My one goal for 2026
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[00:00:00] Hey, and welcome back. I'm Grandmaster Noël Studer and this is Next Level Chess podcast. And today I want to follow up on last week's episode. Last week, for those that didn't listen to it yet, I talked about my lessons from 2025. Actually, my one lesson, which is that most of these results oriented goals are kind of silly and I didn't achieve all three, but had a great year.

So I wanted to do something different this year. And I was thinking about what goal am I setting in 2026? And I came up with a single goal that I hope will be different. And the main idea is that this goal should be a means to an end. And so what does that mean? That means that by setting this [00:01:00] goal, I want to push myself to make more positive daily actions that actually help me feel better and be more of the person that I want to be.

And then, through these actions, I will achieve the goal. And also many other things in my life will be more positive. With the idea being that if I actually achieve that goal, it is implying that I had a good year.

So it should have an impact on everything.

By the way, if you're thinking now, well, why do you even set a goal? I think this is a very fair point. I think for many people it might be good to just focus on their daily actions and just say, okay, I'll not have a bigger kind of goal. What happens for me is, I'm competitive and I like these kind of big picture thinking things.

So I feel like having a good goal and sharing it, especially with many people, privately and now also publicly, it puts a little bit of a pressure on me that hopefully is positive [00:02:00] that pressure should push me to do the daily actions, even when I don't feel so much like it. So that's the idea of setting the goal.

But obviously if I could do the positive actions that I wanna do every single day without setting a goal, that's also great. And this episode will be a little bit different because it's a deep dive into this goal that I'm setting, which has honestly not much to do with chess. But I hope that it gives you a process to walk through if you think about your own goals, if you want to revise them, if you want to set new ones.

And on top of it, if it inspires only one of you guys listening to take better care of their health and reduce stress and just enjoy the year more on a daily basis, I definitely think that episode was worth it. So here is my single goal for 2026, which is: I wanna double my average heart rate variability.

So now you might think, [00:03:00] what the hell is even heart rate variability? So let's go into this and then I'll come back to why this is so important for me, why I think it is a different goal, why I think it's only a means to an end and not an end of itself. And why achieving that goal means I will have better health.

I will be probably happier. Hopefully happier. Not that I'm unhappy, but just having even better mood on a daily basis and has a positive impact even on my business and everything else. So what is HRV?

Here is what the Harvard Health Publishing has to say about it. As I understand, Harvard Health Publishing is the public facing blog of the Harvard School. HRV is simply a measure of the variation in between each heartbeat. This variation is controlled by a primitive part of the nervous system called the autonomic nervous system based on data gathered from many people.

If the system is in more of a fight or [00:04:00] flight mode, the variation between subsequent heartbeats tends to be lower. If the system is in more relaxed state, the variation between beats may be higher. End of quote. And what's good here is I have been tracking my heart rate variability or HRV through the Oura ring for the past five years.

So I have a very good baseline that I can track on, and I know that I am definitely on the low end. And I also have observed that HRV, when it's low, it corresponds to more stress, more fatigue, bad habits and was a result probably, I don't have the numbers before my traumatic brain injury, but it's very likely that due to my traumatic brain injury, 'cause all of these kind of things, stress, fatigue, bad habits are increased since then.

It had a big impact on it, so it lowered down. And just to make it clear, I also talked with doctors, therapists and people that are very well informed about [00:05:00] heart rate variability. So I feel well informed to pick such a health goal. I just wanna say this very clearly because if we set a certain health goal, maybe even, you just write with AI and have a an idea of what you wanna achieve.

I think it's better to talk to someone who really knows about the things to make sure that it's not fri right. Again, in my last year, I set this pace for the half marathon and what happened is I overtrained, so it wasn't actually healthy for some time to train for a half marathon, but instead it was unhealthy.

You don't wanna get into this situation. So this is also just a inspiration and HRV is extremely personal. It depends on your baseline. So it's not like I'm saying, Hey, everybody should increase their HRV. That's definitely not what I'm trying to say here. This is not medical advice.

This is just for inspiration purposes only.

So as of setting this goal, [00:06:00] my average HRV was 38 ms. I think that stands for milliseconds, but I'm not sure honestly. But that's the number and number should go up. So the goal is that by the end of 2026, I have an average HRV of 76. And HRV is measured with this Oura ring, this tracking device that I wear.

It's measured as an average, right? So it's not one day and I'll be successful. But it's a need to consistently build up my habits so that in December for four weeks or whatever, it's averaging around 76, and that would mean that I achieved my goal.

And why I think this is such a good goal is because of four points. Basically, it forces me to pick up healthy habits. We'll talk about this soon. It is easily measurable. Well, because I have the Oura ring, because I measured it already. That's super important with a goal that we can measure it because if it's just feeling based, it's really tricky.

Achieving it means better [00:07:00] health and it will have a positive impact on everything else that I try to do. And better health usually has a positive impact, but I will also go deeper into this. This number going up is really something that also helps my business. So I don't need to specifically set a business goal because, well, if I achieve this, then probably, as I'm motivated and I like creating content, I like helping people.

I would just do a better job at helping people. So that will already result in better results, and that's what matters, right?

So here is why increasing this HRV will force me to have more positive habits because, well, based on my current understanding, better HRV really, really aligns with a lot of good habits that I want to implement, but I'm not really maybe consistent on a daily basis or a weekly basis to actually implement.

And what it really means is, if you have a higher heart rate variability, then you can switch quicker [00:08:00] from different modes. You can switch quicker from a really hard training session to relaxing. You can switch quicker from having a stressful workday to relaxing. You can switch quicker from being two weeks in holidays to then three days pushing hard in sports or business or whatever.

And that's just a better experience in general. It's easier to wind down after work. It is easier to sleep well even if you did exercise maybe later in the day. So there are really a lot of positive impact from that. And mostly because of my traumatic brain injury, I get stuck in fight or flight often, and that means that I'm ruminating a lot, I have some anxiety.

I'm thinking about business when I would really like to relax. So there are a lot of things that aren't super positive on a daily basis. Even if it pushes you to think more about business and maybe you have more ideas and [00:09:00] whatsoever, but that's not how I want to work, right? I don't want to be with my head in work 24/7. Instead, I would like to have good moments where I actually work, when I do my things, just as I teach for chess improvement, right?

You wanna have your two hours or one hour or whatever it is, schedule your training and then you wanna stop thinking about chess improvement and just enjoy your life. That is the same thing for me with my business and with other things as well.

And I also have the comparison to my wife, Alessia. Now this is super important. Again, it's very individual. This number doesn't mean that higher is always better because it depends. Some people have a lower baseline just in general. But Alessia has a very high heart rate variability. I think sometimes it goes above a hundred, or maybe the average is above a hundred.

I'm not exactly sure, but it's a huge difference. A huge, huge difference. And we can observe that she's way better at changing modes. So going from, oh, I thought about business to now, boom, now I'm present privately with you. She's much, much better at this and also recharging from sports or maybe from bad [00:10:00] sleep sometimes, and so on.

So we really feel it in a day-to-day basis that her ability to change modes to go out of fight or flight is way better than mine and I would love to get closer to where she is because it seems like a funnier way to live on a day-to-day basis.

And so here are a few things that I want to improve just in general, and that I need to improve if I want to double my HRV. So it's reducing stress, it's taking breaks. Well, that helps reducing stress, right? Healthy nutrition. Here, especially, for example, alcohol, too much coffee and all of these things have a bad impact on your HRV.

So proper hydration, not too many, what I call fond drinks, which is really just sugary drinks. Sun exposure in the morning, regular exercise, meditation, breathing techniques, cold exposure, the list goes on. But these are really things that I already experienced that I enjoy doing, or maybe I don't [00:11:00] enjoy doing is maybe the wrong way to say it, because if I would love doing them, then it would be easier to do it.

But when I do them afterwards, I feel better in general. That's the key thing. And so I want to do more of these. But they are usually hard. It's not so easy you think you don't have time for them. So I struggle to implement those. And don't get me wrong, I think compared to kind of the average person, I already have very good health habits, but I just think I can do so much better.

And because I have this brain injury, I just need to take a little bit more care than the average person that is 29-year-old. So yeah, I just want to improve my personal situation.

It's very important to say that I don't have to nail everything on this list that I said to double my HRV, right? I don't need to be a machine and spend six hours a day on my health habits, right? That's also not realistic. It's not something I would set as a goal. But doubling my HRV would definitely mean that I improved many of the things and that would [00:12:00] be already a huge win.

And again, it's also not, I need to be half an hour in cold exposure or whatever, but maybe even 15 seconds of cold shower every single morning already helps increase the HRV a little bit. And if I do 10 things that help improve it, a few percent points, then accumulating them might be enough to just double it.

And even if I get in the right direction, I don't manage to double it, but maybe I increase it 50%, 70%, whatever it is, that would already have a very positive impact on my health, on my day-to-day experience. And one thing I really enjoy about that goal is that if you do too much of something, then it's actually bad for HRV.

Okay, so exercise is positive, but when you do too much exercise without recharging, helping your body recharge, then actually the HRV is going down. And I talked in last week's episode about the half marathon and how I injured myself because I trained too hard. And you can see that on my HRV [00:13:00] tracking, which is super interesting.

You might say, oh yeah, I did so well with exercise. Must have been a high HRV? No, my HRV was the lowest in the whole year, in the month, January, February, March. So the months that I trained too much, especially January where I started training and I really overdid it, it was the lowest because I didn't give my body time to recharge.

So this is very important. I need to be good with those habits, but I can't obsess over them. I can't overdo it because then it will have a negative impact and I'll feel that pretty quickly when tracking my HRV.

And then also as mentioned already, HRV is an average. It's not that kind of thing that one day you achieve one thing and then everything paid off throughout the year. Nope, that's not going to happen. So it's not about doing everything perfect, only on December 31st, having a high number then and saying, boom, I achieved my goal.

But it's about consistently improving my [00:14:00] baseline and thus my average, and then bringing it to double of what I had at the beginning of the year. It also means cutting out the very negative days, so days where I'm completely destroyed because that might track down the whole average. So it's really about consistency.

That's what I love about this number, or that it's an average.

So next I wanna shortly talk about why it's so important to be able to measure things. And this, I think is really super, super important because we, humans, we come back to the things that we can track and that is actually quite of a big problem that I realize with myself because I would say I'm a very non materialistic person, but even for me, what is the easiest to compare yourself?

The easiest to compare yourself is finances, is interest rating points and trophies. The things that we can easily track and we can easily compare. So all of [00:15:00] us have them, right? Happiness, extremely hard to compare, but rating points- extremely easy.

There is an official rating list. You can just compare yourself. And even when I intentionally think about, there are other things that matter so much more. When you don't have anything that you're tracking, your brain will lean towards comparing yourself with things that are easily to track.

And so we go back to finances and rating points to compare ourselves with the people around us. And now even more with the internet, right? And online, everybody seems more rich, more happy, more cool, more achieving than they actually are in reality, and that makes it just worse. And so having this one goal where I can track stuff, I can measure myself, and it is so individual that I'm basically forced to only compare myself with my previous self.

Is super useful, right? I can compare myself with my 2021 [00:16:00] heart rate variability, 2022 heart rate variability with the heart rate variability from one month ago. But it's much harder to find somebody on the street and say, Hey, what's your heart rate variability? So the comparison with others comes way less in, and that's what I love about measuring this.

It's something that I can measure extremely well that is very important for me personally, but it's very hard to lose my mind, get FOMO about other people's HRV and what other people are doing because it's more niche and not many people are talking about it.

And so just as a thought, like whatever you might be thinking about for yourself. That's important that you are able to measure what matters. There is a book that is even called like that. So if you are able to measure something, you are more prone to actually putting the action and actually do it well.

So that's important. But then also it shouldn't be a scorecard for society where you get lost a little bit and lose [00:17:00] direction because others are sharing. Oh, look, I'm so good on this. I have this house, I have this car, I have this, whatever. And you feel like, oh, I should do more. No, it's not about you should do more.

It's about doing the best for yourself and having a number that you care about for yourself that impacts your wellbeing. And it's not about, I think if I share online, Hey, I have a 50 HRV, nobody will be impressed. And that's actually also a good thing about it. It's just for myself.

And here's the thing about business success, and this is something that is interesting. I talked about this last week also a little bit, but it's this, how can I say? It's unintuitive. That when we care less about these big numeric goals, if we put in the right process, we are more likely to achieve them.

So caring more doesn't mean achieving them more because often we stress ourselves, we don't do the right things, we get short term hacks and all of these things. So even if, and this is [00:18:00] far from the truth. But even if I only cared about my business output. I only cared about like maximizing profits or whatever it is, like multiplying my revenue or the people I reach or whatever you could set as a numeric business goal.

I feel that figuring out or working more on my HRV would actually also be smart, at least in the long term. When I say long term, it might be three years, five years, 10 years, whatever. I don't do chess improvement with a three month mindset. I also don't do business with a three month mindset or a six month mindset.

It's a long term idea. Because the healthier I feel, the better I can recover, the better I can focus. The better I can put away a bad night of sleep, well probably the better my work will be. The better my head works, the better my work will be. You can push through and maximize short term improvement.

If you put in 10, 20, 30 hours in terms of chess [00:19:00] improvement, for example, now you feel, maybe you feel miserable, you don't enjoy it, but you push yourself and you can see these huge improvements short term. But long term, you just can't keep that up. And in business, it's exactly the same. Wherever it is, it's exactly the same.

So long term, it matters that you avoid burnout, that I keep enjoying what I'm doing actually, that I'm mindful of my energy, that I take time to recharge. So all of these things matter a lot. Improving my HRV, even if it was just for improving my business output would be positive. And I argue that for many of you listening to this, that also applies.

Now, not everybody is as flexible as me. I know I'm super, I have such a nice situation in the sense that I'm my own boss. I can decide when I work, I can decide how much time I take off. But many people that work, not in a manual labor, but output in terms of working on the computer, thinking about code, there are so many jobs nowadays that it's not every single hour you have the same output. But a few hours create the output [00:20:00] for the whole week. And so it's much more important that we think about having right energy, feeling good, being recharged, sleeping well. Finally, some companies start realizing this, right?

Not pushing their employees for maximum hours, but for maximum performance. What does that mean? That means feeling recharged, being inspired, doing the right things at the right time. So this kind of approach of focusing on rest and everything really matters for business performance as well, even if you're not self-employed.

And bringing this back to chess. In chess, I absolutely a hundred thousand percent know that it matters a lot. It's so much more beneficial that you do one hour properly than three hours badly. Quality over quantity, that's really what matters. And so again, even if you're sitting here and saying, the only thing I care about, and I don't recommend doing that, but the only thing I care about is my rating going up.

Maybe actually the right approach is doing something [00:21:00] differently, focusing on resting, focusing on doing things with the right quality, focusing on doing things for the long term, and then by the end of the year, you'll be surprised by how much your rating went up by not focusing on that.

So now I have my goal. Now what? How can I make sure that I have a goal, but it stays important and I stick to it? I do the things properly, and hopefully I will achieve that goal, which means that I had a even healthier year and maybe I achieved more. Who knows? So here is how I try sticking to that for the long run.

And this is again, something I teach in chess improvement as well, which is start small. I listed so many habits I want to work on, and if I just said it's now January, I need to work on all of them at the same time. I know I will never stick to it for long enough. So have a rough outline. I won't bore you with that, but a rough idea in my head what I want to focus on from now on and when which habit [00:22:00] will start mattering.

But for January, I really want to focus on three things only, and I try to keep them as small as possible. One time per week going to the gym. I tried two to three times. In previous years, I always had weeks when I didn't do things.

I hope that saying one time a week is really something manageable I can build up on, and it's really my goal to stick to that for all the 52 weeks in the year and really once. Ha, come on. No, you can do it. The second thing is, I wanna work with a timer. So often I just forget taking breaks when I work, I might work four or five hours in a row without really taking breaks.

My focus diminishes, my work output diminishes. My stress level goes up, not great. So I wanna work with a timer somewhere between 25 and 55 minutes, depending on the task, what I'm doing, and then forcing myself to take a five to 15 minute break. Last but not least, I want to have cold exposure. And the easiest is cold [00:23:00] shower.

Every day, every morning would be ideal. I have to say, since I thought about it and I'm recording this, this is the one thing that I haven't been very, very consistent with yet, but I wanna do that. So five seconds is enough of cold shower because it just wakes me up. And there are some studies that say that it has a positive impact on HRV as well.

And because these things are so small, there really isn't much of an excuse to not doing them, and that is my key idea for this year. January, I start small. I want to make those things really habits, and once they are really good habits that I can stick to without really thinking, putting a lot of energy, I add some small things on top.

And by the end of the year I hopefully have a lot of small habits that maybe also became bigger throughout time. But I want to avoid this having super good habits for two weeks and then going back to zero. That's going back to zero is really what I want to avoid this year, and it's also what I talk about again, in chess improvement.

You don't [00:24:00] wanna get to a point where suddenly a week or two, you don't do anything anymore because you're burned out. Just a little bit. Five minutes of tactics can be something. You stick to your goal, you stick to your habits, can be super useful.

And if you're thinking, oh, you will never reach your goal with these habits. How can these small changes make a two x increase of the heart rate variability? It's actually very fascinating to see, just by thinking about this, I've been thinking about heart rate variability since December and just not setting really a goal, but just being aware what could help.

I had two of the best weeks in terms of heart rate variability in the first and second week of January. So back then, I didn't even have the clear goal. It was just more like, okay, this is the direction I could go. I'm not sure how exactly I framed this goal. Is it really smart? But I just put more thoughts into it.

And last week I had an average of 51. 38 is my baseline. Now, it was [00:25:00] 51. That's a increase of 34%. I don't believe that it will consistently go like that. I also had a very calm time, didn't work as much, so there were a lot of things that were positive for me. But it's just incredible to see just how much small habits daily things can improve our health, our output, whatever it is.

So it's really about these small and tiny changes, that we do it consistently throughout the whole year. There's always this saying: it's a marathon, it's not a sprint. It's not about doing everything in January perfectly and then being back to zero in the mid of February. But instead it's taking small habits, being more aware of them. Maybe writing more diary, being clear about it, really tracking the things that matter.

And then hopefully, come back next year or at the end of this year and say, Hey guys, I doubled my HRV and it really had a positive impact on my day-to-day actions.

Thus, it had a positive impact on [00:26:00] how I felt throughout the whole year, and all of the other projects that I wanted to do were also positively impacted by this goal.

So, yeah, I hope this super long divided way of explaining my goal, helped someone. Maybe you got some inspiration, maybe you at least learned about heart rate variability. Maybe you want to dig deeper into it. Again, this is not medical advice. Consult somebody that knows about these things.

I don't recommend checking those things with your AI if you have no clue. 'cause AI can just hallucinate. Things about your health are so important. At least I wouldn't use it as the only source. So consult somebody that knows about this stuff and hopefully you'll have a great 2026 with whatever goal you're setting and whatever positive actions you do on a day-to-day basis.

Just to be very clear, because I mentioned the Oura ring a few times, I'm no affiliation with this company. I really like the brand. I use it for the past five years. So if anybody of Oura is listening, hey, you [00:27:00] would actually be a brand I would work with, but this is not paid content. This is just because I use this ring and I enjoy it.

And that's it. See ya next week.

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