Enhance Your Physical & Mental Resilience (HRV, Respiratory Rate, RHR)

0:00 The science and practice of enhancing

0:02 human performance for sport, play, and life.

0:07 Welcome to Perform.

0:09 I'm Dr.

0:10 Andy Galpin.

0:11 I'm a professor and scientist and the executive

0:13 director of the human performance center at Parker University.

0:16 And today we're going to be talking about how to control your nervous system.

0:19 My favorite example of this actually comes from a TV show.

0:22 Many of you probably remember the show The Office,

0:25 at least the American version.

0:27 And I'll never forget one of the classic scenes,

0:29 one of the characters, Dwight Trroo,

0:31 was telling and bragging actually about how he had superior genes and he

0:34 was able to at his own will raise his blood cholesterol levels.

0:39 And of course, the bewildered friends of his asked him like,

0:42 "Why would you even want to do that?" And his response

0:45 in classic Dwight fashion was so that he could lower his cholesterol.

0:49 That had made me laugh and I've never stopped laughing at that.

0:52 And it highlights one example, albeit admittedly uh not sure why you would want

0:57 to do that or if that's real or not,

0:59 but it highlights the point of how can we actually have

1:03 control over aspects of our physiology that most people think we can't.

1:07 Maybe we have some control, but it's subconscious or otherwise.

1:11 And that's what I'm referring to when I say control your nervous system.

1:15 There is actually a bunch of science behind this.

1:17 Probably the most famous initial

1:20 scientifically documented experiment came in 1970.

1:23 There was a famous gentleman I think his name is Swami Rama.

1:26 I hope I pronounced that uh appropriately.

1:29 But Swami was able to do a host of feats that still baffle most of us.

1:34 What eventually happened was he sat in a room

1:37 with a handful of scientists and they placed what are

1:40 called ECGs to measure electrical conductivity of his heart

1:44 as well as EEGs to measure directly into his brain.

1:46 and he performed again this whole

1:48 host of insane physiological feats without moving.

1:52 Now, that part's critical, right?

1:53 So, when he did things like take his resting

1:55 heart rate from 70 beats per minute to reportedly

1:58 300 beats per minute and he held

2:01 that for several seconds and then brought it back down,

2:04 he did that not by running sprints up a hill or anything,

2:06 but by just simply sitting there and having

2:08 the conscious ability to control that aspect of his physiology.

2:12 Another really impressive thing Swami was able

2:14 to do was actually shock the scientific team.

2:17 They thought he was in cardiac arrest because his ECG stopped working.

2:21 And what happened was he was able to bring his heart

2:23 rate below 20 beats per minute at the same time,

2:26 give himself what's called Aphib.

2:28 And so the the machine itself thought

2:30 his heart had been stopped for like 20 seconds.

2:32 I guess he signaled that, you know, I'm fine.

2:34 I'm okay here.

2:35 And then eventually brought it back up.

2:38 Arguably more impressive was some of the stuff

2:40 he was able to do with his physical temperature.

2:42 So they had him on the same hand change the temperature by I

2:46 think like six degrees Celsius uh in his same hand again only inches away.

2:51 And so clearly demonstrating some not only control of his whole body temperature

2:55 but extreme precision of where that temperature was going and where it was not.

3:00 But nonetheless, that was documented and published

3:02 and again to this day is probably one

3:05 of the more famous cases of such incredible

3:08 control of one's what's supposed to be autonomic physiology.

3:11 A decade later and I'm going to highlight this one as well.

3:14 I think it was 1982 actually a similar thing was done in a more extensive group.

3:20 And so what actually happened here was a paper was published in nature.

3:25 Now that's one of the most blue ribbon

3:27 highest esteem journals in all of science and physiology

3:32 and so pre-minent journal it was published

3:34 and they looked at a bunch of Tibetan monks

3:36 that lived in the Himalayas studying and utilizing

3:40 a practice that's called tumo tu mmo and they

3:44 were able to do a bunch of similar things that that Rammy was able to do.

3:48 I won't draw them out, but temperature controls raising their body

3:54 temperatures by like 8° consciously without moving.

3:58 In fact, one of the things that they did was them,

4:00 they put wet sheets on top of them and put them in very cold,

4:05 if not sub-zero conditions.

4:07 And these individuals were able to not only stay neutral with temperature,

4:11 stay neutral with their heart rate, but they were also able to physically dry

4:15 the sheets within like 30 to 60 minutes.

4:18 And so you can go on and on.

4:19 You can probably find many other case studies like

4:22 this and again thousands of anecdotes and other stories throughout history.

4:27 But I think one thing that I'm trying to highlight here that is inarguable.

4:31 There is clearly the ability to run control over

4:34 your physiology if you really take the time and attention.

4:38 Is it tumo?

4:40 Is it visualization?

4:41 Well, probably realistically we've got tons of different options.

4:45 And so what I'd like to do today is talk about just a few of them.

4:50 What do we know?

4:50 What does it mean to control your nervous system?

4:52 What can we do?

4:53 What can't we do?

4:54 And then what are a bunch of tactics and strategies

4:56 so that you can have a more resilient nervous system.

4:59 To start us off, I want to make sure we're

5:01 all on the same page when I say nervous system.

5:04 The easiest way to conceptualize it is think about it in two large branches.

5:08 The first is what's called the central nervous system.

5:10 This is your brain and brain stem and spinal cord.

5:13 And the second is what's called your peripheral nervous system.

5:16 So this is everything else that goes out

5:18 and comes back to the central nervous system.

5:20 Now focusing on the peripheral nervous system,

5:23 that's where most of the action happens.

5:26 In this case, the peripheral nervous system is

5:28 broken up into a couple of other categories.

5:31 One being what's called the somatic system.

5:33 This is what you can actively control.

5:35 We're not going to talk about that much today.

5:37 It's stuff you already know you have control over.

5:40 What I want to focus more on is the other branch.

5:43 And that's what's called the autonomic nervous system, the ANS.

5:47 And so within the autonomic nervous system,

5:50 we're talking about things like the parasympathetic system.

5:54 You may have heard of that as rest and digest.

5:56 There are probably better ways we can

5:58 describe it and more interesting applications of it.

6:01 But nonetheless, we'll just keep it simple right now

6:03 and say that the parasympathetic is rest and digest.

6:06 You also have the sympathetic.

6:08 That is your fight and flight.

6:10 And so most of us stop right there and we think, "Okay, parasympathetic.

6:14 I'm relaxed.

6:15 I'm I'm lethargic.

6:16 I'm down.

6:17 I'm chill.

6:17 I'm zen.

6:18 Sympathetic.

6:19 I'm fight.

6:19 I'm flight.

6:20 I'm up.

6:20 I'm focused.

6:20 I'm aroused." And so on and so forth.

6:23 Reality of it is there's probably more things like the freeze mechanism.

6:27 There's also the entic system that happens here.

6:29 This is kind of like well specifically referring to your gut.

6:32 But for the most part, again, for the sake of time,

6:35 we're going to focus on the interplay between

6:37 the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system because that provides

6:41 us the ability to have a lot of control over what our nervous system is doing.

6:45 And as I'll show here very soon,

6:48 that has a significant impact on how you're looking,

6:50 feeling, and performing in the short and long term.

6:54 And I'm highlighting that because again,

6:56 people don't necessarily realize how much

6:58 control they actually have over those systems.

7:01 They are autonomic, but you have the ability to move them up and down.

7:05 You can recalibrate them, and you can consciously critically control them.

7:09 As I've given many examples of already, if we were to zoom all the way out,

7:13 focusing on that autonomic nervous system, the ultimate goal is to not have too

7:18 much time and attention spent on this thing.

7:21 If it is firing and functioning appropriately, it's running in the background.

7:25 It is the software that's running your computer.

7:28 You don't need to be worrying about it.

7:29 It's making your life easier and better,

7:31 but you shouldn't spend a lot of conscious control over it.

7:34 That said, sometimes it gets a little bit out of whack

7:38 and you want to have the ability to toggle it

7:40 and recalibrate it so that you can bring it up

7:42 or back down based on a particular thing you're trying to do.

7:46 And so, all we're talking about really in today's episode

7:49 is what happens when it gets egg out of whack

7:52 or is not as finely tuned to a particular thing

7:54 that you'd like and what can you do about it.

7:57 That is ultimately today's version of controlling your nervous system.

8:01 Now, to be really clear, because we could go in a lot of different areas here,

8:04 I'm also going to qualify this talk even further.

8:07 We're not going to be talking about stress management,

8:10 emotions, or even really mental health.

8:13 In fact, I would encourage you to go listen

8:15 to a recent episode of the Huberman Lab podcast,

8:18 one of the ones that's in the Essentials catalog,

8:21 where they break down a bunch of different tools

8:23 and tactics on overall stress management and neurological control.

8:28 I'm not going to cover any of those things today.

8:29 We're going an entirely separate route.

8:32 I'm also not only talking about downregulation.

8:34 I know personally for many years I had this connotation

8:38 whenever I thought about parasympathetic or recovery or relaxing.

8:44 I just always or breath work for that matter.

8:46 I just always thought it's all about down down and it's not.

8:50 In fact, I'm not only going to focus exclusively on breath work today either.

8:54 We're going to go well past those things.

8:56 What I really want to get at is again fine-tune control,

8:59 the ability to go down but also go back up and making

9:03 sure that system is functioning how you'd like it to function.

9:07 So, what we will talk about are of course the three eyes.

9:11 If you're new to the show, what that means is how to investigate it,

9:14 how to measure your nervous system,

9:16 what that even means, what you should look for.

9:18 The second eye is interpret.

9:20 So, how do you make sense of, how do you judge

9:22 or evaluate that information that you got from that previous test?

9:25 And then the third one which is intervene.

9:28 What do you do about it?

9:29 What are protocols?

9:30 What are tools and technologies?

9:31 What are things you can do at home?

9:33 What are things that can be done at a higher level

9:36 that will make those positive impacts no matter which direction you're going.

9:39 So that overall is our game plan today.

9:41 Talk about how we can control our nervous system in all those forms and fashion.

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12:30 So, to start us off, let's remember the ultimate goal.

12:33 We would like number one that system to be operating independent of us.

12:37 We want it to be that software that's running.

12:39 And then two, we want to have some active control over it when we'd like,

12:43 but we don't want to be spending our entire day man

12:45 mitigating and managing what's going on in our aonomic nervous system.

12:48 So that goal is important because it lays

12:51 the foundation of what we're trying to do.

12:52 And so really, you can bucket control of the system into two main areas.

12:56 Number one is what we simply call read.

12:59 All right?

13:00 You need to be able to read your current state.

13:02 You can use this with technology.

13:04 So you can buy something or use something

13:05 that tells you what's happening in your own internal

13:07 physiology or you can learn what's called interosception

13:10 or introsception which means you can feel it yourself.

13:14 Now some people are really good at that.

13:15 Some people are completely terrible at it.

13:17 But either way we've got to figure out what you where you currently are.

13:22 The second then step is to regulate.

13:24 So know where I'm at.

13:25 Number one.

13:26 Number two move it.

13:28 And when I say regulate,

13:30 I'm going to break today's discussion up into two parts.

13:32 What I call acute things that move it right now.

13:35 So you're feeling flustered right now.

13:37 What can you do about it in this second?

13:38 Or you're feeling tired right now.

13:40 You're losing focus right now.

13:41 What are tips and tricks we can do that'll instantly change my state?

13:45 And then the chronic ones are ones I refer

13:47 to of what are going to move the baseline permanently.

13:51 Where we get confusion or oftent times people that have

13:54 tried things like this where they've maybe been disappointed

13:58 in the past is they're using things that are an acute

14:00 stimuli and hoping it makes a chronic or permanent change.

14:04 I'm really hopeful by the end

14:07 of today's talk that you'll understand the difference

14:10 and you can use the ones in the right form and fashion appropriately.

14:14 But that's what we're after.

14:16 In either case, what we're really trying to do is make sure that we're

14:20 widening the range of our sympathetic

14:23 and parasympathetic experience rather than sensitizing it.

14:27 What do I mean by that?

14:29 It's not about just reducing stress.

14:32 It's not about just downregulating.

14:34 It's the opposite.

14:36 In fact, maybe not the opposite, but it is complimentary.

14:39 The analogy I like to give here is imagine driving

14:41 down a road and you're going down a one-lane highway.

14:46 It's very likely for you to hit the guardrails on one side of the road

14:50 when another car comes by because there's just not a lot of room to work.

14:54 But if you expanded that highway from a onelane road to a seven lane road,

14:58 you're far less likely to hit the guardrails.

15:01 That's what I mean.

15:02 When we become overly sensitized to the down regulation or the upregulation,

15:07 we're driving on a onelane highway.

15:10 We want to not only become better drivers, right?

15:13 I want you to have more control so you're not weaving as much.

15:16 That alone will help you reduce your likelihood of hitting the wall,

15:19 but mostly what we're after is widening out that lane,

15:24 giving you seven lanes so that when you do lose a little bit of control,

15:27 you can feel it, see it, but you're not smashing up against walls.

15:30 When I teach this, I like to use that highway analogy.

15:33 That said, if you were to look at the research

15:35 or talk to clinicians that work in this space,

15:38 you're generally going to see it described more as resilience.

15:41 And what that means is you have the ability to experience high and low levels

15:46 of changes in your autonomic nervous system without

15:49 it having a dramatic impact on your lived experience.

15:52 Whether this is your psychology, your happiness,

15:55 your anxiety, your depression, your perceived stress load,

15:58 or your actual physiology, your hormone health, your energy,

16:01 your metabolism, your sleep, your recovery, your physical performance.

16:06 We want you to all to be able to live a life that is your best.

16:10 Meaning, you can handle things that challenge and change

16:13 your body from a psychological perspective or a physiological perspective.

16:18 And those things don't have dramatic consequences

16:20 for you in the short or long term.

16:22 So I feel comfortable in saying that most of us are

16:25 better off with a more resilient rather than sensitive nervous system.

16:31 What does that technically and practically look like?

16:33 I will give you some tangible examples a little bit later.

16:36 But one thing you want to think about here is if

16:39 you are somebody who feels like you are on constant sympathetic drive,

16:43 you work out really hard at high intensity.

16:45 you have a high stress personal life,

16:47 a high stress place that you live, personal uh experiences,

16:52 jobs, so on and so forth, then you might need to just focus on downregulation.

16:58 That's fine.

16:58 We have hundreds of randomized control trials on people only doing

17:02 downregulation work and it creating tons of positive experiences in their life.

17:06 We've done this a bunch in my coaching programs.

17:09 I've done this with my clients and athletes.

17:12 No question that works there.

17:14 But that's a little bit different and not always

17:17 the best scenario when somebody's having issues on both sides,

17:20 upregulation and downregulation because what can happen is if

17:24 you're only ever paying attention to that down regulation size,

17:28 that highway starts to get smaller.

17:30 All right?

17:30 And so what you probably want to do and if you actually look at the research

17:34 in this space more carefully a lot of the interventions strategically implement

17:42 both upregulation and down reggulation.

17:45 Even if somebody is highly stressed, has a lot of anxiety or has other markers

17:50 of overall dysfunction or problems in the nervous system,

17:55 you're going to see careful integration

17:57 of both upregulation and down reggulation.

18:00 And that's because it works like a hormatic stressor.

18:03 I've talked about this for many, many, many years.

18:05 It's one of my favorite things to talk about.

18:07 But effectively, what you're doing is you want yourself to downregulate.

18:11 Well, just telling yourself to calm down doesn't always work very well.

18:13 Sometimes the easiest way to calm down is

18:15 to actually give yourself a supercharge up so

18:18 that your body naturally swings back down

18:21 as an equal and opposite reaction and the other way.

18:24 So that is the framework with what we're going to talk about.

18:26 Let's get right into how we measure our nervous system, what tools we can use,

18:32 and then we'll go into evaluation and interpretations from there.

18:35 With that all in mind, let's dive into our first eye, which is investigate.

18:39 How do you measure this stuff?

18:40 Well, there's no one answer here.

18:42 I think it's easiest to describe this in three major categories.

18:46 First one are what I call performance-based tests.

18:50 So, in the sporting world,

18:51 you'll see groups do this where they'll take a vertical jump test every day.

18:55 So you'll come in and every single day you'll do say three

18:58 or four maximum effort vertical jumps and they look at the change.

19:03 The assumption there being if your vertical jump is much lower today than it

19:07 normally is then there's a strong likelihood

19:10 your nervous system is a little bit fatigued.

19:13 That is a very common and classic uh approach in the sport performance world.

19:17 Others do it with things like grip strength.

19:20 Again simple test, easy to do.

19:23 Uh there are reaction time drills.

19:25 There's a ton of different apps and and low or free, you know,

19:28 fairly inexpensive technologies to look at firing rates, uh fingering tap tests.

19:34 Um how quickly can you move your thumb?

19:36 Lots and lots of different technologies here.

19:39 Others I've seen, and we've actually explored this a lot,

19:42 have looked at things like range of motion and flexibility.

19:46 And I've actually personally seen this one land pretty well.

19:49 So, a basic sit and reach test of your hamstrings and low back.

19:53 A rotational test, um, a a forearm or or flexion extension test.

19:59 I've seen all these in the field, a ton,

20:02 and I'll be totally honest with you, they're pretty good.

20:06 We spent many years, probably over four years,

20:10 testing some of these things every single day.

20:13 We stuck them directly up against other more scientifically validated

20:16 measures and they all came in pretty much the same.

20:19 And so these are absolutely fine ways to measure it.

20:22 It's obviously mostly used in again the sport performance

20:26 world and so they are hedging towards the performance aspect.

20:29 If you're not jumping as high or moving as well,

20:33 that's what they're concerned about.

20:34 A totally different approach to this is more of a psychological assessment.

20:38 Again, you'll see research and I've seen now huge databases.

20:42 You're talking about millions of data points

20:45 stacked directly up against something like mood.

20:49 How you feel today?

20:51 And you'll be stunned.

20:53 Stunned.

20:53 On aggregate in large populations,

20:56 mood is a very strong predictor of overall nervous system state.

21:01 How tired are you?

21:02 So, fatigue is another question.

21:04 One we see often is called RPE.

21:06 a rate of perceived exertion.

21:08 Just different ways to ask about how do you feel today?

21:12 What's your effort feel like today?

21:13 How interested in training are you today?

21:15 Tons of different questions there.

21:17 That's hedged more towards your subjective experience where

21:20 the previous ones are obviously looking at objective performance,

21:23 but there is classic overlap between both of them.

21:28 The third one though that is more objective

21:31 and where the bulk of the published researches,

21:34 which doesn't mean they're better,

21:35 by the way, it just means they're more used more scientifically,

21:39 are in what I call the physiological markers.

21:42 Common ones here are blood tests.

21:44 I've spoke in season one,

21:46 we had an entire episode on overtraining and overreaching.

21:49 We also had one on how to interpret blood tests for high performance.

21:53 In both of those, I talked about a number of different blood

21:58 and salivary markers you can use

22:00 to assess overall fatigue and readiness and performance.

22:04 We'll have direct links to those episodes in the show notes.

22:06 You can go check them out and see what I'm talking about.

22:09 But we're not going to get into that stuff

22:10 today because we've we've covered a lot of it already.

22:12 What we will get into for the most

22:14 part are what I call the respiratory physiology markers.

22:19 This is everything from resting heart rate to something called

22:23 your heart rate variability or HRV to respiratory rate and CO2 tolerance.

22:30 HRV, heart rate variability, is the king here.

22:33 Not saying it's the best,

22:34 but it has the the overwhelming majority of the research is on HRV.

22:40 You don't see a lot anymore on resting heart rate,

22:43 and that's because it's not very sensitive.

22:46 We used to look at it a little bit more and we kind of walked away from it.

22:50 If you get really shot for a long time,

22:54 you're overtrained or highly chronically stressed or have a a chronic disease,

23:00 you will start to see increases in resting heart rates that are

23:04 not being explained by a lack of physical fitness or cardiovascular fitness.

23:08 So you can see changes in heart rate as a result of this autonomic

23:13 nervous system being pushed into a direction

23:16 in this case more sympathetic than you'd like.

23:20 But it takes a long time.

23:22 You're not going to see the resting heart rate

23:23 move for several weeks before you would really notice.

23:27 And then the amount of movement is small.

23:28 So it's hard to understand kind of signal to noise ratio there.

23:31 So honestly kind of cross off resting heart rate.

23:35 Not a great marker.

23:36 I don't know too many people that use it by itself

23:39 or certainly use it as their first line of measurement.

23:42 Now, heart rate variability is much more documented.

23:45 Respiratory rate is growing.

23:48 That's a something we're learning much more about.

23:51 And CO2 tolerance is something that I have used a lot,

23:54 but there's not a ton of research behind that either.

23:57 I will share with you my personal experiences with all these things,

24:00 but I want to spend most of our attention today on HRV

24:03 because we have so much more information to go off of.

24:07 So, let's dive into HRV.

24:09 What is it?

24:10 Why do you care?

24:11 And how do we manipulate it?

24:12 Heart rate variability is exactly what it sounds like.

24:15 It is the variation in your heart rate.

24:17 Let me use an example.

24:18 Let's say your resting heart rate is 60 beats per minute.

24:22 You would then assume that since there's 60

24:24 seconds in one minute that your heart is

24:27 then beating in this example every second

24:30 on the second and then if you sped your heart

24:33 rate up to 670 or 80 or 90 or 100 beats per minute you would simply

24:38 shorten the time between each heartbeat but that the time

24:42 between each heartbeat would be the same.

24:44 It'd be 1 second or half a second or 3/4 of a second or whatever the case is.

24:48 Well, in that particular case, there's no variation in your heart rate.

24:52 That's not actually what happens.

24:54 If your heart rate is 60 beats per minute,

24:57 what's going to happen naturally is maybe it

25:00 beats at 1.1 second and then the next

25:03 beat comes at 1.2 seconds later and the next

25:06 beat after that comes 9 seconds later,

25:09 and then it comes at 08, and then it goes to 1.3.

25:12 And so there's variations.

25:13 At the end of the 60 seconds,

25:14 you'll still have done 60 beats, but it won't be a metronome.

25:18 It doesn't happen every second on the second.

25:21 How variable that is is the marker we're talking about.

25:25 It's a little bit counterintuitive,

25:26 but the more variation, the more parasympathetic you are.

25:32 So, the more variation your heart rate, the more downregulated.

25:35 If it becomes like a metronome, every second on the second,

25:38 it's dialed in, that means you're in sympathetic drive.

25:42 Now, as I said, parasympathetic and sympathetic aren't onoff switches.

25:46 They toggle back and forth.

25:48 So, HRV is just telling us kind of where at on that entire spectrum we are.

25:54 Generally, on average here, we want to spend more time in parasympathetic,

26:00 meaning a higher HRV, and less time in sympathetic.

26:04 Most people struggle with spending too much time

26:07 in sympathetic and therefore have a low HRV.

26:10 Now, you can have the opposite problem, and we have seen that.

26:13 I've coached people through that where their HRV

26:15 is extraordinarily high and they're lethargic with no energy,

26:19 no motivation, and so on and so forth.

26:21 But that's way more rare.

26:24 Generally, I would probably say 95 times out of 100, it's the opposite.

26:29 We're getting people out of so much

26:31 time in sympathetic drive and more in parasympathetic.

26:35 a million explanations for this, but just as a a practical example,

26:41 you can imagine going from a a high stress job, sitting in traffic.

26:45 Even if it's not a high stress job, but it's a job.

26:47 You're around people, you're performing, you're in traffic,

26:50 you're listening to podcasts, you're coming home,

26:53 you're watching TV, and it's just sensory input

26:56 all the time that requires your attention and reaction.

26:58 if you're managing children, if you're managing other stuff,

27:01 and there's just not enough quiet time that used to be around us.

27:06 Plenty of other reasons to explain it,

27:07 but that's a it's a good way to kind of understand

27:09 the idea here of why most people are probably in synthetic drive.

27:13 If you want to say that that means we're

27:14 in a more stressed life than we used to be.

27:16 I don't know.

27:16 I'll leave that up to you.

27:17 But just from a practical perspective,

27:19 we have way more arousal coming in way more frequently than

27:23 we probably had for most of our experience as a human species.

27:28 So that's what HRV is.

27:30 It's that variation and that's what it tells us.

27:32 It is a snapshot into the autonomic nervous system,

27:37 specifically parasympathetic and sympathetic drive.

27:41 It is only one metric.

27:42 It is not perfect.

27:44 There's not a single metric I will show you today that is perfect.

27:47 But it does have a lot of research behind it.

27:49 So that's roughly what HRV is.

27:51 It is at our best guess 50% genetic and 50% lifestyle.

27:57 Admittedly, I am not thoroughly impressed with that research.

27:59 I think that number is going to change over time,

28:02 but it is inarguable that some point of it is not within your control,

28:05 and some part of it is.

28:07 Why that matters when we get to the interpretation stuff later, it's not V2 max.

28:13 I can't just look at your HRV and tell you you're good or bad.

28:17 You have to consider the fact that a large

28:20 part of it is not within your control.

28:23 Tough to interpret.

28:24 The numbers themselves aren't as specific as they

28:26 are for other variables again like V2 max.

28:29 There's also a age related decline that happens in your HRV.

28:34 So it gets lower as you age.

28:36 That said, a recent paper just came out I think actually last year

28:41 and it argued pretty strongly that the age related decline in HRV is not

28:45 inevitable and if you maintain function

28:48 and fitness through life that HRV should not

28:50 drop as much if any uh but certainly not as much as you think.

28:54 And so those are things that we are learning more about

28:56 but that paper just came out first time I've seen anybody even examine it.

29:00 So we're going to have to see where those things end up shaking out to be.

29:04 Now HRV is generally associated with better health

29:08 and you could look at this in a variety of different ways but from a you know

29:12 physical cardiovascular cardopulinary fitness

29:14 perspective it's generally pretty tied.

29:16 It's not perfect.

29:18 Just because V2 max goes up doesn't mean

29:20 HVA will go up and the opposite as well.

29:22 So they are related but they're definitely not a one

29:24 toone correlation and it's I'd say a moderate correlation.

29:28 So much so we basically factor them in independently.

29:31 I've seen plenty of people with smashingly high V2s and that will

29:36 tell you almost nothing about their HRV and the opposite.

29:40 Okay.

29:41 Now, the research will show and I have seen this personally in my experience.

29:44 We've coached a lot of men and a lot of women.

29:47 Women just tend to be a little bit lower with their V2 max.

29:51 Doesn't mean it's worse, but it is just a little bit lower of a score,

29:54 meaning more sympathetic drive, right?

29:56 Not worse.

29:58 Now that may actually not mean that but that's a conversation for another day.

30:02 But nonetheless little bit of calibration on what this thing actually is.

30:07 We now know HRV influences and I won't say directly and only causes something

30:14 like attention and focus has dozens if not hundreds of things that regulate it.

30:19 So we need to make sure that we're hearing this correctly.

30:21 Right?

30:21 It is just associated with and it does influence

30:24 but it's not the only influence of everything from attention

30:28 to decision making emotional control um and then other

30:33 things like what are called mental endurance now this particularly

30:36 matters because mental endurance under stress is resilience this is

30:42 why we're talking about it right I want you

30:44 to be more resilient to stress in this particular example

30:48 can you maintain decision- making can Can you maintain focus?

30:52 Can you maintain attention and memory skills in the presence of stress?

30:56 Not just when you're baseline, not when you're fresh and okay,

30:59 but what about when you become fatigued?

31:01 That's what a higher HRV allows you to do.

31:04 And that's why we're going to press forward and give you tools to improve it,

31:08 enhance it, or if it's already good, to maintain it.

31:11 You could drown yourself in data,

31:13 whether you want to look at systematic reviews or meta analyses,

31:17 but you'll find them.

31:19 Heart rate variability is associated

31:22 with an enormous number of health implications.

31:26 Everything from I'm I'm being a little aggressive here,

31:29 but basically every psychological or mental health metric, anxiety,

31:33 depression, PTSD, and so forth to things

31:36 like cardiovascular disease all cause mortality,

31:40 inflammation, hypoglycemia, hyper lipidmia, hypertension.

31:44 I mean, pick your metric and you will

31:46 find the meta analysis or systematic review that shows,

31:50 man, a bad HRV is going to be associated with bad health outcomes.

31:55 One example I can give you here is things like that hypoglycemia.

31:58 Now, that's that's high blood sugar, right?

32:00 So, think type two diabetes.

32:03 Well, just think about it this way.

32:05 If you were in a state of fight or flight, right?

32:08 You were fighting for your life.

32:09 Your adrenaline would be up.

32:11 When your adrenaline goes up,

32:12 your body releases a bunch of glucose into the bloodstream.

32:15 And it does that because glucose will then go to your skeletal muscle.

32:18 It gives him short-term energy and it

32:21 can prepare for combat in this particular case.

32:23 Doesn't actually matter if you're fighting.

32:25 General point is this.

32:27 Stress goes up, adrenaline goes up, blood glucose goes up.

32:32 Well, if this is happening consistently throughout the day,

32:35 you're effectively giving yourself stress induced diabetes

32:39 because you're constantly smashing your insulin system,

32:41 smashing the pancreas because you're throwing blood glucose up

32:44 and down and you didn't do anything with food.

32:48 This is why high stress and chronic stress management one of the many

32:52 reasons at least why these things

32:54 are associated with obesity they are associated

32:58 with inflammation there are associated with high

33:01 blood pressure and so forth there's

33:02 a direct physical reaction that happens from your psychology in this case all

33:06 the way down to your molecular biology and it has consequences across systems

33:11 I could keep giving you examples but I think you get the point

33:14 by now in fact many of you may have already realized are known

33:18 that bad HRV is associated with lots

33:21 of bad health implications and that's no good.

33:24 What is less discussed and less understood

33:26 in my experience is how it directly relates to resilience.

33:30 And there's a couple of interesting papers that highlight this point and so

33:34 I want to dive into them in just a little bit more detail now.

33:37 But if you remember your heart rate

33:41 variability is driven by your autonomic nervous

33:42 system and one of the main things within that is called your vagus nerve.

33:47 Now when we hear Vegas, we often think down reggulation, but it's not just that.

33:51 If you were to stimulate the Vegas nerve,

33:52 you could get arousal as well, upregulation, excitement, so on and so forth.

33:57 It is this toggle, right?

33:58 Is it ability to go back and forth between them.

34:00 Well, we have evidence now molecularly of how the vagus

34:04 nerve can directly activate and change the immune system.

34:09 No surprise here.

34:10 What happens when you are really cooked?

34:13 You're shot, overworked, overstressed.

34:15 your immune system gets compromised, right?

34:17 Why?

34:18 Well, in part because of this.

34:20 Now, I'm not saying HRV caused that, but HRV would provide you that signal.

34:23 It says, "Hey, this is why you're not as resilient right now as you used to be.

34:28 Vegas nerve overused, altered immune system function,

34:32 and now you got sick or got more sick than you should have

34:35 got because of that overall stress response you were less resilient to." Now,

34:40 another example of that is a really complicated study, but it was so beautiful.

34:45 I wanted to point it out.

34:47 What they looked at here was this resilience or what's called reactivity marker.

34:51 And so what they found is kind of getting to the end of the paper here was when

34:55 you were in the state of low HRV sympathetic

34:58 drive that gave you higher sleep reactivity to stress,

35:03 meaning when we exposed you to the same stressor,

35:06 you had a exaggerated sleep response.

35:10 In this case, a bad sleep response.

35:13 That's exactly what we're talking about.

35:14 So the same thing happened to you when

35:16 you had a higher HRV didn't affect your sleep.

35:20 Now when we give that thing to you and you

35:22 have a low HRV it affects your sleep a lot.

35:26 That's higher reactivity that is being less resilient to the same stressor.

35:30 So same stress bigger response.

35:33 This is in circular right because we also know at the same point

35:36 less sleep or worse sleep increases your risk of all kinds of problems.

35:41 And in this specific paper,

35:43 the problem that they're looking at was depression symptoms.

35:47 So the lower amount of sleep increased

35:50 the risk of experiencing higher depressive symptoms.

35:55 Many actually examples of this, but that really does

35:58 high again encapsulates what I'm trying to talk about here.

36:00 It's not just up or down.

36:02 It is being more resilient to everything that happens in your life.

36:05 and our autonomic nervous system is a great uh

36:08 tool to measure and pay attention to for that.

36:11 So, if that doesn't convince you, I don't know what will,

36:13 but I'm assuming at this point you're all on board.

36:16 So, how do you actually measure it?

36:17 Let's talk about different ways where

36:19 you can actually investigate your HRV level.

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38:54 Now, nobody has to use supplements,

38:56 and I hope you never feel pressured to do so.

38:59 But if you're interested in supplements,

39:01 it's important that you get them from the highest quality providers.

39:04 You don't want mercury in your fish oil

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39:18 Again, that's live momentous.com/perform to get 20% off because HRV is

39:24 so ubiquitous and you can get it all from just your heart.

39:29 There's a ton of different cheap tools to measure.

39:32 I have used historically something called Morpheus and it

39:35 is amazing for looking at changes in HRV over time, especially at a baseline.

39:41 It's fantastic for improving your conditioning and knowing

39:43 what exercise to do for the day.

39:45 But the other ones I want to get into today function a little

39:49 bit differently and that is kind of more understanding an acute sense.

39:53 What am I at right now?

39:54 And if I go do something, can I see that change in instantly?

39:58 Oh, so for that actually I like a device

40:01 um that's a combination of a couple things.

40:02 Number one, I use a chest strap Polar H10.

40:06 I have no affiliation to Polar.

40:08 I buy it.

40:08 It's about $100 or so.

40:11 Um this is the gold standard.

40:12 And I like this the most because it is

40:14 actually directly measuring uh EKG or ECG in the heart.

40:17 Others, the ones that are worn like on your arm

40:20 or on your wrist are not directly measuring the heart.

40:22 They're using a a different technology or methodology which doesn't matter.

40:26 then they're okay in some spaces.

40:28 Some of them are very good.

40:29 But for me, if I'm going to make a change, if I'm going to pay attention,

40:32 if I'm going to coach somebody on it, I'm not going to try to save

40:35 30 bucks and buying something that's slightly cheaper.

40:37 100 bucks is pretty reasonable for most people to get to.

40:41 And so I want the highest standard there.

40:43 So for me, I've just personally had the most success with the Polar H10 strap.

40:48 On top of that, I have recently been shown by a colleague of mine, Dr.

40:53 Jay Wilds, W I L.

40:55 Jay is phenomenal in this area.

40:58 He does a ton of of research and clinical experience in this stuff.

41:02 He recently showed me an app called Optimal HRV.

41:05 Again, I have no association to them.

41:07 I pay normal full price for it.

41:09 It's about five bucks a month.

41:11 It's really, really cheap.

41:13 It pairs perfectly with that Polar H10 strap.

41:16 So, you can put the strap on, you can pull up the app,

41:19 and you can see your HIV in real time.

41:21 So, we can see it right now.

41:22 we can go test something.

41:23 We can go try something and we can see the response.

41:26 It's very intuitive.

41:27 So, you're talking 115 bucks or something like that.

41:31 You could have yourself a nice HRV tool.

41:34 One more time to be really clear, if we are concerned about HRV,

41:37 we're going to go with one of those devices.

41:39 We're going to measure it directly from the chest.

41:41 We're not going to measure it from the finger

41:42 or the wrist or anywhere else unless we absolutely have to.

41:46 Now, it's been a long time since we talked

41:48 about this, but earlier I brought up respiratory rate,

41:52 and I'm going to come back to it now.

41:53 There's not as much research here, but it is growing.

41:57 And what's clear about respiratory rate is the information you get

42:01 from it is different than what you get from heart rate variability.

42:06 And so, ideally, you're going to pay attention to both of these.

42:11 Respiratory rate like HRV,

42:14 it is a non-specific but highly sensitive measure of your nervous system.

42:21 In other words, if your HRV is up

42:24 or down or your respiratory rate is up or down, something's happening.

42:28 It's very sensitive to changes.

42:30 You will see changes within a day.

42:32 As I just described, you can change these things within minutes or seconds.

42:36 If you see changes over a couple of days,

42:38 it means something, but they're non-specific.

42:41 They're not telling you, oh, this was your nutrition or, oh,

42:44 this is your mental stress or, oh, this is hydration or bad sleep.

42:48 You don't know what's happening.

42:49 It's simply telling you something about the overallic load,

42:52 the total stress of the environment.

42:54 So, then you got to go work to figure out what's happening there.

42:57 But they are both highly relevant.

42:59 Why I like respiratory rate the arguably the most here is because

43:04 I have personally and now I'm walking away from the research here.

43:08 I can't show this scientifically yet,

43:11 but I have found it personally to be more sensitive.

43:15 It'll show up fast.

43:17 Oftentimes, not always, but oftentimes in my personal experience,

43:20 you'll see changes in respiratory rate before you'll see them in HRV.

43:24 You know, in a thing that matters, but not always.

43:26 And so we really pay high attention to both.

43:29 There's a really wonderful article in a technology journal actually called

43:32 sensors uh published a couple years ago u by a scientist

43:36 that I just love in this field Andre Nolo called

43:39 the importance of respiratory rate monitoring

43:41 from healthcare to sport and exercise.

43:43 And in that paper they walk you through

43:46 a ton of the research what's going on here.

43:50 um the fact that it is a critical vital sign.

43:53 It has been associated with everything from cardiac events

43:56 and pneumonia um to heat exposure and cold and exercise,

44:00 emotional stress, cognitive load and so on and so forth.

44:03 You can go read about more of the details of respiratory rate there.

44:07 I've thrown this out a couple of times at the beginning,

44:09 but I wanted to finally tie a bow on this as well.

44:11 What does this have to do with CO2 tolerance?

44:14 If you're not familiar with that, this is a similar metric.

44:18 So when we're looking at respiratory rate

44:20 and we're looking at resting heart rate and HRV,

44:23 we also like to pay attention to CO2 tolerance.

44:26 This is a different way of examining the state of your nervous system.

44:31 Specifically, the way that we have defined CO2 tolerance, this is developed,

44:36 well rather was brought to me by a gentleman named Brian McKenzie.

44:41 I don't know who created it initially,

44:43 but Brian is the one who taught me about it.

44:46 And the way that this works is it's effectively

44:48 like a little bit of a breath hold test where

44:51 you exhale continuously and you can see how long

44:53 that you can continually exhale some small amount of air.

44:56 It's a maximum effort test.

44:58 In the show notes, we'll put a direct link to a video Brian

45:01 has made that shows you how to go through the CO2 tolerance test.

45:04 And I like it.

45:05 We've used it a bunch.

45:06 I also feel like it tells us something similar

45:09 but slightly different than both HRV and respiratory rate.

45:13 So, while I told you earlier we look at both

45:15 of those, we also look at CO2 as much as we can.

45:18 I can't get CO2 tolerance though from a simple

45:21 test on uh you know like a resting test.

45:24 You actually have to actively do it.

45:26 Only takes about a minute.

45:27 But because of that, people won't necessarily do it every day where

45:30 I can check their heart rate easily whether they're doing something or not.

45:34 So, that's the only reason why we don't use it necessarily every day.

45:37 But here's the connection.

45:40 The way that your physiology works is you will

45:43 bring in oxygen when you take a breath in.

45:45 And you're doing that because oxygen's primary job is to regulate metabolism.

45:50 It's energy production, right?

45:52 It's aerobic metabolism,

45:53 which is what most of your body is doing most of the time.

45:56 When you breathe out, you're breathing out CO2.

45:59 The difference between oxygen and CO2 is that carbon molecule.

46:03 That carbon is a byproduct of any metabolic process.

46:06 So whether you're breaking down carbohydrates or fat,

46:09 whether you're using that resulting energy for exercise

46:12 or digestion or immune function or cognitive performance,

46:17 it doesn't actually matter.

46:18 It all is going to net result in you leaving a little bit of water left over,

46:23 making some ATP, and having a bunch of free floating carbon.

46:28 That carbon in your system is highly problematic.

46:30 And so your body will immediately attach it to an oxygen molecule forming CO2.

46:36 And so the way we say this is the net

46:38 end result of all metabolic processes are water, ATP and CO2.

46:44 Now if you're in the case of let's just

46:47 say exercise it doesn't matter but let's just say

46:49 we are doing that the more metabolism you go

46:52 through the more CO2 is generated in your muscle.

46:55 Your muscle then puts it into your blood and then transmits through

46:58 your blood goes into your lungs and then you exhale and get it out.

47:01 That's the entire cycle of life.

47:04 Plants do the opposite.

47:05 They breathe in CO2, pull out the carbon, keep it,

47:10 hold on it to themselves, and then get rid of the O2.

47:12 Right?

47:13 That's the the relationship living beings have

47:16 with plants in terms of oxygen and CO2.

47:19 Why this matters?

47:20 Again, you breathe in oxygen to regulate metabolism,

47:24 but your CO2 levels are there to regulate your pH.

47:30 It has nothing to do with your exercise performance.

47:33 Your body will regulate blood pressure.

47:36 It will regulate electrolytes and it will regulate pH over almost anything.

47:40 And one could argue it will regulate pH

47:43 literally over anything else in the whole world.

47:45 That is because most of your body,

47:48 the vast majority of all enzymes in the world have to run at a very specific pH.

47:53 Too acidic or too alkaline, they don't work.

47:55 If they don't work and your heart can't pump and your brain can't operate,

47:59 you die pretty quickly.

48:01 So, your physiological pH levels are maintained at an incredibly tight number.

48:07 Your testosterone can easily triple in a few minutes.

48:10 Your adrenaline can go up many multiples.

48:13 Your pH stays within an extremely tight window.

48:16 It will move everything else around it to keep your pH at the right level.

48:20 The primary way your body regulates your pH is by changing

48:24 the amount of CO2 that it lets be in your blood.

48:27 If CO2 levels get too high in your blood,

48:31 this will tell your autonomic nervous system to breathe more.

48:35 You don't feel it.

48:37 This is subconscious.

48:38 You're just breathing more.

48:39 You have no idea what's happening.

48:42 Not an active process.

48:43 Autonomic nervous system.

48:45 It does that.

48:46 It gets rid of the CO2.

48:47 It brings the acidic level down.

48:49 If the acidic level is too low, meaning you're too alkaline,

48:53 it will have you slow your respiration down.

48:55 You'll hold your breath.

48:56 Again, you won't even know this.

48:58 It'll let the CO2 levels increase more until it gets to the spot it wants,

49:02 and then it'll bring your respiration back up.

49:05 If you go start exercising, you start putting a bunch of CO2 in the blood.

49:10 That's why your body makes you breathe more because it has to dump that CO2.

49:16 In normal circumstances,

49:17 the primary reason you get air hunger or you feel like you have to breathe,

49:21 if I were to hold make you hold your breath right now,

49:24 it's not because you're running low on oxygen.

49:26 It's because CO2 levels are rising.

49:28 CO2 concentrations in your blood are the primary mechanism

49:31 that drive you to feel like you need to ventilate.

49:34 So, it can be conscious.

49:36 You can feel it.

49:37 But most of the time,

49:37 this is happening without you having any awareness at all of what's going on.

49:42 If you are chronically breathing not enough, you are under breathing,

49:48 which doesn't happen much,

49:50 CO2 levels would be getting really high, you'd be acidic.

49:54 What's more common is the opposite.

49:57 And there are papers on this, right?

49:58 That you can see it.

50:00 If you are breathing too much,

50:02 whether you want to call this over breathing like we tend to call it,

50:06 or if you are actually truly into what's called chronic hyperventilation,

50:10 this is a medically diagnosible condition.

50:12 Chronic hyperventilation is over breathing.

50:15 What that really is is you're putting too

50:17 much CO2 out of your body into the atmosphere.

50:21 So because of that, your CO2 levels in your body get too low.

50:24 This is called hypocapnea.

50:26 Too low of CO2.

50:28 This is incredibly problematic because again, one, we are out of pH range now.

50:34 We're not acidic.

50:35 We're alkaline.

50:35 We're the opposite.

50:36 So, because of that, your kidneys somewhere within a couple

50:40 of days or a couple of hours to a couple of days,

50:42 maybe even a few weeks, can respond to that.

50:45 They don't always, but they can respond

50:47 to that by putting you into what's called metabolic acidosis.

50:51 And it's doing that because it's again trying to reestablish

50:54 some acidity in the system to make everything happy.

50:58 This then has a whole host of renal and kidney issues, hydration issues,

51:01 and sodium potassium and electrolyte issues and a bunch

51:04 of other stuff that is just overall problematic.

51:07 The other major problem with this over

51:09 breathing strategy is CO2 is a vaso dilator.

51:14 And so if you are exhaling too much of it and CO2 concentrations get too low,

51:19 you get vas constriction.

51:21 This means decreased cerebral blood flow.

51:23 This means decreased blood flow everywhere else.

51:26 It also alters what's called bores effect.

51:29 In general, what all this is meaning, you don't have as much oxygenation.

51:33 Not exactly what it is,

51:34 but if that helps you conceptualize what's going on here, then that's fine.

51:39 And so, we're seeing problems in health,

51:42 cognitive performance, physical exercise performance, all of this stuff can be

51:47 a response to chronic hyperventilation or over breathing,

51:51 however you were define those things.

51:52 That said, then if I'm seeing HRV is fine, resting heart rate's fine,

51:58 but I am chronically over breathing, I still have some work to do.

52:03 And it is indicating something is happening potentially

52:06 from a stress situation that's not going to be necessarily

52:09 picked up by changes in sleep or changes

52:12 in HRV or changes in in overall resting heart rate.

52:15 Why this becomes really problematic is they can

52:19 then turn quickly into what are called sustaining factors.

52:22 And so while something caused hyperventilation,

52:24 which is a normal and healthy response, remember I say I get scared right now.

52:30 I want to go into sympathetic drive, I want adrenaline up,

52:34 I want to start an anticipatory over breathing strategy.

52:38 I know CO2 is going to start increasing

52:40 because I'm about to start doing something physically.

52:42 So I'll start over breathing.

52:44 That's great.

52:45 Normal reactive strategy there, healthy one.

52:47 That's what we want.

52:48 But if we're chronically doing that, we're chronically

52:51 over breathing because we're chronically in this sympathetic drive,

52:54 we're chronically in this high stress environment, that can be sustained.

52:58 It can turn into a habit.

53:00 It can turn into misattribution.

53:02 It can turn into lots of different things.

53:04 We have increased that sympathetic adinuric tone.

53:08 We are ready and dialed and primed for the same situation, the same smell,

53:13 the same thing we hear,

53:14 the same thing we see to drive us back into that hyperventilation strategy.

53:18 we then can be causing the same problem and it can be

53:21 cyclical right because that hyperventilation itself

53:24 can cause the same physiological problems.

53:27 So it's hard strategy to break.

53:29 So really important to pay attention to respiratory rate as well.

53:33 I could go on but again for the sake of time we'll stop right there.

53:38 Important highly correlated highly overlapped with some of the other

53:42 markers we've talked about but it tells us unique information.

53:46 Now, how do I measure this?

53:48 Most of the wearables you have will measure respiratory rate.

53:51 I will give you fair warning.

53:52 There is no industry standard though on how that's calculated.

53:57 So, just like HRV, don't put a ton of stock in the absolute number.

54:03 You want to pay most attention to trends and things like

54:05 that, but at least be consistent with the device that you're using.

54:09 Use whatever you like.

54:10 It doesn't matter what you get, how you use it.

54:11 It's a very simple measure that basically every

54:14 variable either directly has or it can have.

54:17 If they're not reporting it, they're measuring it.

54:19 They're just using it to calculate other stuff.

54:20 So, um, that can be done in a bunch of different ways.

54:23 Hopefully, that gave you some more information about how you can calculate HRV,

54:28 how you can calculate respiratory rate.

54:31 You probably can infer how to calculate resting heart rate.

54:34 And I gave you some tools on how to calculate and measure CO2 tolerance as well.

54:40 It's time for us to now move on to where we find figure out how

54:44 to make sense of all that information and determine how do we interpret it all.

54:48 We're going to start off by talking about HRV.

54:51 Anyone who works in this area will be squeamish when you

54:55 ask them the question of what's a good one or bad one.

54:57 We all say the same thing,

54:58 which actually to me is like a badge of honor that that person

55:01 knows what they're talking about when I hear them say that.

55:04 It's a hard thing to put a number on.

55:06 I'll give you something though to get started.

55:08 On most wearables, most men are going to be something

55:12 in the like 40s to 60 range on their HRV score.

55:17 Women are a little bit lower than that.

55:20 If you are older than say 60 years old, then maybe tink that down a little bit.

55:27 That all said, I I wanted to start out with a number,

55:29 but I don't know what that even means.

55:32 And that's because every device actually has

55:35 a different calculation they use to measure HRV.

55:37 So we're not even necessarily always talking about the same thing.

55:41 More importantly than that though,

55:43 there is a misuse of HRV in a bunch of different scenarios.

55:48 So you should pay attention to it.

55:50 I made a long argument of why it's important.

55:52 It's relevant.

55:54 But I just started off by also saying

55:55 the the measurement itself is not the same between devices.

55:58 So, we want to use this as a measure of progress

56:01 or or regression rather than just comparing score to score.

56:05 Especially if you're comparing your score to your friends and you're

56:07 on a ring and they're on a watch or something like that.

56:10 The the numbers actually the the calculation

56:13 the equation itself can be completely different.

56:15 There's many many ways to calculate HRV that are scientifically

56:19 validated and the numbers are digits different than the other ones.

56:24 So, that's an important point to pay attention to.

56:27 I've already also talked about the fact that it could be normal for you when

56:31 you have an HRV score that is let's just to put numbers on it say 25.

56:37 Well, that actually might be normal for you.

56:38 I don't know.

56:39 If we look at your respiratory rate

56:40 and your resting heart rate and your CO2 tolerance

56:42 and your subjective feeling and your recovery

56:45 and your performance and your cognition and they're all great,

56:48 well then I might not be super worried about just your HRV.

56:50 So we're never going to take it of itself

56:52 by itself and only itself and over interterpret its meaning.

56:57 If you are going to calculate it, please collect good data.

57:01 What do I mean by that?

57:02 However you're testing it, be consistent.

57:04 If you're wearing a ring, wear a ring.

57:06 Use the same one.

57:07 If you're testing it with a chest strap every morning,

57:10 use it in the same position.

57:11 Don't take it seated one day.

57:13 Don't take it lying down the next day.

57:15 Don't wake up and go to the bathroom one day and then

57:17 check it and the next day you did it before going

57:19 to the bathroom or you did it before breakfast and then you

57:21 had coffee the next time and you had a giant pancake breakfast.

57:24 You get the point here.

57:26 Test it under the same consistent terms always.

57:29 We want to pay attention mostly to trends over time.

57:33 And the recommendation I'll give you here

57:34 is to establish your own standard deviation.

57:37 Here's what that means.

57:39 Let's say you test your HRV for 30 days and within those 30 days,

57:43 don't do anything about it.

57:44 Don't make any changes.

57:46 On a piece of paper, in an Excel file on your computer,

57:49 just jot down all the score on all 30 of those days.

57:54 Then ask it to run a standard deviation calculation.

57:57 And this will basically tell you what your normal average number is and how

58:02 far off up or low you tend to go within a 30-day window.

58:05 This matters a ton because the amount of that deviation number one tells us

58:11 something about your physiology that's maybe arguably

58:14 more important than the actual number itself.

58:16 Let me give you some mathematical examples.

58:19 Let's say your HRV was 30 on your device.

58:22 Whatever 30 is, whatever that means, it doesn't matter.

58:25 And you calculated it after a month and it said

58:28 your average is 30 and your standard deviation was 20.

58:33 That means you swing all the way down to 10 all the way up to 50.

58:37 That is a very large standard deviation.

58:40 Other people your standard deviation might be three or five.

58:45 And so you have to know what matters to you.

58:48 If your standard deviation is 20 and you wake

58:52 up one day and instead of being at 30,

58:55 which is your average, you're at 27, that means nothing to you.

59:00 That is nothing because that's a that's so

59:02 such a low percentage of your normal deviation.

59:05 The opposite person whose standard deviation is normally five

59:08 and they wake up and they're seven high or low,

59:11 then that actually tells them something's going

59:13 on that that their system is responding to.

59:15 So if you want my honest answer of how to use HRV the most appropriate,

59:18 this is what we're paying attention to.

59:20 Typically, again, just a rule of thumb here,

59:23 people that are more stable in their HRV are generally better.

59:27 If you have a score that is doubling every other day,

59:32 we would immediately start thinking, "All right, this person's hyperreactive.

59:35 Whatever they're doing is causing a huge

59:37 change in their autonomic nervous system.

59:39 We need to create more stability here." That's how we become more resilient.

59:42 That's how we become more predictable.

59:44 That's what we're after.

59:46 If you're so tight, no matter what you do,

59:48 we're getting the same response every day.

59:50 Then we know that system is actually quite stable.

59:52 And no matter what insult hits you that day,

59:54 work stress, environmental toxin, who cares?

59:58 Your body is able to handle it.

1:00:00 You're not hitting the wall on the highway.

1:00:02 You're go you're you're moving left and right, right?

1:00:04 Your car is swerving, but you're not hitting the wall.

1:00:07 So those numbers aren't changing.

1:00:08 That's where we're bringing back that highway analogy.

1:00:10 And that's what we're talking about

1:00:11 when we're talking about nervous system stability.

1:00:13 So we never make changes based on one day.

1:00:16 We never use a cheap consumer wearable to tell us how to live our life.

1:00:22 To exercise today or to not exercise, to sleep today or to not sleep today.

1:00:27 That is, and I think the people behind uh

1:00:30 most of these companies would say the same thing.

1:00:31 That's not the best way to use something like an HRV score.

1:00:35 Interpret your numbers in the appropriate context.

1:00:38 But regardless, we should be able to get better and become

1:00:40 more resilient in our overall nervous system responses to stress.

1:00:45 back to our highway analogy.

1:00:47 What causes people to be more stable versus less

1:00:50 stable with their HRV is a bunch of different stuff,

1:00:53 genetics, but and then it's also the dumb stuff.

1:00:55 U it is in a regular sleep schedule.

1:00:57 Once we get people sleeping just in a consistent time,

1:01:01 HRV almost always goes up.

1:01:03 It in fact so much so it is very often

1:01:05 the first thing I look at when somebody asks me

1:01:07 about their HRV or we're going through their overall analysis

1:01:10 of all their data and we see HRV is poor.

1:01:12 My eyes go right up to sleep regularity.

1:01:14 If their sleep is irregular, then I honestly don't go much past that.

1:01:17 When their sleep regularly goes up, HR just goes up.

1:01:20 So, if you're like, man, I've been doing everything.

1:01:21 I've been doing blah blah blah blah.

1:01:23 My HV doesn't go up and your sleep's irregular.

1:01:25 Well, that's stop number one on the train.

1:01:27 Other stuff is honestly, sorry to be sound this way,

1:01:31 but it's kind of what I call the dumb stuff.

1:01:33 It's alcohol.

1:01:34 It is uh lots of bad negative health habits.

1:01:38 All this stuff will bring it down.

1:01:39 So, if you remove all those from the equation, it's probably going to go up.

1:01:43 Another one I wanted to bring up here um

1:01:46 that people don't pay a lot of attention to.

1:01:48 Two things have stood out when I was diving back through some of our databases.

1:01:51 One was wild changes in exercise within the same week.

1:01:57 So what I mean by that is if you're pretty standard throughout the week

1:02:00 and then you're the type of person who

1:02:02 goes bonkers with your exercise in the weekend,

1:02:05 we see this huge instability of HRV.

1:02:08 So whether you, you know,

1:02:09 you do your 10 mile run in the weekend or you do the multiple classes or you

1:02:13 like to play five hours of pickle ball

1:02:14 or whatever and it is drastically different than your week,

1:02:18 that will also explain a lot of instability

1:02:21 with your HRV and your resting heart rate for that matter.

1:02:23 So that one will sneak up on people.

1:02:25 And the last one I'll bring up

1:02:26 is actually nutrition related feeding frequency of food.

1:02:29 Specifically, we have had a number of people come in for sleep related issues,

1:02:35 whether that is really bad sleep or just kind of sub-optimal sleep,

1:02:37 and they're eating one meal a day.

1:02:39 Now, I'm not fundamentally opposed to one meal a day,

1:02:44 but in our experience, this has led to really, really compromised HRVs.

1:02:50 What has happened many times is these individuals feel good,

1:02:54 okay, or great for 30 days or 45 days, maybe up to 90 days,

1:02:58 but then you see the the nervous system just starting to pay the price.

1:03:03 I'm not trying to indicate that one meal a day is bad for your health.

1:03:07 Again, I'm going on my personal experience and the data we have

1:03:11 in our companies and and we've just seen it not go well.

1:03:16 And we've at the same time seen people then

1:03:19 who eat more frequently in terms of they were eating

1:03:22 one meal a day and they change and go

1:03:23 to two or three and the nervous system sends to recover.

1:03:26 Want to be real clear here.

1:03:28 I don't only mean their HRV score that does happen.

1:03:31 But it's other signs and symptoms as well.

1:03:34 It's objective measures of say sleep quality um cognitive function,

1:03:39 performance and so forth.

1:03:40 They feel good, but their physiology in the longer term isn't

1:03:45 uh responding how they they think or hoping it really is.

1:03:49 So, if you are a one meal a day, fine, great.

1:03:52 If you feel awesome, awesome.

1:03:53 Keep doing it.

1:03:54 I'm only bringing this up to where if you've

1:03:56 made a change recently and you're like, "What the heck?

1:03:58 Why why is my HB going down?" that I think is the most

1:04:01 appropriate way to to interpret it as this is maybe one of the things

1:04:05 that happens with um lack of feeding throughout the day is it creates some

1:04:10 potentially somewhat of a of a neurological

1:04:12 or nervous system stressor that will alter HRV.

1:04:16 So, lots of other things I could bring up here,

1:04:18 but those are the ones that I thought were most interesting.

1:04:21 It's a combination of some of the stuff that is most well documented,

1:04:23 the alcohol, the emotional regularity, so on and so forth,

1:04:26 with some things I thought that maybe some of you would find interested

1:04:29 in that we've just seen behind the scenes

1:04:31 that is not necessarily in the peer-reviewed literature.

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1:05:57 We have a little bit of an algorithm we use

1:05:59 when determining if a change in HRV matters to us.

1:06:02 So, how do you interpret this context?

1:06:05 Number one, we always check to make sure we got good data.

1:06:07 I talked about that earlier.

1:06:09 If they don't, then I disregard it.

1:06:12 But let's say they do.

1:06:12 Most of the time they do.

1:06:14 So, we've got good data, however you define that.

1:06:17 The next question I'm asking is,

1:06:18 are we talking about one day or is this been happening for more than three,

1:06:23 ideally more than five to seven days?

1:06:25 If it is acute, single day, second day,

1:06:27 third day only, then I'm asking the next set of questions,

1:06:31 which is okay, what are we doing with your training right now?

1:06:34 If we're in a phase where we're trying to cause physiological adaptations,

1:06:38 I'm trying to stress you.

1:06:40 So, if your HRV is lower and I'm seeing signs of stress,

1:06:44 that's exactly what we're pushing for.

1:06:46 That's a good thing.

1:06:47 We're not changing anything.

1:06:49 This is one of the huge flaws of general technologies

1:06:53 that just tell you what to do with your workout,

1:06:56 your nutrition based on today's score.

1:06:58 Oh, your HRV is low, therefore take a day off.

1:07:01 That's a really bad approach because it doesn't understand what you're trying

1:07:03 to do in the long term or even the medium-term in this case.

1:07:07 So, if we see an HIV that is low and it's

1:07:10 been down for two or three days and we're in a phase,

1:07:13 we're in the offseason, we're trying to build up change,

1:07:16 we're in a caloric deficit and we're working hard, we're try, I don't care.

1:07:21 You are a little bit stressed, that's the point.

1:07:23 That's going to cause adaptation.

1:07:25 we're going to ignore.

1:07:26 That said, if we're in a phase where we're supposed to be peing,

1:07:30 I'm trying to feel good,

1:07:31 whether we're peing for sports performance or you're simply saying,

1:07:34 I need to be on today.

1:07:35 I need to have a great day.

1:07:36 This is a really important thing I'm doing

1:07:38 in my family life or work life or something like that.

1:07:41 My HV's been down for a couple of days and I got

1:07:43 to get it fixed because I'm trying to perform at my best right now.

1:07:46 Then we're going to do what I call acute state shifters.

1:07:50 And I got a whole category of these things to cover for you here in one second.

1:07:54 But I'm going to give them tons of different strategies

1:07:56 that they can pull out one or more of these acute shifters.

1:07:59 And I promise you these will make that HRV go up right now.

1:08:02 They'll go up today.

1:08:03 They'll probably be up again tomorrow.

1:08:05 And you'll be fine.

1:08:06 You'll be back in the sweet spot.

1:08:07 Going back up our algorithm a little bit.

1:08:09 If we got good data and this has not just been a one or two day thing,

1:08:14 but it's been here for five or seven or 10 days or longer,

1:08:17 then I'm gonna ask the same follow-up question.

1:08:20 Number one, are we trying to induce adaptation?

1:08:24 If so, I'm not going to ignore it, but I'm going to watch it carefully.

1:08:29 Not necessarily going to change your workout program today,

1:08:31 but we are going to watch it carefully.

1:08:34 If it is really suppressed, meaning it's more than two standard deviations

1:08:38 outside your normal for more than five days, we're going to take action.

1:08:43 We're going to do something.

1:08:44 Okay?

1:08:45 If that was really technical for you, if it's a really big change and it's been

1:08:49 around a long time and you're really feeling bad,

1:08:53 your motivation, your energy, you feel junky,

1:08:56 then then we're going to we're going to take action.

1:08:58 Okay?

1:08:59 If we're in a phase where we're trying to perform

1:09:01 our best and that's been down for a long time,

1:09:05 then we're going to go to what I call chronic solutions.

1:09:08 So, we have our acute solutions and our chronic solutions.

1:09:12 And so, ultimately, we want to make sure

1:09:13 we're using the right tool for the right task.

1:09:16 Now, I'm going to go through all those briefly,

1:09:19 but before we do that, I want to finish talking about respiratory rate as well,

1:09:23 because it's a little bit of a different interpretation.

1:09:26 I've given you some sample numbers earlier.

1:09:27 I kept saying 14 breaths per minute or 15

1:09:29 breaths per minute and I'm doing that because

1:09:31 the literature will show you the cutoff line

1:09:34 seems to be about 16 breaths per minute.

1:09:36 If you are over 16, there is clear and consistent

1:09:39 literature tying that to everything from risk of a cardiovascular event,

1:09:45 myioardial inffection or stroke or things

1:09:48 like that is tied to clinical deterioration, pain, uh emotional stress,

1:09:53 cognitive load, and a whole host of things

1:09:56 that you don't want to be anywhere near.

1:09:58 If you are at 16, you're right on that line.

1:10:02 Yeah, I'm not trying to overly scare you,

1:10:04 but if you're above that, I'm going to make the case that you,

1:10:08 as long as our data are accurate,

1:10:10 which is again a whole another question, but if you are up there,

1:10:13 then we have a case of chronic over breathing.

1:10:15 Whether that is chronic hyperventilation, that's a medical diagnosis,

1:10:18 not for me to decide, but you are over breathing in my opinion.

1:10:21 And we're going to want to bring that thing down.

1:10:23 Most of the time I'm looking at if you are

1:10:26 in the 10 to 14 range and then I don't see anything else.

1:10:32 I'm good here.

1:10:33 If you're 15, I'm asking a lot of follow-up questions.

1:10:36 You're 15 16 I'm probably going to ask us to do something.

1:10:40 If we have bunch of other major issues, maybe I'm not too worried about it.

1:10:43 But if you're over 16, then this is going to be one of our top tier priorities.

1:10:48 All right?

1:10:48 Because of all the reasons I shared

1:10:49 earlier about what happens when you're over ventilating.

1:10:52 lots of short and long-term issues.

1:10:55 And so this is exactly how we interpret those numbers.

1:10:58 Let's say you're at 16 or 17.

1:11:00 Okay, very first stop on this train.

1:11:03 I want to make sure your breathing mechanics are okay.

1:11:06 Very simple first principles here.

1:11:08 If you are ineffective with your breathing strategy,

1:11:12 whether you're you're breathing through

1:11:13 your shoulders and your neck, clicular breathing,

1:11:16 whether your diaphragm doesn't work appropriately, your intercostals are weak,

1:11:20 your position or your posture is bad so bad that it's infecting your breathing.

1:11:24 Well, then you can't breathe well, you're going to have to bring more often.

1:11:27 This is simply if you're weak in a spot, you have to do it more often.

1:11:30 If you you can imagine being hunched over, right?

1:11:32 Touch your front of your shoulder to your knee and try to breathe.

1:11:35 You can't.

1:11:36 So, you're going to breathe more frequently to get the same amount of air in.

1:11:38 That's an exaggerated example, but you get the point.

1:11:41 So, number one, before I'm worried about some long-term intervention with you,

1:11:46 I just want to make sure that it's not a mechanical issue.

1:11:50 Past that, we're going to look at breathing problems.

1:11:53 And what I mean by that are everything

1:11:55 from allergies to nasal blockage to clinical sleep disorders.

1:12:00 If you can't breathe through your nose,

1:12:02 there's a strong chance you're going to be hyperventilating.

1:12:04 It's not a guarantee, but we've just seen that really highly associated.

1:12:08 So, step number one,

1:12:09 the way that we're going to interpret this higher respiratory rate.

1:12:13 Okay, maybe it's a sign that mechanical breathing technique is not great.

1:12:18 Nope.

1:12:19 How's your nose?

1:12:19 Oh, yeah.

1:12:20 I'm stuffed up all the time.

1:12:21 Hm.

1:12:21 Have polyps?

1:12:22 Can you breathe through your nose ever?

1:12:24 No, never.

1:12:25 Are you mouth breather?

1:12:26 Okay, great.

1:12:26 Then we're going right there.

1:12:27 I'm not going into anything else past

1:12:29 this until we fix breathing out of your nose.

1:12:31 Dehydration can do the same thing.

1:12:34 So if you just notice your respirator rates up one particular day,

1:12:38 oh my gosh, and then you properly hydrate, it probably goes back down.

1:12:43 Nothing to worry about long term there.

1:12:46 After that, things get a little bit more work intensive.

1:12:49 So it could be a CO2 intolerance thing.

1:12:52 If you're highly sensitive to that CO2,

1:12:54 your brain can sometimes get miscalibrated.

1:12:57 It thinks there's way too much CO2 in the system than there actually is.

1:13:00 So you're either hyper stressed or or hyper sensitive and so it starts

1:13:04 asking you to dump and offload that CO2 way sooner than it needs to.

1:13:08 You're intolerant or hyper sensitive, one of those two.

1:13:10 In that case, we can confirm that.

1:13:13 So we see your respiratory rate is elevated.

1:13:15 We also then run that CO2 tolerance test on you.

1:13:17 Oh, that's also poor.

1:13:19 Then great, we don't need to do anything else with your respiratory rate.

1:13:22 We fixed your CO2 tolerance and that respiratory rate will take care of itself.

1:13:26 Other things to think about here, if your rest rate is high,

1:13:29 it could just be a long-term pattern.

1:13:31 Remember earlier when I talked about how

1:13:32 these can go from initiating factors to sustaining factors.

1:13:36 If you and we've experienced this a lot

1:13:38 in our middle um to later aged uh adults, right?

1:13:43 These are often folks that came from high stress environments,

1:13:46 high stress careers, whether these have been lots of former surgeons,

1:13:51 u military individuals, um entrepreneurs,

1:13:55 things like that, or they just had high stress for a long period of time.

1:13:59 The over breathing was appropriate because they were in a stressful environment.

1:14:02 And then they sell the company, they retire,

1:14:05 they reduce their hours, and then years later they're still over breathing.

1:14:09 And in the cases where we've had years of data on people,

1:14:11 we've seen this uh confirmed pretty well.

1:14:14 That pattern just exists.

1:14:15 You're just over breathing and you don't know it.

1:14:17 So that has happened a lot.

1:14:18 You got to go break that pattern.

1:14:19 One of the biggest causes of this has actually been pregnancy.

1:14:22 A lot of things can happen post having a child for women.

1:14:26 And those patterns can be established and stay permanent unless you

1:14:29 go back in there and actively reframe and rebuild the new pattern.

1:14:33 Last one.

1:14:33 Then here is what we would finally call general elevated alatic load.

1:14:37 whether this is physical or mental.

1:14:39 Remember alistatic load is that colloquial term for kind of like global

1:14:42 stress on your body no matter how it comes in or not.

1:14:46 I went through all that list for a bunch of reasons,

1:14:48 but one of them is I want you to to realize

1:14:50 that that stress thing is at the the last one.

1:14:53 We don't look at respiratory rate and go,

1:14:55 "Oh, you're stressed." That's that could be,

1:14:58 but it could simply be the fact you can't breathe out of your nose.

1:15:01 It could be something you're not hydrated.

1:15:03 It could be the fact that you're just intolerant

1:15:06 or sensitive to CO2 or any number of reasons.

1:15:08 And that is the pecking order.

1:15:10 That's the strategy we go off of when

1:15:11 we try to solve those simple problems first.

1:15:13 And in our experience, you get through one through four mechanics,

1:15:18 breathing problems, hydration, and CO2 tolerance.

1:15:21 Most of the time, your situation is solved.

1:15:24 Whether you pick any of the metrics I just talked about today,

1:15:26 heart rate or respiratory rate or anything

1:15:29 else or you pick something else entirely different.

1:15:31 I think most of us in this field would

1:15:33 agree you should not be overly fixated on one metric.

1:15:36 There is no best number here.

1:15:39 And there's problems with data and interpretation

1:15:41 and normative values and so forth.

1:15:44 Things like stress, things like recovery are multiaceted.

1:15:48 You need multiple objective and subjective measures before you get too excited.

1:15:53 Let's actually finally talk about what some of these interventions

1:15:55 are and how we can improve overall nervous system resilience.

1:16:00 It makes sense for us to start off with the acute changes.

1:16:03 This is the stuff you can do right now in any

1:16:05 given moment and it will change how you're feeling and experiencing life.

1:16:08 It will shift your state.

1:16:10 You already know this.

1:16:11 This is what I call the 4x4 matrix.

1:16:13 So picture on one part of the matrix

1:16:16 your physiology on another part your autonomic nervous system.

1:16:20 What I'm going to share with you is how physiology can change autonomic nervous

1:16:23 system and it can make it go up or it can make it go down.

1:16:27 Autonomic nervous system can do the same thing with physiology.

1:16:30 So, it's a four-way street here.

1:16:32 Really easy examples.

1:16:34 If you want to make your physiology change your autonomic nervous

1:16:37 system and you want to make it go up, just scream.

1:16:41 Yell right now.

1:16:42 Flex your muscles as hard as you possibly can.

1:16:45 You do anything like that with your physical body,

1:16:48 that will cause your autonomic nervous system to change instantaneously.

1:16:51 Heart rate will go up, respiratory rate will change, adrenaline levels.

1:16:54 You pick your metric physiology

1:16:57 directly increasing autonomic nervous system activity.

1:17:01 You can also do the opposite.

1:17:03 You could do a physiological double sign.

1:17:06 You could do progressive muscle relaxation.

1:17:08 You simply relax your forearm and this could

1:17:11 cause a change in your autonomic nervous system.

1:17:14 You get the idea.

1:17:15 That is physiology to ANS.

1:17:17 ANS to physiology is basically the opposite.

1:17:20 You get scared.

1:17:21 Big shot of adrenaline happens.

1:17:23 This will physically increase your strength capacity,

1:17:25 force production, and power output in your muscles.

1:17:29 An autonomic nervous system change.

1:17:30 You could do this with a supplement or a drug.

1:17:33 We could go down.

1:17:34 You could be more zen.

1:17:35 You could take again a medication.

1:17:37 It could lower your heart rate.

1:17:39 And because of that, it could have a physical response as well.

1:17:42 So, you intuitively know the answer.

1:17:44 you want to change and regulate your autonomic nervous system,

1:17:47 you have the capacity and you already know the basics of it.

1:17:50 I break these acute and chronic actions up into a bunch of different categories.

1:17:55 For me that looks like there are food based solutions, there are supplements,

1:18:00 there are thermal stressors, so temperature, of course there's breath work,

1:18:05 there are what I call brain distractions or brain alterations,

1:18:08 basic rest or sleep, there's light things you can do like physical light.

1:18:13 There's movement stuff, physical movement,

1:18:15 and then there's what I call motivation.

1:18:17 Tons and tons and tons of examples.

1:18:20 Most of them though are acute.

1:18:22 Let's take motivation for example.

1:18:24 If you scrolled on social media and came across

1:18:28 a a phenomenal uh Cameron Haynes or Jo Willink quote, you might get inspired.

1:18:33 That could change your autonomic nervous system.

1:18:35 That could change your arousal state.

1:18:36 Right now, you might have been low energy, lethargic.

1:18:39 That could put you in more sympathetic drive.

1:18:41 Your your HRV will change if it is actually sufficiently motivating to you.

1:18:46 You could read a story or a book or watch a movie.

1:18:49 You could do a physical warm-up, start training, do some hops.

1:18:52 I mentioned earlier, flex as hard as you can.

1:18:54 if I shine a bright light directly in your face.

1:18:56 All these things would change your state in the moment,

1:18:59 but none of those are going to make your chronic HRV improve over time.

1:19:02 These are mostly short-term solutions.

1:19:05 The chronic ones are a little bit more difficult.

1:19:07 Okay, this is when we get into stuff like BOF feedback training.

1:19:11 If you have sleep issues, getting a chronic sleep improvement.

1:19:14 If you are chronically underex exercised, start exercising more.

1:19:18 um if you are really off particularly if you are low in caloric

1:19:22 intake you're hypocchloric for too long this might have a chronic effect

1:19:26 of of bringing more calories back and then there are things like again

1:19:29 thermal exposure that can have a chronic effect but most of that stuff

1:19:32 is pretty direct and acute give you really easy example I've been

1:19:37 doing a cold water immersion cold water exposures for a very long

1:19:41 time I do not use them because I think it adds a minute

1:19:45 to my life I do not use them to burn more fat.

1:19:49 You guys can all debate whether or not you think those things exist,

1:19:52 but for me, we have used it for stuff like this.

1:19:55 We actually ran a bunch of experiments.

1:19:57 Uh we never published this stuff.

1:19:58 We didn't take it through IRB.

1:19:59 We just ran it with a bunch of our athletes.

1:20:01 And what we found was if you looked at somebody's HRV very specifically,

1:20:06 then you put them in a a cold bath, cold water for 2 to 5 minutes, how cold?

1:20:12 I don't know.

1:20:13 Um in American units here, somewhere between 30 to 50°.

1:20:16 It didn't really matter that much to be honest.

1:20:19 And you sat them there.

1:20:20 Here's what would happen.

1:20:21 Your HRV immediately post the ice bath when you got out would go down.

1:20:26 No surprise.

1:20:27 If you get in cold, really cold water,

1:20:30 you get sh shot immediately into sympathetic drive.

1:20:33 Low HRV.

1:20:34 Remember, fight or flight.

1:20:37 However, as quickly as 30 minutes post, your HRV will be 10 to 20% higher,

1:20:45 more downregulated than you were before the cold.

1:20:48 And that continued to increase for about the next 3 hours or so.

1:20:53 And we ran this stuff by actually checking

1:20:54 HRV like every 15 minutes for several hours.

1:20:57 So, we had 30 minutes post, 45 minutes post,

1:21:00 60 minutes post, etc., etc., all the way up to 180 post.

1:21:03 And we stopped measuring that then.

1:21:05 and still 180 minutes post cold

1:21:07 water immersion HRV was higher significantly higher

1:21:11 25 to 50% depending on the person higher three hours after the cold bath

1:21:16 and so while I know that most of us think about it as like

1:21:18 that short-term thing no I don't have peer-reviewed publications on this but we

1:21:23 saw this enough to where I was like yeah okay great and it

1:21:25 also stacked up with what I feel it's going to last day now

1:21:28 will this last weeks and months I don't know so probably if I

1:21:32 had to guess but it certainly will give you a nice acute bump.

1:21:35 And by acute, I mean several hours and several days, right?

1:21:39 If you hate the ice, you think it is terrible or you don't like it at all, fine.

1:21:43 I got a 50 more examples I can give you.

1:21:46 It's just one that that showed up as really clear evidence to us.

1:21:50 Changing gears entirely,

1:21:53 you can do this without moving your physical body at all,

1:21:55 without suffering, by just doing what are called visual resets.

1:21:59 Mentioned him a couple of times now, but thank you, Dr.

1:22:02 Andrew Huberman.

1:22:04 some of his early podcasts on his uh his platform,

1:22:07 his show talked a lot about this, but visual resets,

1:22:10 I know his lab worked on it a lot, are really compelling and really effective.

1:22:15 Lots of ways you can do this.

1:22:17 There are simple drills like eye circles.

1:22:19 So, you just stand there and basically run

1:22:21 a big loop with your eyes circling around.

1:22:25 That will change your sympathetic drive.

1:22:27 Other ones that again my colleague Emily High Totower I

1:22:31 know uses a lot are things like a smooth H.

1:22:34 You can see this and the literature is really clear here.

1:22:36 There's lots of different cortical and and visual resets,

1:22:40 but this stuff is really fantastic and super effective.

1:22:43 A different one entirely that I think a lot

1:22:46 of you exercisers and strength trainers will like.

1:22:48 It's a modified Volva maneuver.

1:22:50 the Volvo maneuver and is that intraabdominal pressure that you create

1:22:54 when you're doing things like lifting weights or having a bowel movement.

1:22:59 This is exactly how you use it.

1:23:00 Again, we're still talking about chronic or acute rather.

1:23:04 This is something you're going to do right now.

1:23:06 It's not going to fix your long-term stuff,

1:23:07 but it'll give you that change when you're feeling like you need it right now.

1:23:11 So, you're going to hold your breath.

1:23:13 You can do an inhale and hold, or you can do an exhale and hold.

1:23:16 It doesn't really matter,

1:23:16 but you're going to hold and then create a bunch of intraabdominal pressure.

1:23:20 And what's really key about this is the pressure

1:23:23 needs to be in a true 360°ree range.

1:23:27 Here's the analogy I like on this one.

1:23:29 Imagine you are a can of soda.

1:23:32 So, you're a barrel, if you will.

1:23:35 And the bottom of the barrel that's sitting

1:23:37 flat on the ground is your pelvic floor.

1:23:39 And the top is your diaphragm.

1:23:41 So, these are running parallel to each other.

1:23:44 And then the barrel or the can of soda, however you like to think about it,

1:23:47 is everything from the front of your stomach to the side

1:23:49 of your stomach all the way to your back.

1:23:51 You want to create pressure against all of those surfaces.

1:23:55 So imagine you're trying to explode that barrel every way.

1:23:59 You're trying to blow the bottom out.

1:24:00 So blow the bottom into the ground.

1:24:02 You're trying to blow the top up in the air.

1:24:04 And you're trying to blow every side out each individual way.

1:24:07 Right?

1:24:08 That's how we do.

1:24:08 It's not just a crunch.

1:24:10 It's not a back extension.

1:24:11 It's not anything else.

1:24:12 It is a all quadrants vertical and horizontal.

1:24:16 And you're going to do that and you're going to hold it for 10 seconds.

1:24:20 In doing that, you're going to see your heart rate jump from, you know,

1:24:24 60 70 beats per minute to 120.

1:24:27 It'll shoot way way way up in the air.

1:24:30 But then at the end of those 10 seconds, you exhale.

1:24:34 And actually, that the literature suggests

1:24:35 that it doesn't really matter how you exhale.

1:24:38 Go slowly.

1:24:39 Go through your mouth.

1:24:39 Go through your nose.

1:24:40 kind of let it all dump out quickly.

1:24:42 It doesn't actually matter that much.

1:24:44 In doing that, that heart rate will go from 110

1:24:48 or 120 all the way now down to like 40 or 50.

1:24:52 So, before you started the drill,

1:24:53 you were at 60 or 70 and now your new baseline is significantly lower.

1:24:57 Really effective.

1:24:58 You can do it anywhere.

1:24:59 It takes just a few seconds to do.

1:25:02 Doesn't cost you any money at all.

1:25:05 And it is particularly good at altering what are called

1:25:08 barrower receptors that have specific action on that vagus nerve.

1:25:12 And so you can do this.

1:25:13 The magnitude of effect is actually really really high.

1:25:17 You'll hear in a second, but there's different technology you can

1:25:20 use to directly stimulate your vagus nerve,

1:25:23 but the magnitude of effect is much lower than something like this Volva.

1:25:27 So it's free, it's cheap, it's easy, you can do it a bunch,

1:25:30 and it has a big uh magnitude of effect.

1:25:34 Couple of caveats here with this modified balsa though.

1:25:37 If you are prone to orthostatic issues, you pass out a lot.

1:25:41 You have low blood pressure.

1:25:42 Don't do this.

1:25:44 Don't do this if you're by water or in a pool or in the ocean.

1:25:48 Uh don't do this a whole bunch of times.

1:25:50 Probably don't do this immediately during your workout.

1:25:53 All the caveats aside, right?

1:25:54 You're going to create a bunch of intraabdominal pressure.

1:25:57 You're going to block a lot of blood flow, if not oluded entirely.

1:26:01 Don't pass out.

1:26:02 Don't fall into water.

1:26:03 Don't drown.

1:26:04 Don't do all that stuff.

1:26:05 Another option, like I just mentioned,

1:26:07 are what are called those veagal nerve stimulators.

1:26:10 These are somewhat new.

1:26:11 There are a handful of FDA approved devices that you can use.

1:26:15 You generally have to have a prescription to get them, though.

1:26:18 You can buy a ton of these as normal consumers,

1:26:21 and I have not been impressed with any of them.

1:26:24 The data are, I would say, weak at best on them.

1:26:29 I have personally used many of them and found like I got nothing out of it.

1:26:34 The people we had try it got nothing out of it at all.

1:26:37 The studies that are the most supportive are

1:26:40 ones that are funded by the companies themselves.

1:26:43 So that doesn't inherently mean the data are wrong or bad or manipulated,

1:26:46 but you all know what that means.

1:26:47 So for me, when it comes

1:26:49 to these these commercially available nerve stimulators,

1:26:53 until we can see some more independent testing

1:26:55 done and the and the data are more impressive,

1:26:57 uh I generally don't like to use them.

1:26:59 That said, if you've had a different experience and you like it a lot,

1:27:02 that's by all means that's great.

1:27:03 Use it.

1:27:04 I have tried some of the clinical ones, the FDA approved ones,

1:27:08 the ones that require a prescription, and those are far more powerful.

1:27:12 Those have been effective.

1:27:14 I specifically have used one called the Gamma Core.

1:27:17 You have to have a RX for it, as I mentioned.

1:27:20 Uh, no affiliation to the company, but it is quite effective.

1:27:24 You you'll notice it pretty substantially.

1:27:26 your data will change almost instantaneously if

1:27:28 you're if you're measuring it and monitoring it.

1:27:31 Mostly when it comes to these things,

1:27:33 these are coming from neurologists, people with severe migraines.

1:27:37 This is just generally the application.

1:27:39 This is not something of that we often think about

1:27:41 if somebody's like trying to make their HIV score better today.

1:27:44 So don't swing a sledgehammer at a at a fly, if you know what I mean.

1:27:49 But these things are out there.

1:27:51 Hopefully that gives you a sense of a bunch of different tools and strategies.

1:27:54 I intentionally picked things all over the map.

1:27:56 Cold water to a breathing drill uh to technology

1:28:02 from free to a little bit more expensive

1:28:04 and a whole bunch of other things in between

1:28:06 that can shift or improve that state instantaneously.

1:28:09 We're going to transition now and finish up by talking

1:28:11 about some of the things that will actually make improvements chronically.

1:28:15 So, let's get you out of that hole and let's make you a more permanent,

1:28:19 more resilient nervous system.

1:28:21 Remember our goal.

1:28:22 We want to desensitize.

1:28:24 We want that system running in the background and for us

1:28:27 to have the ability to have some control over it when we want.

1:28:31 If you think about basic desensitization, the exact same principles apply here.

1:28:37 Which means you can already intuitit a lot of the solutions.

1:28:41 I'll give you some again what the science shows us, what we've experienced,

1:28:44 but there's obviously many many more things

1:28:47 or an unending list of stuff you could try.

1:28:50 Think about this from the perspective of the immune system.

1:28:53 Now, I'll tell you a personal story.

1:28:55 My daughter has an incredibly severe allergy to cashews.

1:28:59 We put her through a treatment.

1:29:00 It took us about 18 months and she now eats cashews every day.

1:29:04 Right?

1:29:04 We were in a position for when she was

1:29:07 younger to have to carry an EpiPen with us.

1:29:10 If there was cashew dust in the air,

1:29:12 you know, there's a non-zero chance that she could die.

1:29:15 It was that severe.

1:29:17 How did that program work?

1:29:19 basic desensitization.

1:29:21 You give them a very, very, very small load.

1:29:24 Don't put anything else in the system that could irritate them.

1:29:28 As time goes on, you give them a slightly higher amount

1:29:31 of load until she got up to eating again multiple cashews a day.

1:29:35 If you look at a totally different system,

1:29:37 another personal experience I had many years ago,

1:29:40 I had an athlete who was struggling a lot with low back pain.

1:29:43 I called a colleague of mine, a physical therapist, Dr.

1:29:46 Quinn Heno.

1:29:48 Quinn was fantastic and he basically said,

1:29:50 "Hey, you're dealing with low back pain.

1:29:52 Take her all the way up to the point of low back pain.

1:29:55 Go right below that line and then train a bunch.

1:29:59 Don't hurt her.

1:30:00 Don't exaggerate it." Right?

1:30:01 Don't give my daughter a bunch of cashews and cause a huge reaction.

1:30:04 That makes the system worse, more sensitive, right?

1:30:07 It's on high alert.

1:30:09 No, no, no.

1:30:10 Small doses and then and build those doses up and desensitize the back pain.

1:30:15 Worked perfectly well.

1:30:16 the athlete has it's been years that athletes not had back pain,

1:30:19 chronic low back pain ever since.

1:30:23 Completely different.

1:30:24 And again, I'm showing you wildly different

1:30:26 examples here because I want you to understand,

1:30:29 in my opinion, this is a ubiquitous physiological thing.

1:30:33 This is not specific to HRV, specific to the nervous system.

1:30:36 It seems to be just a renowned physiological principle.

1:30:40 So, it carries a ton of weight.

1:30:42 This looks a lot of different ways.

1:30:43 I'm just going to give you some samples.

1:30:46 The research is going to show you most of the time practices in this area,

1:30:53 you're going to start to see changes in three to four weeks.

1:30:56 You should feel noticeable changes, but it won't be a week.

1:30:59 It won't be a day.

1:31:00 3 to four weeks seems to be the number.

1:31:03 The biggest impact seems to come around the 6 to 8 week mark.

1:31:07 Consistently dosing for that long.

1:31:09 Past 8 weeks, you don't see as much continued progress.

1:31:14 And so what often times happens is you can whatever you're doing,

1:31:17 you can kind of back it down from doing it once

1:31:19 or twice every day to maybe two or three times a week.

1:31:22 So you're kind of at a maintenance dosage from there.

1:31:25 That's what my daughter is with her cashews.

1:31:27 She has a little bit of cashews a couple times

1:31:29 a week and that keeps her immune system totally at bay.

1:31:32 As we as far as we understand it,

1:31:34 if we were to do that, pull the cashews away for a couple of months,

1:31:37 she might actually regress all the way back to the beginning.

1:31:40 Okay, again, some analogy that helps help there.

1:31:43 If you were to think about this from a growing muscle perspective,

1:31:48 nobody in their right mind would go do one

1:31:50 workout and then go to bed that night and go, "Ah, my biceps aren't any bigger.

1:31:54 This stuff sucks.

1:31:55 It doesn't work.

1:31:56 Strength training is a joke.

1:31:57 It's fake." Woke up the next day, my arms aren't any bigger.

1:32:01 Like, you just you just know that doesn't work, right?

1:32:04 But yet, we expect the same thing to happen when we do breath work.

1:32:08 Uhhuh.

1:32:09 I've been doing it for two days.

1:32:10 Nothing happened.

1:32:10 My HRV score is the same.

1:32:13 Sure.

1:32:13 Of course it is.

1:32:15 This is a system approach.

1:32:16 This is a desensitization.

1:32:18 You're reframing.

1:32:19 You're building a new road here.

1:32:20 It's going to take several weeks.

1:32:22 That's where the benefit comes.

1:32:24 If you feel better right now when you do it, great.

1:32:25 That was an acute thing.

1:32:27 But we're trying to get to chronic changes, right?

1:32:30 So, we want to be active now so that it can be passive later.

1:32:34 What that means is during these first four to eight weeks, it's work.

1:32:40 It's a lot.

1:32:41 You're going to have to dedicate 10 to 15 minutes a day of doing

1:32:44 something that you're not going to necessarily feel that much better in doing.

1:32:49 But if you do this appropriately, we reset this baseline,

1:32:53 then you could be on to maintenance dosage

1:32:54 and not have to actively do this so much.

1:32:57 So, there's a bunch of examples for you.

1:33:00 I'm going to go through a handful right now.

1:33:02 And again, I've intentionally tried to choose

1:33:03 these from a wide variety of activities.

1:33:06 So, let's dive into them.

1:33:07 Very first one we're going to start with is exercise.

1:33:10 You know about the hormetic stressor effects of exercise, right?

1:33:14 You break it down to build it up.

1:33:16 Not exactly what happens, but that's what hormesis is, right?

1:33:19 Small insult, come back better.

1:33:22 We saw this with cold.

1:33:23 You get really, really cold, you dive into sympathetic drive,

1:33:26 which then has this compensatory response into parasympathetic.

1:33:29 Same thing here.

1:33:30 Same thing else.

1:33:31 You can look across the research.

1:33:32 I've got some papers specifically I pulled up that'll be in the show notes.

1:33:37 Strength training, low intensity cardiovascular training,

1:33:40 highintensity intervals, all of it works.

1:33:44 If you want to directly compare them,

1:33:45 looks like highintensity interval training seems

1:33:48 to be the best for this specific marker.

1:33:52 Same time, if you're doing max effort high intensity intervals every single day,

1:33:57 you're going to run into a hole.

1:33:58 you're gonna run into a wall and it's going to go down eventually.

1:34:01 So, dose appropriately.

1:34:03 We use a little bit of all of it.

1:34:05 If we feel like somebody's doing way too much highintensity work,

1:34:08 we will pull it back and HRV will improve.

1:34:12 Respiratory rate will come down.

1:34:13 Resting heart rate will come down.

1:34:15 I've seen that more times than I can count.

1:34:18 That said, if you're not exercising at all or you're exercising a little

1:34:22 bit or moderate amount or you don't go that high of intensity very often,

1:34:26 we will see the same positive responses by adding highintensity training.

1:34:31 Whether that's higher intensity strength training,

1:34:33 higher intensity interval training or cardiovascular training, same thing.

1:34:37 So, this is just about the right dose for the right overall experience.

1:34:42 Totally dependent upon your lifestyle and sleep and nutrition

1:34:44 and blah blah blah blah blah blah, right?

1:34:46 So, not a one-sizefits-all answer here, but pay attention to those things.

1:34:50 So, overall, exercise wins.

1:34:52 And this has been again documented so many times, I can't even count.

1:34:57 Next one on that stop is breath work.

1:34:59 Remember earlier when you exercise more CO2, so you breathe more.

1:35:05 So, when you start thinking about it, what is structured breath work doing?

1:35:10 It's kind of like manipulating a little bit of a lower level amount of exercise.

1:35:16 It makes sense.

1:35:17 The same physiology happens.

1:35:19 The same basic benefits.

1:35:20 It's really consistent.

1:35:23 The framework we use to think about it is in three basic steps.

1:35:26 If we're going to implement a specific breathing protocol for somebody,

1:35:31 here's how we do it.

1:35:32 Again, for these particular purposes.

1:35:33 Number one, before we actually put somebody

1:35:36 on a breathing program, we reduce arousal.

1:35:41 I said this a while ago now, but this is actually step number one.

1:35:45 Before you have to go through

1:35:47 this uh meditation or intentional breath work protocol,

1:35:51 we just got to reduce the sensory input.

1:35:53 We have seen this a lot.

1:35:54 Go for a walk in nature, no podcast, no music, not as much time.

1:36:00 Don't you can't wake up in the morning,

1:36:02 immediately go to your heavy metal music,

1:36:04 work for 15 hours, come home, answer emails, and then fall asleep.

1:36:09 You can because you burn a lot of energy.

1:36:12 You're going to be tired,

1:36:13 but that's going to keep you in a pretty high state of arousal.

1:36:15 So, I'm telling you right now, if you want to do breath work, you're into it.

1:36:18 Cool.

1:36:19 We've had a lot of people who just don't like it.

1:36:21 I'm be totally can with you.

1:36:23 I'm not the biggest fan myself personally.

1:36:26 always feels good, always works,

1:36:27 but it's not like on my high list of things I enjoy doing every day.

1:36:32 And so, I would rather just be like, man, I need some recovery.

1:36:36 It's easier for me to just reduce physical arousal.

1:36:39 Give me some more quiet time.

1:36:40 No more sensory input for the day.

1:36:42 That'll take care of most of it.

1:36:44 If that's not enough,

1:36:45 the next step we go to is more time doing nasal only breathing.

1:36:51 Close your mouth.

1:36:52 Breathe through your nose.

1:36:53 Whether this means you tape your mouth closed while you're

1:36:55 working or you go for a walk and you're breathing

1:36:58 only through your nose or you're doing some or all

1:37:02 or any portion of your exercise with nasal only breathing.

1:37:06 I don't really care.

1:37:07 It activates the diaphragm more.

1:37:09 It tends to on itself slow respiratory rate

1:37:12 down because you can't move air like you can.

1:37:15 You will notice hyperventilation through your nose when

1:37:17 you won't necessarily notice hyperventilation through your mouth.

1:37:21 You'll feel that.

1:37:22 You'll hear that.

1:37:22 that that would be very different than it coming through your mouth.

1:37:26 And we also know that nasal breathing is more parasympathetic on itself.

1:37:31 So by doing that reducing arousal and then

1:37:34 forcing people into some nasal only breathing time,

1:37:37 this basically takes care of all of our problems.

1:37:39 If you like or want to still need to do more things past that, at that point

1:37:43 we will instill a specific breath work protocol

1:37:47 and it could look a bunch of different ways.

1:37:49 But again, here are some samples intuitively here.

1:37:54 Just make your breath do what you want to feel like.

1:37:58 What's that mean?

1:37:59 Let's say you're trying to go up more energy.

1:38:02 you're feeling lethargic or lack of motivation and you're down and you're

1:38:08 not breathing very much and everything heart rate's low and energy is low.

1:38:13 Think about it.

1:38:13 What would your breath look like if you were

1:38:16 at a high energy state and then do that.

1:38:19 Force your breath to do something.

1:38:21 And as I talked about earlier, your physiology will respond to match it.

1:38:24 This is hyperventilation.

1:38:26 Breathe more.

1:38:27 Any of you have ever done hyperventilation breath work?

1:38:30 You'll know within a few seconds tingling in your arms,

1:38:34 you might start sweating, temperature goes up really acutely.

1:38:38 So, just do that.

1:38:39 Just hyperventilate.

1:38:40 If you're in the opposite and you're trying to come down,

1:38:43 just don't breathe as much.

1:38:44 Tons of protocols.

1:38:45 Yeah, extended exhales.

1:38:46 Sure, sure, sure, sure.

1:38:48 But the basic concept is slow your breath work down.

1:38:51 That's as complicated as it has to be.

1:38:53 If you want individual protocols, cool, fine, got them.

1:38:55 But that is the top line strategy here.

1:38:58 Most of the research and most practitioners who are effective

1:39:01 at this are going to use a combination within one protocol.

1:39:04 So you're going to do not just only extended exhales,

1:39:08 not just slowing your your breath rate down, not just speeding it up,

1:39:11 but you're going to use a combination to develop that hormonic stressor.

1:39:14 So if you want to truly downregulate,

1:39:17 you can just simply slow your breathing down.

1:39:19 But actually within one session, a combination of slower and faster and slower

1:39:25 and faster will lead to that hormetic response.

1:39:29 And if you finish, especially on low,

1:39:32 it's been our experience and and the research

1:39:33 would support this, you're going to often

1:39:35 times see more of a parasympathetic response than

1:39:37 if you were to just do parasympathetic alone.

1:39:39 So most of the time we're looking for a combination of up

1:39:41 and down for the same reasons that we talked about with exercise.

1:39:45 In other words, conflicts of interest here.

1:39:47 I am a board member no pay here

1:39:50 for a nonprofit called the Health and Human Performance Foundation.

1:39:54 I've been a part of this group for many years.

1:39:56 I was one of the founding members.

1:39:58 I'm bringing that up because that group led

1:40:00 by Tanya Bentley recently published a phenomenal review article.

1:40:05 We'll link it in the show notes, but I want to share with you what they found.

1:40:08 They were looking directly at the relationship

1:40:10 between breath work for stress and anxiety.

1:40:13 What do we know in that review?

1:40:16 They found I think 72 papers and something like 75

1:40:21 or 80% of the papers found that the breath work helped.

1:40:26 So just on its surface if we want to say like does breath work actually help

1:40:29 for anxiety and stress I think pretty clearly

1:40:32 the vast majority of the time it does.

1:40:34 But what was really interesting that Tanya did there

1:40:36 is she started breaking down the papers and saying,"Well,

1:40:38 what was true among the papers that worked and what was true

1:40:42 among the papers that didn't?" And can we glean anything from that?

1:40:44 And the answer was yes.

1:40:46 So here we go.

1:40:47 There were a handful of things, in fact,

1:40:48 five things specifically that were common among

1:40:51 all those papers that showed it worked.

1:40:54 And here they are.

1:40:54 Number one, they avoided fast only breathing practices.

1:41:00 I know these are very popular.

1:41:01 People love the the max inhalation exhalation stuff.

1:41:04 They like hyperventilation breathing.

1:41:06 If your goal is to try to reduce stress and anxiety chronically,

1:41:10 pretty clear evidence at this point that alone will not do it.

1:41:14 Doesn't mean you can't hyperventilate,

1:41:16 doesn't mean it can't be part of your practice.

1:41:18 But if your only practice

1:41:20 is chronic hyperventilate or consistent hyperventilation,

1:41:24 probably not going to be effective

1:41:25 for reducing your stress and anxiety long term.

1:41:27 Number two, the breath practice needs to be longer than five minutes.

1:41:31 Number three, generally needs to be humang guided.

1:41:35 So people that do it by themselves initially probably not the best strategy.

1:41:40 Whether you're physically in a room with somebody, that doesn't seem to matter,

1:41:44 but you need to have somebody coaching you through something at some point,

1:41:47 especially initially.

1:41:49 Number four, it takes multiple sessions per week.

1:41:53 You can't do this once in a while.

1:41:55 You can do it and feel that acute effect,

1:41:57 but it won't have that carryover chronic benefit.

1:42:00 Number five, there need to be a little bit more of longer term practices.

1:42:06 This is that four to six to eight week thing.

1:42:10 So, if we were to recap that, if you're using non-exclusively hyperventilation,

1:42:15 you're doing it more than five minutes,

1:42:17 ideally multiple times per day, someone that knows what they're doing,

1:42:21 has designed it, and you're giving yourself four to five, six weeks,

1:42:27 you got about a 70 to 80% chance that it

1:42:30 will meaningfully and clinically improve your anxiety and your stress.

1:42:35 That's some framework for breath protocols should work.

1:42:40 Most of that will take care of HRV,

1:42:42 CO2 tolerance, resting heart rate, and respiratory rate.

1:42:47 The next big category I want to talk

1:42:48 about are what are called BOF feedback mechanisms.

1:42:52 There's a lot of things here, tons of research.

1:42:54 I've actually been tinkering with this stuff

1:42:56 for probably 15 years or so at this point.

1:42:59 I want to categorize them for today's conversation into two main areas.

1:43:03 One what I'll call internal and the other that are called external.

1:43:06 So the internal ones are when you're trying to have that inter interosception.

1:43:11 You're trying to pay attention to your heart rate

1:43:13 and I'm intentionally telling you to slow your breathing down.

1:43:15 So that's an internal focus.

1:43:17 External is when you're actually watching your physiology on some

1:43:21 screen and you're just trying to make that thing improve.

1:43:24 So I'm not telling you how to do it.

1:43:26 I'm telling you what I want the response to be

1:43:28 and you're using that direct visual feedback to make alterations.

1:43:32 Both are great.

1:43:33 They're a little bit different and there's a lot of tools within them.

1:43:37 So, getting us started with a handful that I'll call

1:43:40 internals and these ones are free or close to it.

1:43:44 The very first one is any sort of hypoxic exposure.

1:43:48 I've talked about that earlier.

1:43:49 Hold your breath, the Volvo maneuver, anything like that.

1:43:52 This will give you an acute change and I'll absolutely reset you.

1:43:56 It will change your subjective feeling by simply holding your breath.

1:44:01 If you want to cue that to some physical exercise like

1:44:04 the balsa or you want to do jumping jacks or push-ups or something,

1:44:07 you'd be surprised, but a very short burst of holding your breath combined

1:44:12 with physical activity for a couple

1:44:14 of seconds can change perception pretty immediately.

1:44:17 And I'm calling this BOF feedback because you're going to feel it.

1:44:20 You're going to do it.

1:44:20 I'm telling you to do something to your body.

1:44:23 Ones that are more chronic though,

1:44:24 which is what we're trying to get into now, there's a cascade of them.

1:44:28 One that we've used a lot is actually uh a meditation app,

1:44:32 if you will, called Waking Up.

1:44:35 This is by Sam Harris.

1:44:37 There are plenty of ways to learn of meditation.

1:44:42 There are many different strategies for it,

1:44:43 but I'm highlighting this one because we've used it a lot

1:44:46 as well as because it is a it is a progressive system.

1:44:48 So, you can kind of take it, follow the course,

1:44:50 and if you don't know anything about meditation,

1:44:51 the lessons are pretty simple and small, and it kind of walks you through it.

1:44:55 I've personally been paying for Waking Up for many years.

1:44:58 We've given it to lots of clients plenty of times,

1:45:02 but I've only recently learned you can try it

1:45:04 for free for 30 days by going to wakingup.com/huberman.

1:45:08 That's my friend Dr.

1:45:09 Andrew Huberman's uh sponsor to his podcast over there.

1:45:13 So, you can try it all there and I hope you enjoy it.

1:45:16 It's it's truly phenomenal.

1:45:17 We've used it a lot.

1:45:18 And why again I'm saying that is we maybe sometimes someone's done breath

1:45:23 work or they won't do breath work or they're not interested in meditation.

1:45:26 We can just send them that say hey this is the only thing we're going

1:45:27 to ask you to do and they can kind of get hooked on a little bit.

1:45:31 They can gify it.

1:45:32 They can get there just focusing on paying attention to their breath

1:45:37 which is effectively what Sam is doing in that course.

1:45:40 It's bio feedback.

1:45:41 They have no connection with their breath.

1:45:43 They don't understand what's going on.

1:45:44 They're learning to connect to their breath and it makes a big difference.

1:45:48 That's why that's in BOF feedback.

1:45:50 Another super simple one is what Brian McKenzie calls gear one walking.

1:45:55 So you're going to walk 30 minutes, 45 minutes.

1:45:59 We have one client who we have walking almost two hours a day like this.

1:46:03 And why we're calling it BOF feedback

1:46:05 here is you're breathing through your nose,

1:46:06 but you're breathing at a very specific and intentional breath rate.

1:46:10 Two second inhale, two second exhale.

1:46:14 That's a 4 second rhythm.

1:46:16 Why that matters is four multiplied by 15 is 60.

1:46:22 That's 15 breaths per minute, right?

1:46:25 As I said earlier, 15 is kind

1:46:26 of that respiratory line where we start to be concerned.

1:46:29 If you're sleeping and you're breathing 15 breaths per minute,

1:46:32 we think that's a little bit high.

1:46:33 But if you're walking, 15 breaths per minute is appropriate.

1:46:36 So in doing this, what we're trying to do is

1:46:38 match an appropriate breath rate with an appropriate caloric expenditure.

1:46:42 We're not having you do sprints

1:46:43 or you're running where your heart rate's really,

1:46:45 really high and you're under breathing.

1:46:46 We're trying to retrain your baseline of saying

1:46:50 this is what 15 should feel like.

1:46:52 Now, when you go back and sleep,

1:46:54 bring it down to 10 or 12 or wherever the case is.

1:46:57 So, it's a very intentional two in two out.

1:46:59 It feels very, very weird.

1:47:01 It's nasal only.

1:47:02 You can't listen to a podcast.

1:47:04 You can't take work emails when you're this.

1:47:06 You have to be in that space and you got to spend some time there.

1:47:10 But it is quite effective.

1:47:11 Third one here we'll talk about is the cold exposure.

1:47:14 Now what I didn't say earlier is how you can use

1:47:17 cold exposure for bio feedback and retraining things like respiratory rate.

1:47:22 Common one we have used many many times get in your cold

1:47:27 whether this is your shower or your bath or whatever you're doing.

1:47:31 I'll give you the first say one to three

1:47:34 breath cycles to kind of calm yourself down.

1:47:37 And then past that we're not sitting in here for a particular amount of time.

1:47:42 What we're trying to do is take 10 breaths under control.

1:47:47 We are using the cold to regulate breath.

1:47:51 We are learning resilience.

1:47:53 I put you in a very physiological and psychological stressful situation.

1:47:59 Your hormones, your adrenaline, your heart rate will be flying up.

1:48:04 And I'm asking you to control them despite

1:48:08 the fact that they are wanting to go up.

1:48:10 That is exactly how you build stress inoculation.

1:48:13 That's walking you up to that line of low back pain,

1:48:16 but not pushing you over the edge.

1:48:18 You're not scared.

1:48:19 You can get out anytime.

1:48:20 There's no danger here.

1:48:22 But your body will be screaming at you that this is a all those things.

1:48:26 But you know it's not.

1:48:28 You might panic.

1:48:29 You might do a bunch of different things.

1:48:30 Fine.

1:48:30 Get out.

1:48:30 No problem.

1:48:32 That's the game we're practicing.

1:48:33 Just like Dr.

1:48:35 Harris in waking up.

1:48:37 The practice is not how much focus you can have on your breath.

1:48:41 The practice is when you lose focus, can you bring it back.

1:48:45 Same thing here.

1:48:46 We're using the cold to intentionally put you out of control.

1:48:51 And then we're saying, can you practice regaining control?

1:48:54 That's all we're doing.

1:48:55 Now, the things I just mentioned I call bio feedback,

1:48:57 but they're not the true scientific definition of that.

1:49:02 what we're really getting into this field is stuff more specific to HRV based

1:49:06 bio feedbacks and so we'll we'll cover those things right now a couple examples

1:49:11 many years ago I had a colleague who was actually a sports psychologist who

1:49:15 used BOF feedback this way he would put athletes in front of a computer

1:49:20 screen and he would have I think an electrode attached to their ear

1:49:25 um that was measuring things in a and a pulse oximter and they would

1:49:28 look at a screen and it was say a picture of a landscape

1:49:31 or maybe kids playing at a park and it was all in black and white

1:49:35 and he would not tell them anything but he would simply say make

1:49:38 that picture turn into color and they're staring at a screen they're like what

1:49:43 and then all a sudden the screen would start filling in color and then

1:49:47 it would go away back to black white and it would take people

1:49:49 a while but once they realized oh wow when I bring my heart

1:49:52 rate down I get more colors on the screen and so they would bring

1:49:56 their heart rate down and the colors would start filling in then we get

1:49:58 excited and then the colors would go

1:49:59 away and so they're not paying paying attention.

1:50:02 He's not telling them, "Bring your heart rate down,

1:50:03 stop breathing as much, exhale,

1:50:05 extended exhales." He's asking for an external solution

1:50:09 and they are figuring out internally how to get there.

1:50:12 Awesome.

1:50:13 Awesome.

1:50:13 And then there's lots of different tools and technologies for that.

1:50:17 But an awesome way of developing bio feedback that way.

1:50:20 Really simple examples of stuff we've used

1:50:23 for many years are things like a weight belt.

1:50:25 Yeah.

1:50:26 20 bucks on Amazon.

1:50:27 You put this strap around your stomach and you

1:50:30 can actually see increased propriception in your core muscles.

1:50:34 Lots of research on this.

1:50:36 If you take a weight belt and you cinch it down really,

1:50:39 really tight and you go to lift your weights,

1:50:42 there's been many studies show a reduction in core strength in response to that.

1:50:48 You make it so tight, think of it this way, the core muscles turn off.

1:50:53 They don't have to do their work because the belt's doing it.

1:50:56 That said, if you put the belt on just kind of a little bit,

1:50:59 you can see increases in core strength.

1:51:02 Why?

1:51:03 Because you gives you a little bit of a tactile feedback.

1:51:05 You know that you're not pressing hard with your core.

1:51:09 You know, you're not activating in all spots because you can

1:51:11 feel the belt pressing back up against it when you're contracting hard.

1:51:14 So, because of that, it gives somebody

1:51:15 a bio feedback reminder, a tactile feedback.

1:51:18 Keep your core engaged.

1:51:20 Keep your core engaged.

1:51:20 And so, by keeping it engaged more often, you get more of a training effect.

1:51:24 Same exact principle can be applied here.

1:51:27 You can put people through a specific breath protocol

1:51:29 or you can put a weight belt on them.

1:51:32 Put a bigger one.

1:51:32 Put a a lot of the ones we'll use are like fat burning stomach belts.

1:51:37 You know the ones you put on you're like plastic on them

1:51:39 and they're there to help people think they're going to have a six-pack.

1:51:42 But what what it's just doing is giving you that feedback.

1:51:44 You don't necessarily have to give them a program.

1:51:47 You can just say, "Hey, wear this for 20 minutes.

1:51:49 Wear this for a couple of hours." you'll start to feel,

1:51:53 man, I'm not breathing through my core.

1:51:55 I'm breathing through my shoulders.

1:51:56 I'm breathing through my neck.

1:51:58 So, number one, we're starting to make

1:51:59 improvement and progress in breathing mechanics.

1:52:03 It also generally tends to slow people's

1:52:06 breath rate down because you feel you'll

1:52:10 hear that belt crunching and moving and going back and forth and you're like,

1:52:15 geez, that's happened a lot.

1:52:17 And you tend to just slow it down.

1:52:19 Simple BOF feedback, easy solutions,

1:52:22 no complicated schemes at all, very effective.

1:52:25 For those of you that want more structure and specific protocols to follow,

1:52:30 this last one will get you really excited.

1:52:32 There's a whole bunch of research on what's called resonant breathing.

1:52:37 This is HRV, BOF feedback resonance.

1:52:40 There's lots of different terms for it,

1:52:41 but if you Google that phrase, this will what will come up.

1:52:44 same goal, trying to give you more ability to recognize and control your HRV.

1:52:51 Recent meta analysis found very positive

1:52:54 benefits for self-reported stress and anxiety.

1:52:57 Other papers have looked at this and found

1:53:00 positive benefits for cognitive function and depression.

1:53:04 It has the same basic prescription of the other breath work.

1:53:08 You probably got to do it for about 20 minutes per day.

1:53:10 Takes four or five weeks, ideally morning and night.

1:53:13 morning and night rather and so that stuff is fixed but what is

1:53:17 specific about this it's really really clever a lot of the research here

1:53:22 came from a guy named Paul Layer L E Her I believe out

1:53:26 of Ruters in general this resonance is supposed to be consistent throughout life

1:53:32 now I don't know if more research comes out that that'll change

1:53:35 but that is as far as we understand it it seems to be about

1:53:38 the same so this resonance frequency is

1:53:41 something internal to you in your respiratory

1:53:44 rate starts to match up with your HRV and your heart rate.

1:53:50 Like, what?

1:53:50 What?

1:53:51 Here's what I mean.

1:53:52 It's really, really clever stuff.

1:53:54 This is like really fascinating research.

1:53:57 I use that optimal HRV app I told you earlier.

1:54:00 It's five bucks a month.

1:54:01 The studies oftentimes will use another app called Paste Breathing.

1:54:06 That is just simply an app that helps you watch

1:54:08 the app and breathe in and out at the right time.

1:54:11 All right.

1:54:11 So on that optimal HRV app,

1:54:13 you can do this test that I'm about to take you through as well as the training.

1:54:17 It's why I like it so much.

1:54:19 So I can send people that polar strap.

1:54:21 I can send them this app, say,

1:54:23 do this resonance test and then our training program

1:54:26 is based upon the results of this particular test.

1:54:30 It's telling you how long to inhale and exhale.

1:54:33 Remember earlier where I've said kind of like five in, five

1:54:36 out or six in, six out is a good starting place.

1:54:39 That's true.

1:54:40 But the individual responses to people is different and this is

1:54:43 a phenomenal way to figure out which cadence is best for you.

1:54:47 The test takes about 12 minutes and effectively what happens is

1:54:52 you start at a breath rate of about seven breaths per minute.

1:54:57 Now depending on the study you'll find most will

1:54:59 actually start you at about 6 and a half.

1:55:02 I think the optimal HRV if I remember correctly starts you at six and a half

1:55:05 and then some have gone all the way down to as low as three breaths per minute.

1:55:08 Most are going to start you at like six and a half

1:55:10 breaths per minute and drop you to four or so breaths per minute.

1:55:15 Here's exactly what I'm talking about.

1:55:17 You breathe for two minutes at this specific cadence.

1:55:20 Let's say 6 and a half seconds in, 6 and 1/2 seconds out.

1:55:25 And you do that for a total of two minutes.

1:55:28 While you're doing that, it's measuring your HRV.

1:55:33 Okay?

1:55:34 What it's trying to identify is when your HRV gets the highest.

1:55:40 So you're breathing in and out at seven at six and a half

1:55:42 breaths per minute and then you go from 6 and a half to six.

1:55:46 So every two minutes you lower your breathing rate by half a breath per minute.

1:55:52 Now for some people when they go from six and a half to six their HRV goes down

1:55:58 and some people it goes up and then you go from six to five and a half to five.

1:56:04 all the way down.

1:56:05 Like I said, someone as three.

1:56:07 At some point in that spectrum, your HRV will be its highest.

1:56:12 Where that lands is totally dependent upon the person.

1:56:15 So, let's say we do the test and my optimal HRV

1:56:18 happens at six breaths per minute and yours happens at four.

1:56:23 That's that's called our resonance frequency.

1:56:26 I now know you will get the highest HRV

1:56:28 right now when you breathe at four breaths per minute.

1:56:30 So then you're going to spend more time breathing

1:56:32 at four breaths per minute where I'm going to do six.

1:56:34 That make sense, right?

1:56:35 So we're looking at how can I actually optimize my inhalation

1:56:40 exhalation strategy to get the highest impact on my HRV?

1:56:44 Well, it turns out this strategy is highly effective.

1:56:49 I'll go over more of those details here in one moment.

1:56:52 When we're defining higher HRV,

1:56:54 it's really actually important that the highest HRV score like you're going

1:56:58 to see on your wearables is not what we're necessarily talking about here.

1:57:02 That there's three criteria that are used to determine best HRV score.

1:57:06 And that yeah, that RMSS thing is is the lowest one.

1:57:11 Highest on this is what's called low frequency power.

1:57:14 This is another way of kind of defining and measuring your veagal nerve power.

1:57:20 This is parameter.

1:57:21 This is the thing we're optimizing for rather than that actual HRV score.

1:57:25 Another really interesting one is looking at your HRV amplitude.

1:57:29 I've talked about that before.

1:57:30 It's the difference between kind of your maximum heart

1:57:32 rate and your minimum heart rate in one breath cycle.

1:57:36 Remember, when you breathe in, heart rate goes up.

1:57:38 When you breathe out, it goes down.

1:57:40 And so, let's say when you took a breath in, you went to 80.

1:57:43 And you took a breath out and it went to 40.

1:57:45 80 minus 40 is 40.

1:57:48 So therefore your amplitude is 40.

1:57:52 One thing that you'll see is people that are

1:57:54 really well trained physically have a really big amplitude.

1:57:58 People can go like a a welltrained individual,

1:58:02 cardiovascularly fit individual might have a resting heart rate

1:58:05 of 40 and they might jump from 40 to like 90.

1:58:09 So that amplitude would be 50.

1:58:11 Where someone who's not very physically fit might go from 60 to 70.

1:58:14 Their amplitude is 10.

1:58:17 I know I'm throwing a lot of numbers and most of you are listening so

1:58:19 that's hard to follow along but just

1:58:20 the amplitude the difference your ability of your heart

1:58:23 rate to go from really high to really low within one breath cycle is a positive

1:58:27 thing that is an indicative of a really

1:58:31 really um uh resilient nervous system and remember

1:58:36 from the very beginning that's what we're talking

1:58:38 about today the HV score itself again cool

1:58:40 it's on there but it's the bottom list

1:58:42 so that's what we're optimizing for and I needed

1:58:44 to draw that little technical detail out there

1:58:46 because I wanted to make sure that it's

1:58:48 landing so deeply in your brain that we're

1:58:50 trying to go after that resilience, not the score.

1:58:52 And those other two measures, that frequency, power,

1:58:54 and that heart rate amplitude are the things

1:58:56 that are more important than just that HRV score.

1:58:59 So, more to be said about the resonant breathing thing,

1:59:02 but it's just really phenomenal area uh that we love.

1:59:06 Um I wish I had something to do with those companies.

1:59:08 I don't.

1:59:09 Uh but they're just phenomenal products.

1:59:10 So, I wanted to make sure you had some specific example of something

1:59:13 you could go try that I personally used and that I like.

1:59:16 Last thing I wanted to mention,

1:59:18 and this is what some of you might deem to be outrageous,

1:59:21 but again, full disclosure here, I have one of these things.

1:59:25 I don't have anything to do with the company,

1:59:27 but this is something that I'm seeing pop up a lot.

1:59:30 I was just traveling around the country recently and saw

1:59:33 a bunch of different professional and other groups using it.

1:59:38 I have one at my home and this is a chair called the Shift Wave.

1:59:42 It is $10,000, but it is phenomenal.

1:59:45 You lay in this chair.

1:59:46 It has haptic feedback, so it will vibrate.

1:59:49 It has sensory control, what you're seeing, what you're hearing.

1:59:53 It has a whole bunch of programs.

1:59:55 It will directly measure your heart rate and HRV.

1:59:57 And you can do guided bio feedback through again movement,

2:00:02 through uh light and sound, and a bunch of different strategies.

2:00:05 I've used it a bunch.

2:00:07 Um, we use it a lot with again

2:00:10 special groups of individuals and it's been really impressive.

2:00:12 So, those of you that just want to know what

2:00:14 the best in the world are doing behind the scenes.

2:00:16 I can't say that everyone's doing it,

2:00:18 but I know some are and it is really pretty awesome.

2:00:20 And so, there you go.

2:00:21 Check out the Shift Wave chair if you'd like.

2:00:24 If that is completely ridiculous, you're like, $10,000 for a chair?

2:00:27 I totally get it.

2:00:28 And so, we'll move on to our last couple

2:00:30 of things that I just couldn't leave off the table.

2:00:34 No good podcast can be done without talking briefly,

2:00:37 and I do mean very briefly, about supplements.

2:00:41 First and foremost, what we're talking about here mostly are acute benefits.

2:00:47 Take caffeine, take a stimulant,

2:00:50 you're going to change sympathetic drive, and you all know that.

2:00:53 But what's more interesting,

2:00:54 and I dove into a lot of, was what do we know about chronic benefits?

2:00:58 So, if you're in that hole and HRV is way down for a long time,

2:01:02 can supplements do much to bring you out

2:01:04 of that hole and and bring that HRV back up,

2:01:08 bring that respiratory rate down or however we're defining autonomic control.

2:01:13 The short answer is not really.

2:01:17 Well, maybe they can, but there's not a lot of evidence to support that.

2:01:21 Closest thing I found was there was actually

2:01:23 several review articles and meta analyses on omega-3s.

2:01:27 uh benefit doesn't seem to be huge.

2:01:30 We know a lot of positive benefits omega-3s,

2:01:33 but this doesn't seem to be a massive one,

2:01:34 but there's some indication that there's some help here.

2:01:36 So, that was pretty cool.

2:01:38 Other ones that we'll see, uh I actually found a study on watermelon juice.

2:01:43 Now, this may surprise you, but people don't realize the citrine and arginine,

2:01:46 the nitric oxide capacity in in watermelons is is pretty high.

2:01:52 So, there's a pretty cool study.

2:01:53 They actually did it in combination with like an oral glucose tolerance test.

2:01:56 And what they effectively found was it doesn't improve HRV,

2:02:00 but what it does do is it blunts the HRV response

2:02:05 when you dose them with something that should normally compromise it.

2:02:09 It's stress inoculation.

2:02:10 In fact, if you look at other things like ashwagandha,

2:02:13 very similar types of research.

2:02:15 So, it's not that these things will take

2:02:18 your resting HRV and make it get better,

2:02:20 but what it will do is it helps you not be as responsive to a stressful stimuli.

2:02:27 That is the true benefit.

2:02:28 So, whether this is highintensity exercise or a psychological stressor,

2:02:32 things like watermelon juice or ashwagandha may blunt how

2:02:37 much of a impact those things make on you.

2:02:39 So, kind of stress inoculators, if you will,

2:02:43 but they're not really recovering you from that hole,

2:02:45 but worthy of mention nonetheless.

2:02:48 A final one that I thought worthy of talking about was actually a review article

2:02:51 on human studies that found an association between

2:02:55 low vitamin D and B12 and low HRV.

2:03:00 This was not a randomized control trial.

2:03:02 This was not an intervention study, but it was interesting nonetheless.

2:03:06 So, I'll keep my eye out for more work in this area.

2:03:08 Maybe we'll see that maybe if you take people

2:03:11 who are low and again in vitamin D and B12,

2:03:15 you will actually see a chronic improvement in HRV over time.

2:03:19 Maybe you won't.

2:03:20 Not sure.

2:03:21 I'd be willing to bet if you take and just

2:03:23 give people who are normal in vitamin D and B12,

2:03:27 those supplements, it probably won't do much,

2:03:30 but we'll have to wait and see how the data pan out.

2:03:33 So, we've covered a lot of ground today.

2:03:35 I think we should finish on a little bit of a wrap-up.

2:03:38 want to keep this stuff in proper context.

2:03:40 Remember that hormesis.

2:03:42 We want to stimulate but we don't want to annihilate.

2:03:44 You want to touch the boundaries.

2:03:46 You want to desensitize but we don't want to push people so

2:03:49 far into an area where it actually creates a greater stress response,

2:03:52 a greater protective mechanism.

2:03:55 Small bump in uncomfortableness gives you a nice rebound.

2:03:59 That's what we're looking for.

2:04:01 But a huge trauma is not helpful or potentially even sends us backwards.

2:04:06 There are a couple of types of people in this world in this regard.

2:04:09 I I call them big feelers.

2:04:11 People that have that high introsception.

2:04:13 They pay attention to themselves too much and they cause themselves

2:04:16 way too much stress because they're hyperfocused on every little thing.

2:04:19 In that case, maybe don't use that technology.

2:04:23 Use more the feeling type of stuff or don't do anything.

2:04:26 Pull them off of of a lot of these things.

2:04:29 Then you have the dull knives is what I call them.

2:04:31 People that just have no contact with their body whatsoever.

2:04:34 Maybe you want to use more of these technological

2:04:36 solutions to get more calibrated and more aware.

2:04:39 Other big conclusion we talked about is

2:04:43 overall the first step is just reducing arousal.

2:04:46 This is a free thing you can do.

2:04:49 It's probably going to have multiple

2:04:50 benefits across multiple areas of your life.

2:04:52 And so before we start worrying about specific protocols or supplements

2:04:56 or anything like that, let's just start by reducing our overall stress cup.

2:05:02 Number three, find things that work best for you.

2:05:06 This is fill your recovery cup.

2:05:09 This is something I haven't said yet,

2:05:12 but it's really what I've been getting at the whole time.

2:05:14 It's not enough always to just reduce stimuli.

2:05:20 Sometimes you got to actively recover.

2:05:23 Most people don't think about actively

2:05:25 recovering until they desperately need it.

2:05:28 So, not being stressed is not the same as fully recovered.

2:05:32 Spend time figuring out what hits it for you.

2:05:35 I know some of the things that land for me and they're not the same for my wife.

2:05:39 They're not the same for my family members or some of the athletes I work with.

2:05:42 What really fills your recovery bucket up.

2:05:46 Spend time tinkering with that and then use it

2:05:49 honestly quite often and as much as you possibly can.

2:05:52 Final thing I'll say here is don't expect those acute solutions.

2:05:56 Whether it's the supplements or the thermal

2:06:00 immersions or the motivational quote or the music,

2:06:03 don't expect those acute things to fix chronic problems, right?

2:06:09 When you use the chronic problem solution stuff,

2:06:11 probably looking at more than five minutes a day,

2:06:14 ideally every day, if not multiple times a day,

2:06:17 at least for the first four to six weeks.

2:06:20 Past that, you can back it down.

2:06:21 maybe even as little as just a couple of times

2:06:23 per week and you should be in a pretty good spot.

2:06:26 Want to finish up by giving some thank

2:06:28 yous as people have mentioned several times now.

2:06:31 Thank you Dr.

2:06:32 Jay Wows.

2:06:32 Jay, you were phenomenal.

2:06:33 You were so helpful here.

2:06:35 Uh we had a lot of conversations and I deeply appreciate your help there.

2:06:39 Uh Jill Miller I mentioned and your book

2:06:41 body by breath covered a lot of these concepts.

2:06:43 It was also incredibly helpful.

2:06:45 Emily and Brian at Shift Adapt and then somebody else, Martin McFilly,

2:06:49 who I haven't had a chance to speak about yet,

2:06:50 but has done a lot of great work in this area.

2:06:52 So, all you people, thank you so much for your help.

2:06:55 I appreciate all of you for listening.

2:06:57 I hope you have some new skills, some new things to try, some direct tools.

2:07:01 Some may be more interesting to a few of you,

2:07:04 others may be uh less so, but either way, I would really love to hear feedback.

2:07:10 which ones did you like?

2:07:11 Which ones have you had different experiences with?

2:07:14 And if any of you do take the time to go try something,

2:07:18 uh comments on YouTube would be a great place to fill me in on on what worked,

2:07:22 what didn't, and any other feedback you have.

2:07:25 Thank you so much, and I look forward to doing it again.

2:07:28 Thank you for joining for today's episode.

2:07:30 My goal, as always, is to share exciting

2:07:32 scientific insights that help you perform at your best.

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