Dhru Purohit Show - Struggling With Mystery Symptoms? An Expert Explains Why Your Vagus Nerve May Hold the Key and How to Fix It with Dr. Navaz Habib

Episode Date: January 27, 2025

This episode is brought to you by Fatty15 and Cozy Earth. When we think about longevity and health, the vagus nerve isn’t always at the top of our minds. However, its function—and the signs of dysfunction in our body—can signal that it’s time to reassess our lifestyle. Prioritizing sleep, rest, and relaxation might be the key to restoring balance. Today’s guest highlights why this is essential and shares practical tips for integrating these practices into our busy lives. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with Dr. Navaz Habib to explore the power of the vagus nerve and how modern life stressors affect its optimal function. Dr. Habib breaks down the four types of stress we face and how wearable technology can help us self-assess throughout the day. He also delves into sleep architecture and shares strategies for building routines that enhance overall well-being. Tune in to discover simple, actionable steps to reduce stress, optimize your health, and take charge of your well-being today! Dr. Navaz Habib is a functional medicine practitioner, chiropractor, renowned international speaker, and bestselling author dedicated to optimizing health by addressing root causes. As the founder of Health Upgraded, an online functional health clinic, he empowers parents and health seekers to enhance energy, productivity, and overall well-being through vagus nerve optimization. Inspired by his transformation from chronic health issues, Dr. Habib takes a holistic approach to help clients overcome challenges like chronic, uncontrolled inflammation. He is the author of Activate Your Vagus Nerve and Upgrade Your Vagus Nerve, working with clients worldwide to teach strategies that activate their innate parasympathetic healing capacity. In this episode, Dhru and Dr. Habib dive into: Top signs that the vagus nerve is not working as it should (00:26) Top triggers that damage the vagus nerve (04:50) How wearables technology can help us self asses (14:13) Breaking down heart rate variability and the healing process (23:21) Respiratory Rate (33:28) Optimal Sleep architecture and cycles (38:33) Doubling down your sleep to improve your vagus Nerve (50:55) The importance of creating routines in the morning and the evening (54:06) Recommendation to protect your vagus nerve (01:03:16) Dr. Habib's practice (01:08:09) Also mentioned in this episode: Dr. Habib’s Book: Upgrade Your Vagus Nerve  Dr. Habib’s Slides: Deciphering Wearable Data For more on Dr. Habib, follow him on Instagram, X/Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and his Website. This episode is brought to you by Fatty15 and Cozy Earth. Fatty15 is offering an additional 15% off its 90-day subscription Starter Kit. Go to fatty15.com/dhru and use code DHRU to replenish your C15 levels for long-term health. Right now, get 40% off your Cozy Earth sheets. Just head over to cozyearth.com/dhru and use code DHRUP. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Habib, welcome to the podcast. A big part of your mission and what you're here to do today is to help people understand that when their vagus nerve is out of whack, everything in their life becomes tougher. So give us a short reminder of what the vagus nerve is. And more importantly, or just as importantly, help us understand what are the top signs that our Vegas nerve is not working in the way that it should be working. So as a very simple overview, the Vegas nerve, is our 10th cranial nerve. We have 12 pairs of cranial nerves that come out of the head and neck area, that come out of the brainstem in particular.

And they generally send information to and from the head and neck area. They're the ones that are pulling data as to what's going on in our vision and our hearing and sending info out into what's going on or what we should be seeing or feeling around the face and the head and neck area. The vagus nerve is unique. It's the 10th of those 12 pairs, and it is the only one of these cranial nerves to actually leave the head cavity. It comes out from the brainstem. It has a few branches within the head and neck area, one to the ear, to the airways, the pharynx and larynx muscles.

And then it comes down through the neck, and it actually leaves that head and neck area. And it sends branches to every single organ in the entire body. It comes down to the heart. to the lungs and the thorax, which is a chest area, continues down along the esophagus and goes down through the diaphragm, which is the muscle separating the thorax and the abdomen, the chest and the belly. And then it continues on in the belly to attach to virtually every single organ in the abdominal cavity or all of our abdominal organs. So the stomach, the intestines, the liver, the spleen indirectly.

It has direct connections to nearly every single organ in the body. And that is unique because there's no other nerve like the vagus nerve. It is sending information to those organs, but the vast majority of information that's flowing on the vagus nerve is actually coming up from those organs to the brain. So it's actually reporting in what's going on with regards to inflammation, with regards to optimal regulatory function, with regards to digestion and detoxification, and it's sending that information up to the brain

to tell the brain what's going on. 80% of the information on the vagus nerve is going from the organs up to the brain. That's different than what we generally initially expected to hear because when we think of the vagus nerve, we think of the parasympathetic nervous system, the rest, digest, and recover system, meaning that we're sending this information

to tell the body to relax, to slow down. that's not entirely true. Only about 15% of the information on the vagus nerve is brain to body. So we need to be very particular in knowing that the vast majority of information is coming up. What that means is when there's breakdown of the vagus nerve, we're often not getting good information up to the brain. We're not getting the information that what's going on in the gut needs to get to the brain. And that's a huge area.

The gut brain connection is made up. via the vagus nerve. So if there are changes or issues going on with regards to the microbiome, if there's issues going on with regards to inflammatory processes and any one of these organs, getting information up to the brain is so uniquely important. And so the symptoms of vagus nerve dysfunction will often show up as gut issues are kind of the number one that I tend to see challenges with regards to digestion. We have a digestive insufficiency, constipation, diarrhea, IBS type of conditions. Next, we have inability to regulate or control inflammation. So we'll often have inflammatory processes, things like autoimmune diseases, things like brain issues,

specifically mental health type challenges, anxiety, depression, very commonly linked to vagus nerve dysfunction. So these are the big ones that we tend to see in regards to symptoms in regards to specific conditions that are linked to vagus nerve dysfunction. I'd love to ask you, think about our modern world and help our audience understand. If you had to rank the things that you typically see in your clinic, your practice that are most often damaging the vagus nerve or impacting how it functions in our day-to-day life, you shared some of the top symptoms that were there, what would you say are the top things that damage the vagus nerve? Yeah, so over the past five years, I've been working with clients that have had

Vegas nerve issues pop up. And I've come up with a bit of a categorization of what these Vegas nerve specific stressors, the major challenges that cause the Vegas nerve to break down are. And I outline them in more depth in my book. But here are kind of the four areas that we need to look at when it comes to the type of stress. And strice as an overall kind of overarching determination is chronic stress. Chronic stress is what breaks down the vagus nerve. But there's four areas that we need to look at to understand what types of stress. Because often we tend to discount certain ones or forget about certain ones as contributing factors to our stress levels. So number one, daily stressors. These are the day-to-day challenges that people are experiencing.

And what we tend to look at or call kind of the stressors that we are dealing with. These are the financial challenges, the relationship issues, the day-to-day issues of, you know, running the kids out of the house in the morning or being stuck in traffic during the day, the running around of day-to-day life and these kind of menial annoyances of day-to-day life that tend to chip away or cause us to become annoyed or stressed. So that's going to be the first area of or the first type of stress to look at. The second one is psychological stress. Now, I consider psychological stress.

Anything that's happened in the past that's caused a significant emotional distress or a significant challenge to your ability to see the world clearly or in an objective way. So things like adverse childhood events, things like being the victim of a crime, having some sort of trauma, kind of a bigger T trauma, not in all cases, because everybody experiences different things and everyone has a different childhood. But if you ever experienced a significant event, you're more prone to having these major psychological stressors, which are actually the number one cause or the number one reason why Vegas nerve breaks down is these psychological stressors, because it primes our body to be in this threat response state more than any

other area really does. So psychological stressors are a major one and one that needs to be looked at in significant depth when we're assessing the specific reasons why Vegas nerve would break down. The third area is physical stress. Physical stress are the stressors regarding or involved in our movements and our ability to move or function in the world in a physical manner. If we've ever had car accidents, slip and fall injuries, concussions, sedentary lifestyle for a period of time. If we sit too much, that's a major stressor on our body. So these are things that we need to look at. Are we moving enough? Is there something that's potentially contributed to our inability to move as we want to in the world? Has there been a physical injury that

actually can cause these issues? This is particularly true for injuries of the neck. So physical stress that happens in and around the neck area can be very, very powerful in causing vagus nerve dysfunction, something that really needs to be looked at. And in my capacity as a chiropractor, I've seen numerous cases where physical issues, physical injuries, have actually significantly contributed to the inability to send these vagus nerve signals effectively. So what we call autonomic dysfunction as a result of physical injury. And the last area is biochemical stressors. So these biochemical stressors are now things that we're becoming more aware of, thankfully,

because we have access to more and more data with regards to our health. So with regards to biochemical stressors, we're looking at, are there toxins that are entering your body? Are there specific nutrients that are not getting into your body? Is there challenges that are causing issues to your cellular function, your ability to pull in nutrients and your ability to release toxins. What if there's a buildup of toxins in your body and you have poor liver dysfunction or you have the inability to clear out these toxins? So biochemical stress results in cellular dysfunction.

So issues of dysfunction at a cellular level. If you're lacking the nutrients to absorb or to allow for cellular function to be optimized, if there's microbiome dysbiosis, if there's access, to, you know, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, all of the things that are sprayed on our foods now, chemicals that are found in indoor air quality issues, the cookware that you're using that might be coated in specific things that are toxic to our bodies,

as well as excess sugars and excess processed foods. These are all biochemical stressors that cause cellular dysfunction. And this is really where functional medicine thrives. So identifying the sources of these biochemical stressors is another area that really needs to be looked at. So those four areas, once again, are daily stressors day-to-day, psychological stressors that occurred in the past, physical stressors that caused your body not to be able to function in a movement pattern effectively, and biochemical stressors that actually break down our body on a cellular level and create dysfunction on our ability to regulate or trigger inflammatory control.

We know the role of the vagus nerve is to control inflammation. And when we cause issues to its ability to control that inflammation, because we're overstressing it, that results in vagus nerve dysfunction. And that's how people become sick because we lack the ability to control inflammation. And so now what we're able to do, lucky enough, we have access to amazing data almost all the time. And I'm sure we'll get into that as we continue on.

That's fantastic. You know, one of the greatest things that's happened, this is your second book now on Vegas nerve. And the book is called Upgrade Your Vegas Nerve. We have the link in the show notes below. People can check it out. Since your first book, something amazing has happened.

A lot more people are using these wearables that maybe they're not perfect. You're going to talk about that. but they can give us an indication of a proxy of where our vagus nerve is. Can you talk about that? And then you've also additionally, for those that are watching on video on YouTube, and we have the link below for those that are looking on audio, you have a series of slides that you can help us get an understanding of how many of us who have these wearables can do a little bit of an audit to see where our Vegas nerve health is

or maybe in some cases isn't. Can you talk about that? You know, after I turned 40, I started doing everything I could to understand what was going on with my heart and making sure that I do everything that I could to protect it as I get older. I'm sure a lot of you can relate to this, but metabolic dysfunction and high cholesterol are rampant in my family. So, you know, while I may be genetically predisposed to certain things because of my South Asian background, I'm doing everything in my power to help prevent trouble down the road with lifestyle nutrition and targeted supplements. That's why I'm so excited to talk about this incredible scientific breakthrough to support our long-term health and wellness. It's called C-15, and it's the first essential fatty acid to be discovered in 90 years. The concept is actually pretty simple.

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That's Fati-F-A-T-T-Y-15.com slash Drew and use the code Drew at checkout. The newest and coolest technologies are these health tracking, wearable technology pieces. And what we're really excited about when it comes to overall health care and the way that people function is we're able to now have data coming in on a continuous basis as to their movement patterns, their sleep patterns, their readiness patterns. And this is really what's exciting when it comes to this new trend in health is wearable technologies. So you're absolutely correct when you mentioned that they're not perfect. And I promise you at this point, they're not. These are not diagnostic tools. I don't think wearable devices should be considered diagnostic tools for the vast majority of them.

But what I would say is that they're phenomenal at providing trend data, trend analysis, to tell us about certain processes, certain issues, and provide us a bit of feedback as to what's actually happening in our bodies. Because humans notoriously are not very good at knowing. what's going on with regards to the internal functioning of their body. Their interoception is not very good. And we tend not to, in our day-to-day modern world, spend time becoming more aware of that. And that's a real issue. So having access to wearable health technology data can help provide that insight.

And so I want to share a few really interesting slides because these are the big three that I look for when I'm working with my clients. to pull in some information as to what's going on with regards to their health. Okay. So we'll talk about deciphering some of that wearable health data. Okay. So the top three wearable health metrics that I focus on when I'm working with my clients is, number one, HRV balance and recovery index. Each wearable device will call it something a little bit different,

but I believe HRV balance and recovery index are one of the more powerful ones that we should look at. And I'll talk about that in a little bit. The second one is respiratory rate, which is your breathing rate. And that's something that people tend to undermine. And there's a really big reason why we shouldn't. We should really pay attention to a respiratory rate. And lastly, is sleep architecture. The way that our sleep is built and functions, that's really important to knowing.

So I want to talk first about HRV balance and recovery index. So different devices will take. call it different things. And each of them has a different algorithm by which they're pulling that data and determining what the name of it is and what it really is. But what I want to talk about is that HRV balance or recovery index is really talking about the measure of time or efficiency to enter that rest digested recovery state. How quickly can we shift from essentially having our foot on the accelerator to having our foot on the brakes when it comes to proverbially in our bodies. And HRV balance tells us that. HRV heart rate variability is the marker that we want to

look at when it comes to autonomic balance. Autonomics being the sympathetic fighter flight system shifting to the parasympathetic rest, digest, and recover system. And be the access to be able to shift between these two systems, to be able to go from fighter flight accelerator being pushed. To rest, I just recover brakes being pushed. That's a really important marker and something that we need to really look at. So this is a client of mine who noticeably had a terrible week. He had really, really low recovery levels. But his recovery levels were directly linked to his HRV. You can see that very clearly. So this, what we're looking at here for those who aren't on video with us is we have two screenshots taken from a whoop band.

Okay, the whoop band is a great wearable device that's worn on the wrist. And on the left side, we have an image showing his recovery percentages on Monday through Thursday were 26%, quite low, 33%, 30%, 20%, 24. And then on Friday, he bumped up into 64%, and Saturday down a little bit to 54%. So he had a little bit better Friday and Saturday, but he had pretty terrible numbers when it came to his recovery capacity during the week. Now, if we correlate that on the right side of this image, we have a very particular set of HRV balance numbers or HRV numbers during the week. And so his heart rate variability Monday through Thursday were on the lower end as well. And they actually followed this recovery trend.

You'll notice that Monday was 33, Tuesday was 40, Wednesday was 41, and Thursday was 30. Dudes correlate with that recovery percentages that we saw on the other screenshot. And then on Friday, he bumped up when he went up to recovery of 64%. His HRV went up to 58 milliseconds, excuse me. So he had this big jump and then HRV dropped a little bit on. Saturday down to 47, and that's when his recovery was given a 54% mark. What this tells us is heart rate variability or the average HRV is essentially a marker of the balance between sympathetic, parasympathetic, so we're able to pull this data and determine if we are

capable of shifting sympathetic to parasympathetic and back pretty easily, then HRV generally is going to be higher and HRV balance is going to be higher. That means that we're recovering better. In this particular patient's case, he wasn't. His HRV was generally significantly lower than his average, and that caused his recovery scores to be significantly lower. And then he was actually taking a bit of time after he noticed this week was pretty terrible. I believe there was travel involved.

That's really what was causing these lower levels, but he finally was able to get himself into a situation where he was sleeping more readily. I believe he got sick on this trip. And so that was what contributed to his very low HRV markers and his recovery index being as low as it was. And then finally on Friday, I believe he started to feel significantly better. He was able to overcome some of these sickness challenges

in addition to the travel issues. And that resulted in a slight increase in his HRV and his overall recovery percentage. So this is Woot Band data. And there's another set of screenshots that we can look at here with regards to what these look like. So on that last day, if you remember, his recovery was 54%. His HRV was 47. It was on the lower side.

And his body had experienced a pretty significant amount of strain, meaning that he was at a 12.7 strain marker. Wootband has a very particular way of pulling in strain data. Each device has a slightly different one. So this is a great way to know that. but he got back to his house, he got back home, he started feeling better. And you notice on the right side here, we have a screenshot showing that his recovery went from 54% up to 93%. And his HRV followed suit, went from 47 up to 73. This was huge.

And so his strain was a little lower that day. We were at 10.6. And his sleep, because he slept really well, was at 100%. this wearable device data helps to provide feedback as to what's going on with regards to our heart, our heart rate and our heart rate variability, which are these great little signs that we can pull to look at vagus nerve function and autonomic balance. And so that's really where wearable device data can help to provide some insight that we weren't aware of. What I'm hearing from you is that while we don't have exact way to test the health of the vagus nerve that is available at scale for

people, that some of the best proxies are the trend data over time from these wearables. Like a whoop, I have an aura, I have a whoop as well. So if people are using these and they see that trend data. So in this instance, your patient is seeing that whatever they were doing on Friday and Saturday, which you'll be talking about, ways to improve your HRV and your recovery, those things were resulting in more heart rate variability. More heart rate variability means that we are, as you mentioned, healing better, recovering better, and it's going to be a good proxy that we're supporting our vagus nerve. Is that accurate? Yeah, you're absolutely right there. When we have this

data, when we are able to pull this information, we know that then this is a great proxy for whether our vagus nerve is able to send good information to the immune system. cells that it needs to to turn on that healing state. We know that healing state is necessary for our ability to perform at a higher level. We know that we need to be able to recover from the breakdowns that have occurred. So when we see low recovery data, it means we're not going to be able to perform at a higher level in the gym, at life, whatever it is. We're also seeing that when we do recover well, our ability to shift from sympathetic to parasympathetic is going to be shifted off. And what that's going to do is it's not going to allow us to enter that healing state.

So our ability to perform in the gym, lifting weights, doing whatnot is going to be reduced. So with this particular patient, we saw that that first week when he was really down, really sick and not doing well, we noticed that his ability to recover was reduced. So he wasn't able to go to the gym and perform at a higher level. He wasn't able to show up at work and perform at a higher level. So the vagus nerve was not able to send the anti-inflammatory signals and create that recovery process as effectively during that process as when it was when he was doing better. When he's doing better, then he can show up. He can perform better for sure.

And just to add in there, it's not just that, you know, having talked a little bit with you about, you know, these slides. It's not just that he could perform better at the gym or, you know, go for a longer run. It's also that when our HRV is working well and we are ranking higher in our score, we're less anxious of an individual. We might notice that our digestion is improved that day. We're less reactive to the events of the world. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Going back to your original components, not saying,

that in one day it solves for everybody, but that is it common that people would see an improvement in many of these symptoms, especially when they have a trend of scoring higher on their HRV and recovery, that they're going to actually notice that it's not just about lifting more weights in the gym, you actually start to notice that certain things are not impacting you as much. Yeah, that's actually like the perfect way to put it, because when our bodies and our signals in our bodies are pushed towards that sympathetic side, what that's telling us is that our bodies are in a reactive mode, that we're in a more threat response type of mode.

We're ready to respond to threats around us in a very particular way. We either fight with them or we flee from them. And what that means is we're not able to think as clearly. And that's really important here that you've kind of brought up because when we're in a sympathetic state, things that aren't threats will actually. show up more as a threat to us or will perceive them to be more of a threat to our survival. And in reality, they're probably not major stressors or major threats to our survival.

So when we're in that mode, when we have lower HRV markers and we have lower HRV and recovery numbers, it tells us that we're primed to be in that threat response mode. And we're not in that parasympathetic rest, digest, recover mode. because that mode, when we're in that mode, we think more clearly. We have better executive function. We have better signals being sent to our brain telling us that we can think about things in a more logical, more reasonable manner and not think of everything as a threat. And so we're able to then not be as anxious, not show up in this threat response type of mode.

And that's really important to understand. What's really cool here, though, is we're also able to look at other markers that will tell us whether we're in that threat response mode or not. And one of those big ones is resting respiratory rate or our breath rate. I'm going to share my screen again and would love to kind of dig into this a little bit. So when it comes to a measure of your cardio respiratory efficiency, your breath is really key to understanding whether we're in more of a sympathetic or parasympathetic state because our breathing is what really drives this particular pattern.

When it comes to our resting respiratory rate, what we see here is that I've got two screenshots from an aura ring, and this is actually from my aura ring. You'll see on the left side that during this particular week, the 39th week of the year, that my respiratory rate was significantly higher than average. So my average is sitting here on the chart as 15.3 breaths per minute. and during this particular week, it went up to 17.2 breaths per minute. This is a week where my breathing was significantly faster. I was not able to slow everything down. I think I was actually quite sick this particular week. And so my respiration was poor.

And then you'll notice on the right side, the 45th week of the year, I was able to bring my breathing rate down well below the average of the average of, 15.3 to 14.6. And what this meant was I recovered really well. I was able to get myself into a state where breathing was much more measured, much more calm. And this was really optimal for my breathing pattern and for the signals that I was sending through my body because respiratory rate is so important to understand as kind of a proxy marker for your VO2 max and your ability to take in oxygen and be comfortable holding one to carbon dioxide before you release it out. Now, when it comes to kind of that average versus optimal respiratory rate,

what we'll see here is that the normal average worldly respiratory rate is somewhere between 12 and 20 breaths per minute. We've got a chart here showing kind of a bell curve data with regards to where people's breath rate truly is. 12 to 20 is kind of the full range. But in an optimal scenario, respiratory rates for males should be between 10 and 14 breaths per minute. For females, it should be closer to 11 to 16 breaths, simply due to differences in sizes of lungs and respiratory capacity and kind of the strain that females are under other than males. and when we are actively breathing, when we're spending time in active breath recovery mode, and we're trying to control our breath to create what's called a resonant frequency,

and this is what we use to improve HRV, we want to get our breath rate down into the four and a half to six and a half range of breaths per minute. This is really important to understand because breath control is one of the best ways for us to shift our recovery state. And when we're breathing faster, when we have a higher respiratory rate, shorter breaths, they tend to be more chest-based breaths.

And this is driving us towards sympathetic state, that threat response state more, versus a state where we want to be in a slower, more calm breathing pattern. And when we notice that our respiratory rate is higher, we're in sympathetic state. When our respiratory rate is lower, than we're in a parasympathetic state.

This is really ideal for us to look at and a great proxy for our ability to function as wonderful humans that we are. Just to add in here, one of the top recommendations inside of your book is obviously people paying attention to their breath and why I like this section of your presentation is that it's one thing to tell people,

hey, focus on breathing techniques, do more of that in your life, but also because we tend to not have the best interocellar, of how we're doing, these wearables can be a great resource to say, hey, is that breathing exercise and you recommend a bunch inside of your book? Is that breathing exercise? Is that meditation? Is that thing that I'm trying? Is it actually taking me in the right direction where, to link it back to your last slide, I'm seeing that my respiratory rate is potentially improving? Is that a fair way to think about things? You know, my wife cannot stop raving about our new cozy earth bedsheets.

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They even offer a 100-night free trial and a 10-year warranty. Right now, Cozy Earth is offering my listeners 40% off site-wide at checkout. Just go to cozyEarth.com slash Drew. That's D-H-R-U to get 40% off-site-wide. Take advantage of this amazing sale right now. When we see that this data tells us that we're not functioning optimally, that our breath rate is less than optimal, that we're shifted with lower HRV.

What we're actually getting is this interoceptive information as to what's going on inside our body and our ability to sense threat. And we have kind of two sides to this coin. We have a threat mode, a threat response mode, which is more of that sympathetic activation. And then we have the opposite side, which is when parasympathetics are functioning.

And there's a specific feeling that drives parasympathetic functions. function and allows us to enter that parasympathetic mode, the vagus nerve activated mode, more effectively. And that is the feeling of safety. Safety drives our breath rate. It drives our ability to feel comfortable, feel safe. And when we feel safe, our breath rate comes down.

Our heart rate variability goes up. These are important markers, important data points that when we get this data in, it tells us that, yeah, you know what? Your body is responding and maybe a more threat response mode because for some reason you're not feeling safe. So having these proxies as to what's going on internally tells us what the signals internally are interpreting and how we're essentially shifting between that sympathetic and parasympathetic mode. So my wife and I both have an aura ring and I also use a whoop pretty regularly as well. And unfortunately this summer while we were on vacation, our place in LA got broken into.

And luckily, everybody's safe, but some items were stolen, and it's more of just a violation of privacy and other components that were there. And my wife was noticing that naturally, after this break-in, even though we weren't there physically when this thing happened,

there was a general sense of not feeling safe. And that led to a situation where both she had a decrease in her HRV. and she was also noticing that the respiratory rate was not as good as it once had been. And so even though we're sleeping in the same way, we have our eight sleep, we're sleeping on time, we have our blue light blocking glasses, all the things that we do, our magnesium, just her not feeling safe in that location. So ultimately, we made the decision to move from the place that we were at to a place

that felt more in alignment with what she wanted in terms of safety and everything. And within a matter of a few weeks, we saw that respiratory rate and that HIV related to sleep, especially improved significantly. And I look back at that and it's just her nervous system feeling a lot more safe, a lot more secure in the new location that we're in compared to where we were previously. So this goes back to this general sense of if we're regularly feeling, And in that case, there's obviously a physical sense of safety, but even it could be an emotional sense of lack of safety that people feel.

I was just having dinner with a friend the other day who was saying that they were going through a very tough time with a business dealing that they were having. And for two weeks, they couldn't sleep well and their HRV tanked. Again, that's an example of how an emotional situation could throw us off. We all know these things. We all feel them in our life. It's not groundbreaking news. But when you actually have a wearable, and this is not an endorsement for any particular wearable, we don't have any affiliation with them. It's more just when you have that tracking information, you can see, hey, I'm not just, it's not just in my head that this is going on. This is actually genuinely impacting my nervous system, impacting my vagus nerve. So now is the time to double down on prioritizing my sense of activating and supporting the vagus nerve in a way that lets my body feel safe.

Yeah, safety is that most important feeling. And when we don't feel safe, and I'm sorry to hear obviously about the situation with regards to the break-in at your home, but when we don't feel safe, our body responds in that particular way. And even though we will often enter a threat response mode in our brain, our body shows these symptoms and it shows these signs. And if we don't take the time to read into them, to listen to them, then we're not able to get that feedback data that's being provided by our bodies. And I think that's really important to understand. So getting that feedback, getting that understanding of what our bodies are trying to tell us is absolutely imperative. And that's where wearable technology can help to provide that insight

as to, yes, I am feeling safe or no, something's not exactly right here. And maybe I should do a deeper assessment into why I'm not feeling as safe as I should. Now, I also want to get into talking a little bit about sleep. Sleep being that third area, that wearable technology can really help to provide phenomenal information. So with regards to sleep, we really want to know what our sleep looks like, what our sleep architecture looks like. So I'm going to share my screen one more time, and I want to go over kind of the five sleep cycles and having this goal of 25, 50, 25 on wearable device data when it comes to sleep. So with regards to these particular markers, optimal sleep architecture.

I've got an image here showing what optimal sleep architecture looks like and it's showing the time that should be spent generally in REM sleep, in light sleep, and in deep sleep. And we have a marker kind of showing that there should be five sleep cycles through the night that we go through. And we should be noticing that the majority of our deep sleep is happening in the first two cycles and it kind of weens off in three and four. We shouldn't have too much deep sleep in the fifth cycle, but we should have a lot more REM sleep in the later cycles in

four and five. And light sleep is generally going to be pretty equal throughout all the five cycles. But what we should have is this percentage of optimal total sleep time of 25% spent in REM sleep, 50% spent in light sleep and 25% in deep sleep. That 2550, 25 is kind of that optimal. And on this next slide here, I'm showing actually sleep data from a really good night of sleep that I had very recently that showed that my time asleep, these are screenshots from my aura ring.

I was in bed for eight hours and 20 minutes, but my sleep time was seven hours and 49 minutes. And you can see as you kind of look through the trend data of the aura ring, I go from being awake where it's white here, down into a light sleep for a short period. But then the majority of my deep sleep is happening in my first two sleep cycles, cycle one and cycle two. And then we're spending more time in REM later on in cycle three and four, and then more time in light sleep and popping out of sleep later on in the night. And so that night, on another screenshot here, it shows that I spend.

spent 22% in REM sleep, 53% in light sleep, and 25% in deep sleep. And I actually had 31 minutes awake, which obviously tracks with the time of sleep versus time in bed markers. Sleep is so important. And noticing that your sleep is off or something is not working really well there really helps to provide input into whether we're recovering well or not, because sleep is where we truly recover. That's where recovery occurs is during sleep time.

The vagus nerve is most active immediately in the moment where you fall asleep. There's been a great data study showing that the moment you fall asleep, your vagus nerve spikes activity for a moment there. And it continues on through the night so that recovery process is going to be occurring through sleep time. And this tells us that we're going to be able to control inflammation, improve the recovery process, send information to the immune system more readily to engage in regulatory and recovery functions. And what we're then going to see is, you know,

if this isn't working well, we're going to see changes in blood sugar. We're going to see changes in your ability to control and regulate functions. So I want to go over a few data trend comparisons that can help to provide some real insight into how wearable devices show that there are trends that can pop up from time to time. So I use a particular technology, a software called Heads Up Health, that helps me track my

patient's data to know what's going on and to see where blips or changes can affect in a positive or a negative way their wearable health data. And I think this is really where wearable health data can be very powerful. So I'm going to show a couple of screenshots from my Heads Up Health with my patients. And you'll notice in this particular one, I've got to be very powerful. got a screenshot of my patient's aura ring tracking the changes in AM readiness score, which is the same idea as kind of the recovery index versus their resting heart rate. And you can see that the red line here tells us about resting heart rate.

The average of that resting heart rate is sitting around kind of a 65, 66 area on average. It does kind of bump up and down as the weeks go, obviously. and on the blue line we see that AM readiness score. And AM readiness scores are trending kind of from an upwards maximum of 88 or so down to the mid-70s. Okay? And they're kind of up and down. But what we see is on nights when the resting heart rate popped up, got up into the higher marker closer to 70 on average, the AM readiness score significantly dropped following.

So the heart was beating harder, telling us that we were unable to enter that healing state and that readiness recovery state more readily. That occurred around October 28th. And then again, we had a huge spike in heart rate, average resting heart rate up into the 75 zone. And that also correlated with the drop in AM readiness score. So what we're seeing is your heart rate and your readiness scores will correlate in an inverse manner. This is an important one to look at. So getting this data in for me tells me, hey, what were you doing those two nights? Did you eat a late meal?

Did you maybe have a more sugary meal? Was there something that triggered you to go into this state of a higher resting heart rate? And so do we need to do something to ensure that we keep. our heart rate lower and not allow those spikes to occur because you showed up not ready the next day. Your body was unable to recover more optimally. On this next screenshot, this next slide, we have a comparison between a couple of different devices. So we've got Apple Health tracking weight, which started kind of halfway through this slide. We've got a Libre view, which is telling us about it's a continuous glucose monitor in the green.

here and then we have AM readiness score tracking as well and this was a really cool one because we were able to track three different data points and notice that there's a trend that followed accordingly so where AM readiness is and AM readiness continues we have glucose kind of following suit so average glucose through the day we notice that as AM readiness decreases as we feel like our vagus nerves are less capable of sending information and regulatory information, our average blood sugar actually increases. So when we have spikes in blood sugar, more spikes, we have more of these higher number days or moments, our readiness decrease. And that was a huge one, okay, on the negative side. But then we have this other marker that as AM readiness increases,

our blood sugar decreases. So this was really cool. And what followed suit there was weight actually followed alongside with that sugar level. So as this person was sleeping better, getting better recovery scores and recovering more readily, getting their readiness scores up into the 80s and 90s rather than sitting in the low 80s on average, their glucose levels through those days came down. They actually were able to get their glucose levels into the sixes and sevens. rather than being in the nines and tens, which is where they were disregulated.

And what was very exciting there was they actually started losing weight. They actually lost a couple of kilograms over that last month or so. So this was a really great marker telling us about how our vagus nerve, our wearable data helped to provide insight into how to improve the glucose levels and then to show up in a much better situation. And this last one is actually a baseline versus intervention timeline. So this was really cool. We were able to identify that once we started doing, in this particular case,

hyperbaric oxygen therapy for this particular client, they actually had improvements in their sleep scores and their HRV. So with this particular person, we have a red line of data tracking essentially. their HRV. And then we have blue markers spiking on when hyperbaric oxygen therapy was delivered. And when it was delivered more readily, what we saw was an increase in HRV of 30%. Average HRV went up by 30%. And max HRV went up by 20%.

And their minimum HRV actually increased as well by 42%. What this meant was we could see that there was benefits to this therapeutic intervention that were more powerful than getting just kind of subjective data from this patient. So this was a really cool set of data points that I think can be really powerful in helping patients to identify what is working really well in their case and what isn't. This is where wearable device data of wearable trend data can be so powerful in helping to support patients' health and provide a set of information that helps. helps us become more empowered with our overall health. Lots of data there, but I think there's a lot of

great stories that can be told from these data points. I'm a huge fan of glucose monitors. My audience knows I'm an investor in Levels Health. I love what they're up to. And just like you were sharing earlier, that these tools are great for the trends that they show. And you can match those trends up with certain symptoms that you're having and see if there's a correlation or provide many practitioners now will actually take your data and use it to inform their diagnosis. And just like HRV is not great at diagnostic, but the trends are helpful, I would also just put a little caveat, even though I'm a huge fan of glucose monitors, is that, you know, your body is meant to be able to put up with some of those stressors that are there.

So if your blood glucose does go up a little bit in the morning where naturally our cortisol is higher, so that's going to already spike on top of, then you have kids and rushing around and other stuff. Great. Your body should actually be able to handle some of that stuff, and it's not the end of the world. It's more to look at this data along with symptoms that you're having. Like, do you, after that, crave unhealthy foods because then you have a big drop in blood

glucose? Is your metabolic labs, your fasting insulin, your A1C, are those also off? and now you're paying attention to the particular eating pattern or stress pattern that might be driving some of those things. So like all these things, great information that helps us make better and informed decisions of how we want to show up in our life. Yeah, I think that's really the power of wearable device data is helping to provide that feedback, helping to provide that data point to help encourage and empower us to make better decisions. So you're absolutely correct with that. No question about it.

Would you say that the lowest hanging fruit for the vast majority of the population that's out there to improve their vagus nerve function is simply just doubling down on sleep in terms of the attention they give it? Just getting more time in bed, getting better quality sleep, giving themselves the permission to let other people around them know that, hey, I'm taking sleep seriously. would you say, or would it be fair to say that that is the lowest hanging fruit for people who want to be serious about improving the vagus nerve? Sleep really is the playground for the vagus nerve. It's where the vagus nerve goes to work. And so, yes, I would absolutely double down on the idea of improving sleep because when we sleep well, our bodies recover more readily. And if we put attention to ensuring that sleep is optimized, that our sleep environment is optimized, that we're ensuring that we're getting our bodies into that recovery state more readily, we're giving the vagus nerve an opportunity to turn. on more and to engage that safety response and to engage that recovery process. The immune system

is, I think, been siloed into this being our protective system and protecting us from threats to our survival. It's not just that. It does so much more. The immune system needs to be given signals to tell it to engage that recovery-based process. And that happens when good signals are being send to it and that can only happen if we sleep well. So without a doubt, if you can improve your sleep quality, the time that you're spending, the effectiveness of your sleep, everything will tend to trend in a much more positive direction when you do so. For a lot of us, we can think, and there are things that we can do additionally to just sleep, and we'll be touching on some of those there. But when you look at the list of things that can insult and impact the vagus nerve,

for the worse, it can feel easy to feel overwhelmed by them. You have everything from childhood trauma, which plays a huge role in people or adverse childhood events, you know, bad divorce amongst parents, some sort of being sick a lot as a kid dealing with health issues, you know, having a parent who's an alcoholic, a whole list of things that could be there. You have toxins, which we're all exposed to, some more than others, but we all are going to have some toxins in our water and our air, in our other supply and we're just doing our best to minimize them. Diet you touched on a little bit. Of course, sleep quality.

But when you add the list up and people see it, it can feel easy to feel overwhelmed. And part of today's conversation with you, Dr. Abe, is reminding people that, look, the problem is big and it's not getting enough attention. And yes, there are a lot of things that can damage the vagus nerve. But there are just a few simple things if we can pay attention to them that will make a huge difference. And then for other people who are really dealing with something more complicated, it could be worthwhile to work with a practitioner like yourself or other individuals. Most functional medicine doctors are going to be knowing a little bit about the vagus nerve and can support

and then getting into the weeds to figure out toxins exposure or to treat an autoimmune condition or whatever it might end up being. But just a reminder that a lot of the things that will move the needle forward are things that we can all do at home, at least to get started. Yeah, it can absolutely be overwhelming. There's a lot to take in here. There's a lot to understand. And when you're empowered to make changes, it often has to do with the simplicity or your ability to handle these. So I'm going to provide one big recommendation that I think has helped the vast majority of my patients more than anything else.

And that is bookending your day. Essentially creating routines in the morning and in the evening, around your sleep to ensure that you're preparing yourself to handle the stressors of the day in a really powerful way. So wake up in the morning and essentially providing yourself this initial window of preparation and recovery assessment as to what's going on in your body. Maybe doing some breathing exercises in the morning, getting a sense of how you slept. Do you feel good? Do you feel capable? Do you feel ready?

What are you grateful for in that moment? What are some of the things that you're ready to take on? What are the challenges that you're ready to take on that day? And then bookending at the end of the day, ensuring that we're not overdoing it, ensuring that we're not maybe exercising too late at night or pushing ourselves too hard, maybe having a meal too late,

something along those lines, and allowing our bodies to enter that recovery mode more readily because what that does is it drives that vagus nerve function up. It allows that recovery process to occur more readily. So if we can start to bookend our day, I think that's the greatest, easiest starting point to help ensure that sleep is optimized, to help ensure that these recovery processes

are given the attention that they require, that they deserve. This will help to provide a set of instructions as to how to enter that state more readily for sure. So bookending the day is a great one. And for some people listening, you may not be exercising at night, but you could be dealing with stressful emails at night that you don't need to be dealing with.

I think it's so important to protect that last little bit of the day. As you mentioned, book ending the day, protect your sleep. If you're doing things that are too extraneous for you, some people might be able to deal with a stressful email for somebody else and it doesn't bug them. Great, you're fine. Everybody's different.

Like I can watch an action movie. at night and take a little bit of time for recovery and still be okay my wife can watch an action movie at night and feel completely wrecked and all night long she's dreaming of violent scenes and other things which I absolutely do not want her going through so we don't watch anything stimulating like that together at night if we're going to watch anything it's going to be a lot more calm and chill so again everybody intuitively kind of feels these things but when you see the data actually there that your heart rate is higher and your heart is working harder because it's dealing with this sort of anxiety in the system or your vagus nerve to go back to your example is feeling like,

hey, something is going on. There might be a threat or something could happen. That is going to impact your sleep. And that's going to make it a lot harder to show up the next day to do what you want to do in life. When we get this data in, when we get a sense of, of whether we're sleeping well, whether our heart rate is higher, whether we're in this state of increased HRV or low HRV. It helps to provide changes to our habits and to our lifestyles. And this is really where we want to create change because the change doesn't necessarily just

come from, you know, the supplements that you're taking or the food that you're eating. It comes from your behaviors. And your behaviors drive all of these things. And so, yes, if you're sleeping in feeling stressed prior to sleep, it's going to drive your A heart rate up. It's going to create physiological changes. And that's what these devices help to provide is these trend data analyses that help us to note where we're at

and what we can then do about it. And if we can make changes, then we'll actually see these benefits on these wearable trend data points as well. Fantastic. You know, when I look at all this data that you're sharing, again, I'm left for, with the reminder that simple devices that generally have become a lot more affordable. I think the

aura ring and the whoop, you know, you might spend a hundred or a couple hundred dollars, which is an investment for some people, but better investment than splurging on some luxury good, like a, like a handbag or a new phone when your current phone works, you know, great. In my opinion, no judgment. You know, investing in your health, a couple hundred dollars for one of these devices. and then you might be paying a monthly subscription of, you know, $99,000 somewhere around there to get access to the ongoing health information. You're going to get such a level of an insight that, again, is going to be a good proxy of how your vagus nerve is going to be showing up, that now you're going to have data that informs you on lifestyle modifications. And generally

what I've seen is that a lot of us know that, hey, in this phase of life, I'm not sleeping as well as I should be. Or in this phase of life, I've been over consuming, you know, foods that I know don't agree with me. But when we see that data, it's one thing to kind of know it and have an internal dialogue in your head about it. But then when you see that data that you're actually, your heart is working harder than it needs to or you're breathing harder than you need to. There's something that clicks for a lot of people where that's the motivating factor for them. In fact, I would say, if anything, the number one thing when I've recommended these devices for friends and they start to have more of awareness of the Vegas nerve, and now I'm going to be sending them, you know, your book to pick up is they start to realize that they can make a huge impact with just a few small changes in their lifestyle. And again, some people are dealing with bigger stuff and they might need to work with a practitioner.

Great. We have people like you that are available for individuals. But there's so much agency that we have to be. make a difference and we don't have to feel like we're left with bad genetics or, hey, it's my parents' fault or the situation's fault for this childhood trauma that went. It might be, but we can still make a difference even amongst whatever life circumstances or cars we were dealt with. I think it's really easy to play the victim. And when we get the data and we get these important tracking points that these wearable devices can provide, and yes, they are an investment. But

When we get this data point, it can actually change the way that we show up in the world in such a way that can actually improve how we interact with others, how we maybe work with our business partners or produce new content or share new ideas with others. And what this does is when we function at a higher level, because we've invested in something that's providing us this feedback, this recommendation, these tools. tools. What this provides us is opportunities to, you know, show up in a much better sense when it comes to our patients. I have a really great friend who made it, gave me this, this really great quote. And he said, make it worth more than you paid for it. Make it worth more. And what that means to me is, yeah, you might have paid a few hundred bucks for your aura ring or your Woot Band. And yeah, you may be paying $6 a month for it. But is that helping you bring home an additional $2,000, $5,000 a month to help support your family,

to help to do better? Are you able to show up better in a physiological pattern with better executive function because you've invested in knowing where you currently stand and the things that are causing you to knock down or to build up? So make it worth more than you paid for it, I think is the best way to look at this. You're going to pay for it one way or another. Might as well invest into something like an aura ring or a healthy diet or a gym membership or you're going to end up giving that money to the medical system or prescription drugs or other things like that that are out there. Dr. Hobby, this has been great.

As we wind down now after your fantastic presentation, I promise that we would touch on it. But just give us a few of your other recommendations. So number one, obviously we have your book. People can pick it up and they can learn more about the vagus nerve. and you go deeper into all the things that you presented today. Number two, wearables can be super helpful to help you track that data over time and have a proxy for how the vagus nerve is showing up. What are the recommendations?

We've already chatted a bunch of things about sleep, but what are the recommendations that you often leave your patients with when it comes to all the different ways to protect the vagus nerve? So even if they're basic, like eating a whole food diet, you know, minimizing sugar. You know, give us some of those as a list. our audience has them and understands other things that they can do to improve how their vagus nerve shows up. I think the top three ways to improve vagus nerve function, in addition to what we've already discussed today, come down to number one, your breathing pattern, identifying and

adjusting your breath pattern. We talked about respiratory rate, but I want your breath to be three things. Your breath should be nasal, meaning you're breathing through your nose. It should be diaphragmatic, meaning you're using your diaphragm, which is the muscle that separates the chest from the abdomen. And it should be slower exhales. So nasal diaphragmatic lower exhales. What that means is slower breaths through the nose that are more belly breathing breaths and longer exhale time. These things are important because when we're inhaling, when we're taking a breath in, we're turning on the sympathetic nervous system. we're pushing the accelerator.

When we're exhaling, we're pushing the brakes. We put our body into a state where the brakes turn on and we slow everything down. This is a huge and very powerful tool in creating that shift between sympathetic parasympathetic. And when we learn to breathe really effectively, that will do it. The exercises that we add on on top of this all work on improving your breath pattern and spending more time in that exhale state. Exhalation is the key to driving that vagus nerve activation upwards. So humming, chanting, breathing, gargling, phenomenal tools, all requiring you to be in an exhale pattern. So I would add all of those exercises on top of that breath pattern.

Number two, I think practicing gratitude is so powerful. Forgiveness, gratitude, it provides a sense of safety inside your body. knowing that you're in a state because of the things that happened around you, the driving factors that put you in the position that you're in, knowing that you are capable of doing better and being excited about what the next day brings, creates that sense of internal safety. And that is the major driver, as we know, from a feeling perspective of improving vagus nerve function. So breathing with longer exhales, nasal diaphragmatic longer exhales, practicing gratitude, gratitude practice, ensuring that you're feeling that sense of safety. And lastly, I think just spending time with friends, being around loved ones, people that you can laugh with, that you can spend time with. And we tend not to laugh when we're feeling threatened, when we're feeling unsafe. Laughter is this great little hack that helps us shift into Vegas nerve activated states.

and being around loved ones, being around people that make you feel good, make you feel safe, friends, family, whoever it is on each individual basis, I think that's an area that's incredibly overlooked. And we felt this during the COVID lockdowns that we felt lonely. We didn't feel connected to people anymore. And that was another driver of why we didn't do so well during those responses during these lockdowns. So I highly recommend engaging in physical or emotional contact with others and just experiencing that lack of loneliness. I think that is a huge hack that can be easily overlooked. That's great. I want to thank you, Dr. Habib, for your presentation and for reminding our audience, even if they've heard of the term Vegas nerve, what tools are available to them to really prioritize this 10th cranial nerve, one of the most important. important nerves inside of the body because we live in a modern day world that is unfortunately

impacting it in a lot of different ways and a lot of different ways that many of us don't know, but there's a lot that we can do about it. If people want to stay in touch with you in our audience, obviously we have the link to your show notes below. What's the best way to be able to keep in touch with you in this incredible conversation that you're prioritizing and putting out in the world? Yeah, absolutely. You can check out my book, Upgrade your Vegas nerve. You can look out for me on Instagram, Dr. Navaz Habib, and you can go to the website, Dr.navashabib.com, and you can sign up for our Vegas nerve upgrade program. We've got a free program, a very simple kind of 10-day protocol program that you'd be able to access and get a sense of some of the great tools that you can utilize, very simple ones, to help improve Vegas nerve function. So go to Dr.navazhabi.com and sign up for our Vegasnerve Jump Start program.

Amazing. And last question, are you taking on new patients? I'm always highlighting people who are practitioners who are taking people on because I think that, you know, if you're going to have somebody amazing on and somebody's looking for additional resources, you always want to highlight. Some people are or some people aren't. But are you taking on new patients? Yeah, I am taking on new clients. And we work online. So everything is remote. You don't have to wait in line. You don't need to come to me in person. And we work with clients to consult with them to improve their overall health. I'm not taking people on as a primary care practitioner, but I absolutely am consulting those who want to upgrade their overall health. Okay, great. We'll see what happens after this podcast. Hopefully we'll send some people over. Dr. R. B, thank you again for being on the podcast, for sharing this information. I couldn't think of a better time of year, especially that we all need to invest into protecting our nervous system, including our biggest nerve. Thank you so much, Drew, for the opportunity and for allowing me to share. with your audience.