Dhru Purohit Show - Top Techniques to Radically Heal Your Body and Ease Your Mind with Dr. Jay Wiles

Episode Date: September 1, 2022

This episode is brought to you by InsideTracker and Pendulum. We’ve all heard about the concept of heart rate, especially in terms of working out or how it can become elevated with stress. But did you know that heart rate variability is an important metric for understanding your level of health? Heart rate variability is actually a window into the dynamic shifts within the nervous system and how different things we do are interpreted in the body.  Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru and Dr. Jay Wiles take a deep dive into the concept of heart rate variability, also known as HRV, and how we can use it to dial in our health routine on an extremely personalized level.  Dr. Wiles is a clinical health and performance psychologist with board certification in heart rate variability biofeedback and peripheral biofeedback, and he works as a leading consultant in psychophysiology to professional athletes, executives, and high performers. He is also the cofounder and Chief Scientific Officer of Hanu Health, a company that’s pioneering a new and innovative means of using heart rate variability and respiratory training as diagnostic indicators of the dynamic nature of the human stress response and for providing therapeutic tools for regulating and conditioning this response for peak human performance. In this episode, we dive into:    -The top hidden sources of stress and anxiety that significantly impact our health (1:56) -How HRV ties into our stress response (16:07) -What is biofeedback and how does it work? (18:08) -What is HRV and why is it important? (20:43) -How to measure HRV (25:24) -How anxiety impacts HRV (32:40) -What happens to our nervous system when we hold our breath (48:57) -How to use your breath to calm your nervous system (1:03:19) -Why hot and cold exposure are so pivotal in reprogramming our nervous system (1:28:47) -How male and female bodies react differently to hormetic stress and what women should keep in mind (1:56:12) To receive 40% off Hanu Health, go to hanuhealth.com/dhru and use code DHRU. For more on Dr. Wiles, follow him on Instagram @drjaywiles, Twitter @drjaywiles, YouTube @hanuhealth, and through his websites, drjaywiles.com and hanuhealth.com.  This episode is brought to you by InsideTracker and Pendulum. InsideTracker provides detailed nutrition and lifestyle guidance based on your individual needs. Right now, they’re offering my podcast community 20% off. Just go to insidetracker.com/DHRU to get your discount and try it out for yourself. Pendulum is the first company to figure out how to harness the amazing benefits of Akkermansia in a probiotic capsule. To receive 20% off your first purchase of Pendulum’s Akkermansia probiotic supplement, go to Pendulumlife.com and use code DHRU20. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We know that that in and of itself increases people's stress load, increases people's propensity to anxiety, and increases people's propensity to depression. Welcome to the Drew Proet podcast. Each week we explore the inner workings of the brain and the body with one of the brightest minds in wellness, medicine, and mindset. This week's guest is Dr. Jay Wiles. Dr. J. Wiles is a scientist, clinician, and expert on all matters related to the human stress response, holistic mental health,

heart rate variability and peak performance. And on today's podcast, Dr. Jay, as his friends call them, we'll be diving deep into the areas of the hidden sources of stress in our lives that significantly impact our overall health. These hidden sources of stress that even healthy people are guilty of having in their lives. Now, a little bit more about Dr. Jay. He's a clinical health and performance psychologist with a board certification in heart rate variability biofeedback and peripheral biofeedback, and works as a leading consultant in psychophysiology to professional

athletes, teams, executives, and high performers. Dr. Jay is also the co-founder and chief scientific officer of Hanu Health, a company that's pioneering a new and innovative means of using heart rate variability, which we call HRV, and respiratory training as both diagnostic indicators of the dynamic nature of the human stress response and providing therapeutic tools for regulating and conditioning this response for peak human performance. If you're interested on practical things that you could do starting today, and I literally mean today, to improve your stress response and improve your resilience to stress, this episode is absolutely for you.

Jay, welcome to the podcast. It's a pleasure to have you here. I want to jump right in and deliver some value for our audience. What are some of the top hidden sources of stress? that are active in people's life that they may not know contribute to this general sense of overwhelm and anxiety, hidden sources, things that people don't normally think of as contributing to stress and anxiety. Yeah, it's a great question. There are three that come to mind. I would say the first one, I put it not necessarily as a tiered system that I believe one is more important than the

other, but I think this one goes unnoticed and maybe shoved under the rug, which would be dysfunctional breathing. There are so many individuals that are walking around not paying attention to the role that dysfunctional breathing plays and their overall communication pathways that respond to stress. So dysfunctional breathing in and of itself can actually cause us to experience a heightened stress response. And we know this through numerous studies, through biometric monitoring of things like heart rate, heart rate variability. And we can see how they can become quite dysfunctional. when individuals are breathing in a matter of or a way that is dysfunctional. So what do I mean by dysfunctional breathing?

Well, when we become stressed, which for, as you know, many of us, like all the time now, like in our modern day society, we're always on the move. We're constantly going. We're driving faster and faster and faster. One of the biggest problems that we end up having, unfortunately, is that we don't respond to the way that we're breathing. We don't check in to the way that we're breathing. And when we think about dysfunctional breathing, when we are stressed, we are breathing generally from the chest.

So we're not breathing more from the belly or from kind of more of the diaphragm and shifting those areas of the body that we need to in order to functionally breathe. We're breathing more what we call thoracically or even clavically like up in the shoulders. The biggest problem that happens here is that when we are not allowing for vast expansion of the lungs, when we're not allowing the cardiovascular system to work as it should be with the respiratory. system, this causes immense dysfunction from a physiological perspective. The things that are happening here are that the body is not receiving as much oxygenation as it should. So if our tissues, our organs, they're not receiving that high level of oxygenation, well, that's a stressor on those organ systems. So what are we talking about here? Well, predominantly our lungs,

our brain, and our heart. Those are the three primary organs that when we are dysfunctionally breathing do not receive the matter of oxygenation that they should be receiving. And then this is perceived as a stress signal because when we are indeed stressed, we're trying to, let's say, flee or fight that threat that's in front of us. One of the things that we need is to be able to utilize both oxygen and CO2 effectively. And so when we're getting to those situations and we need to flee or fight, like we want to breathe really quickly. The body actually needs to utilize oxygen in that sense to get out of what's in front of us really quickly. But the problem is that over time, if we revert or we are only in that state, well, this causes

an immense cascade of dysfunction. So that's what results in stressors. So what I tell people is that if you find yourself breathing really quickly, really shallowly, really kind of from the chest, we need to figure out a better way to result kind of our body's natural state, which is more functional type of breathing. So functional type of breathing is from the diaphragm. It's vast expansion of the lungs. It's allowing the body to receive the oxygenation that it should be receiving,

which will then send the signal from the body up to the brain that we are in a relaxed state. We're not in a state where the mountain line is about to attack us around the corner. We don't have that inherent threat in front of us that we need to self-preserve by kind of either getting out of there or fighting what's in front of us. So dysfunctional breathing is my key number one point. that I would say. Number two. Before you go into number two,

I was telling you that my wife has struggled with a little bit of dysfunction. I mean, a lot of people do. I have some dysfunctional. Everybody has it. It's not like some people have it and some people don't. There are moments and situations that it might come up. But then for some people,

it's more of a thing for them. And so I have a bunch of follow-up questions for you on that when we dig into it a little bit further. But yeah, let's go into number two. Number two would be nutrition. And when I say nutrition, I'm really talking about the root causes of inflammation.

We know that when we look at individuals with mental health-related difficulties, so it could be excessive stress, it could be anxiety, could be depression, that these individuals typically have higher inflammatory responses. And a lot of this response can be interconnected with how their body is responding to, yes, the stress, but also to the things that we're feeding or the things that we're providing kind of our bodies, which would be indeed nutrition. So for instance, we know that individuals, especially if they have this roller coaster of what we call glycemic variability.

I know you've done a lot of podcast and talked a lot about this, but this cascading kind of glycemic variability that can come from eating an excessive amount of sugar, high carbohydrate-rich foods, eating all throughout the day as well. This continued turn-on of the inflammatory responses that happen because of glycemic variability can cause an immense amount of stress or taxation on the body. So we see this in terms of biometrics again, like when people are having immense amounts of variability in their glucose, we see a reduction in markers that are associated with stress, like a reduction in heart rate variability, an increase of heart rate, and even an increase, a significant increase in respiration rate. So people, when they have immense changes in glycemic variability, will actually breathe faster and will actually breathe more dysfunctionally. So there's immense chaos that can happen simply because people are eating a significant amount

of refined carbohydrates, of sugars, and so forth. Yeah, when they're eating these sugars and they're eating these refined carbohydrates as the base of their diet, you know, some people will have them. It's fine to have them here and there. And again, we've done a lot of episodes like this. You're on this blood sugar roller coaster of a spike and a crash and a spike and a crash. And besides feeling like shit, what I'm hearing from you is that you also stress your body out. Yeah, 100%.

And you're right. What I always say is like you should earn your carbohydrates. So you should be actively moving. Like you should be exercising. And then it would make sense to have those carbohydrates there because you're utilizing them. You need them. But for the modern day individual who's eating a standard American diet who's living more of a sedentary lifestyle, the problem is that they're not exercising and mobilizing all of that energy. And so therefore, they're having immense amounts of spikes. These aren't just happening acutely. They're happening all throughout the day. And that sends a signal to the body, number one, to increase these inflammatory markers that we know are quite deleterious for the human body, but also the human stress response is activated. And the one key

component to this, especially when we engage in sympathetic activation, is that this causes another whole cascade of physiological difficulties. So you have the secretion or oversecretion of glucocorticoids, like cortisol, which people are quite familiar with. Very effective tool when we need it. cortisol will save your life if the mountain line jumps around the corner. But if you have a constant secretion of cortisol, well, this causes a constant increased inflammatory response in the system. And this can have a deleterious impact on your cardiovascular system, on your neurological systems, on your respiratory systems, and then really, excuse me, all throughout the body.

So the one key component to remember here, too, is if we can reduce kind of the amount of glycemic variability. If we can reduce overall inflammation through our nutrition and through what we intake from our diet, then we can significantly enhance our overall resiliency to stress. We can blockade some of these constant deleterious effects. Like I mentioned, cortisol increase. We also know that there's an increase of noropenephrine and epinephrine, which again, very good for us and help us out of certain situations will save your life. But it's the constant impact of it that's going to cause you to reap unfortunate deleterious effects, both on the mind and on the body. And you had one last one, and that was a sedentary lifestyle. Talk about how a

sedentary lifestyle, which a lot of people actually, the sister component to this is that a lot of people don't realize how sedentary they are. This episode is brought to you by Inside Tracker. You know, I just turned 40 this year, and I can honestly say I've never felt better. So many people have a fear around getting older because they think it has to come with chronic disease and deteriorating mental and physical health. If that were the case, I'd be worried too about getting older, but it doesn't have to be that way. It's possible to get older and stay young at the same time, but sometimes we need a little help to know exactly how to do it. That's why Inside Tracker developed Inner Age 2.0. This proprietary AI-driven platform reveals how your body is aging

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and now you can too. Right now, Pendulum is offering my community 20% off your first purchase with their Pendulum Acrimancia probiotic supplement. All you have to do is go to their website, pendulumlife.com. That's Pendul-U-L-U-M-L-U-M-L-I-F-E-D-O-C-O-O-O-O, and use the code, Drew-20, spelled D-H-R-U-0. For 20% off your first. first purchase. That's the biggest problem, right? Is there are so many individuals if you ask them,

and there's been interesting research about this and polling that they've done with individuals who kind of ask them to rate their overall activity levels. And most people will overestimate how much they're actually moving, how much they're actually mobilizing energy. The big problem with this is that as humans, we always want to convince ourselves that we're doing the right thing that we're actively engaging in things that we know are beneficial to our health. But the biggest problem is that these lies end up turning into us just kind of living that lifestyle without actually doing anything that's beneficial to us. So the sedentary lifestyle component that we're talking about here is one where we convince ourselves that we're engaging in movement, but we're not. And we know

that sedentary lifestyle means that if we have energy that needs to be, mobilize, so we actually have to utilize energy, but we're not utilizing it, that's what causes the really detrimental health effects that we see and can cause us to experience more stress. There is no component or no tool that I've seen in the scientific literature that I am convinced is most effective for overall mental health and well-being than movement and exercise. But the problem again lies in this fact that if we're not true to ourselves and we do not actually monitor or at least take into account how much we are moving or are not moving, we're doing a huge disservice to ourselves.

So my key takeaway here is that we have to take a cold, hard look in the mirror and say, am I moving, am I engaging in movement throughout the day? And then if we're not, and we find that we're kind of sinking a little bit below the set goals that we have for ourselves, or maybe we need to set the goals higher, that we need to really engage in that form of movement in that level of exercise. Because without it, the problem that ends up happening is that us sitting still, us not mobilizing our energy, it causes a couple of really detrimental things. Number one, from a psychological perspective, when people, and studies have shown this, when people are sedentary, when they are just sitting and not engaging in active

movement, we know that that in and of itself increases people's stress load, increases people propensity to anxiety and increases people's propensity to depression. So all these mental health related concerns. So that's key component number one. The other thing that happens too, if when people are sedentary from a physiological perspective, we know that we're causing a lot of harm as well. So we're not activating our respiratory and cardio respiratory system, which causes a lot of immense amount of stress. But the other thing too is that we're causing a lot of other issues related to muscular density, to bone density, to flexion. So those three components, so if we talk about dysfunctional breathing, we talk about nutrition and we talk about overall movements and exercise,

if those three components aren't there, that is the first three things I would tell someone to engage in in order to really affect change from a stress resiliency standpoint. So a big part of today's conversation is taking the topic of stress and really getting a chance to understand it from one of these biomarkers, heart rate variability, and understanding that this one marker plays, I've heard you say actually in past podcast episodes, that it's the most crucial marker when it comes to understanding how well we handle stress.

Most people who listen to this podcast and people who are in the health world know from all the great messaging that's out there is that there is actually a form of stress that's good for us. Even things like exercise is a good stress on the body. So that, you know, and we'll break that down in a minute. And when we have too much of these micro stresses, we end up being in a place where we just are overburdening our body.

So there's a lot to impact there, but let's start off with the basics. A lot of people have heard of heart rate variability. And in the context of this conversation and some of the things you've mentioned, why is it that this is so important? And you've dedicated so much of your career to talk about this and educate people about this topic. Yeah, it's interesting because I did not come across this term heart rate variability until I was pretty deep in my postdoctoral fellowship. I had heard of the term biofeedback, which was an interesting one for me. But as a psychologist, it was kind of seen as being more out there. It wasn't necessarily adopted by a lot of individuals within my field.

But then I came across it when I was working in an integrative pain center with the Department of veteran affairs. And I saw how it was being utilized quite effectively. We published studies on this. We were also able to present a lot of presentations on the efficacy of different integrative modalities, one of them being biofeedback. But I saw these individuals who are engaged in biofeedback were experiencing immense subjective relief from their overall pain response, something that they weren't experiencing with a lot of other modalities. And some people know the term biofeedback. Some people don't. Can you just break it down? Yeah, for sure. Biofeedback is the utilization. of your biology. So it's actually getting biological feedback from different biometric sensors

in order to demonstrate state change of your biometrics, which are associated with many different things like your stress response can be associated with overall chronic pain and muscular tension because maybe we're looking at something like EMG, which is assessing the amount of tension you're holding in your muscles. And then one of them being heart rate variability, which we'll get into here in just a second. But biofeedback is a means of determining how, efficacious or how effective a treatment is in changing certain markers of your biology. So in the case of, you know, you're working with these veterans and the group that you were with, they're in pain. They're getting some data that helps quantify their current state,

whether it's heart rate variability or something else. They're getting to see that data, right, like some sort of scale. And using that, they are implementing some sort of changes. and then they're seeing that data shift. Yep, that's it. So in terms, and how does this relate to pain? Because a lot of people may wonder, well, how does this relate to pain? Well, we know that an overactivation of your nervous system, which happens quite often when people experience chronic pain related issues, that overactivation of your sympathetic nervous

system or that fight or flight response increases kind of many different things. But the one thing that it increases is a person's overall subjective experience of pain. So we utilize these different biometrics and watched with different therapeutics the change or the response of this individual. So for instance, one that we used was heart rate variability. A lot of people who are experiencing chronic pain and have that continuous almost always on fight or flight sympathetic response have a suppression in heart rate variability. And we see this kind of through this biometric real time monitoring. But then when we teach them some different therapeutic tools that are intended on helping them to reduce. reduce the output of, or reduce the output of their stress response and increase the output of

their relaxation response. We call this the parasympathetic response. Then what we see is that heart rate variability goes up. And the beautiful correlation that we see is that as heart rate variability goes up, subjective pain experience goes down. What are we teaching them better autonomic control, better control over their nervous system? And with better control over the nervous system results in a reduction or experience of pain reduction. And so that's the big key component. But I know you wanted to go into heart rate variability. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Let's break it down on the most simplistic level. Like, what is it? How do you actually measure it? And is it good when it's up? Is it bad when it's down? Break down the basics for it for, you know, again, I would probably even put myself in the camp of for many years, I would hear the term heart rate variability.

This is like probably like six, seven years ago. And I kind of understood some of it, but nobody ever really kind of walked me through it. And until I met, you know, a friend who was like, here's what it is. Here's how we measure it. Here's how it works. That really was a game changer for me in that understanding. So I'd love for you to give that to our audience. Yeah.

Your experience is not uncommon. I mean, heart rate variability is ubiquitous and like basically every wearable now. So you can be using aura or you can use Wu, Pergarmine, Fitbit, or the device I created, not to provide a shameless plug, but Hanu. You have all these devices that are providing this data output, but a lot of people just see it as a number. And without context, a lot of people don't understand that number because it can use, it can be used for recovery. It can be used at looking at overall psychological stress and that response. So the best way for me to unpack what heart rate variability is, is to provide a definition, an operational definition, but then also talk about not just what it is, but how it can be utilized.

How can we put it into practice? because I think that's the big gap for people is that they hear about this data, but then they say, well, what do I do with that data? What is this informing me of? How can I actually make or implement changed based on what I see? So when we think about heart rate variability or HRV, as most people commonly refer to it as, is that the 30,000 foot view of this is that it is the single greatest non-invasive proxy that we have for assessing or looking at the dynamic shifts in the nervous system.

Another way to put that... So if you ever... Just to pause you here, and sorry for the interruption. And by the way, you can interrupt me, whatever you want. So just to break that down, because that's like a big statement for a lot of people. And I want to kind of connect the dots on it. What I find, the more that I got into the world of health, the more I realize that a lot of times people don't know that they're actually stressed.

Their body is exhibiting, you know, behaviors or their nervous system has shifted but they don't feel good, but they don't know that they're stressed out. So in a way, this heart rate variability in the number that's associated with it, you're saying it's like the best way to get a snapshot. Like, where's your nervous system right now? Are you relaxed? Are you in a rest and digest place? Or are you starting to freak out a little bit in your body?

Or are you in full-blown freak out? That's what I'm hearing from you. Yeah, no, I think that's a great synopsis of it. When we think about HRV, HRV is simply a data point. that data point is providing us with a representation of how either taxed or not so taxed the nervous system is at any given moment, which is then reflective of what is your stress response doing in that moment. And so when we think about heart rate variability over the course of time, if you would take a single snapshot of your heart rate variability right now, if you say you had

your aura ring or you put on Hanu or you did whatever device that you're using and you look at heart rate variability right then and right there, that number would be almost. essentially meaningless because there's nothing to frame it. What we actually have to have in order for us to understand heart rate variability is a lot of data over time because what we're comparing and the way we can see what are happening in terms of shifts in your nervous system is that we have to begin to compare it to your baseline. We have to see where do you normally, where are you normally at? And then when you experience stressors and let's also refresh the audience that stressor can be both physiological and it can be psychological. It doesn't have to be, you know,

one or the other. It's both of them. It's always looking at how taxes the nervous system at any given moment, which again is saying how much stress is your body experiencing at any given moment. Yeah, no different than a lot of lab tests, you know, just on its own if you go to your doctor's office and they tell you you're fasting glucose. That's like trying to plan your budget for the year, but you only get to look at your bank account once. and you have no idea of what's coming in, what's going out, you can't balance your checkbook, and so you're just kind of in the dark. So in that same way, you're saying just looking at one number and getting a quick little

snapshot in time of your heart rate variability is not going to tell you much. We really need to look at you personally and look at it over a period of time to understand what your baseline is. So even take a step back a little bit further. So what actually is it and how do you measure it? Yeah, yeah. So heart rate variability, I can explain the definition almost even in the words itself, heart rate variability.

I almost always like to explain it, though, by starting off with utilizing maybe more of the more commonly understood concept, which would be heart rate. So a lot of people are very familiar with what heart rate is. If you were to put on a monitor right now and check your heart rate, what we're looking at is averages. So if you, let's say you put on a heart rate monitor. and your average beats per minute right now was 60. So you have a 60 beats per minute heart rate.

What most people would deduce from that is that every single second then in a 60 second epoch or time frame your heart was beating at a matter of one second in between each heartbeat. You wouldn't be wrong to think that because on average that is what was happening. But from a physiological standpoint, that's not what's happening at all. The heart does not operate like a metronome or at least it shouldn't. If the heart begins to operate like a metronome, which is a paste, not a lot of time that is happening differently in between heartbeats, well, that's actually a sign of some pretty significant dysregulation.

That might mean an enhanced stress response, could be psychological or it could be physiological. You may be sprinting, you know, down the road doing your high intensity interval training. But what we want to see, actually, is a lot of variability that happens in between successive heartbeat. So heart rate variability is looking at the time differences that occur in between, successive heartbeat. So if we think about from one heartbeat to the next, it could be that it's a matter of there's 600 milliseconds that's different between those two. But in the next set of heartbeats between one another could be 700 milliseconds. And then one after that, it could be 800 milliseconds. As you can

see, the time difference between those heartbeats are beginning to change. Well, why is that so important? Well, what variability tells us, again, is what's happening within the dynamic shifts of your cardiorespiratory system. If we think about our cardio respiratory system, it has to adjust to trillions of processes at any given moment because our biology is so immensely complex. With that, the heart needs to be able to adjust with speed both up and both down. Good adjustability means better resiliency. So as a heart rate variability increases, that's indicative that the system, the bodily system is better maintaining homeostasis. It's able to adjust rapidly to sudden internal cues and to sudden external cues. As the body begins to receive the signal that I'm not able to handle

everything right now, I have limited capacity. I have limited resources because this stressor or this thing in front of me just seems too overwhelming. The body will do what it has to do in order to regulate. And what the heart does is that it begins to pace like a metronome. And variability becomes less and less in between the heartbeat differences. And that's the sign of like boom, boom, there's stress. Watch out. And we're all getting this from biometrics. And a lot of people will go throughout that day and have that pacing of the heart and a reduction of heart rate variability and never know it. Because they're pushing along. We as humans are really good about just pushing through and continuing and going on.

But the problem is, is that that continuous lack of variability, that lack of us adjusting accordingly to our body's needs and our body's response has immense negative impact on our overall health and well-being. So when we think again about heart rate variability, it's not that we want to have always a quote-unquote high or low heart rate variability. And we can talk about those terms because I think that's the big myth, Drew. There's a lot of people think they should have a high heart rate variability. what you actually should have is a normal heart rate variability.

And normal is normal to you. It is relative to you. This is one of those weird biometrics that because of a lot of different confounding variables cannot be compared to anybody else. There's no normative comparison or a comparison to the everyday individual. You look at your profile and my profile. It's comparing apples and oranges. It truly is.

And I'm sure we'll get into why that is here in a minute. But it's really knowing what is your baseline over time. And then monitoring and looking at the different. fluctuations of that over time. And that can provide us insight and direction into how our body's responding to stress. Taking even one more step backwards, when you look at our modern life to, let's say, at least what we know, I'm sure there's a lot we don't know about different hunter-gatherer groups throughout evolutionary history, what are some of the things that you see that put us in a place where our heart rate variability is,

not in the optimal state that we want it to be and is more dysregulated. Yeah. Disregulation occurs all throughout the day for everybody. And when I say dysregulation, I don't want that to sound like it's just wholly negative. It's not all negative. You're going to have natural dysregulation of your nervous system all throughout the day, peaks, valleys, ups and downs. If I were to get up right now and run to the bathroom and run back,

you're going to see significant changes in my overall biometrics. Change is good. You want that change to be there because that means that your heart, just like you're pushing on the gas because you've got to go faster because you've got to take an off ramp or whatever. Yep. You want your heart to respond appropriately. 100%. Yeah.

You have to have it response like that. Like if you do not, then that's what results sometimes in people experiencing certain health-related problems, but especially mental health-related problems. One just interesting aside, and then I'll come back, is that there's been studies done and looking at individuals with depression, and they've actually looked at their overall sympathetic and parasympathetic response, kind of the modulation of their gas pedal, which is more like the fighter flight response and their brake, which is more of their parasympathetic rest, digest, relaxation response. And with individuals who have depression, they've actually seen that a lot of

these individuals will have quite inflated heart rate variability. They'll have quite low heart rate overall resting heart rate. And if you just look at their biometrics, a lot of people would say, wow, this looks great. Like they have a really nice profile. But on the inside, from a psychological perspective, like they're hurting, like they're dying. They're suffering. And so context is always key in this. But yes, like you said, you want to have these ebbs and flows throughout the day to a certain extent. You want them to be congruent with what you're doing. And that's why again, we say context is key. You're exercising. You want your sympathetic stress response to be on. That is a great thing. That is going to help you to optimize performance. But if you're not exercising, then I always say if you're

not exercising, you're recovering. The nervous system should be focused on a state of recovery. So as you and I sit here, as I do work, or as I'm kind of in a more active rest or even more in a rest position, I don't want my body to respond like it's running down the hallway and running back, but far too often, this is what we see with individuals. So like when you talk about like, let's say anxiety and you've done a bunch of content on this, when we talk about anxiety, what's going on with somebody who's anxious and their heart rate variability? Yeah. Yeah. What's going on in that situation? There's kind of two different components that we, that we've seen in the literature and that we see from a psychological and physiological perspective. One would be what is happening physiologically. So we know that our central nervous system, our brain and spinal cord is going to receive cues from the peripheral nervous system, which is where our autonomic nervous system is. If we start to have anxiety, our bodies will respond, even before cognition, starts rolling, our body will respond in very unique patterns. So respiration goes up. We start breathing

faster or our respiration can actually significantly go down. And you might say, why would that be? Well, hold my breath or after an exhalation. Hold your breath. A lot of people go into that state when they're really anxious. So that's one component that can happen physiologically. We know that heart rate significantly goes up. If you've ever just been sitting around and maybe, like you're about to give a big speech or a keynote or maybe you're about to record a podcast or maybe or like you're going around the table and everybody's introducing themselves and it's about to be your turn. Indeed. And what do you experience? Well, if you have good interoception and you're able, excuse me, able to like get into the body well, you'll see, oh man, I feel it. My pulse just feels like it's about

to pop out of my neck. My heart feels like it's about to explode out of the chest. So what signal is that sending to the brain. Something is about to get me. Like, I've got to self-preserve because, and, you know, it's funny to think about because I like your example of going around the table, like, is there actually an imminent threat to your survival there? No, but does your brain and body think there is? Yes, it responds almost like there is some type of imminent threat here. Maybe, you know, it's your sense of pride because you'll mess up on what you're saying. Or maybe it's like, whatever that situation or context is, there's something about it. There's someone there who's going to be listening to you who like you have a lot of respect for. And so for you, it's like, I got to do

everything right and have everything kind of, what are they going to think about me? Yeah, exactly. Or are they going to think about me? And so the body responds accordingly. So from a physiological perspective, we see that the gas pedal is being ramped up. The break is being released and the body is getting into high gear. Again, this is not inherently bad in certain situations. What it's bad is when it happens over and over and over and over and over on a given daily basis. It's kind of like when we talk about glycemic variability, if you have some increases in glucose and then decreases that stabilize, one, two, three a day is probably not that detrimental. But if it's going over and over and over and over and over and over and it's going more extensively and it's getting worse and worse and worse, well, now we have a problem. So from a physiological perspective, that's the one thing that I would characterize and say is we have to watch out.

for. But then when we move over to the psychological, which is more cognitive, it's more about the self-talk. It's more about the thought process. This is also kind of the thing that I think sometimes unfortunately gets thrown under the rug a lot in the scientific community because we really want to focus on physiology and what's happening to the body. And we don't really think about kind of these components that are related to thoughts and to cognition and to how they drive the stress response. We know that this is a feedback loop. So as the body responds and cognitively, starts going, we start to just nose dive. One thought leads to the next, which leads to the next, which leads to the next. We're concocting all of these worst case scenarios of what's going on. And then how

does the body respond to that? Because that's going to send a signal to the body. Well, heart rate gets faster. Heart rate variability gets lower. Everything, we get tunnel vision. All of these things happen in physiologically. So we see all these negative cascades of events that happen when physiology gets disregulated when cognition then follows and gets dysregulated. But what we have found too is that we can also start with cognition as well, especially if we have a lot of deep underlying core schemas, a lot of just really negative self-talk, unresolved trauma. Again, this is a two-way street. The mind and the body are interconnected, inextricably interconnected. And we know that when there's dysregulation in one of them, it causes dysregulation than the other. And then it just starts to ping-pong

right back and forth to one another. So those are the two components. And I can't remember if that relates solely to the question that you asked initially. But I think it's relevance just in the interaction. Yeah, I was asking like what goes on with somebody who's having anxiety and what are the two different ways that they, you know, experience, you know, challenges in that in that area of heart rate variability. And I think that you mapped it out well. I'm very curious because, you know, you and I were chit chatting a little bit beforehand and you brought up the name Andrew Heberman. And, you know, he's been on the podcast before. And one of the things he says is that you can't, access the mind through the mind. You have to access the mind through the body.

Yes. And especially when we have these places of dysregulation or we feel like a little bit out of whack. And it seems like going back to your first, your three things that you mentioned, all those in a way are three ways of accessing the mind and reducing stress through the body. Starting off with number one, you know, the dysregulate, when somebody has a dysregulated breathing, bringing in regulated breathing to there. Is that right? Would you say that's accurate? Yeah, it's accurate because what I love about Andrew's comment there,

and I wholeheartedly agree, is that when people try to jump first to cognition, especially if they're not ready to go there, we can talk about reasons to jump to cognition, especially in more of a therapeutic session. But when we simply as ourselves solo try to jump to cognition, the major complication that we have is that for the most part, get stuck here. And when we get stuck here, it begins to dysregulate the body. Yeah, your brain is

already stuck and you're trying to use the brain to unstuck yourself, but you're already stuck. So just for everybody who's following along, you are worried about some sort of problem in your life. You are stressed out about asking your boss for a raise or you have a big presentation coming up and you're worried about it. And if you try to outthink your brain, there's only so far that that you can go, especially if you're not in a section or a setting where somebody could therapeutically ask you like very targeted questions that could help you understand. Like, hey, when was the last time you felt this way? And how did it work then? Okay, it was good then. Do you also see now that there's some parallels, you know, like what a therapist would do? Yep.

But for most people, they're not going to be able to do that in a healthy way, which makes it very tough to try to calm yourself through the mind. Right. When we try to play our own therapist, it's like when we try to play our own therapist, it typically ends in disaster. And that's because we think and we try to convince ourselves that we can be an objective bystander and we can't. Like with our own selves, being an objective bystander, while not impossible, is pretty close to impossible. Just like being objective is not very easy.

So the point that Andrew Huberman is made and the point that I would make too is that if we first try to target physiology. If we first go to the body instead of trying to control the mind, we see this in research that as we functionally breathe, as we slow the pacing or the cadence of our breath down. And for practical sense, I tell people that getting it down to around six breaths per minute to around what we refer to as someone's resonance rate, and we can talk about what I mean about that concept too. But if we do that, that simple function in a matter of for most people seconds. I'm not talking about minutes, hours. I'm not talking about decades of practice, but in a matter of seconds, we can significantly impact physiological change that can calm the mind

down. It can actually turn down the volume of that crazy inner monologue, that nasty self-talk that happens. Do I believe, and I'll be very clear about this, do I believe that us simply changing our physiological response is going to result in everything cognitively just kind of fading away? are going into the background or not being a part of us? No, I don't believe that. And this gets down to as a psychologist, the knowledge that we can have very deeply ingrained core schemas, core ideology, or self-talk, absolutely, that changes in physiology from breathing, from biofeedback, from meditation, from whatever practice is not going to just resolve it simply with the snap of a finger with 30 seconds of breathing. Can it help? Sure as hell it can help. And it will absolutely

absolutely help. I think it's a beautiful aid. It's a beautiful, beautiful adjunctive. We know this from research and we know this from, you know, thousands of clinical hours. But the thing that I think a lot of people get into is they say, oh, I'm going to change my breathing. I'm going to change my physiology and therefore my PTSD is going to be cured or my anxiety disorder is going to be cured. My depression's going to go away. And I don't like to set people up with that expectation because that's just unfortunately it's not what happens. But again, it can be so incredible. aidful. And I would say the key component here is that a lot of people are not ready to start with the cognitive component, but most people are willing to at least try something physiological

that can have immense change and prep the mind and body to taking them in that direction. I think the keyword that you mentioned there was prep. It's sort of like you're priming your body to now be less crazy in that instance, you know, just our body being over. anxious, other stuff, we've all been there before. And when we're in that state, it's harder to be our best. You know, there's even a term that is used when it comes to, you know, disregulated blood sugar and how that can make us like hangary. They call it like hypoglybichy.

Right. So like if you are like, if you have dysregulated blood sugar and your blood sugar drops because you ate like a, you know, big bowl of like oatmeal with sugar and berries or like a big Asaibo has all this like sugar and carbs in it. Then you crash later on. Genuinely, it's harder for you to be nicer, not just to other people, but to yourself. Then what often happens is that people go on Instagram or they go on social media. And then when you are primed and your body is looking, your body doesn't feel good. And it's on the hunt for reasons that my life isn't working out. So you see somebody else, even if it's somebody that you're close to and they

just got married or they just launched their business or they hit a milestone you're like oh this is why I don't feel good I don't have the right partner in my life I don't have enough money I don't have enough this so our body physiologically is always trying to take us in the direction that we set the state up for so if we don't prime it in the right way it cannot head towards a direction of questioning these stories and these biases that it has so I think you Your point was an important point. Things are not going to change overnight, but without accessing the body, the likelihood of things changing at all is very low.

And this is where you see people who have been in therapy for years and they're primarily talking things out and great, maybe that's better than nothing. But still, they maybe haven't made progress because they're not accessing some element of the body. 100%, Drew, the one thing that we have to remember and to not take it into too much psychological science, but I think that it applies here, is that to your point, what you were just mentioning was confirmation bias. When we take all of the information within our external environments and we try to use that information to confirm our own biases about who we are, maybe it's our identity,

maybe it's our ideological system, whatever it may be. We use that information. Every time we do that, from a psychological science perspective and a physiological perspective, what are we doing? Well, we're conditioning. That is operant conditioning 101. We are conditioning behavior. We're conditioning thoughts, we're conditioning ideology. The same thing happens with our physiology for better or for worse is that we can condition from a physiological perspective, different behavior that's associated with different events. So every time that you experience an event that has posed as a stressor to you in the past, your body might already be conditioned.

Your mind might already be conditioned to respond to that event in the way that it did in the past. And when you continue to do it over and over, you strengthen those neural networks. You strengthen that condition for, again, for better or for worse. But we can go in a different direction, which is the most beautiful aspect about this. If every time you are in a car, your heart rate races because a few years ago, you were in a significant car accident that left you and let's say your kid injured, well, your body is going to naturally try to get into that position because it says, I got to protect you. Like that was a really bad thing. I solve for impact, literally. Absolutely. Like, it thinks, I got to do whatever I can to protect you because that's going to happen again. It's coming. Like, it happened once. It will happen again. So the body goes nuts every time people are in cars. And this is examples clinically that I've actually seen. So what do we do with someone like that? Well, do we go straight to cognition and have them say, well, let's just retrain the brain to think about like, you know, what scenarios could happen. What are the pros, the cons? Like, you know, all of these things that we do in something like cognitive

behavioral therapy. I was going to ask you, would that be like CBT? Yeah, yeah, it's just like CBT. And that is all good and well. Those are great components. But the one thing that we're not addressing is, again, the conditioned physiological response. This person gets into the car. They might even see a damn car and their heart rate goes nuts. And tell me this is true or not, but I've heard this from a lot of practitioners that have been on this podcast is that the body knows where it stands before the brain. Like the brain is actually the last to figure out, but your body and it's nervous. will first decide. It's not like your brain thinks about something. I mean, it does happen this way, too. And then it can tell your body that does happen sometimes. But a lot of times it's your body actually is deciding first. Yeah, accurate. It is. There's a great book on this called The Body Holds the Score. It's about trauma and how trauma relates to sitting physiologically with the individual. And it is 100% true. So what like what do we do with these types of individuals, which is a lot of people who experience this? We all, I mentioned say a lot. Everybody experiences this. We can,

our body gets conditioned, our mind gets conditioned to different scenarios and to different events. Well, back to the point, which is, again, the beautiful thing about it, Drew, is that it's so simple. It's like, it's not like we're trying to overcomplicate this. The beautiful thing is, is that we can enhance change in our physiology and condition a different response by simply creating more functional breathing patterns, by slowing the cadence of our breathing down, because what that's going to do is send the signal to the body and to the brain that you are in a safe, protected environment. And that thing that's in front of you, while still it may be stressful for you, it's not having nearly as deleterious of an impact on the mind and body when you do this

simple, simple state shift of changing your overall breathing. And that is the message that I sent to people is that it's as simple as doing that. Like, do you need like heart rate monitors and heart rate variability monitors? Like, I own a company who does this. So I should be the fox guarding the henhouse here. But my answer to that, no, it's like if you want to instill change, like we can utilize just the purest parts of our physiology, which is breathing and functional breathing. And we can include these biometrics that we've talked about if we want to in an effort to just kind of objectify the data, to see how efficacious it is for us, and to better strengthen that condition to response. So that's it. I mean, it's, it really comes down to

something as simple as just changing your breathing to associate that physiological response with the thing that formerly resulted in a way worse physiological response. So every so often, even during interviews like this, as much as I know about breathing, I'll still every so often catch myself holding my breath. So is that a similar thing? I'm sort of bracing. My nervous system is bracing a little bit. It feels like there's going to be some sort of impact.

There might even be people, especially because I talk very fast. You talk very fast. We're both high energy individuals. And I notice sometimes people listen to the podcast and they'll be like, there's a lot of information coming through and especially if they're like driving like sitting and driving and listening or like working at their desk they'll just hold their breath for a little bit of time. What's going on in that situation?

Yeah, I love this question. There is something called a lot of people are familiar with it now, but that weren't familiar with it. And you probably have experienced this before. There's something called email apnea, which is when we get on the computer and we're writing emails, we will unconsciously hold our breath. And the question has always been, well, why do we do that? While we don't have a really great answer for it, we do have some theories behind it. And so what I will do, what I will also say is that

there is a significant difference between unconsciously holding your breath and consciously holding your breath. And they're very two different related mechanisms from a neural circuitry perspective. one, which is unconsciously holding your breath, is mostly associated with what you mentioned before. It's a mental and physical bracing. It is the body preparing for something to happen. What is most interesting, though, is what precipitates it. Not the event of you actually holding your breath, but it's the events that precipitate it. What does that actually mean and what does it actually look like? So a lot of the times it is theorized that we're holding our breath. during those certain situations because prior to it, we were breathing too fast.

We were hyperventilating. And so that is our, we were expelling way too much oxygen and we were expelling way too much CO2 and that's the key component, way too much expelling of CO2. So what happens with the body when we breath hold? Well, it's actually the body's way of trying to repair and recover as quickly as it can because it senses a threat in front of us because you were just hyperventilating. You're just breathing fast. So it helps you to pool CO2.

The one thing we know about CO2 is that CO2 is the key that delivers oxygen. The reason that oxygen is delivered is because of the bore effect. It's because the CO2 binds with oxygen to hemoglobin and then is able to be moved throughout the body to different organs to be utilized, different muscles to be utilized. So without CO2, especially if we hyperventilate and expel too much of it, this sends a extreme stress signal to the body because it's saying you're hyperventilate. hyperventilating. So again, self-preservation. Something is threatening your life right now. We need to pool CO2 because you need it. Like if you don't start pulling CO2 right now, you're not going to have efficient oxygen delivery. So we hold our breath. So that's one really interesting thing that we've seen. I think they need to do more testing on that theory. But I think

it seems at least from an anecdotable perspective, anecdotal perspective to hold true. So that's that's one component. The other thing that I was going to mention with breath, holding as well is that if it's conscious, it can actually be a major way to enhance performance. You see with a lot of different breath work practices, a lot of individuals are incorporating breath holds as a mechanism to enhance the stress response, but create what we call CO2 tolerance. Because we know as we enhance CO2 tolerance, we enhance our body's resiliency and fortitude to stress. So I don't want people to think that it's a bad thing. No, actually it's a good thing in both situations.

One, though, is we're doing it because the body's trying to save embrace and it's starting to pool CO2 so that we can utilize oxygen more effectively. The other one is us consciously doing it so that we can get the same results, but it's much more from a performance-based perspective because we want to enhance it. People going to the gym and about to do a deadlift or something, and often you'll see, I mean, there's different philosophies. I'm just, I'm sure, like everything, but the trainer that I'm working with here at a local Jim and Brentwood called the ultimate performance, they'll say, okay, you know, brace.

So they're actually trying to get you to brace to protect your body before you, let's say, pull up. But it's just for like a little micromooment. And then they're immediately getting into a regulated breathing, right? Like breathing in. Okay, we're about to go down. All right, we're breathing down, breathing out on the way down. So it's a temporary conscious thing, tightening the body, construct, you know, constricting the abs and really engaging them and engaging the glutes and breath is a big tool for that. But I love how you mention that is that, is it a conscious thing that you're utilizing with some sort of performance goal?

Or is it an unconscious thing that could come from just a general, okay, this email or just even doing email is very stressful? Even the way that email is designed, it's kind of crazy. You have all these emails in front of you. And it could be about anything random. It could be an email from your wife. It could be an email from your, you know, something good, something bad. And a lot of times people go into email and it's kind of like, oh shit, like what am I going to find? Like the nervous system feels that way.

Even though there's no threat that's there, it can kind of feel like that direction. So are you preparing for some sort of bad news, some sort of threat, some sort of bad thing to happen? So you're just unconsciously holding your breath. Or the other thing that I'm hearing, which is very fascinating, were you just maybe a minute before talking really fast? using a lot of energy and like holding your breath during that sort of thing and this is your body's way of like trying to regulate in that sort of component very interesting well the body wants to maintain homeostasis as much as possible so when it receives what we refer to in psychology and physiology all static load which is this off balance like we're the body's really good at adapting it

should be really good at adapting that's why we've evolved to where we are today but the problem that lies in all of this is that if we are not adapting effectively then this can have extreme load on the body and on the nervous system. And so again, it's going to try and repair. It's going to try and maintain as homeostasis as much as it possibly can and as efficiently as it possibly can. But if it's repeated, it has these repeated exposures over and over and over and over again, well, the thermostat starts to change and we start to see things shift in our physiology. See blood pressure go up. We see heart rate variability go down. We see resting heart rate go up. We see respiration rate go up.

All of these things happen because the body, well, it's trying to maintain homeostasis, says the only way to maintain homeostasis is for me just to change the damn thermostat. Like I don't need to keep trying to readjust. We'll just change the thermostat. The problem, though, is that that change in thermostat has a really long-lasting negative effects if we do not intervene and do something about it. And just to zoom out further because stress can feel like so like out there in the world. And again, a lot of people don't even really know how stress they are until they're.

until they get like an eviction notice, right? They go to their doctor and they're like, whoa, this is what's going on with your heart or, you know, they get, they have a breakdown in their life because that final little, you know, stress is like drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, the cup fills up and then something ends up happening. And I've seen a lot of people who thought that they were doing good. And maybe partly that's too that they're looking around and because everybody's stressed like, hey, I'm doing better than the average person.

And some major life event happens. and there's a complete breakdown that's there. And so a lot of times people don't even know how stressed they are. And so I guess my question is, you know, even in this moment here, you know, I was using this example of people holding their breath. So using your breathing, like, can you show us here in this moment? Like you were talking about like getting to a place within a matter of like minutes where we can start to use our breath to bring in more of a, of a, of a.

balanced state inside of our body. Like, is that a demonstrable thing that you can take us through right now? Yeah, 100%. So before I do the demonstration, I want to mention one thing that I find very fascinating. It's not comical because it's really detrimental to who we are in our health and well-being, but one thing that you mentioned is like this social comparison that we have of other people is so common. And we see this in psychology and social psychology that we will feed off of like what's going on in our life by comparing it to others for better or worse. Which is how we were probably wired as human beings. It's 100% how we're wired.

It only makes sense for us to have some level of social comparison. But when we see people who are either experiencing significant anxiety, but it's on par with us, we're like, oh, okay, not too bad. They got it as well. Or if we see somebody probably even worse who's experiencing a ton more anxiety than you or stressed than you, then we do that comparison. We're like, oh, I'm not too bad. Like I can just kind of keep doing what I'm doing because them over there like, oh. Or should I be stressed? Right.

Everybody else is stressed out about this. I'm not. It's like, oh, should I be more stress? Indeed. But it provides such a barrier for behavioral change because if we make those types of comparison and we kind of convince ourselves, well, there's not really any need. This is quote unquote normal. Well, then yeah, we have all of these micro cascade events that happened that initially maybe every one of them doesn't feel massive. It's not like we're experiencing a trauma like a car accent or being, you know, in the middle of Iraq in 2004, 2005. Like it's it's not like that experience on the body. But the crazy. thing about is that these micro things that we're experienced, it ends up resulting in our physiology responding as if we were in a car accident. And I would say, and we talked about this a little bit offline before we get to the demonstration, one of the things that we talked about is that the research is actually pretty clear that these significant traumatic events are, they're bad on the body

and on the mind, and especially as they elongate and go on and on and on. Big T traumas. Exactly. Big T traumas are really bad. But the micro ones, the small ones that occur throughout the day, would argue from a physiological and maybe even a psychological perspective. And again, I'm not trying to compare these two. So I don't want people to think like, oh, he's saying like, you know, your email apnea is on par with, you know, a veteran who was in the middle of Iraq, you know, during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Like, it's not a comparison I'm making.

But what we do see is that the combination of all these that occur for days, months, years, decades have more of a detrimental impact on overall health and well being than the singular events that happen to the body. Death by a thousand cuts. Yep, exactly. And we, and we see that 100% in the literature, and this is something that I've seen clinically as, as, as well. But sorry to derail. I know. No, no, I think it's an important point. It's an important point for people to know because there often is this idea of what is normal. And because you might have been somebody that felt that you had a quote unquote normal life and have not had to be shipped overseas to war and been in a very intense situation,

or I have not had a violent act of sexual abuse as a kid or something like that. You know, these things that would be in the classification of Big T trauma, you don't realize that if you don't have these lifestyle components, many of the things that you mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, right? If you have the opposite of it, if you have dysregulative, if you don't have regulated breathing, if you don't have a good diet that's balanced blood sugar, if you don't have regular movement in your life,

those things add on top of the mind, micros stresses that are already there and just living normal life is enough that it will significantly chip away at your health and happiness. So this is such an important thing because, you know, we were also chatting about this previously. You can think of heart rate variability and you can hear some of these terms. You can think, well, this is only for performance or it's only for biohackers. Or it's only for people who have plenty of free time and want to geek out about this. No, we're fundamentally talking about your day-to-day sense of contentment. That's it. We're talking about your day-to-day sense of contentment, your hour to hour ability amongst all the noise that is

the modern world, young kids and not sleeping and a stressful moment in your relationship, being a caregiver. I was just talking to a family member who is a caregiver for their, their mom and dad right now in both situations at the same time. And it's, you know, you cannot prevent that from happening. That's there. But what can you do in the in-between while you're going through that to actually experience the world in a different basis. So I'm so glad you mentioned it because this is really just driving home the idea that we're really talking about everybody. Modern life is eating away at us and we have to fight back, literally, by taking control

of our health. Yeah. It goes back to that. I love the concept that you mentioned before about death by 1,000 cuts. It's the compounding experience of these micro-stressers or stressors throughout the day, whatever you want to call it, that eat up at us. And they take away from our sense of value and meaning and purpose and contentment in life. And I think that the single greatest way, or at least the starting place to prep the mind

and body, to get back to a place where we can begin to repursue some of our goals and our values and live a life according to our aspirations and become or live a life. that is content is to come back to the basics of who we are in our physiology, to change our breathing, to stop conditioning a response that is so overly active, so overly sympathetic driven, removing that break and just saying, like, I'm going to be, you know, have the gas pedal on the floor all day long. It's eventually going to burn you out. And not only do you take yourself out, but you take those around you, who you love, who you cherish, you take them out with you as well and they feed off of it and it becomes this nasty global systemic thing that we see

in overall health is that like people that are just become disconnected they become discontent so how do we get back to the root of who we are at least as a starting place and I think that are attending to our physiology attending to our breathing is just a really good foundational starting place so you were going to take us through a little bit of a breath uh I don't if you call it a meditation, just breath awareness, whatever it is. Yeah. Take us through a little bit of it. So one thing that I'll say before I do this, two things is number one is that though

I'm a biometrics and data guy, you don't need to have that to do this. But the cool thing about having the biometrics, if somebody was, let's say, going along this practice here in just a second with me, one of the things that they're almost always going to see is they're going to see changes in their physiology when they do this. And I think that the power in that is that it demonstrates to this individual that this This is real. Yeah. This quote unquote simple practice that we're doing, breathing, is actually having inherent

physiological changes. There's a lot of power to that. And I think it's one of the things that we think about like meditation and we think about apps that use meditation. These are great applications. These are great practices. This is something that I do every single day of my life because I find value. But the one thing is that a lot of times it can be a little bit lengthy.

You have to have like a dedicated place to do it. where as opposed to breathing, you can do it anywhere. And I think that that's the great thing about this. No one has to know that you're doing it. But again, back to my point, if you do have biological data, it's a great way to condition the response and act as almost like an accountability partner. Yeah.

And we'll chat about that more, but just so everybody understands where, you know, you have a device out holding in my hand if you're watching on YouTube. And we'll chat more about it and how it works and everything and how it can be incorporated. But that's what you mean by biometrics. That's what I mean by biometrics. Like having something that can actually tell you where. your heart rate variability is, but more importantly, in your instance, which is why you guys started the company, Hanu, right? Am I pronouncing that? Hanu. It's okay. Hanu. Why you guys started the company

is that you're taking a different twist, which is establishing first a baseline for that person individually and then not just using a snapshot in time and saying, you know, people, for instance, who work out more often, you know, their details might be different. Or you mentioned like you're taller. You're like six foot five. So your heart rate rate. variability might be a little bit different. So personalizing it and then knowing which are the tools and techniques and tips, lifestyle integrations that you can incorporate that actually make a difference for you. Yep. You got it. Yeah. Indeed. Awesome. Indeed. So the first thing to remember with any type of breathing practice is to think about where's the breath coming in and where's the breath coming out. So

everybody asked the question. Well, should you be inhaling through the mouth, exhaling through the mouth, inhaling through the nose, exhaling through the nose. One thing that we really know, and James Nestor has done an amazing job with his book Breath that came out. I guess it's now been like two or three years, which is bizarre to me. You think it's been out that long. But it was a New York Times bestseller where one of the key components he said is that nasal breathing is absolutely going to be the best method from a physiological perspective

to enhance better stress resiliency and is more associated, obviously, with functional breathing. Now, on the exhale, I'm not as concerned, but I would say from the inhale, it should be the nose. From the exhale, it can be through the mouth. That's okay. But I think the argument for the nose is that it resists the amount of air that comes out. That's why I like breathing out through the nose. It makes it easier to slow it down. If you breathe out of your mouth, you get rid of that oxygen just really quickly.

Exactly. And it's harder to have that prolonged sort of exhale. Yep, that's it. You could do what's called in the literature. They call it pursed lips breathing, which is an inhale through the nose. You purse your lips, almost like you're blowing through a whistle. So. And that will restrict.

I like nose. It feels more natural to me. Because throughout my day, like, I'm not breathing in through my nose out through my mouth. That's not a natural process. But what, unfortunately, a lot of people are conditioned to breathe through their mouth and out their mouth. And we know that that has immense, like, negative effects, especially with asthma, from a cardiovascular standpoint, respiratory standpoint. So for this practice, the sake of this practice, I would say, let's focus on nasal breathing, inhale and exhale.

The best place for people to start is to take their breathing down to a cadence of sense. six breaths per minute. If you do not have a pacer in front of you, it's very simple. If you want to do what we call an even breath, which is that the time on the inhale and exhale is even, it's five seconds in, it's five seconds out. If you want to do what we refer to as an extended exhalation breath, which is my preference, it's four seconds in and six seconds out. Why is that important? Well, actually, we know that on the exhalation, we actually stimulate more of our vagus nerve as we continue to extend the exhalation. I know we haven't talked a lot about the vagus nerve, but that's our 10th cranial nerve, which is the nerve that's responsible for a lot of our

parasympathetic relaxation functioning and response. So what I would say there is that if we extend the exhalation, we actually know that we can increase the amplitude or increase heart rate variability. We also increase something called respiratory sinus arrhythmia. That's the peak detroth differences in heart rate across the respiratory cycle. So as we inhale, heart rate should go up significantly. And as we exhale and extend the exhalation, heart rate should then decrease significantly. So in this practice, we'll do six, we'll do a six breaths per minute practice, which is pretty good for most people in terms of increasing heart rate variability and reducing stress. That's the cadence. The next thing to remember is biomechanics. Because like I mentioned

earlier, when we breathe from the chest, when we breathe thoracically, when we breathe from our shoulders, we don't allow for much lung expansion. And so, we don't have much lung expansion. Obviously, we're not going to be able to get in as much oxygen, but also we're going to dispel, or expel, I should say, CO2 a lot quicker. So we need to breathe more from the belly. For a lot of people when they go down to six breaths per minute, just the pure change in cadence will actually change their mechanics, which is kind of cool that from an evolutionary perspective, the body almost just reverts to something that it knows it should do when you're in a safe and protected environment. Because if the mountain line's chasing you, I don't think you're

going to breathe at six breaths per minute. You're going to breathe really fast, really shallow. But when you're in a rested place, the body should naturally revert to this more functional breathing that's diaphragmatic, that's deep, that's low and slow. We call LSD breathing, low, slow, and deep breathing. So what does that look like? The best and simple way to find out if you're doing this correctly, or at least naturally, is to place one hand on the chest. And it's to place one hand just like right on top of the navel. And when you inhale, you should feel almost like, and you can visualize, almost like a balloon expanding in the lungs. And when you inhale, you should only feel your bottom hand that's on your belly move in an outward direction.

And the hand that's on the chest shouldn't move. So how would that look? And I'll perform it here. It's inhale. And then exhale. You want to feel that gentle pull of the belly button in towards almost like your spine. So it's the movement out and it's the movement in. one thing that I'll mention before I kind of run us through like a full practice is that it shouldn't be forced.

This is passive volition that we're using on breathing. A lot of times people will try to force the belly out and they'll force the belly in. And what do you think happens with the HRV? What do you think happens with heart rate goes up? It's an unnatural thing for the body to experience. So the body responds in a way of like, what are you doing? Like this is not this is not what you should be doing. So really you should just feel it almost like this.

There is no force. It should naturally happen. And sometimes if I could just interject and correct me if I'm wrong, right? You're the expert on this. I feel that sometimes the reason that people can't get their belly to move, right, is number one, there could just be general tension, right? They've been holding on to a lot of stress. But number two, if they're not used to deep breathing, there's a lot of sort of stale air, right?

Yeah. They're kind of stuck to the breathing up here. So I often find that getting them to kind of do a little bit of like exhaling first, like blowing out the air in their body. And this is just some anecdotal thing. I don't have anything to support it. It's just when I would see friends, they're like, okay, my belly's not moving.

I'm like, okay, let's just get the air out of your body. So let's just take a few minutes. It's just like blow out like exhale. So take a deep breath in. And then I'll have them breathe through their mouth and like really try to expunge. Is there anything to that or am I just making shit up? No. So it's interesting.

I haven't thought of it that way. I'll be perfectly honest with you. But I think it makes sense. What we know, too, is that when someone initially tries, especially if they're not used to it, like, so for me, this is a practice that I make a part, it's daily for me. And it's multiple times a day I do this. My body is so conditioned to it that when I start to do this practice, my heart rate variability skyrockets. And my body just gets into a natural flow state. And we've actually done some studies where I've actually been on a QEG and we've looked at just brainwave, brainwave shifts in state.

and we'll see just like immense alpha wave brainwave increase in power as soon as I start increased HRV that only came with practice that was not a natural part of what was happening to me initially because I was pretty freaking stressed when I started doing all this I was in graduate school I had all these pressures of dissertation and licensing and you know clinical hours and you know publishing was all those things so my body was not in a great state so this can take time be gentle with yourself it takes time so it could be that again like getting the body that stale air out of there is like basically you got to rev the system up. Like you've got to say, hey, this is something a little bit different than maybe what you were

just doing. Let's slowly engage the gas pedal, which really more and more engaging the break with this practice. But I think that it makes a lot of sense. So, hey, it's something for maybe to put on the docket to research. Okay. Cool. Yeah. So what I would say again, passive volition, what I will do too, and it's hard for me to kind

of like count and lead somebody through this and show biomechanically how it works. But everybody gets the gist. But I would just encourage people when they at least first start practicing. hand on the chest, hand on the belly, my good friend Patrick McKeown, who wrote the book The Oxygen Advantage, this is the way that he teaches this practice. He works as an advisor for Hanu. And I think it's just a really great practice on feeling the mechanics, getting into that rhythm, conditioning it. So what I would just like to say, and this again, if you have no timer, you can just count. So we would just do, again, everything into the nose. It would be

inhale, two, three, four, exhale, two, three, three, three, four, five, six. Inhale, two, three, four. Exhale, two, three, four, four, five, six. One more. Inhale, two, three, three, four, six. So you tell me, Drew, subjectively going through those three breaths subjectively what did that do to your physiology instantaneous relaxation it is isn't it crazy and if somebody had on your device and it was uh just explain a little bit of like wherever they wear it right and if they had it and it's connected to an app it's a whole ecosystem yep what would they start to notice on their device yeah so if people are wondering number one like what is the differentiator between our device why can i just use you know my And people on the camera are going to see my whoop, my aura, my garment.

I'm brand agnostic when it comes to hardware. I love it. Like, there's just great tech out there. And you probably want to try it all just to see how it all compares to what you can learn and make your system better. Indeed. Most people are used to getting HRV one time a day. They'll take it in the morning or they'll look at their device and they'll see the overnight data. And that's really great for recovery and looking at it over time.

So looking at from night to night or from morning to morning from a sports recovery perspective that HRV can provide so much amazing data. Where ours differentiates is that ours is actually worn all throughout the day. It's a wearable ECG or EKG chest strap. And the reason we chose that is because we wanted the most accurate and reliable device that we could, which takes the actual direct input or output, I should say, of the electrical components of the heart and measures that time frame as opposed to being indirect with some of these other devices that we wear. So it's not prone to artifact.

So as prone, I should say to artifact. And what I mean by that is like movement, shifts, a lot of those things can impact the data quality on a lot of these devices from a heart rate variability standpoint. So for us, we can guarantee accurate heart rate variability continuously. So it's not just you have to be still to take it. You're going to get it continuously. So it's a polar H10 chest strap is what it's what we use. So it just goes around the body. And you wear your clothes on top of it. Yeah. So it can be underneath your clothes. Exactly. And it just sits right beneath your stermis. So your sternum is that really hard bone right there at your chest cavity. It just sits right there. You can

even shifted a little bit to the left right over your heart if you want to, but it sits fine. And for women, would they typically be like right under the bra strap? Right under the bra. Right under the bra. One thing to remember too, um, is doesn't happen very often because they've really built the device. It's throughout the years. It's just advanced is that for women, it used to be that the, uh, if they were wearing a wired brawl, the, uh, wiring could actually interfere with some of the electrical components and output, but that's actually been solved now. So you don't see that affecting. But I, what I will say, too, that if a woman is wearing a wired brawl, just to be conscientious of that, if you see some kind of like wacky data, it's not probably because something's happening with

the device. It's more likely because there's wiring in the brawl. But it really doesn't happen that often. I'm not an expert in this area, but like I've heard people in the past and the podcast talk about like there may be other health benefits for women to move away from wired type bras and move to something else. Yeah. I can't speak super intelligently on that, but that was my first thought that I would also second to you on that. I've heard that there are some pretty, you know, detrimental effects. I think some are like arguing now. There's probably detrimental effects. Maybe DeBrawls in general, but I don't want to be, you know, that hippie saying like, all right, women burn the bras. Maybe you should. Maybe you shouldn't. I don't know. You're,

you know, that's your own prerogative. But just be conscientious of it. That's one thing. But it goes there. I mean, it's a very comfortable strap. The one thing that's great about it is that you can put it on, take it off. Like, you don't have to get it wet. You don't have to put electrode gels. Like you don't have to deal with sticky electrodes like you do with other EKG monitors. It's on, off, easy. Wear it for, you know, 30 minutes to, I wear it generally 12 to 16 hours, but I'm the co-founder of the company, so I probably got to wear it more. And what the difference is between our platform and others is that you're getting three different continuous components or different biometric outputs that are associated with overall

stress, resiliency, and mental health outcomes. So for us, we're a wearable in the mental health space. We are mental health or mental wellness centric, which is different than a lot of other wearable companies that might focus on sleep or metabolic health like levels or, you know, recovery. Athletic performance. Yep, you got it. We are mental health focused. So that means we're doing a couple of things. Number one, we're continuously monitoring your biometrics, heart rate variability, heart rate and your respiration rate all throughout your day. And we are acting almost like this stress coach as well. So it's like a full time stress monitor. And we're a full time stress monitor. a full-time stress coach. Well, what does that look like? When we see distinct changes or shifts

in your numbers, whether it's heart rate, heart rate variability or respiration rate, we're going to provide you feedback on that. We're going to say, you're going to alert on the app. You get it. Yep. You get a push notification on the app. And what that push notification does is it says, you know, hey, Jay, it looks like something's going on. We're not going to be the ones to make the assumption of what's going on. But what we do know, no matter what, is we see changes in your stress response. It appears that your nervous system is being taxed right now. That gives you the opportunity to do two things. Number one, log it. Because if we want to have better self-awareness of what's going on and what's causing a stress, I should say, we need to log it. We need to have

track of it. So for me, it's like I can look back on the past week and see all of the things that caused my stress resiliency to plummet because my nervous system was being taxed. I can also do the opposite and see what were all the things that were really enhancing my nervous system fortitude? What were all the things that were enhancing my resiliency to stress resulted in better outcomes? I can look at that as well. So for me, it might be, oh, man, commute. Like, I log that one a lot because with traffic, like the commute can really amp up my nervous system.

And so I will log that one. It could be email apnea. It could be, you know, relationships at work, relationship with, you know, your significant other. Maybe it's your kids that cause you a lot of stress. You can go in and log it. The one key component that's very different from other apps is we don't want you just to take our word that your body is experiencing taxation on the nervous system from objective data. We want your subjective input as well.

So you tell us, like during that moment that we alerted you, during that moment, were you experiencing a lot of psychological stress at that time? Or were you maybe not so? Maybe the thing that your body was getting into gear for was actually something quite pleasurable to you. Maybe you were in the office with your boss who just handed you an amazing bonus. And now your stress response is going up because you're excited. Your heart rate's pumping. Like you feel really good in that moment. It's really good to differentiate those things because the last thing that we want to do is demonize stress.

Stress is inherently a good thing. And I always like to mention that. And it's always met with like a, are you sure about that? Stress is a warning sign. It is a good thing. It's really just alerting us that something. is going on in our environment that you may need to self-preserve for, but it's also an opportunity for you to do your own assessment, to be the bystander of what's going on. So we help with that.

But the kicker here, too, is that self-awareness without self-regulation or action is not very helpful. We can become so self-aware of all of these things that are resulting in our body experiencing stress, like email apnea, commutes, relationships, kids. That's good. good in all, and it's very helpful. But if you don't do anything about it, then it's just data. It's just information. It's just zeros and ones. And so what our responsibility then is, if we really want to develop better stress fortitude, if we really want to develop better stress resiliency, is to condition a different response, if it is appropriate to condition a different response. Like the breathing exercise, you just took us through. You got it. So that's the prompt that you'll get.

So going back to that, in the case of the breathing exercise, you know, let's say somebody, was you commuted up here from San Diego today, right? So let's say that was like stressful for somebody and, you know, they finally get to the office. Then okay, great, they get an alert. And now, you know, there's a recommendation of like, you know, do something about it, right? That's that regulation piece. So what would you have noticed or if somebody had this device on? What would they have noticed inside? What would their response have been? Yeah. This is, so I'll talk about two different things. I'll talk about one, the objective data, and then I'll talk about the subjective and interoceptive data. So the objective data, if someone is experiencing a stress

response, if their nervous system is taxed, heart rate variability from their baseline or from where they're at will go down pretty significantly. Which is not a great thing. That is not a good thing. What that means, if heart rate variability goes down, what that means is that you could have either one or two things, really one of three things. You have parasympathetic withdrawal. which means that the vagus nerve is being less responsive because it doesn't need to fully respond if there is a significant threat or perceived threat in front of you.

The vagus nerve is very smart. Your parasympathetic nervous system is very smart. It says, I have no need. Actually, it's quite detrimental for me to keep the break on. I need to pull it off. And the sympathetic nervous system, especially if things are pretty significant,

we'll say it's time to go on. The one thing that I tell people is that there's not just this mass activation of the sympathetic nervous, system or mass activation of the parisimbabotic nervous system and the same as it's reverse. There's not a mass withdrawal of either of them. It's a modulating system. These two systems or divisions of our nervous system are complementary. They're antagonistic. Like they can work in depending on the context and scenario in conjunction with one another or against one another. Again, it's all

about us getting out of there in order to save or preserve ourselves from an evolutionary perspective. So when the vagus nerve starts to withdraw and the sympathetic nervous system starts to kick into high gear, we see the heart rate will increase and heart rate variability will decrease. That's all because right then and there, it's time to mobilize energy. We've got to get going. We've got to fight what's in front of us, flee what's in front of us, or the other one that we're finding in the research is freeze. It's just to like absolutely like just be kind of caught in our tracks like the deer in the headlights. So that's what you'll see from an objective data standpoint.

Within our app, you'll see again all those numbers change, but also we have what's called the stress resiliency score. It's an aggregate composite score that modulates all throughout the day. So if people are familiar with like ORA's recovery score, their readiness score, WOOP has one as well. A lot of companies have those. Those, whenever you get them, it stays with you throughout the day, like whatever it was after sleep. Whereas ours is kind of more similar to levels where it modulates depending on the context and depending on what your data has to say. So when someone's experiencing a stressor and all of those markers are kind of fluctuating in the direction you would expect with stress, then we see the stress resiliency score will move in a downward direction. And all that number is saying is that it looks like your nervous system's being taxed. It looks like you're experiencing stress. Now subjectively and interceptively, it could mean a whole slew of things depending on the individual. It can manifest in frustration, in anger, in anxiety, and kind of getting caught in that cognitive funnel. It can also be, especially if someone's very interoceptive, which is what we train a lot of people

to do. And if people aren't familiar with that term interoception, that's our body, that's our ability to tap in with what's going on within our body, to feel what's going on. So if you're someone who when you get anxious, you can tune in and feel heart rate increasing, you can feel the changes in your muscular tension. That's somebody who has a high level of interoception. We've seen that when people become more self-aware of their stress response, And as they train more resiliency to stress through breathing, biofeedback, meditation,

and other things that we include in our app, we see that their level of interoception goes up, which is a good thing. Now, it can't be a bad thing. You can actually have too much interoception. And you know, you're too tuned in. You can be too tuned in and not be able to distract yourself away from there. And not be able to turn off what's not needed. Yep.

I guess like sometimes people would say like empaths, you know, maybe people who they're a little too tuned in to what's going on, even it could be of picking up other people's energy to the point in degree that it's very hard for them to maintain their own. Yep. They're being influenced by everything around that. That's it. The extreme example or more clinical example would be someone who has like trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder, is that they become so in tune sometimes with their body. It's interesting because you can see one or two things. So in tuned with their body that become fully immersed and that's all they can see and feel and experience or, and this is what happens that a lot of people initially experienced that when they experience trauma. And so the only

mechanism that they feel like they have at their disposal is to avoid, is to distract and to move themselves so far out of their body that they are like almost 100% disconnected with it. And that's common, the most common response. But for a lot of these individuals, they become overly attuned at first. And then because they have, feel like I have no tools to manage this, they move away from it. They say, I know, well, the only thing I can do is to shove that in a corner and avoid. And as we know, it bottles up, bottles up until the person explodes or they implode, which is never something that we want to have happen. So the intention of the app, again, great objective data, get your subjective input. And then we want you to train and condition a different response because the more and more,

especially if you have a common occurrence of a stressor, the more and more you condition a response of safety and of relaxation, the body is going to change that to being your natural response. again, this can happen for better or for worse, but in our case, we try to train this more resilient response to be associated with these things that we know are common stressors for people so that therefore we can then increase overall sense of well-being. We reduce the frequency of these events. We reduce the severity and the duration of these events. And then people cannot have their daily life functioning impaired so much. Yeah, that's great. And on the topic of training, that's the next section that I want to go into here in the interview. And then we can

tell people about how to find the app and sign up for and everything because you guys are about to launch coming up soon. That's really exciting. Congratulations. As a fellow entrepreneur, I know that journey well. It's crazy one. And I love anybody that's working on how to make health more accessible. How to make it more accessible because if we can intervene now, there are things that we can do now that can prevent us from having so many chronic issues later on. And it just takes a little bit of access to data and some recommendations to be able to do that. And you start 10 years early, I mean, every doctor knows my brother-in-law is a cardiologist. He always says, like, people come to my office all the time

and stress is the major connector to all these different things that they're going through. So, okay, coming back to the word training, there are two things that I've heard you talk about that anybody can do, whether or not they have your device, whether they have it, and I hope a lot of people sign up for it. I know I'm going to start using it. And those two things that can help the body train that you've shared in other interviews are hot and cold exposure.

So walk us through both of those and why those two things are so pivotal and a huge part of us reprogramming our nervous system. Yeah, I love these subject matters because we start to move into things that for the general public, I know for the health optimizer, peak performer biohacker, very immersed in this world. So they're probably going to just say, yes, I love this. But for the common day individual, they may not see the connection, be charged. overall stress fortitude and stress resiliency and then putting ourselves into these pretty stressful situations. And the one thing that I think I would need to explain is how stress can actually

be good for us and lead to us being more resilient to stress. So we come back to this concept that a lot of people are familiar with that is called hormesis or hormetic stress. Hormetic stress kind of works under the notion that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. It's a bit of a bastardization of what hormetic stress is, but it's basically using things within our internal and exo, I would say more so our external environments that cause this inactive stress response and therefore can help you to build overall resiliency. So this is the idea that if you think about what is the most common state of hormesis for most people that they can fully understand, exercise. Exercise is a state of hormetic stress. When you go into the gym, it doesn't matter if you're doing

calisthenics, cardiovascular output, you know, yoga, Pilates, weight resistance or training, we know that we are inherently stressing the body. We are putting the body in a state of stress. That's why if you're wearing my monitor, what you'll see is all these markers that are consistent with stress, they're going to go in that direction. HRE is going to drop. Respiration rate's going to go up. You're going to see that you're going to have an immense increase in heart rate. You're going to see all of these things. Well, what is this actually doing? Well, if we think about, for instance with weight training or resistance training. We're breaking down the muscle.

We're stressing down the muscle so that it can indeed build back bigger, faster, and stronger. So then I would beg the question, are there mechanisms for doing that for our nervous system? And I would argue that exercise is one of the biggest formesis that breaks down a nervous system as well and allows our nervous system to repair. But hot and cold exposure are too that for now are becoming much more readily available and accessible to people. but we know have profound effects. The one that I think is a little bit more of the Wild Wild West would actually be cold therapy or cold exposure. I think we have a little bit more literature on sauna

and the impact from a cardiovascular standpoint and also nervous system standpoint. But there's really interesting new data that are coming out on cold exposure and a lot of great antic data that I can talk about, as Andrew Huberman always likes to say, that I think is very intriguing and I know the research will be coming down the pike.

Let's talk about heat exposure. your first. Well, there's been some really interesting studies that have been done in the last 20 years or so that have looked at what happens to markers of stress resiliency and fortitude and even cardiovascular resiliency and fortitude when people do a sauna session. What we have found is that for individuals, and again, I would encourage people that if they do sign up and use Hanu to test it, I test this all the time and it's consistent with the research, that when we get into a sauna, heart rate and heart rate variability are going to change to the stress. Like we're going to experience the stress. Like we're going to experience the stressor. It's a very difficult thing to do, especially if you're in 200 degrees or

whatever for 20 to 30 minutes. We're going to see all those markers change. But the really interesting thing that happens is that around 20 to 30 minutes post sauna, we see HRV and heart rate, not just go back up to where your baseline was, but to go above it. And this is an interesting phenomenon because what this is telling us is not only does our body repaired and recovered from it, which is good, and that's indicative of getting back to baseline. But a relaxation response in the nervous system is actually being heightened at that time because heart rate variability is going significantly above baseline in these research studies. Heart rate is dropping significantly below baseline.

So this is a great example of how we're using hormesis or a stress that is heat, which is doing a lot of other things. I mean, we're talking about certuan activation, activation of heat shock proteins. There's a lot of other things that are going on that are quite a high. effective from a physiological perspective that likely tie in. We don't have the research yet for me to say definitively these likely tie in with nervous system repair. But what we do know is just these simple more or less biometrics or biomarkers are responding in a way that appears that these are very significantly helpful or effective for enhancing resiliency to overall stress.

So we're using stress and exposing ourselves to stress in order to heighten our body's resiliency to it because it's saying, well, I got through this. This is something that's helped me to build and to repair. I can now get through other things. And I think that that's actually drew one of the key components that a lot of people miss out on is when we think about how exposure to these certain types of external stressors increase mental fortitude and psychological fortitude. And how does that play in our overall physiological response? It's crazy because like we see it so clearly with kids. Yeah. No, I know. We see it so clearly with kids in their development when they're and they fall down or they hit their head and it's like, it's okay, look, it's all good, or they're

riding their bicycle and they fall off. It's like, look, you're on your way, you're building and falling as a part of the process. And that's actually, if they didn't go through that and if we just put them in a bubble ball, you know, they wouldn't develop. They wouldn't grow. We need to think of ourselves in that same way and think how are we actually challenging ourselves so that we can increase our nervous system's ability to handle anything that it comes across. Absolutely. I mean, if someone who's watching this has never been or listening to this has never been into a sauna, the first time they go into the sauna, it's going to be pretty painful. And they may say, one, depending on how it is. But if they're at like, let's say kind of the recommended range of heat, which is generally around 185 degrees Fahrenheit to around 200 degrees Fahrenheit, they're going to find that maybe even after the first five, six minutes, like it's going to feel like I need to get out of here. And maybe they do need to get out of there because their body might not be ready for it. But what do we gain? more and more we do it. Tolerance.

We develop fortitude. We adjust to those things. What's helping us to adjust? Well, we're conditioning our nervous system. Our nervous system is able to prepare and handle it. But also psychologically, it is helpful as well. Because for me, the way I look at it is like, I go in there. And I do, so I'm one of those crazy guys that wakes up super early.

I do my workout super early. And I always finish my workout with a sauna. And for me, to use Ben Greenfield's term, I like to eat the frog first. Like just get the hard thing out of the way in the morning so that when I go throughout my day, even if I have a cascade of shit that hits the fan throughout the day, which happens plenty of times, I can look back and say, look at the success I had this morning. I was able to get up and I was able to do it.

No excuse for me. And I like having that. But the one thing that I've noticed and the point that I was going to make is that for me, like when I get into that sauna from a psychological perspective, one thing that I almost repeat to myself like a mantra when I'm really feeling it around, you know, minutes 15, 16, 17, I normally stay in for about 20 minutes. I start repeating to myself like, you think you're going to encounter anything that feels this physiologically painful today? Probably not. Like I can concoct some worst case scenarios of how I'm going to hit, but I'm like, for me, I'm like,

look at what I am doing right now. Like I'm putting myself through the ringer. I know this is going to be helpful for me and to use, you know, Ryan Holiday's terminology. I love, you know, Sto's philosophy and I of Ryan Holiday, but he mentions this idea of like the obstacle is the way. And that's a Marcus Aurelius quote. But for me, I kind of view that when I'm in these painful situations. This is my obstacle. This is the barrier. But this is the way. This is the thing that's going to build character, build me back bigger, faster, stronger. And again, this is a way of not just building physiological fortitude. It is a mechanism for building psychological fortitude, which we have to have. We can build all this physiological fortitude. But without the psychological fortitude, there's going to be a lot of shortcomings.

We're leaving way too much on the table there. So that would be, you know, my notion there. So heat is such an incredible influencer, but cold is also one. And before we go to cold, just a couple things about heat, you know, because of course, not everybody has a sauna, but just a couple things that I'll throw out there and maybe you have some too. I think saunas are getting more and more affordable that are out there. In general, most of the data that's out there is on not infrared sauna, but traditional

saunas because a lot of the Nordic countries and the history of use over there, so it's going to be, and those saunas are going to get typically hotter. And that's at least where the data is right now. Maybe in a few years that will change. But at least getting some exposure to that type of thing. So if all you have is infrared right now because a lot of, I mean, it's nice to see a lot more gyms having saunas and places. So if you can't afford one or you don't have one in your house.

And another thing is you could, I've seen a few people do this as part of our community. they've gone in on a sauna with like a group of friends and whoever has the bigger outdoor area or the garage or whatever will have it but you know everybody gets to use it and a garage is a great area because you can come in and now without disturbing the family and other stuff so you can go in on one on a go in with one on a friend some people talk about you know warm baths what are you feeling about that yeah um or hot baths not to not not to mention my continued man crush of Andrew huberman but i've listened to him on this one and i agree with what he has to say because i've tried it as well the problem I think that happens with warm baths is that while we can get body temperature up, and I've heard Rhonda Patrick mentioned this as well, while we can get body temperature up and it can be somewhat effective, it doesn't appear at least the research that we have right now, or at least the thought that we have right now is it doesn't appear that it's hot enough for us to actually begin to activate Sertuans to activate heat shock proteins. And the one problem that you have, too, is that even if you get into a hot bathtub, the heat dissipates rather quickly compared to a sauna

that's regulated. So for me, I've tried it before. And again, this is purely based on me just looking at my own biometric data. I know that when I'm in my traditional Swedish sauna, which is what I use, that's regulated normally around 195 to 205 is where I like to keep my sauna, is that my biometrics change immensely different than if I get in a hot tub. It's very difficult for me. I can get my heart rate up to 120 or so, like when I'm in a 200 degree sauna, when I'm in a bathtub,

like if I can get my heart rate up to like 95, like I'm really like pushing it. So we can see just the pure biometric change is different. My body just doesn't respond that way. But I don't want to just throw the baby out with a bathwater, if you will, and say that it's not effective. It might be quite effective for some people. I just find for me I do tend to stick to a Swedish style sauna. And I do think that while there is the potential for infrared sonnas to really take hold because they're the most affordable, easily accessible mechanisms, I still am a little bit worrisome about them not getting hot enough. And they typically are not my recommendation for people just based on that fact.

I will say, though, that about two years ago, I was sent a sauna blanket by my friends over a higher dose. Yeah, they're great. Yeah, they're awesome. And they sent me a blanket to use. And I was measuring metrics, biometrics, because I always do that. And I had actually more of a visceral, bodily, physiological experience and change with a sauna blanket, an infrared sauna blanket than I did with the infrared sauna that I had in my home at that time. And I found that fascinating. I didn't know because it was on me.

It's touching me. I have nowhere to move. Like, I can't really escape. Like, you're a locked in to like this blanket, which, like, people who have claustrophobia. I probably like, yeah, never getting that thing. But for me, it just kind of locks you in. And I found I just got a better sweat and got my body temperature up higher. So that could potentially be an option.

But I think like if you have access to more of a Swedish style sauna, that's probably the best way to go. Yeah. Great. Awesome. You were about to get into cold. Yes. Cold therapy.

This, as I mentioned before, I think is a tad bit more of the Wild Wild West in terms of what we know and what we don't know. The great thing, though, is that the research is starting to spin up really, really quickly. And we have some great research out there in terms of just the overall positive health benefits that this can have. And for me, obviously, as a psychologist, I'm very interested in the psychological effects and the neurological effects. Just in general, those are the things that I tend to gravitate to when I do research and data. So what I'll speak to is first the research on that in terms of stress resiliency and stress fortitude. But then I'll also speak to kind of what we're finding in our own research at Haun.

So cold exposure is one of those things. A great, I don't know if it was an article, but a piece came out. I'll have to search and see what it was, but it came out from a researcher named Susanna Soberg, who's very known kind of in the domain of looking at metabolic changes with cold exposure and heat exposure. And she does a lot of work on that end. The question was asked to her because this one always comes up, the difference between like cold immersion and cold showers and what does that do to our overall?

overall physiology, how does that impact our overall nervous system? Well, what they're finding is that cold showers, while it can be very effective in helping to boost overall mood, it can be effective and kind of enhancing like that sympathetic output to drive up performance and really kind of get us going, it doesn't have nearly as much of an effect on overall metabolism, overall longer term neurological changes as well, which is why I think it can be really helpful to a lot of people just to get a cold shower. It's a great stepping stone too. If people have never done cold therapy or like a cold immersion, cold immersion the first time that people do it, it can be quite shocking. Like from a physiological perspective, they get that big gasp reflex

and they're like, yeah, 20 seconds or maybe 10 seconds and I want to get out of here. Cold shower is a great stepping stone. But it does appear that the immense physiological benefits come from a more longer cold immersion. And I shouldn't say longer. I should say cold immersion in general. Yeah, like a cold plunge or a cold bath or something like that. I often find showers, just a little segue segue or a little note rather. I find showers actually sometimes, they're more accessible and so I'm glad that they have them and, you know, the whole Wimhoff process and everything. But it's weird to have like your back is super cold and then your front is like normal

unless if you have a overhead shower where like all parts of, that's easier. If I'm cold, I want my entire body to be cold. I don't want one side to be warm and another side to be like, you know, cold. I find that a little bit, that contrast is tougher. No, I'm with you too. I found cold showers are interesting to me. They definitely wake me up and I really enjoy them. And I do them daily.

For me, it's, I find sometimes that I actually feel colder in cold showers than I do cold immersions. Oh, totally. And I think it's because, and maybe it's because that you got that weird contrast between that contrast. And then also you're, I find I move a lot when I'm in a cold shower. So I tend to, this is interesting because there has been some thoughts and studies on this. When I'm in a cold shower, I tend to move a lot.

So I'm just kind of exposing the body like really frequently to these like just kind of microblast of the cold because I'm spinning around trying to get the whole body wet and cold at once with cold immersion. Boom, the whole body is in. A lot of people, and I've heard human talk about this, when they get into a cold immersion, they try to stay nice and still, stoic, nothing on the face. but that creates this heat layer on the body, because the body will create a natural heat layer when you're still. But if you're moving, you break up that heat layer.

So you get a lot colder, a lot faster, and you stay colder. So my recommendation is that if you're doing cold immersion, move. Like, don't try to be that, like, hardcore warrior, stoic individual. Like, that's fine. But if you want to get the most benefit, and for it to be the most efficient, is to move. Now, here's what's cool about the effects of it, is that we know, number one,

significant amount of dopamine dump that goes along with norophenephenephrine and epinephrine dump. So basically the sympathetic nervous system is going to kick into high gear. But the reason people feel so incredibly good is because norepinephrine and epinephrine can actually make us feel good. They're not modulators that make us feel anxious. They can. There's an overabundance or an oversecretion of them. But they are ones that can actually make us feel really good. And then dopamine obviously is one that's more about anticipation of pleasure. But we know. that this chemical once it's secreted causes a lot of these areas in the brain to light up and we feel that sense of euphoria especially in anticipation now the one really insane thing about coal plunges

that i find happens every single time that i do them is that and the monitor can be worn in a cold plunge it can be it's fully waterproof so i wear it there it's fully able to wear in the sauna so when i immerse in the coal plunge we see as you would expect heart rate variability plummet's like a rock heart rate will go up like everything appears to be like oh looks like jays in pain looks like he's anxious and suffering and he's stressed because it's it's it's tough like being it full or it is very uncomfortable and my stress response is on but then again the same exact thing with sauna however will happen afterwards however i think it's even more uh significant and more robust i actually see a more significant increase in heart rate variability i see a more uh even more

significant decrease in heart rate. I also have more of a sense of euphoria and overall just outlook tends to be better after a coal plunge. And I don't think we fully have the research to be able to talk about all of the mechanisms that are occurring there. But I think it's that inherent dopamine dump that you get afterwards that just makes things feel so incredibly good and probably has to do with serotonin regulation as well and the regulation of other neurotransmitters and in glucocorticoids, but there's this, this inherent pleasure that I get from that and sense of euphoria that I don't necessarily get with sauna. With sauna, I find that it takes me a little bit more time to recover. Like, I get done and I'm like, dude, I'm still just like burning up. And it's like

30 minutes afterwards. And I'm like, a little bit of like a post sauna days. Right. And that's what it is. But you get into a coal plunge and you get out. And for most people that I've heard, I would say it's the bulk majority of people I've heard. I can't actually think of one that has said differently now that I think of it. They get out and say, I just feel rejuvenated. I feel revived. I feel like I have boundless energy. It's just this interesting experience.

It feels like you just drink like a cup of coffee and you're ready to go. It does. But not like too much caffeine, like the right amount. Right. And you're like good. And you're there. It's like the no jitter version of caffeine. The no jitter version.

Just down the street from our studio over here in Los Angeles, there's a, there's a, little like membership sort of like a recovery center. It's called reset by Therobody. Oh yeah. Yeah. People make the Therogun. Oh yeah. And they have cryout therapy there like a full,

uh, full like you go in and the door closes look like a little refrigerator. And of course crowd therapy is available in a lot of places. Upgrade labs by her friend Dave and many other, uh, locations. And, um, that's kind of my access to cold therapy right now. I'll go in for, for, uh, and I'll do it with friends and I'll do usually like three, three and a half minutes. That's kind of the max that they let you do over there.

And I get out and I'm like ready to start the day. I feel so I feel like in a, I'm already in a good mood usually in the morning, but I already feel like a sense of like focus. I feel like a little bit of that kind of caffeine boost without the jitters. And I'm just like ready to like take things on. Yeah. So for me like first thing in the morning, usually like three times a week. I'll go there. I'll do a little cryout therapy session.

But I know that there's, you know, this gets into the nuances. we don't have to go to here. I did order a cold plunge because I've been seeing the different conversations and the access and that prolonged exposure seems to be where a lot of the benefits are.

And like saunas, you know, cold plunges, the price is coming down. They're still, you know, pretty expensive, but you can get like a barrel sauna. Mm-hmm.

A lot of people have a hack where they'll get like a little horse trough. What's it called? Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you put ice into it or more accessible than heat is that you just have your bathtub,

You put ice into there. Indeed. And then you fill it up. Right. Indeed. There's also one other one that's really cool. I've seen a lot of Crossfitters do this. And I believe the first person I ever saw do this was Luke's story.

But they changed like those freezer chests, like those really large freezer chests. They convert them by like doing some caulking and some different things into a coal plunge. It's really cool. So, you know, instead of a lot of the coal plunges now are typically whatever, like 2000 to 4,000, some even more than that. but you can buy a chest at wherever. Sears is Sears even still around? I even know what's so. Home Depot, whatever is still around nowadays. It's funny. I barely go to physical stores anymore.

What a modern day individual I am. But you can go buy one of those for whatever, $6, 700 and make your own. I mean, it's probably maybe less hygienic. You have to clean it out a little bit more than some of these other ones that are like ultra-filtrated. But it's a way to kind of like to dip your toe in the water, if you will. What's a good temperature you think? For somebody who's starting off who hasn't done it, And they're just, you know, building up their tolerance.

What's a good temperature and an amount of time if you have any recommendations? Yeah. So my good friend who owns a company called Marasco Forge. So they're a coal plunge company. His name's Tom. And Tom is out of Arizona. He's a professor of Arizona State University. So one of the things that he's honed in on a lot that's really interesting.

I've heard others talk about this as well is that when you first get into full cold immersion, the temperature doesn't have to be that cold. Like they've done research studies where they've actually just taken the water temperature down to around 60 to 65 degrees, which is chilly. Like it's not like it's like, oh, this is super, super comfortable temperature of water, but it's definitely not freezing. And what they've found is that even within that temperature, which is 60 to 65 degrees, not that cold, you can replicate this pretty easily at your home, like just within a bathtub. You don't even need ice for that. You probably just put it on the cold temperature, have a temperature gauge or a thermometer that goes in it

and set it to around 60, 65, is that while you had to elongate the amount of time that you were in there, because the more cold you get, the more you can decrease the amount of time that you're in, even though you didn't, you had to elongate the time, we still saw pretty significant beneficial effects from just being in 60 to 65 degrees.

Now, in these studies that they were doing and they were measuring different kind of outcomes as well. I think they had them in like in that water for a crazy amount of time. Like I don't remember specifically so I can't speak super intelligently, but it was hours and hours and hours. So I don't think that people need that in order to experience the effect. They were looking at something different. They weren't looking at it for like the modern day individual who's trying to get the health and wellness benefits out of it. They were studying something different. But Tom has mentioned that just to start, you can start off around that range and then just get in for like 10 to 15

minutes at that range. And a lot of people are going to experience some of that brown fat mobilization. And then they're also going to experience, again, just that sense of euphoria, the dopamine release, the epinephrine, norephenephrine release. So I think that's a good place to start. And then as you progress and the temperature as it goes down with cold immersion, you can start to also take the time that you're in down. So like for instance, if you're using something like Tom's company who develops Marasco's, like these things get down to like 33 degrees. So it's like right at the freezing level. It creates its own ice. I've been in them before and it is, it is cold, cold. And so for a lot of people, again, it just depends on how well they're adjusted

to it. So if I'm generally getting into, let's say, a 34, 35 degrees cold plunge, which is around where mine generally is, I'm getting in there anywhere from about three to five minutes. And I do three to five minutes anywhere from two to three times a week. So not every day. And the one thing that I make sure that I do not do is that I do not put cold therapy right after a workout. So I do not fully immerse myself into cold right after a workout because it can blunt the effects. We know that it can blunt the effects of exercise. So you want to move that generally around six to seven hours after a workout so that you do not blunt the hormetic response that we have and the reparative response that we need from exercise.

But I would say that for modern day cold plunges, a lot of people will get in, generally from around three to five minutes. Now, Tom, I'm Hogan's a researcher on all of this stuff and has a lot of more, it can speak a lot more intelligently than I can. He has a lot of individuals get in there for way longer than that, for eight to 10 minutes without having detrimental effects. A lot of people are nervous, like, am I going to, you know, like, is my body going to go into shock?

Am I going to have something extremely deleterious go on? And the one thing just to remember is to have someone with you, if you start to have these more elongated practices, ease yourself into. it as well. And then also the one thing that I mentioned, which bears repeating probably a thousand times, do not do cyclical hyperventilation or Wim Hof style breathing prior to getting into a cold plunge. It is a recipe for disaster. And unfortunately, people have died. So, you know, I would say that when you... That's from people like doing a type of breathing that basically caused them to like pass out. Yep. Yeah. Cause them to pass out. And it's happened far too often. Well, I think the one problem that

was happening is that a lot of people who are doing Wim Hof style breathing. Wimhoff, one of the core tenets is breathing and another core tenant is cold exposure, but they're not supposed to be intermixed with one another. Or the times that they are utilized together, there's always people that should be there with you to kind of monitor and make sure that if something does happen and you have a vasovagal response or a syncope response which is just passing out, that you have someone there who's going to be able to help you out. I had a good friend of my, I've got to tell this story because it's crazy. His name's Dr. John Deloney. He said, John, if you're watching this, I love John.

He's a personality for Dave Ramsey. He does podcasting with him and he's on his show. Yeah, John's awesome. He was doing like Wimhoff style breathing when he was in the car driving on the interstate. And let's just say he no longer has his previous passed out and just gotten in a pretty awful wreck. He's okay. But I don't want, John is always says, like, I don't want people to have to learn that lesson themselves. Like just take my lesson as the example and move on.

know on that note and i'm glad he's okay and everything on that note there is a lot more conversation of the world of health and wellness about how something that's good for one person may also need to be tailored a little bit right so or like have to be looked at in the right situation so with my audience largely being a female demographic one of the things that we've had is we've had different experts come on and functional medicine doctors that say that some of these extremer or like more what was deemed to be more extreme, hormetic type of inclusions that we want to pull in, that we want to make sure that for women,

especially in their childbearing years, that we understand that every, first of all, everybody's different, but that some of these things that could be very beneficial to like a male like me or you, who doesn't have those hormones and that body and that makeup and that biology,

that certain things like doing a lot of cold therapy could actually be very, stressful for that person. What have you seen and can your device be something that can help people target in and actually know is this beneficial or is this not beneficial? Right? Like one example that's often used is that we know that fasting has a lot of benefits. And there's more and more functional medicine doctors and educators who come out and say, well, we don't want women, even if they're not planning on getting pregnant or even if they've already been pregnant, they've had all the amount of kids that they've had that they want to have,

we don't want them to be going on maybe extreme fast because there are detrimental aspects that can happen to their hormones and they can have increased production of cortisol. And my guess is also too, would that also probably throw off their heart rate variability? I'd love your thoughts on this. Yeah, this is a wonderful question. And it's something that I will admittedly be the first to say that because of me wanting to scratch my own inch and building a device and doing all the stuff in health and wellness, that I have been distracted from the female needs and the female response because I've been

overly focused on the male response. But for me, over the last, especially year or so in the development of this company, I had to get out of that mindset. I had to think differently about it and bring people around the table who are experts in on this and get their take on it. So the one thing, and I just recently did a podcast on the Hanu Health podcast about this where I brought multiple women who are elite health coaches and also experts in this field to talk about kind of the myths that surround doing a lot of this more or less what we can call now excessive

hormesis or excessive hormetic stress and how it can detriment or cause detriment to the female body. And the question that you were asked is like how can Hanu be used or how can other biometrics be used to assess kind of the detrimental or maybe even like thereof impact on female physiopiop. And the answer is that it can absolutely be an age there. Because just as you've mentioned before, whether it's fasting and the dysfunction that can cause on glucocorticoid dysregulation or thyroid dysfunction, we know that hit exercise or high intensity interval exercise, we kind of were just prescribing the same thing for males as we were for females.

And all these females were out there, you know, busting their butts and like doing all this work and hit. And then next thing they know, they're like, I'm drained of energy. I'm not recovering. I'm getting injured. My thyroid levels are crazy. My cortisol levels are crazy. My cycle is thrown off.

I'm not having my period anymore. Exactly. But they're like, but I keep getting this advice. Well, the advice was indeed tailored toward males. So what do we do about that? Well, the biggest thing that we can do, and I really credit the health optimization community, the biohacking community.

And then also, too, just the ability now in our everyday life to capture these biometrics is that we can be this end of one and we can experiment because what is going to impact and affect one person and one female may not affect the other and then vice versa. So it's all about this level of experimentation and not just saying, well, you know, I heard Dr. Jay or someone else, you know, who's on the podcast say this, who maybe they were gearing it more towards a male protocol or maybe they just even weren't to think about the potential detriment that it could have for the female anatomy and physiology. Well, then this is where we can bring in this end of one. So what,

will Hanu do? Well, again, if we remember what Hanu is looking at, it's looking at taxation of the nervous system. And taxation of the nervous system is a sign or an impact of what stress is doing to the body. It's a communication pathway. It's informative data. So the one thing that we've seen and what you would expect to see, that if a woman is engaging in something that is excessive for that individual, then we're going to see not just transient changes in these data, but more chronic. long-term downward trends. So for instance, this is a really interesting example that I could give. I was working with an Olympic athlete, a female Olympic sprinter. And she came to me, this was probably about two or three years ago. And she said, Dr. Jay, I heard you on a podcast. Like, I've been

looking at HRV on my aura ring, you know, for quite some time right now. And like, I'd see nothing but, like, this nasty downward trend in heart rate variability. And, and I need some health. And I need some help. And so I said, okay, well, let me do a little bit of investigation. I gathered some information from her. And what we saw is, well, like, she had that kind of this nice flat line. The baseline was staying the same. And then all of a sudden it started tipping off. And so I was like, okay, what, what happened from here to here? Like, what was this point right here? The inflection point that started this downward spiral. And she said, well, I'm not sure, but let me kind of look through and journal down things. So she did a journal and she came back to me

the next week. And she was like, well, I started this, this, this and this. Everything that she had mentioned was benign, except for one thing, is that she, as a sprinter, like she, obviously, she's got a sprint. So, like, every day is, like, high intensity interval training for her. It's all set up that way, which is good and well. But the one thing that she started including were cold plunges. And she's like, and I heard all in this podcast. I bought a cold plunge.

She's like, I wanted to use it for recovery. And I was like, interesting. How often are you doing it seven days a week? Wow. And I was like, whoa, okay, I think I see what's going on here. The other thing that she was already doing was sauna. And I forgot to mention that. But sauna, she was doing already like three to four times a week.

She was doing that seven times a week as well. The other thing, too, is that she was doing a sauna immediately going to a cold plunge. So it's like all of these exposure exercise, sauna, coal plunge, all of these things at once. And what we started to see is this crazy connection with her nervous system, responding immensely to this stressor. Now, I'm sure that from, if we looked at other biological markers, if we looked at other biomarkers, like blood related, I'm sure that her blood panel would probably be,

there was something probably in there that would be representative of change. But from a purely nervous system standpoint that we were looking at with this type of heart rate monitoring, we could see that these things appeared to be kind of the common denominators. So what did we do with her? Well, number one, we stopped the whole seven days a week of cold plunging. And we really just only made that one day a week to start off with. So we said, okay, I think this can be helpful for you, but let's just dial it way down.

And actually what we initially did was we went to none. I said, let's go to none because the only way we're going to know whether or not that is a huge culprit is that like it's kind of like an elimination diet, right? Let's just take it out. And then we'll slowly reintegrate it. And I had to do that with that and with sauna. And then what we saw is like every single day, heart rate variability was going up and up and up. until it was not very long. If I recall correctly, and if she's listening,

she can, and I'll probably ask her after this, I believe it's only about a month for her to really just get back from this really big sink in HRV as her baseline to back up to where she was. But here's the really cool thing, Drew, is that once we started to reintegrate SANA and we started to reintegrate protocols for cold therapy, for her, we found out where that sweet spot was.

What did it end up being for her? No more than two to three times. week for cold therapy for heat therapy or for sauna it was no more than three to four times a week she was just doing an excessive amount because she didn't she didn't know and she thought kind of more of a good it was kind of like this notion of like I can do more of a good thing and that will be better for me and it was not it's this inverted U shape curve that we have in almost everything in life that there's this optimal zone right in the middle and when you start to kind of move past it you're going to decrease performance in any any way as we add more stressors. This is like the Yerkes-Dotson

law. So for her, it was so visceral. And the great thing, though, is that once we introduced the protocol that was fitting for her, we saw heart rate variability go up even more in her baseline. So she was recovering better. She felt better. Like she just felt libidoless, no energy. Like she felt her performance was going down. This was when she was doing seven days a week of sauna and cold therapy, to now feeling like I'm on top of my game. And she was able to go and compete that year in the Olympics, or it was the year either before or after, and did really, really well.

So it was, it's watching this end of one is just one example of why people have to test it out. And start slow. Don't just throw everything at it. And I always like to say, it's like, if you're doing a lot for your health and well-being, and you're doing a lot for your mental health and well-being and nervous system repair.

The one thing that I would encourage or challenge people not to do is just to try to continue to add more and more and more and more and more because it ends up being like this system overload and they feel like I've got all of these check boxes for my health and well-being that I need to check. And then they go from kind of like this idea of like not addressing kind of like the core foundational basics of health and wellness. And they just want to biohack everything. They want to like optimize everything and all of this stuff kind of.

kind of ends up being not so sexy and they move it away. Sleep, basic movement, walking, getting enough steps in the day, basic nutrition. And of course, community. Yep. Right? Community is a big part of it. One of the biggest ones. I'm sure that if you're wearing this device that you hang around and you feel like yourself

more stressed around them and there's other people that are going to be individuals who are going to be giving you energy and are going to help you calm down and help you sort of relax in the world and see the perspective. And, you know, going back to early in the interview, you were saying, you know, we compare ourselves. of the people around us, the good and the beneficial hack of that is that when we start to hang out with people that are also growth mindset, driven, want to give back to their community, are involved in wanting to make the world a better place, or show up strong in their family, you know, all these things that make a good citizen.

That rubs off on us too because we want to see those, we see those examples who are like, wow, this is how somebody handles stress. If they can do it, I can do it as well. It's so true. And the opposite is also in effect. If you're around those people who bring you down, you see their visual, you know, emotional dysregulation, they're flying off the cuff, then that rubs off as well. Personal example that I feel completely okay sharing is I've seen this with my kids.

If I find that I allow my nervous system to go nuts and I am not regulating my emotions, which I work diligently on doing, but sometimes I'm human and it comes out, well, what do I see my kids start to emulate. Uh-oh. They're doing it as well. Their emotional dysregulation occurs more often or it's more severe. So it goes in the opposite direction, but I think to your point, when we align ourselves with other individuals who have that growth mindset, who are really taking hard charge with their life, with their health, with their well-being, with their community, we are going to want to be a part of that. Because for us, like, we see the good that it's doing and we know that we can make it, we can help to make it better, but it's going to help us to be better as human beings as well.

And I think everybody wants to be a part of that collective, that collective sense, that collective community, because we inherently, as humans, the core of us is relational. And so when we start to isolate and move away from that core need, from that core aspect of who we are as human, we feel that sense of void and emptiness. and when that sense of void and emptiness is there, our response is different, but also our nervous system is responding different as well. And we see it so clearly. So again, not to try to bring it back to biometrics and data, but it's all interconnected, 100%.

It's all interconnected. And I think the more that we can increase that ability for us to know where we stand, the more that we can do something. You know, I always share on this podcast that I love finding out when I'm part of the problem. Because if I'm part of the problem, I'm part of the solution.

If life is happening to me and there's nothing that I can do about it, that means that I have no control. And if everything is happening to me, if everything is other people, the problem, if everything is something else's fault, there are legitimate times in our life

where, of course, we're not the cause of everything that's there. Things do happen to us, but if we don't see how we can be part of the solution, which first understands how we are being playing part of the problem. And problem often has a negative connotation. It can actually be a positive thing. Like just something broke down. Okay, there's a little breakdown. Maybe that's a better word than problem. So there's a little breakdown here. Or I started running with a story, you know,

talking about how story shape us. I was visiting my chiropractor one day. And he was showing me some of his biometrics on some HRV and everything else like that. And also he was wearing a glucose monitor and he was like check out this the spike that happened to me yesterday he's like what do you think happened i'm like i don't know did you like eat something crazy he's like no this patient who has at times problematic and always has something that didn't go right or whatever called and my staff said that she called and immediately i went into like a story that's it oh you know this is there that's there it's going to be crazy it's that and i don't remember what the patient called for um but it was not as bad as he was expecting but the body had that response

The more that we can understand how these things, little things, these micro-stressers, as you call them, shape our life, the more that we can actually see how we can intervene. Yep. Good self-awareness leads to great self-regulation. And without self-regulation, again, self-awareness is just data. So we have to know through whatever means, objective data or subjective checking in, us taking one of the things that you mentioned earlier was kind of this notion of not just like having this external locus of control. and an external locus of control is that like I am just a victim of fate. Everything else shapes what happens in my life outside of me, whereas an internal self, or sorry, internal locus of control is much more geared towards this mindset that I have the ability.

I have the choice. I have the volition to make inherent change in my life. I am the one who is kind of like the person who's writing the path to destiny. And that is the component that I think that we know from literature leads to to more better health outcomes, better longevity outcomes. That is what people should really focus on. And the one thing that we have to do, which you reminded me earlier, is Jocko's notion of extreme ownership, not blaming others for where we are.

Yeah, sometimes life deals us some really shitty cards. And it's really difficult. And I would say that for me, I'm an individual who's experienced a lot of privilege in my life. Have I worked hard? Yes. But also, too, I have been put in a place where a lot has been handed to me throughout my life. Does that mean I didn't experience obstacles? No, I have experienced obstacles and barriers, but I have to take extreme ownership and not blame others or my situation or whatever

it may be. Now as me, kind of coming back to the stoic philosophy of the obstacle is the way, is like the only way forward is right through that obstacle. Yeah, the mountains in front of us. I'm at base camp on Everest and I've got to trek up this thing. But the only person that's going to be able to do it is me. Like I've got a team around me, but my legs have to be able to carry me up this mountain. That barrier is there. And when I get to the peak, when I'm at the pinnacle and I look down, I can say, look at how these barriers, these challenges, me taking ownership, look at what this has made me as a human being. I've chosen to kind of go down this path and take every challenge that's in front of me as a means for me, not to concoct worst case scenarios to get into my head, to allow things to spiral

downward, but I've looked at this as a mechanism for growth. And that again is the difference between a growth mindset and a fixed mindset and so needed in everybody. Well said, Dr. Jay. Tell us where people can get the device. And I think we have like a special link for the audience that's there when you guys are launching. And how much does it cost and, you know, give us some of the details. Yeah, absolutely. So head on over to hanuhealth.com. So Hanu is H-A-N-U-Halth.com. Hanu. And we talked about this a little bit. go is Hawaiian for breath. So Hawaiian for breath. So HanuHealth.com, right now the device retail is $2.99 for 12 months. That includes the device, but that also includes access to the platform,

which is a mobile-based platform. What we are doing right now, though, for all pre-order specials, we're going to give it to them for 40% off. So depending on when they watch this YouTube video, listen to the podcast, they might be able to get this deal. We'll always have a coupon code for you, Drew. But right now, if you use coupon code Drew, so D-H-R-U, give them 40% off. I get the device plus access to the platform for 12 months for $180. So we think that's pretty good value for like an all-day stress monitor, all-day stress coaching platform as well. And there's a lot of amazing features in there that you can see on the website that we haven't even talked about today that are going to be really helpful

and just helping people to increase overall mental fortitude, self-awareness of stress, and then better tools for self-regulating. I love it. And you put out content on this and you're always on podcasts and stuff and people can follow you personally. Where should they head for that? Yeah. So if you want to follow me personally on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, all the other ones. It's at Dr. J. Wiles. And then Hanu has one on all platforms as well. So at Hanu Health, H-A-N-U, at Hanu Health. And we're trying to throw up as much valuable content as well. One of the other things that we provide as well, which is free of charge is our, it's basically our blog on our website. But it's just really practical articles. on all things, stress, mental health, heart rate variability. Like if you want to take a deep, deep dive into heart rate variability, go on to the website and our articles are like, they go to an area that's like for the scientists, but also to practical applications.

Yeah, we try to. We try to. And then the other thing that we have as well that I haven't even announced, but we have coming along is that if you're a health coach and find value, maybe using this for your clients, or maybe you're a clinician, a mental health clinician, or a practitioner, or an integrative clinician, we're also building out health coach. or Hanu Health Certification courses so people can take these, understand more of the science behind what we're doing, and then also learn protocols to be able to use with their clientele,

with their patients, you know, with whoever they decide to use it with. So have that going on as well. So tell people to follow us on all of our platforms, go on to the website and we'll have that dropping probably around the same time that we hit market in October. Amazing. Dr. Jay, thank you for coming on the podcast. And, you know, when I first heard about what you guys were up to, up to from our mutual friend John, who have known for many years now. Initially, I was like, okay, I kind of get it. And then when I listen to you talking about it on other podcast episodes and your passion and the way that you're helping people understand, like, how early they can connect

to how they feel, it really clicked for me. So I just want to say, like, you're an incredible educator. And I just get the sentiment that, like, you're just like a super nice guy. And you have a really. interesting background of all these different roles that come together. So I appreciate you channeling that into making the world a better place to this mission and the company. And through just the content that you put out there. So thank you for coming on our show and really breaking it down for our audience. Thanks, Drew. I really appreciate it. And I will mention that in

high school, I did get the superlative for the nicest individual, the nicest male. But I appreciate this is something that I'm super passionate about. And I really just want to help as many people as I can. didn't really get into this to build the device to, you know, just make this large company. That's great. And obviously that's a part of the vision. But for me, it started with just this idea of like, there's a really big problem. And there's not a lot of great solutions for it. And I think we can build some better solutions for it.

So thanks for having me all, man. Absolutely. We'll have all the links that you mentioned in the show notes. Thank you again for being on the podcast. Absolutely.