Introduction To Our Technology
If the COVID-19 pandemic has shone a light on anything, it is the importance of our health. More than ever, we want to be proactive. We want to feel in control. We want to be in the driver’s seat of our well-being, and have peace of mind that we are doing the right things to look after our physical and mental health. To do this, we need personalised data. We need insight into how our own body and brain are responding to daily stressors and different lifestyle factors.
Neuroscience provides us with this personalised data and insight. While there are many biomarkers you can measure, only a few give you true advantage day-to-day. Neuroscience is one of those. Neuroscience explores interactions between the nervous system with other networks in the body – such as the immune system, the cardiovascular system, and centres of the brain driving our productivity, emotions and behaviour.
You can think of the nervous system like a satellite in space, orbiting the earth. It receives information, analyses it, and relays a response. In our case, organ systems send information up to the brain about our moment to moment health needs, the brain deciphers what we need, and the response adjusts the activity of core physiological systems.
This two-way communication process between the body and the brain is happening every millisecond of every day with one goal in mind: to help you respond to demands being imposed on you and then return you to physiological balance as soon as possible. This state of internal balance is called homeostasis and is central to our physical and mental health.
Now, imagine if you could measure your levels of homeostasis. Imagine knowing each morning, just after waking up, if the body and brain are in balance. Imagine being able to see proactively when you are responding well to your lifestyle or need to make a change to protect your wellbeing and performance.
This is what you are doing when you use 360 each day. We created this technology back in 2016 supported by over 1500 research papers from evidence-based medicine and years of experience coaching professional athletes and high-performers. Our mission was simple. We wanted to provide our clientele with a cutting-edge technology that would enable them to look after their health, energy and performance, wherever they were in the world.
For example, our athletes travel the globe and we cannot be with them all the time. So between clinic testing and all the health and performance metrics we collect when we are together, it became important we understood how our athletes were adapting daily to jet lag, workload and the pressures of competition on the world stage.
We, therefore, asked the question: what is the single most useful biomarker that quantifies activity of both the body and the brain which empowers a person to take control of their health and productivity? Neuroscience was the answer.
We also believe that you are the expert on you. As such, on top of the neurophysiological markers in 306, we wanted to build technology that encouraged you to self-reflect on your lifestyle, think about factors affecting your wellbeing, and nudge helpful habits in the right direction. The result is what you have in your hands today; an elegant, accurate and integrated technology to care for your health and performance.
Each day you check-in you complete a simple, but very powerful approach to sustainable high performance. You measure how you are feeling about your lifestyle (subjective scores), how you are adapting to your lifestyle (objective scores), and what factors you think might be involved (tags and journal). 360 then gives you personalized insight to help you get the most from your day-to-day life.
This approach can be a game-changer for all of us in our physical, mental, and emotional health. 360 enables you to be preventative in your approach to managing stress and life-load because know ahead of time each morning when to push and when to protect resources. The technology enables you to personalise your approach to training, nutrition and lifestyle management by surfacing insight into what works for you. Our passion is to ultimately give you peace of mind and control of your health because you get to make positive and personalised decisions in your well-being each day.
This proactive, preventative, and personalised approach sits at the core of 360’s technology and philosophy, and it is why we invested in neuroscience. Rather than an app or wearable giving you lag markers on what you have done that day in your health (sleep, steps, calories, and training), 360 gives you guidance on what you need that day. This insight is powered by AI and machine learning and based on high-quality science from thousands of papers from evidence-based medicine.
Neuroscience is beautiful, and a fantastic opportunity for each of us to live our best life.
The 360 Health & Performance Method
Measure
Capture proactive insight quickly and accurately.
Personalise
Adjust your lifestyle based on your personal needs.
Improve
Master your lifestyle and improve your wellbeing.
Prevent
Identify imbalances early and correct course.
Enhance
Enhance your physical, mental and emotional health.
Relax
Take control of your health and gain peace of mind.
The Nervous System in Health & Performance
You now know why we built 360, and why we looked to neuroscience as our digital biomarker of choice. To help you understand your scores in the bigger picture, let’s talk about the autonomic nervous system in a little more detail.
If there is one thing you remember in this post, it is the importance of homeostasis. Every cell, pathway, and system in your body is hardwired for health. One of the key ways this is achieved is through the maintenance of physiological balance – homeostasis. When you are exposed to acute demands, the body mobilises resources to help you survive the moment, and then it seeks to return you homeostasis.
When we are healthy, we can adapt to large acute stressors and then return back to normal physiology quickly. We are adaptive. A metaphor for this is a tree moving around in a storm. When the winds come in and the rain is howling, trees need to be resilient enough to stay in the ground, but flexible enough to adapt to the environment. Similarly, the tallest buildings in the world move in the wind. They are resilient and stable but adapt to the environment.
As human beings, we are brilliantly designed for acute stress. Faced by a lion in the savannah, our ANS has been hardwired over several millennia to quickly and effectively activate the sympathetic nervous system (SNS). The job of the SNS is to mobilise resources so that we can fight the lion or flee as fast as possible.
To do this, the SNS increases your resting heart rate, drives up glucose levels in the blood, and shunts blood away from organs, such as the digestive system, to the muscles of the arms and legs so that we can respond rapidly and survive the moment. Problems occur when that stress response is activated too much too frequently. Those same mechanisms that save us in the short-term become drivers of disease in the long-term when chronically activated. Think hypertension, type II diabetes and digestive disorders.
This is also why we age rapidly with excess stress. When the brain thinks there is a lion in your life everywhere you go, the SNS is activated too much. This is catabolic, breaking the body down and causing wear and tear on both the body and the brain. With chronic activation of the stress response, we also experience blunted regenerative activity of the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS). That’s why under stress you look like death warmed up, can feel achy and fatigued for no obvious reason, and do not respond as well to hard exercise.
This physiological response to chronic stress makes sense when you think about it. Facing life or death scenarios, our SNS shuts down regenerative activity and long-term building projects because the priority is to survive the day. As Robert Sapolsky so beautifully puts it in his classic book ‘Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers‘:
“If there is a tornado bearing down on the house, this isn’t the day to repaint the kitchen.”
The PNS is responsible for our recovery, regeneration and rebalancing activities in the body. It helps us return to homeostasis once the stress has passed. The parasympathetic nervous system is vital not just for regulating renewal in the body, but it influences brain health too. Emotional health, flexibility in thinking, problem-solving and cognitive health are hugely influenced by homeostasis.
Research shows that low levels of parasympathetic activity are linked to low levels of prefrontal cortex activity in the brain. The prefrontal cortex is vital for emotional intelligence, working memory, wisdom and self-regulation in our thoughts and behaviours. It acts as a brake on the amygdala on the brain, which forms part of the ancient limbic system that processes emotions and focuses on survival.
The amygdala has a negativity bias by default. This is an evolutionary response to humans constantly scanning the environment for danger and threats over thousands of years. Left unchecked by the prefrontal cortex, our mental and emotional health seriously deteriorates. This is why low parasympathetic tone is a predictor of depression, anxiety and PTSD.
The flipside is also true. When we are maintaining homeostasis, we have sufficient activity of both the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system to drive optimal health and performance across the board.
Now you can to see why the nervous system is so helpful in looking after our wellbeing and productivity.
Easy. Accurate. Insightful.
Ease: We make it simple to get insightful data. Instead of having to wear a widget all day, we only need you to wear a sensor for 90 seconds at the start of your day.
Accuracy: We use direct ECG data plus a huge amount of science behind the scenes to ensure your parasympathetic scores are as accurate as possible.
Insight: We use AI and machine learning to generate proactive insight you can use to adjust your day and master your wellbeing.
The 360 Scoring Continuum
Now that you understand just how valuable it is to focus on homeostasis in your overall health, let’s share with you how this relates back to the 0-10 objective scoring continuum you see in 360 each day.
When you check-in on 360, we utilise the Polar ECG sensor to extract raw data and quantify your level of homeostasis upon waking. Scoring is always between 0-10. It is worth emphasising that this scoring continuum is not subjective, random or arbitrary. With some health technology providers, you may not know if the scoring is accurate nor if the scoring system refers back to a wide distribution of people across the spectrum of health.
To build this scoring system we spent an inordinate amount of time looking independent clinical data covering tens of thousands of people. These individuals covered a wide spectrum of health; from high-performing professional athletes at the peak of their fitness to patients with various types of chronic illness. We used this to create the 0-10 scoring system used in 360, thereby giving you context on your scores.
Raw Data: As you know, the objective check-in uses a Polar sensor. 360 uses this to extract a range of raw data covering several types of heart metrics over your 90-seconds of mindfulness. This data includes resting heart rate but it also includes heart rate variability metrics. We use Polar because it is easy to use and one of the most well-validated tools in the research for collecting accurate ECG data. 360 takes your raw data, applies various algorithms to ensure accuracy, and turns it into a morning objective wellness score.
Conversion: The analysis, filtering, and scoring we use at 360 are born out of clinical research from evidence-based medicine. This technical information sounds like a nerdy throwaway comment, but it is something you need to know. A lot of wearable technology quantifies your well-being based on their research, not impartial peer-reviewed research. Over 2500 external research papers have gone into 360, and we have done our best to take the complex and make it simple and easy for you.
Objective Score: You will get a score between 0-10 in your objective wellness. The score is derived from heart rate variability metrics and represents the level of activity of the parasympathetic nervous system. If you remember, the parasympathetic nervous system is responsible for driving “recovery, rebalancing and regeneration” in the body.
PNS Fluctuation Level: In 360, you will see us refer to “PNS Fluctuation Level”. This refers to the level of change in your objective scores, your parasympathetic activity. If you remember, we said that the body likes to live in homeostasis. If objective scores are changing a lot each day, the percentage will go up. This tells you that the nervous system is working very hard to restore homeostasis in response to stress and life-load. This is fine in the short-term, but you do not want a high percentage score in the long-term because a constant battle to get you back into balance is very fatiguing for the body and brain.
Autonomic Balance: You will also see we refer to the term “autonomic balance” in 360. This is the same as your objective wellness score but is a more accurate term scientifically-speaking. Your score of 0-10 is an index of parasympathetic activity upon waking. It tells you how much “recovery, rebalancing and regeneration” is happening in this resting state after sleep. Low scores (<3.5) indicates low parasympathetic tone – blunted recovery and more cumulative stress on the system. Elevated scores (>9.2) indicate elevated parasympathetic tone – an excessive push to drive recovery and restore homeostasis.
The goal for you is not the highest objective score possible. The goal is autonomic balance; a dynamic balance of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity. This is homeostasis in action, and the quicker you can return to homeostasis after acute stress, the more resilient your brain and body are.
Understanding Scores: It is normal for your scores to drop in response to stress. Indeed, you would expect this. As the body mobilises resources to help you through the storm, regenerative parasympathetic is blunted. That’s why when scores drop acutely on one day, or drop over time, you will want to help the body and brain return to balance through restorative healthy habits, such as high-quality nutrition, hydration, sleep, easy exercise, mindfulness and stress management. This helps buffer the body against stress and “flip the switch” in the nervous system towards homeostasis. You might also see a spike in your scores on occasions too, above your normal or population data (>9.2). When this happens, those same strategies (high-quality nutrition, hydration, sleep, easy exercise, mindfulness and stress management) will help you regain physiological balance and homeostasis.
Health and high performance is a dance between pushing limits and deep recovery. This is true whether you are an elite athlete in sport or high performer in business. Use 360 to measure where you are, learn wellness strategies that work for you and improve your health and performance. This is an ongoing feedback loop where you toggle between stress and recovery to live your best and reach your potential.
Made with ❤️ by the team at 360 Health & Performance™