Whoop Stress Monitor

More: Detailed Whoop 4 Band Review

Hot on the heels of a revamped app dashboard and home screen, WHOOP has added a significant new stress monitor feature.

There is even more new stuff to come from Whoop this year, but today is the day of the stress monitor.

Stress Monitor – More Info

Stress can significantly impact your physical and mental well-being, including your strain, sleep, and recovery. With WHOOP’s Stress Monitor feature, you can keep a close eye on your daily stress levels and improve your overall performance.

So, how does it work?

A: By measuring your heart rate and HRV and comparing it to your baseline, Stress Monitor provides you with a real-time stress score ranging from 0 to 3. Depending on your score, you can choose from two science-backed breathwork sessions developed in partnership with Dr. Andrew Huberman.

What do the sessions do

Unsurprisingly, one session has low-frequency deep breathing and the other higher frequency more shallow breathing. The former is said to lower stress and the latter to make you more alert. It pretty much IS that simple.

Note: Resonant breathing is an interesting, personalised concept where you can test how your HRV reacts to different breathing frequencies. You should find that a certain frequency gives the lowest HRV. WHOOP does NOT do that…and I thought its science-based techniques should.

I was pretty chilled out when I tried these two sessions. The relaxation session didn’t lower my HRV but the alert one definitely increased it! On previous occasions when I’ve practised lower frequency breathing it clearly has lowered my HRV.

 

Thoughts

I’m not sure of the usefulness of tracking stress throughout the day. Sure, it looks good in an app but I’m not entirely sure about the science behind it in general across the industry. Although people love to know how stressed they might be and to have that information to hand 24×7 must be a good thing…right?!

Despite the lack of resonant breathing, WHOOP’s breathing exercises seem to offer little more than those offered by Apple, Fitbit and all the rest. It’s a #Shrug moment of catch-up awesomeness.

In summary, however, people want this and will be happy they got it. A little chilled, me-time to relax and take a 3-minute breath also must be a good thing.