133 BPM standing still

It’s Tuesday morning, October 20th, and I’m about ninety minutes into our quarterly board review. The meeting started at 6:30 my time, which is the arithmetic of working East Coast hours from California, so by then I’d already been awake for two and a half hours in a house where everyone else was still asleep.

I have a standing desk and I move through a long meeting, sitting while I listen and standing when it’s my turn. Just before eight I raised the desk, got on my feet, and started walking the board through the quarter.

At some point my watch buzzed against my wrist and I ignored it, the way you ignore anything that isn’t the slide you’re on.

When I finally looked at it that afternoon, it was a high heart rate notification. Starting at 8:02, right as I began presenting, my heart rate had gone to 133 beats per minute, then 132, then 126, logged across ten minutes while the watch had me down as inactive.

That’s the part I keep turning over. Standing still at a desk reads as nothing to an accelerometer, so as far as my watch was concerned I was doing absolutely nothing. My resting heart rate is 63. I more than doubled it giving a presentation in my own house.

What makes that number worth writing about is everything that came before it, because I had done this exactly the way I know how to do it.

The night before.

Monday was a heavy lifting day, and that’s deliberate rather than coincidental. I put the heavy session the day before a hard day, partly because moving real weight makes me feel capable logging onto a call where people are going to ask hard questions, and partly because it turns the hard day itself into a recovery day. On the 19th it was bench, which has always been the lift that makes me feel like myself.

The rest of the evening gets built backward from a 4am alarm:

None of that is sophisticated. It’s mostly just removing reasons to fail at 4am, which is a time of day when I am not at my most resourceful.

The morning.

The actual preparation had happened over the weekend and the team had been aligned for days, which is the part that counts. Proper preparation prevents poor performance, and nearly everything you do in the final hour is theater you’re performing for yourself.

Then 8:02, and 133 beats per minute, standing perfectly still.

So the protocol didn’t work.

If the point of all that was to stand up calm, then the watch is telling me I failed. I had the sleep and the training and the water and the caffeine timing and the shower and a quarter’s worth of preparation behind me, and my body still looked at a slide deck and decided there was something in the room that wanted to eat me.

I’ve sat with that finding for a few days now, and I’ve come around to thinking it’s more useful than the version where a good morning routine produces serenity. The protocol doesn’t prevent the spike. As far as I can tell nothing available to me prevents the spike. What it seems to change, and I want to be clear that this is belief rather than data, is what I’m capable of after the spike has already happened.

Because the board meeting itself was never the hard part.

Everything after it is the hard part.

The board review runs three hours and I spend all of it presenting and defending, and when it ends I am emptied out in a specific way. Then the rest of the day has to happen anyway. My sales huddle lands immediately behind it, there are follow-ups and deliverables waiting, and at the end of all of it there’s a four-year-old and a one-year-old who have no idea what a quarterly review is and shouldn’t have to.

That stretch is what I’m actually managing for. Not the meeting. The eight hours after the meeting, and who shows up for them.

On an ordinary week my sales huddle has slides and a data review and a great deal of me talking. On board days I throw the script in the trash, and I tell the team I’m throwing it in the trash, because I want them to know the format changed on purpose. Then they get the microphone. We walk specific deals, they tell me what’s genuinely hard right now, and my only job for that hour is to listen well enough to be worth talking to.

It’s also the reason I eat earlier on these days instead of waiting. Forty to fifty grams of protein, low carb, somewhere around ten in the morning. I’m not eating for performance at that point, I’m eating so that I’m not hungry while somebody is telling me something difficult, because a hungry listener is a bad listener and I’ve been that person often enough to recognize him.

Why the listening part matters so much to me.

I learned this one the expensive way.

During my years at Vertosa we were in and around capital raises and board meetings, there was constant pressure to accelerate sales, deals weren’t converting the way anyone wanted, and I put a great deal of that on the product. My co-founders held a mirror up to me and I held it straight back at them, and it got contentious in the way those things do when everyone is tired and the stakes feel enormous.

The mirror I actually needed was pointed somewhere I didn’t want to look. I had reps who weren’t performing and I was protecting them instead of having honest conversations with them, and I covered the gap by going out and selling everything myself. I ended up as the number one salesperson at a company where my job was supposed to be building salespeople.

I was also, in that stretch, a guy with no children who was hard on a co-founder with a young family, because I had no way of imagining what he was carrying home at night. Years later, after I’d lived it myself, I apologized to him in a one-on-one.

So when I clear the calendar after that huddle and drive to my daughter’s school, it isn’t a wellness tactic I picked up somewhere. It’s something I’m still paying back.

On the 20th that meant a thirty minute walk in the sun, then school pickup, then lunch at home with my daughter, my son and my wife, with my phone somewhere else entirely. Ninety minutes. Afterward I went back and worked through the board follow-ups while the kids napped, and I was back at it again after bedtime, because these are ten and twelve hour days and I’d rather tell you that than pretend the walk is the whole story.

What happens when the routine breaks down.

That’s the day where it works. I should tell you about the days where none of it happens, because I have a control condition and it isn’t flattering to me.

Some mornings I sleep through the alarm. Some mornings my body is too beaten up to get moving and I go straight from bed to the desk, and the whole sequence collapses before it starts. On those days I don’t get tired. I get irritable. Short with people, sharp in the way that cuts, annoyed by things that have done nothing to deserve it, and reliably worse as the day goes on. Eight hours of spreadsheets and video calls later, the version of me that’s still at the desk is not someone I’d want to work for.

My mother spotted this pattern decades before I did. She warned my wife about it before we were married, and her instruction was simple: if Austin is irritable, ask him when he last worked out, and if it’s been more than a couple of days, you’ve found your answer.

She’s right, and there’s something humbling about the most reliable finding in all my personal data having been identified by my mom without a single wearable device.

The fix doesn’t have to be the whole protocol either. Twenty minutes walking around the block and then washing my face has rescued more days than I can count.

But some days you can’t walk it off.

Which brings me to the two bottles on my counter, and to the day after the board meeting.

The 20th went well. The 21st came apart. Both kids woke up sick, my wife was sick, every board follow-up landed at once, and by the middle of the afternoon I was trying to work while a four-year-old and a one-year-old screamed at each other in my house. There was no walk available. There was no twenty minutes. There was a man at a desk listening to two small people in genuine distress and feeling every one of those cries land somewhere behind his sternum.

That’s when I went and got the holy basil.

I want to handle this part carefully, because this is exactly where most people writing about supplements start making things up, and I’d rather show you the label than tell you a story about my cortisol.

Gaia Herbs Holy Basil Leaf. One capsule per serving:

Gaia Herbs Turmeric Supreme Extra Strength. One capsule per serving:

Two observations from somebody who reads these panels for a living. The dry herb equivalent on the holy basil is genuinely useful information and more than most labels bother to give you. And that 363mg is a proprietary blend, which means the components aren’t broken out, so the only number anyone is actually accountable for is 8.5mg of eugenols. I flagged this same structure on a box of tea a couple of weeks ago, and it applies just as much to a bottle I buy with my own money.

What interests me more is that these two bottles represent completely different decisions, and I only noticed that while writing this.

The turmeric I take consistently, and I take it for a specific physical reason I can point at. I’m forty, I lift heavy, I’m running again, and my joints tell me about it. There’s a named problem, a routine dose, and an outcome I’d notice over weeks.

The holy basil I reach for in chaos. There’s no schedule. There’s a moment where the house is coming apart and I want to do something, and reaching for that bottle is the something.

Those are not the same kind of decision, and the second one deserves more honesty than I usually see it given.

So here it is. Did it do anything on the 21st? I don’t know. Did I feel better? Maybe. Was that placebo? Probably. I took it anyway, and I’d take it again under the same circumstances.

That night I had the tea and the magnesium and the yogurt the way I always do, and Thursday turned out to be a much better day, and I genuinely cannot tell you which of those four things was responsible or whether any of them were.

I’m one person running an experiment with no control group, several variables moving at once, and a well-documented human tendency to feel better after doing something that feels like taking care of myself. I know what a defensible number looks like. That’s exactly why I’m not going to pretend I have one here.

What I can tell you is what’s printed on the label and what I actually do. Anyone telling you more than that about a 363mg proprietary blend is telling you something they don’t know.

Try this week.

Find your next genuinely hard day, the one already sitting on the calendar that you’re slightly tense about.

Then protect the two hours after it instead of the two hours before it. Nothing scheduled. A walk, some food, somebody whose company you enjoy.

Most of us prepare carefully for the event itself and then stack the rest of the day behind it as though the event were free, when the truth is that the spike is coming either way and the only thing you can really build is what you’re capable of once it’s passed.

And if you’re irritable today, go check when you last broke a sweat. My mother has been running that diagnostic for forty years and she has yet to be wrong.

What’s one advantage you could compound from here?

Hit reply and tell me. I read everything, and what you send shapes what I write next.

— Austin

Austin Stevenson is CRO at ACT Global Lab Services and a co-founder of Vertosa.