Does Where I Live Change How I Recover? Five Years of Whoop Data Across 8 Places

"Wherever you go, there you are." - Jon Kabat-Zinn

In my last Whoop project I found that going to bed earlier was one of the best things I ever did for my health. Since then, I've moved from Vancouver to Querétaro, spent stretches in Tijuana and Mexico City, and squeezed in a few trips. So I wanted to answer a new question: does where I am change how I sleep, strain and recover?

Here's what each of those means in Whoop:

• Sleep (sleep performance, 0 to 100%): how much I slept compared with how much my body needed, also factoring in how consistent and efficient that sleep was.
• Strain (0 to 21): how much load I put on my body in a day, based on my heart rate across the day plus the muscular load from workouts.
• Recovery (0 to 100%): how ready my body is each morning, based mainly on my heart rate variability (HRV) and resting heart rate while I sleep, plus sleep and breathing rate.

The short answer

• I recovered best by the ocean. Tijuana and Cozumel were the only places where my recovery sat well above my normal.
• I slept worst on short trips and steadiest in Querétaro, where I live now.
• My strain was highest in Vancouver, where I worked out the most.

How I did it

I matched 1,899 nights of Whoop data (August 2021 to October 2026) to my travel log, so every night has a place attached.

• The problem: my habits kept improving over those five years, so comparing raw averages between places would mostly show when I lived there, not where.
• The fix: I compared each night against my own 90-day average using Z-scores (I explain them here).
• How to read it: a Z-score of +1 means that night was one standard deviation better than my usual. So the "vs my normal" numbers show the effect of the place, not the year.

Place	Nights	Avg recovery	Sleep performance	Avg day strain
Vancouver	1,170	66%	79%	12.5
Querétaro	623	65%	86%	10.1
Mexico City	55	64%	81%	10.4
Tijuana	38	77%	81%	10.9
Cozumel*	6	83%	86%	11.7
Las Vegas*	3	39%	58%	9.4
Hawaii*	2	47%	66%	14.8
San Francisco*	2	63%	71%	8.0

*Fewer than 7 nights there (Cozumel 6, Las Vegas 3, Hawaii 2, San Francisco 2), so take those rows with a grain of sand.

Quick note: I'm not a health professional. This is one person's data, and Whoop scores aren't a diagnosis.