my my battery started low, I better rest a lot today. But I would still just watch the number drop. Rapidly, and like, ⁓ my God, that's just stress. Like, I'm laying on my ass. I'm not doing anything, but I'm just even in laying here doing nothing, I'm so stressed out that my battery is just being depleted rapidly. and in contrast, I would do things like go for a like a nice long walk or try to just like get moving, and I would be shocked at how little the battery would drain. I would just be like, but I just did a thing. I I would think my battery would be more exhausted, but it just shows me how much the stress is just taking a toll on my body versus the.

Jason: Stress. Yep. Yeah. Yeah.

Jeremy Grater: the physical stress that I would choose to put myself through to try to take better care of myself.

Jason: Well, here's the reality is psych psychological stress is physical stress. And that's the thing that people don't realize is that your body is and your mind, who you are, are in the same fucking meat coated skeleton. Like that's just who you are. And the same chemicals that you use to go through and motivate yourself to wake up in the morning.

Jeremy Grater: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jason: ⁓ go and do something nice for somebody, get stressed out and get angry, are the same chemicals that you're gonna use to motivate yourself to go pick up something heavy or go for a long run or go drink a beer. Like it's all th it's all connected. And because it's all connected, the amount of ⁓ pressure and stress that people get under has a huge deleterious effect on an individual's ability to be able to regulate their own physiology. And it's this inability to regulate your own physiology, be it based on stress, that actually has that that's actually the biggest threat to a human being these days. Because we don't have saber toothed tigers chasing us. We don't have bears chasing us. I mean, I guess there are some exceptions in some places. Yeah. Yeah, right. Right. ⁓ but the point is is that like it's not a constant daily threat, right? Like you the chances of you running into something that's going to be a life and death situation on, you know,

Jeremy Grater: Mm-hmm. In my neighborhood you do.

Jason: even, you know, once a year, is pretty fucking low. And your body has a system that is designed to stress it to push it up and pull it back down and move those things around because it actually does exercise your physiology and your brain is set up to see patterns and alerts and understand these things and to look for threat and danger. And when you don't see threat and danger, a lot of the times your brain just starts making shit up and it turns those things into stress. Because it's like, I know something bad is coming, but I can't identify it. Which happens all the time. Cause that's what human beings are.

Jeremy Grater: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jason: And you and you brought up something really interesting around looking at the way it tracks your battery, like the the str the the battery for because the body battery measurement on that, it's not terrible, but I mean it's basically a corollary of your sleep information and then your stress output throughout the day. And if you look at it, like you can actually see when you go and exercise and you can see your stress spike when you exercise. Like it definitely does that because it's tracking your physiological responses.

Jeremy Grater: Yeah. Yep.

Jason: What you don't see a lot of time though is that when you exercise really, really hard and you're stressed out, it doesn't come back down. And that is one of the biggest problems that people have is they go and they work out like first thing in the morning and they just spike their stress and it never comes back down again. So s because they go straight to work. Stressed out state. Yeah. So I mean the the thing you you have to balance these things. You have to figure out a way to have recovery. You have to figure out a way to not let things make you worried. And it's

Jeremy Grater: Mm. Right, 'cause they go straight to work and like stay in a stressful state. Yeah.

Jason: Way fucking easier said than done. but yeah, the tool does a decent job of telling you what's going on.

Jeremy Grater: Yeah. ⁓ another number that I thought was interesting was my resting heart rate. When I started again roughly a month ago, it was around 70 beats per minute. ⁓ now we're closer to 64. So it's just so I so I guess let's jump to the how, right? I I I've made I've made some changes. What are the changes that are that are doing this? And the thing is, like I started like as someone who has been doing this podcast for several years that was originally very much a health and wellness mental health podcast. I have the tools.

Jason: Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Grater: I know what to do. I I've talked to hundreds of people that essentially all said the same thing. And that's kind of where where this started was I was I was sitting by the pool with my kids and they're playing and I'm sitting there stressed out and I'm on my computer. And that thought literally occurred to me as like, hey dummy, you know how to fix this. You just need to like start putting the pieces back in place to to fix it. And so I jumped onto my little claw conversation and said, I'm I'm like wildly burned out. in every aspect of my life. I'm carrying way too much stress. I'm exhausted. I I don't know how much more I can take. I got to do something. And so it it really focused in on the burnout. Like, okay, we gotta, we gotta like lighten the load. Let's take some things off. So ⁓ it was really interesting because the it it wasn't it wasn't a matter of here's more to do. It was like, let's start taking stuff off your plate. What can you stop doing? And so literally I have a task every day, a reminder to take something off of my list to do that day. So, like every day I've got all these things. And I just pick I'm like, you what? I am just not gonna do it, I'm not gonna reschedule it. It's just not gonna happen. Done. That problem is solved. ⁓ it's it's also like when you first wake up, go outside and just absorb sunlight for 10 minutes. Okay. So I make my coffee and I go sit outside for 10 minutes. ⁓ and then one other thing I started doing that is a little bit more extreme, but ⁓ I I go, there's a ⁓ a float tank in my neighborhood. So ⁓ I go and I float once a week in a you know salt water tank for an hour, just hanging out, chilling out. And the sensory deprivation is awesome because it's completely dark. There's no sound. The only sound I hear is whatever sound I make. ⁓ so that is super relaxing and that is ⁓ has been really helpful. And that's really it. Like I just said, I want to start really slow. Like I know that I can do all of the hundred things I used to do every day and like perform in a more optimal state. I'm not ready to be back at a hundred. Let's start with three. And just those simple little things started opening me up to well, what if we start tracking what you actually eat every day? What if you walk a little longer? And now like today I'm gonna go to the gym. I haven't been to the gym in months. And when we're done here, I'm gonna go to the gym because I'm starting to have the capacity again. Because I just started chipping away like I don't need to do all this other crap. Let it go and find ways to rest and recover.

Jason: Yeah. It's small, iterative, repeatable change. I mean there there's a concept of th the one percent rule where if you can make yourself one percent better every day, you know, you're gonna be more than three X as good by the end of the year. Those are all true. And the thing is is that when we go to make big changes, if you don't see big results, we get demotivated. So if you make small changes and you see small results, then you're gonna keep going. And like that that's a consistent thing in pretty much all of the literature around when we go to big changes, if you don't see big results, we get demotivated. ⁓ So if you make small changes and you see small results, then you're gonna keep going. And like that's a consistent thing ⁓ in pretty much ⁓ all of the around ⁓ Performance enhancement and self-care. Performance enhancement and self-care. And you know, it's like people that try to stop smoking cold turkey, the success rate is like super low. but the people that you know wean themselves off, it's a little better. But it's hard, right? Like it's difficult to do. And it's the same thing with breaking other habits. Like it's easy to make a small habit if you make it a small habit.

Jeremy Grater: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jason: If you make it a big habit, that's harder. If you want to do a big habit, break it down into smaller chunks and do smaller pieces. And just doing it repeatedly over time, making those little adjustments, it makes a huge difference. And your your sleeping heart rate getting from from the seventies into the sixties, that's a huge marker. Yeah. ⁓ And ⁓ just doing it repeatedly over time, making those little adjustments, it makes a huge difference.

Jeremy Grater: Yeah. Yeah. Massive. ⁓ now I do, you know, in full transparency, not everything has been a huge success. There were some other suggestions that were made that ⁓ failed immediately or or or have been rocky. ⁓ one of them is another one that I know full well that my habit is a bad one, but it's putting the phone away well before bed and not like having every night. I use it for a sleep meditation. So it's sitting right next to me every night and I play the thing. So of course I'm tempted to sit there and like, ⁓ what's on my calendar for tomorrow? What am I gonna wake up to? What do I need? Like I kind of prep myself as I'm laying in bed trying to go to sleep. I'm ramping myself up for tomorrow already. So I know that's a bad habit. But you know, I've already said like I I need this app and it's like, okay, cool, let's not worry about that one. Like if that's if that's what you need right now, keep it. So that's one that I I haven't been able to give up yet.

Jason: Can I make a suggestion? What time do you normally go to bed?

Jeremy Grater: You can. These days midnight.

Jason: Okay. So you should do all of your phone checking and scheduling, planning and all that shit at ten PM.

Jeremy Grater: And I do, but I'm also just it's it's kind of a an obsessive like, did anybody cancel? What's gonna ch like it's just it's it's the ha it's the addiction, right? It's the addiction of I need I need to look at it, that's my excuse.

Jason: ⁓ Yeah, so ⁓ stop ⁓

Jeremy Grater: Yeah, I know, I know. And and it will get there. It will get there. But so far. Right. Right. Exactly. So those little changes are still coming. ⁓ another one I mentioned the the diet tracking. ⁓ I've had an app that I paid for for most of the year, off and on with it. I'll do well and then I'll give up. I'll get bored of it and and stop. So of course, like the new tool that I have now has that built in. So it's a new toy. So I'm excited about it. So I'm using it every day and doing a really good job.

Jason: Small incremental changes. Do it at eleven forty five. You know, and just keep pulling it back.

Jeremy Grater: ⁓ so that but that has been rocky, right? I would do it for a couple of days and then I'd stop. I would get busy, we'd go somewhere for the day, I'd lose track, like and so I I in my conversations with Claude was just like, Look, I'm gonna and it was even hesitant to let me do this. It said, I don't know that you want to take that on right now because you're so burned out. Do you really need another thing? And I was like, I get it, but I also am going into it going, if I miss a day, if I miss a meal, if I miss a week, whatever. I'm just trying to like do it a little bit to get better at. So that it's been rocky, but I'm now I'm now I've I've been clean for seven days with my with my tracking, so I'm I'm proud of that. So that's been pretty good so far. ⁓ one other thing that it recommended was building in a full recovery day every week. I've got two kids, I've got a job, I've got rent to pay, I've got dogs. Like it's really hard for me to say this whole day is gonna be a lot of nothing of just Rest, relaxation. So I'm trying to build in time every day, whether it's watching wrestling with my kids for a couple of hours or you know, sleeping in a little bit later on a Saturday, like slowing down my mornings so that I don't have to rush, rush, rush. Just looking for places where that can go so that it fits my lifestyle. So again, small incremental changes that, you know, it's not, it's not about the massive overhaul. It's where can you start to make changes that will stick? And and that's been pretty good so far as well.

Jason: Yeah, like I've I've tried to keep food journals. I've never gone more than four months.

Jeremy Grater: Mm-hmm.

Jason: I have found that when I try to do big weight loss changes or big, you know, body composition changes, I just go, I'm gonna eat the same fucking thing seven nights a week. And I'm gonna that's all I'm gonna eat. And then I don't think about it because I don't wanna have to go through and track and do calorie nutrition profiles. Like there's a thousand of them out there. I've built an app for it. ⁓ I mean I have another one called Uprove that, you know, takes data from these kinds of things, lets you put your dietary information in, it gives you all kinds of insights. And I don't use it often enough. And I fucking made it. You know? I mean and there's other people that use it. I mean th and they they use it consistently and it's it's nice 'cause it actually has more of the data points that are in there. But this just goes down to the idea that anything w where it's gonna require you to go through and have a human do lots of interaction and input it

Jeremy Grater: Yeah.

Jason: shit falls out. I mean we even went so far as to go through it and say, Gibb make it an Alexa skill so that you could just tell Alexa what you ate and would automatically put it into the app. Which we're like, ⁓ this is gonna be great. And then we started dealing with all the problems around, you know, not being able to give it enough context information to understand what a McDonald's happy meal or number six was. And it's like, ⁓ shit, well I ate like trash and I need to tell it. And like

Jeremy Grater: Yeah. That's cool. Mm-hmm. Right.

Jason: It's cool 'cause when we did it for a long period of time, we could track it. And you can see your stress breaks and you can see when you sleep bad. Like alcohol is a great one. I and continuous glucose monitors are a great example of this kind of falling into place also using these kinds of tools. But the idea is that you've got if you've got a continual way to give you biofeedback and give you information on something, then you can see the effect of your small incremental changes. If you don't have a way to give you biofeedback, you're not gonna see shit. And you're gonna get discouraged and you're gonna stop doing it. Like, ⁓ fucking Because that's human nature.

Jeremy Grater: And that's been the thing that like the underlying thing to all of this that I haven't talked about ⁓ yet is that I basically it was a Wednesday afternoon when I started this and I basically set a reminder every Wednesday, revisit that conversation in Claude, update it with screenshots that that Garmin has captured of, you know, what my all of the all of the data, dump it in there and go, How am I doing? Like just just real dumb guy. Hey doc, how am I doing? And week after week it was like, wow. Good progress on HRV. Your sleep is getting better. Stress is coming down. This needs some work. How's it going with the sunlight? How's it going with food? It would it would ask, it would keep me accountable for the thing. I said, I'm gonna try this. And I would just be honest and go, Yeah, I shit the bet on that one. Like, let's let's start it again this week and see how it goes. And it would go, okay, cool. I'll I'll ask you next week. So it really has been an amazing accountability partner to just keep this thread that has all of what I'm trying to do in a single place. as though it's a a health coach or a doctor that I get to talk to for free every week and say, What do I need to do next? or or what what should I change here? And and that's been massive. And then I and also like again there's some danger in this with talking these things. But I would also share with it there were there was one week in particular in this process where life got in the way. Like I I started doing some EMDR with my therapist and Week was particularly heavy and like emotionally very draining and and like I did not expect the impact that it had to have on me. ⁓ my wife got sick, though suddenly I was carrying the burden of making sure the kids are fed and off to the places and all the things. I I had a family member with a health scare. Like there's some pretty stressful stuff over the course of one week. And so when I checked in, I said, Hey, yeah, I really fell off in this area, this area, this area. ⁓ but here's some context. And it was like, Fuck, dude, that's a lot. And and the crazy, this is the this is maybe the part that surprised me the most is that like it didn't come back with here's how to fix it, here's here's what's wrong, here's here's the it just went, wow, that's a lot. I'm sorry you had a hard time. And I was like, this fucking robot just had more empathy for me than most people that I would share this with. Yeah, than that that I have for myself. Absolutely.

Jason: Then you have for yourself. Yes.

Jeremy Grater: But I got emotional and like started crying. So I like, all I needed was for someone to acknowledge that, yeah, this is hard. I don't need you to fix it. I don't need a plan. I don't need a correction. I just just somebody, just another voice going, Fuck man, that sucks. Let's let's get after it again tomorrow. And and I did. I was like, that's great. That what what an amazing tool that we have at our disposal.

Jason: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I I I I a hundred percent agree. I mean that it's there's so much potential for goodness of it. just have to eliminate the people using it for bad, which would probably make it not cost viable 'cause it'd be like eighty percent of the population. so, I mean it i it's just There are so many neat insights you can pull out of AI when you start looking at these large data sets. And you're you're giving it small sample data sets and it's using it to compare it against other big data sets that are out there, which is useful and helpful and it's great for personalized care. And when you start talking about these as large data sets and programming them and putting them in and trying to understand them, we get smarter and better over time. And this is a collective process where everyone benefits from the input of these data sets. The downside is, you know, you don't really want an insurance company getting hold of that shit. You know. So y you gotta kinda walk a line. And being in Canada, you've got, you know, options that are probably better than here in the US. But it's also the the way the AI can look at these problems and see them and state them back to you in a way that feels very humanistic and very compelling, it's admirable. Like I i when it says things to me that are more compassionate than my therapist can say to me, it's like, ⁓ fuck. Hmm. Yeah. You know, and is it being honest and truthful? I mean maybe not, but sometimes you need a fucking teddy bear to cuddle.

Jeremy Grater: Yeah. And that that's where it has excelled, right? Is it's it's been great at kissing ass since the day that that it was launched. And sometimes that's not the worst thing ever.

Jason: We do a l we deal a lot with tough love and brutal honesty and sure. People need fucking hugs, man. That's what it comes down to.

Jeremy Grater: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So this is just a snapshot of the last month or so of my life. ⁓ by no means am I better. I mean, I I guess I guess better is the right word. I'm not fixed. Incrementally better, but but there's a long road to get back to feeling the way that I know I can feel and have felt at you know for short stints in my life. ⁓ and I'm gonna just keep doing this and look for ways to add and subtract.

Jason: You're incrementally better. Yeah.

Jeremy Grater: ⁓ the the things that fill my days to try to help me feel less the way I did a month ago and more the way that I'm starting to feel now. ⁓ all of this. Please, yes.

Jason: And can I make one bit of advice? Don't put an enter. There's not a state at which you're done doing this. There's just not. You're gonna keep doing this for all the rest of your days. And there's no goalpost, there's no target at the end. You will have times where you'll succeed, you'll have times that you'll fail, you'll move forward, you'll move backwards. And that's okay. If the goal is to get better over time, get better over time. And don't feel like you have to rush and don't feel like you have to get to a specific target. And don't feel like there's gonna be some end target that's gonna solve all this shit. Cause there's not. There's always gonna be some more stuff that comes towards us.

Jeremy Grater: But but my my hyper ⁓ traumatized ⁓ fight or flight state that I constantly live in says, Go now, do faster, vo it, do it more. So I I that's I'm trying to trying to turn that down.

Jason: And this is one of those things that you should work on. Yeah. Well it also helps you can wear your garment while you lift weights as opposed to your Oura rings. You can actually track all your exercise stuff. Yes. Yes. But you've added more tools to the arsenal and just keep using them.

Jeremy Grater: That's true. That is very true. Yes. Absolutely. ⁓ that's my experience. I imagine if you're listening to a podcast like this, you have done something similar. I would love to hear if if you've done something similar. What has your experience been? What's worked for you? Where have you failed? ⁓ you can ⁓ comment on this podcast on our website, brobots.me You can message us, respond to of our social media posts, or email us info at brobots.me. ⁓ and I'd I'd love to just hear what other people have done and and where they've found success and failure. So please do so. ⁓ and in the meantime, we'll get to work on another episode and be back Monday morning at brobots.me ⁓ with a brand new episode. Thanks so much for listening.

Jason: Thanks everyone. Bye-bye.