How To Maximise Your Brain's Performance - Louisa Nicola

There's many studies that have been done on basketball players. A lack of sleep can go through and interfere with reaction time. It can interfere with visual acuity, their ability to see the ball at the speed of light and react to it. So that's the software things. Their ability to think fast, that really goes down, and that's diminished. One second for LeBron James can mean the difference between winning and losing, right?

(wind blowing) Louisa Nicola, welcome to the show.

(laughs) Chris, so happy to be here.

How would you describe what you do for work?

Well, uh, my company, Neurathletics, is literally the intersection of neuroscience and athletic performance. Uh, a-around six years ago, I would say, six years ago, 2016, I saw a gap in that market, where I was looking at athletes, I was training athletes. I had a neuroscience background and I thought, "Why is everybody obsessed with making these athletes better by just working on their speed and agility? Why are we not working on their brains?" The brain is the powerhouse of the entire system. So that's what I did. I just started my company and started working on the brain.

Okay. But you don't just work with athletes, right?

Correct. So right now... So at the start, at the conception, Neurathletics was purely athletes, and then we moved into an only, uh, Major League Soccer, NFL, and NBA pathway. And then just by chance, two years ago, we, uh, we got the attention of the finance world. And let me tell you, their brains are, uh, their brains are, are in dire need of Neuroathletics. So we now service, uh, some of the financial world.

What's the similarities between a portfolio manager and an athlete?

Uh, lack of sleep, first and foremost. Secondly, competitiveness. Thirdly, they've got that ability to do whatever it takes. They're not just getting up for a, for a day job at 9:00 AM and putting their suit on. They have to train like athletes to get the best results. Some of the guys I'm working with tell me, "Louisa, if I don't make this trade tonight, if I'm not in the peak state to make a good trade, I could lose $30 million."

Okay. So slightly high stakes. When you actually put it like that, you think, "Oh, he's kicking a ball about." You know? He's kicking-

Yeah.

... a ba- kicking a ball into a goal. What does it matter? It's not $30 million. Um, you said that both of them were underslept. Do you find that your athletes, on average, are underslept? Is that something specific to athletes, or do you think that this is just the entire world is underslept and athletes are a subsection of the world?

Very good question. So I think everybody, not just athletes and portfolio managers, I think everybody is underslept. Now, just 12 hours ago on Twitter, I posted a tweet saying, "Guys, I think I have it all wrong. I've been talking about sleep deprivation, but instead, why don't I talk about, why don't we say REM sleep deprivation or slow-wave sleep deprivation?" I think, um, I think we've got it all wrong when we talk about sleep deprivation. Now, a lot of people in society are sleep-deprived. Now, sleep-deprived is classified as six hours or less. I live in New York City. Almost everybody in the city is sleeping six hours or less. It's a hustle city. But then also, now because of technology, because of what we're eating, because of how we're going out, the fact that the pandemic has brought us inside, we are being exposed to things that are keeping us up longer throughout the night, but also disrupting our patterns of getting into deep sleep and slow-wave and, and REM sleep. So I coined this, this new phenomenon, I think, of 2022. Instead of somebody saying, "I'm sleep-deprived," I'm gonna say, "Well, what part of sleep-deprived are you?" D- Are you lacking REM sleep or you're lacking deep sleep?