The HRV Paradox: Why Tracking Your Sleep Makes It Worse

In this episode of the Health Optimization Medicine Podcast, Dr. Scott Sherr, Dr. Ted Achacoso, Jodi Duval, and Boomer Anderson explore:

• Why can constantly tracking HRV, sleep scores, and recovery metrics create anxiety that ultimately worsens sleep quality?
• What is orthosomnia, and how can an overreliance on wearable devices disconnect us from our body's natural feedback systems?
• How do chronobiology, the autonomic nervous system, and cellular metabolism work together to regulate healthy sleep and recovery?
• Why does Health Optimization Medicine prioritize measuring intracellular deficiencies, toxicities, and metabolic health rather than relying solely on wearable data?
• How can practical strategies such as sleep anchoring, reducing nighttime light exposure, and using wearable data intentionally help restore healthier sleep patterns?

What We Discuss:

00:00 - You Are Outsourcing Your Intuition
00:58 - Introduction: The $64,000 Sleep Tracking Question
01:41 - The Modern Obsession with HRV & Wearables
04:36 - The Paradox of HRV: Low Scores & The Cell Danger Response
06:16 - The Problem with Generic Lifestyle Advice & Sedatives
09:45 - The Protocol: Ripping the Band-Aid Off (Removing Trackers)
11:28 - Precision Supplements: Magnesium, Tart Cherry Juice & Honey
13:03 - The "Do This on Monday" Protocol: Inverting Your Calendar
14:37 - Biological Information vs. Illumination (Blue Light)
15:47 - Steel Manning the Argument: When Are Sleep Trackers Useful?
18:29 - Final Takeaways: Hiding Scores & Intracellular Optimization
19:59 - Dr. Ted's Sleep Anchoring Technique & Salutogenesis

Full Transcript:

[00:00:00] Dr. Ted Achacoso: If you're staring at the digital ring or wristband every morning to tell you whether you slept well, you have outsourced your body's most basic intuitive feedback loop to a proprietary algorithm. When you wake up and let a red line on a screen dictate your mood, you aren't optimizing health. You are cultivating autonomic anxiety. Your cells do not read scores. They read biochemical markers of safety.

[00:00:20] Dr. Scott Sherr: And welcome back, everybody. This is the Health Optimization Medicine Podcast. My name is Dr. Scott Sherr. We have Jodi with us, Jodi Duval, Dr. Ted Achacoso, and Boomer Anderson. And today the question is: why does tracking your HRV make most people sleep worse? And in the next 20 minutes or so, you'll get the mechanism, the protocol, and one thing most practitioners get wrong about it. So let's go here. So let's start with the $64,000 question, everybody. Every single wellness enthusiast in 2026 is wearing some kind of ring.

[00:00:50] Boomer Anderson: Scott, how many different devices do you have on right now?

[00:00:55] Dr. Scott Sherr: Just seventeen. Just seventeen. How about you, Boomer?

[00:01:00] Boomer Anderson: Mm. I've got two that are visible and then the third I'll take a guess where that one is.

[00:01:06] Dr. Scott Sherr: Are you measuring penile tumescence in the evenings? That's trendy, you know? So I know everybody's obsessed with all these markers, right? Heart rate, heart rate variability, VO2 max, and you know, et cetera, et cetera. And so what do you think about all this, Jodi? I mean, this is kind of a crazy time.

[00:01:25] Boomer Anderson: Mm-hmm. It's trendy right now.

[00:01:28] Jodi Duval: Major.

[00:01:30] Jodi Duval: Yep. We wake up, we look at a machine, we look at an algorithm and we think, "Are we feeling okay today?" Instead of going, "Right, check in, let's look at this." So, you know, the HRV, if we see that or if we see our deep sleep or our REM is lower than a specific percentage, then we freak out and then go and change everything. Yeah, exactly. So...

[00:01:50] Dr. Scott Sherr: Yeah. No, it can't be. I got to bed at the right time, but I still didn't get my REM.

[00:01:58] Jodi Duval: They can be markers, but you know, I think it is stressing everyone out a bit.

[00:02:05] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Well, for those of you who take prescription sodium oxybate, right? If you see you have very good deep sleep, then that's all that you look for.

[00:02:15] Boomer Anderson: Yeah, and I think I wanna... Yeah. So one thing I want to jump in here is talk a little bit about HRV in today's conversation. So HRV being the space or distance between each heartbeat. And you know, one of the things about having low HRV, if you're one of those people that has orthosomnia or whatever the latest trendy term is to describe the obsession with it, is that a low HRV can ruin your day. So Dr. Ted, let's go into kind of the paradox that comes with this modern day space that everybody likes to call biohacking.

[00:02:45] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Yes, remember that multi-billion dollar sleep tracking economy is what they call this. I don't know, I'll lose sleep over it. It actually has coincided with an unprecedented rise in sleep anxiety and chronic insomnia because it's causing orthosomnia. And prevention is still disease-centered; optimization, however, is health-centered.

[00:03:05] Boomer Anderson: Are you gonna buy the Oura IPO?

[00:03:08] Dr. Scott Sherr: Yeah. Funny enough.

[00:03:12] Dr. Ted Achacoso: The $64,000 question is, why has sleep tracking made our sleep quality worse, and how do we restore intuitive chronobiology?

[00:03:22] Dr. Scott Sherr: Yeah, I think this is as you were talking about Boomer, I think we should define HRV even a little bit more than you did, right? So if you listen to somebody's heartbeat and they have a normal heartbeat, it should sound regular, right? But there's still a beat-to-beat variation between each heartbeat you can't hear with a stethoscope. And that beat-to-beat variation is what you call your HRV. And the more HRV you have, the better your balance between your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. The less HRV you have, the worse it is, the more stressed you are. And I think people... I was actually initially paradoxical to me. I think if you have higher HRV that'd be bad. But higher HRV is actually, I think most people now know, is good. But this is very person-to-person dependent. And I think that's an important part of this as well.

[00:04:15] Jodi Duval: And it can also be the fact that you wake up and you are unwell or you're, you know, not feeling good, or you've been woken by your children in the middle of the night. So when you wake up and see that low recovery score, you know, that infamous algorithm-caused recovery score, your prefrontal cortex then interprets that as another threat. And we've got so many threats in this world. And this activates your HPA axis or your hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. And then we actually get more release of the cortisol and epinephrine than we would normally be having. So we're already in critical mode and threat mode as soon as we wake up.

[00:04:55] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Yes, it's actually, as Jodi said, it raises your heart rate, constricts your blood vessels, flattens out your diurnal cortisol curve just by looking at your fucking data. It's just like getting an erection while watching porn. It's the same thing. But at least the erection part is parasympathetic. And this is actually sympathetic.

[00:05:15] Boomer Anderson: Hmm.

[00:05:17] Jodi Duval: Same thing.

[00:05:19] Dr. Scott Sherr: Wait, I was about to say isn't an erection parasympathetic? Yeah, there we go. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:05:25] Boomer Anderson: Ha ha ha.

[00:05:28] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Okay. So, but when you stress about your HRV score, then you're biochemically driving your body deeper into sympathetic dominance, which guarantees another night of fragmented sleep. It's self-fulfilling, it's a device-induced loop. And evolutionarily, really guys, we started off with parasympathetic, right? The cell was all liquid and parasympathetic, the development of the nervous system that had a sympathetic branch actually occurred much later, especially in chordates and those chordates that were able to traverse land.

[00:06:10] Boomer Anderson: All right, Scott, what's the problem with all of the lifestyle advice around this stuff?

[00:06:18] Dr. Scott Sherr: Yeah, I mean it's like it's common, even though you love your caffeine Boomer, like you shouldn't have it before you go to bed. Reduce it, right? Get a better mattress, as Dr. Ted said. We spend one-third of our life on these things, so we should have a good one.

[00:06:38] Boomer Anderson: It's definitely not one-thirtieth, I hope.

[00:06:42] Dr. Scott Sherr: The problem with this is that if you're just using lifestyle advice without precision medicine, then you really don't have any markers to kind of guide you, you know, and you're just like kind of shooting in the dark at what might help. But certain things you know will help, like spending more time in bed will help in general rather than spending less time. But that's not the only thing, of course.

[00:07:15] Jodi Duval: Yeah. Yeah. So and then we've got, you know, conventional medicine, so we've got lifestyle advice that we can be looking at for sleep, obviously. But then, you know, and supporting sleep in that way. But then the conventional medicine we look at normally supporting that sleep anxiety. And it's not a sleep aid or a sleep inducer. It's actually a sedative and the sleep medications that they use. So it's actually suppressing the brain activity. But they are not increasing or supporting the sleep architecture with what we want to be looking at. They block the deep slow wave sleep and the REM sleep. And so we are not rested. We're metabolically unrested.

[00:07:55] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Well, people have to realize that sleep has very many different factors to it. You have an increase in sleep drive that you need to create, right? And so, you tire out during the day, you work out and so on, and then you have to induce sleep. When you're finally asleep, you have to induce sleep, and then you have to maintain sleep to prevent wake-up due to sleep, so you actually wake up refreshed. There are many hormonal and nutritional factors that go into this, right? So it's a highly coordinated cellular timing event with precise biochemical and biophysical safety signals. And when you look at this, the body is really only able to sleep when it feels safe. And therefore that ties us out to what's called the cell danger response 1, which is if you don't remove what's stressing you out from your sleep, like for example, taking out a snoring partner from a room because you can't sleep because of the...

[00:08:50] Dr. Scott Sherr: I knew you were gonna go there.

[00:08:54] Boomer Anderson: Yeah. How many times have we heard Dr. Ted's favorite detox is divorce? And that includes sleep divorce.

[00:09:02] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Sleep divorce.

[00:09:04] Dr. Scott Sherr: At least a sleep divorce to start. You know, if that doesn't work then, you know.

[00:09:12] Dr. Ted Achacoso: So, you know, if you don't remove the toxic stimulus, then it actually will never work, right? So the inflammation will go. And we know that lack of sleep actually induces brain inflammation. And it also, you know, actually makes you consume a lot more food, like 10% more food if you're sleep deprived. And then you start complaining that you're gaining weight, right?

[00:09:35] Dr. Scott Sherr: Totally. Yeah. I remember this during medical school. It's classic during medical school, right? You're up in the middle of the night at two o'clock in the morning, you are just freaking starving. And no matter what is in that ER refrigerator, even if it might be two days old, you might go for it just because you're so hungry.

[00:09:55] Boomer Anderson: Mm. And it's usually not paleo, I can tell you that. All right. So guys, let's all get into the protocol now. So what's the protocol here? How do we reduce this device induced anxiety and restore true chronobiology?

[00:10:15] Jodi Duval: Well, you know, the common sense would be to actually not wear these devices. But I think it's not about not wearing them and not using them. I think it's using them for a good purpose. But sometimes a reset might be needed. So you might want to be able to take them off for a week or two and learn what it feels like, you know, rip the band-aid off and actually get that feeling of having to listen to yourself and tune into yourself for the inner measurables and breaking that psychological loop. So and then just relearning that aspect and then bring it in to be able to look at key parts of data or some changes that you're trying to make on other protocols.

[00:11:05] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Well. Next, we actually need to take a look at cellular data. We're data-driven in health optimization medicine and practice. So run comprehensive clinical metabolomics tests. Look at the organic acids like kynurenic acid or kynurenate, which actually would signal brain inflammation, your lactate to pyruvate ratio, which actually signifies how well you're using your fuel. And that's to check if your brain's energy pathways are functioning and if there's any inflammation. So, and the conversion of tryptophan to melatonin, of course you need fucking vitamin B6 in there. These are simple things that you can measure, right? And you can actually, even without any wearable, you can actually see if a person is sleep deprived and what the effects of sleep are.

[00:12:00] Dr. Scott Sherr: Yeah, I mean, this is a really good point, right? So we can now go from testing to actually correcting, which is the next step, right? Which is addressing deficiencies. And some of these are pretty common in the US population, especially magnesium. Magnesium, I think like 70 to 90 percent of US adults are magnesium deficient. And magnesium has a lot of different roles in the body. One of them is to work on the GABA system, basically making your glutamate receptors less active and optimizing your GABA system. So you want to get good magnesium. There's different types. Everybody has their favorite type. Now you get supplements with like ten different types of magnesium that I think Boomer takes on a regular basis. You have glycinate, you have threonate, you have malate. I mean, what's your favorite magnesium guys at this point? Does anybody have a favorite?

[00:12:55] Boomer Anderson: Taurate. But I use a combination of them just because you never want to be left out, right?

[00:13:02] Dr. Scott Sherr: Yeah, you've done it.

[00:13:05] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Yes, I do a combination of three, which includes threonate, malate, and glycinate.

[00:13:12] Dr. Scott Sherr: Yeah, and glycine, remember, also has glycine in there, which is an amino acid that's also calming as well. So I know Jodi, you're a big fan of the tart cherry juice, aren't you?

[00:13:25] Boomer Anderson: Such a big fan, Jodi, are you a big fan? Yeah.

[00:13:30] Jodi Duval: I like making gummies out of it. The tart cherry juice, yeah, so you can make some yummy gummies out of it. That's good. Yeah.

[00:13:40] Boomer Anderson: Mm. So not a whole gallon of tart cherry juice with excess sugar before bed, huh?

[00:13:46] Jodi Duval: No, no, no. So...

[00:13:49] Dr. Ted Achacoso: So, Boomer, tell me what is the Do This on Monday protocol.

[00:13:55] Boomer Anderson: Well, I mean, Dr. Ted, the do this on Monday protocol is funny enough, your sleep anchoring technique. I think we live in an awesome modern day society that prioritizes everything but sleep. We want to be constantly on. And the fact is, is that the recovery equals the stimulus, right? And so one thing that people can start to prioritize is sleep in their lives and that really starts with kind of inverting your calendar. I actually haven't figured out how to do this in Google Calendar yet, guys, but starting your day with sleep. So prioritizing like, hey, my day starts at, let's say my bedtime's 9:30 p.m., my day starts there and making sure that I have enough of a sleep window to get ideally seven to eight hours of sleep per night. You can also look at things like stopping eating three hours before bedtime. You do not need that tart cherry juice in a gallon glass before bed. In fact, that's a great way to give yourself diabetes. But you might want to also look at eliminating things like blue light. We're all people who love technology. Eliminating blue light before bed is actually becoming harder and harder to do. So covering yourself with things like blue light blockers, they're not meant for daytime, guys, despite what you see at a lot of conferences, but they are meant for the nighttime for those of us who like to work right up before going to bed.

[00:15:15] Dr. Ted Achacoso: And do remember, light is not just illumination, it's biological information.

[00:15:22] Dr. Scott Sherr: I wanna just put like a little sugar thing here for bedtime for some people actually. Like a little bit of honey, a little bit of honey can go a long way. Okay. And this is the reason why if you're hyper stressed all day and you're having a hard time, like a little bit of sugar...

[00:15:45] Boomer Anderson: Yeah, sorry, I was shitting on tart cherry juice and you have to bring me back. Bring me back.

[00:15:52] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Honey as in the honey produced by honey bees.

[00:15:58] Dr. Scott Sherr: Depends on the day. Depends on the day, right? So yes, that's a different part of the sleep cycle, right? Is the sleep challenges.

[00:16:08] Boomer Anderson: Honey is in the Mariah Carey song. Is Mariah Carey?

[00:16:14] Dr. Ted Achacoso: No, the bed is for sleep. You have the kitchen table for the rest.

[00:16:20] Dr. Scott Sherr: But no, a little bit of sugar can decrease your cortisol before you go to bed, increasing your GABA and getting you to go to bed with a little bit of insulin. So it can help.

[00:16:35] Boomer Anderson: Okay, I'm gonna rope us all back in here just a second. And we're gonna talk a little bit about... let's steel man this whole argument about sleep trackers. What's the strongest case for keeping them on? Jodi, over to you.

[00:16:50] Jodi Duval: Okay. Should we look at maybe that the data can be valuable, we need to teach how to use it. So I think that's the biggest thing. And then if we're looking at them every day and they're causing us anxiety to actually realize that that's not a good thing, maybe we need to be able to rethink the way that we're using them. So, you know, I think the biggest argument for them is that they can prove useful for things that I use them for specifically is when I'm trying to introduce something new. Either it's peptides or magnesium or increase my doses of magnesium or a sauna at night time. Yeah, tart cherry juice... so any of that or, you know, add a little bit of melatonin at nighttime, has that helped me has that not? So any of those sorts of strategies, that's how I use it and I think that's how we should be using it. And then knowing if we've done enough recovery in the days, do we need to make sure we're focusing on meditation, reducing exercise, et cetera. So it's more of a metric versus just telling us how we feel.

[00:18:05] Dr. Ted Achacoso: Well. That's an excellent point. I agree that aggregate long-term trends can be useful, but I disagree that these companies own your data, not you. That's fucking annoying, right? But as I said, the tool is only as good as the user's relationship with it. Like for example, I have a hate-hate relationship with mine and still I wear it, right? If tracking data causes orthosomnia and sympathetic dominance, then just take it off, right? For mindful tracking, then we use the wearable as a passive research tool rather than something that we can actually scream at every morning, like, "Why did I not sleep again?" But if you can discuss this with a practitioner, that would be great, right? And we should never let the daily morning score override our intuitive somatic experience.

[00:18:55] Boomer Anderson: So guys, let's wrap this up and do our take homes. Scott, first, you.

[00:19:00] Dr. Scott Sherr: Okay, so first take home here is that sleep devices can actually cause this thing that we're calling orthosomnia, right? Device-induced sleep anxiety that elevates cortisol and directly degrades sleep quality. Hide your daily scores to break the loop, meaning take breaks from them. You don't always have to know the first thing when you wake up what your score was. If you feel good, then go with it. If you feel bad, then go with it. There's nothing you can do about it except just go with it.

[00:19:40] Boomer Anderson: Go with it. Excellent, Jodi.

[00:19:44] Jodi Duval: Yep, and I think number two, so sleep is this metabolically active cellular timing event. So, you know, we need to be smart around this. It's not just a shutdown time, there is so much that happens in our sleep. So true optimization really requires addressing the intracellular deficiencies, toxicities, and we can be measuring that. And so we don't just need to be buying more sleep gadgets. We use those as a marker, but we can then measure all of the things that our body needs to have a proper sleep.

[00:20:15] Boomer Anderson: Jodi, how many sleep gadgets should a person have? I'm kidding.

[00:20:20] Jodi Duval: Well I've got one, so I think one.

[00:20:23] Dr. Ted Achacoso: No, one should try at least one gadget, which is a lucid dreaming gadget. Forget about other sleep gadgets, just try one.

[00:20:30] Boomer Anderson: So this episode is not DMT for sleep. But Dr. Ted, let's pass it over to you for number three.

[00:20:36] Dr. Ted Achacoso: So this is my sleep anchoring technique. Your day begins when you go to sleep. Use the sleep anchoring technique to protect your night and align your circadian light signals to entrain your natural biological clock. Meaning, if you place your sleep as the beginning of the day, then you're not going to skimp on it. But if you're gonna put it as the last activity, you're likely to skimp on it. Like, you know, I'll just continue on working until I finish it and then pretty soon it's dawn and you haven't had any sleep, right?

[00:21:05] Boomer Anderson: And how does this all relate to HOMeHOPe?

[00:21:08] Dr. Scott Sherr: Pathogenesis explains how biology breaks. And Salutogenesis asks how biology becomes coherent or in balance again. So let's return safety to ourselves, everybody. And this is really the one cent answer for this particular podcast. If this changed how you think about sleep, stress, or your wearables, send this episode to one person in your life who needs to hear it. Subscribe so you don't miss next week's episode. This week's featured product is Tro Zzz by Troscriptions, by the way. If you want to support your brain's nighttime program without relying on heavy sedatives or synthetic melatonin. Check it out. It's got eight ingredients. It's the most comprehensive formula on the planet for sleep at Troscriptions.com and use code POD10 at checkout to save ten percent. We'll see you all next Wednesday.

Find more from Health Optimization Medicine and Practice (HOMeHOPe):

Website: https://homehope.org/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/homehopeorg/
HOMeHOPe Conference 2026: https://homehope.org/homehope-conference-2026

Use PODCAST10 to get 10% OFF your purchase of the Clinical Metabolomics Module at https://homehope.org/products/clinical-metabolomics

Find more from Troscriptions:

Website: https://troscriptions.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/troscriptions/

Use POD10 to get 10% OFF your Troscriptions purchase at https://troscriptions.com/collections/our-products