Connecting my Mind and Body

Project Infobox
Self researcher(s)	Juliana Chua
Related tools	Jawbone, tinke
Related topics	Stress, Sleep, Heart rate, Breathing rhythm, Blood tests and blood pressure, Activity tracking
Builds on project(s)
Has inspired	Projects (0)

Show and Tell Talk Infobox
Featured image
Date	2014/05/11
Event name	2014 QS Europe Conference
Slides	Connecting-my-mind-and-body.pdf

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Connecting my Mind and Body is a Show & Tell talk by Juliana Chua that has been imported from the Quantified Self Show & Tell library.The talk was given on 2014/05/11 and is about Stress, Sleep, Heart rate, Breathing rhythm, Blood tests and blood pressure, and Activity tracking.

Description

A description of this project as introduced by Quantified Self follows:

Juliana discusses her steps, sleep, stress and also her fitness level. She shares how she did it and what she she has learned. She uses data from her activity, sleep, heart rate, and stress sensors to explore the effects of mindfulness on her physical condition.

Video and transcript

https://vimeo.com/103282807

A transcript of this talk is below:

Juliana Chua Connecting my Mind and Body

Hi everybody, my name is Juliana Chua. I’m just going to go through my steps, my sleep, stress, and also my fitness level and also how did I do it and what did I learn at the end of it. So a bit of myself, my background is in computer science so that’s what I was studying and I was very interested in data analytics. So when I was working at IBM I got introduced to intellectual property, so I got very interesting in inventions and now working and interested in multimedia and creative arts. So this was me about 10 years ago, you can see I’m 15Kg, 33 pounds lighter right now. So my weight fluctuated when I was studying and there was this yo-yo diet going on for four years. I put on plus/minus 30 pounds easily every year. And then what I realised was that if you can find a better way to be happy than over eating your body will be trusting, and when I was in my 30s I kind of realised that it was not just this intensity. So I put it through to the exercise that I do and what I’m doing now is using life study devices like Jawbone and also a device Tinke, to measure my fitness, my stress level and also the steps and also the sleep I’m doing. So these are the two key devices that I am using, and how did I do it, I’m looking at Ford matrixes. So the restful sleep how is it going to be, my stress level how relaxed I am. My fitness I’m looking at the power I’m giving out and also the steps as an activity. So I’m just going to share my data in these next few slides. So on the active portion, I think a lot of us and when we ask how healthy we focus on these behaviors, so 50% should be devoted to behavior. But instead what we spend on being healthy is about medical devices. So this is my activity chart for the past six weeks, and you can look at over here, the activity that goes the highest was when I was actually travelling. So when I’m not travelling I’m actually working and my steps is around 6000 region. And the next one is about my sleep. So most of us are actually about 60% not getting enough sleep and the same for myself, and when you do not get enough sleep you get a bit of a memory loss as well and some weakness in your system. So I’m going to look a little bit in my fitness data, and you can see that my sleep actually fluctuates around 4.5 hours per day would be my medium, and it can get as low as 1.5 hours per day. That is how little sleep I am getting per day when I’m working in a start-up. So with Tinke I started to measure the four key parameters including my heart rate, and my heart rate validity for my stress levels, oxygen and also my breathing rate. So these are the four key parameters that Tinke currently measures and in the future we are going to add more. And how these four parameters work is it gets into the fitness measurement, so I use these three parameters essentially for your breathing, heart rate, and oxygen for fitness. Heart rate validity is for my stress levels and you can come over later to the booth if you want a demo. So these are the two key parameters I do for fitness and stress. So for fitness what we want to maintain is really a good cardio, and you can look at over the years since 2008 and in the prediction, the heat spots are getting redder and redder, which means that more people will die of more cardio problems. Looking at my heart rate alone, and this is purely about resting heart rate, so a lot of people asked us why not do your continuous heart rate when you are exercising. The resting heart rate is important because it gives you a very good indication of what your fitness level is. So you can see my resting heart rate fluctuates around 60 to around 70, and some in the region of good and excellent for my age group. The ones that are not so good is when I have coffee and I measure that right after exercise, now I am trying to do not so much coffee right now. This is my oxygen level, and the oxygen level is very key because you breathe in enough oxygen to get your brain and your cells working. So when you have low oxygen levels, what happens is there is a depletion of things going to your brain, and the low oxygen is very hard on your heart and also your brain. These are the key factors, likes a stressful meeting gives me low oxygen including now I think. At 2 AM I’m tired and I’m still working and I get very low oxygen as well. So the next one that I’m looking at is respiratory rate. So rest respiratory rate is when you do deep and long breathing, so a lot of us don’t do deep and long breathing instead we do very shallow breathing. So when you do very shallow breathing it actually increases the rate of not being well. When I do very rapid breathing is when I was doing my work and I’m on a plane to QS but 60 minutes is not too bad. So between 12 and 16 is the optimum region that you want to hit. Actually when I’m at home and I’m resting, Mike breathing rate is actually quite low and nice. So, for fitness level that’s how the three parameters come down to the fitness level. So for the past six weeks you can see my fitness level has actually gradually gone down because I am travelling a a lot for the past few weeks. If I talk about stress, stress can cause a rash and a lot of other reactions. So I have to take a pill every two days for a couple of weeks because of the stress that I get, because I get a little bit of spots and scratchiness. But it is still okay, and I still measure my stress I am floating around the region of about 80+. So when I just sleep two hours you can measure my stress, and just right after sleeping I measured it was very bad stress levels. So these are some of the things that I tried to do, and each time I do my measurements I write it down in a journal to see what the stress level is. So the better ones are during the weekend, and during the weekend I try to put in more sleep and you can see that my stress level is actually much better. So the higher the number the better the relaxation is. When I’m actually correlating the fitness of the stress level, I wanted to see the correlation, and you can just see a very minor gradient of my stress level going down. That is actually correlating with my fitness level; so the stress actually affects my fitness. Coming back to what I learned for this life balance that I am trying to lead. These are the four key areas that I am now tracking myself, and I’m trying to see how the matrices together with the steps and also with the restfulness of the sleep. So when I do my steps and my sleep, and you can see that my steps doesn’t correlate to my sleep. So even if I am doing more activity or more steps, this does not help with my sleep. Actually there is a very minor gradient of my sleep going down as well. So the more steps might mean that I actually get worse sleep. So in effect the sleep actually affects my stress, and the gradient level that you are seeing in my sleep and my stress level actually correlates to each other. So the less sleep that I am having actually affects the stress level as well. Also the stress affects my fitness trend. So the more stressed I am then actually the fitness level goes down, so the only thing that I don't see any correlation with is the fitness level. It doesn’t mean the more steps you are doing means that you are more fit. So what I am actually still going to do is maintaining a 2 ½ hour activity on a moderate basis but not too intense. A lot of are actually are too intense in exercising, so that is not good. I’m also starting to breathe more right now, to be more comparable and more Zen in my life.

Thank you.

About the presenter

Juliana Chua gave this talk.