Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - Adapting to Stress and Building Trust In Self | Dr. David Rabin

Episode Date: February 17, 2021

This week’s conversation is with Dr. David Rabin, MD, PhD, a neuroscientist, board-certified psychiatrist, health tech entrepreneur & inventor who has been studying the impact of chronic stress in humans for more than a decade.David has always been fascinated by consciousness and our inherent ability to heal ourselves from injury and illness.As such, he has specifically focused his research on the clinical translation of non-invasive therapies for patients with treatment-resistant illnesses like PTSD and substance use disorders.David is the co-founder & chief innovation officer at Apollo Neuroscience, which has developed the first scientifically-validated wearable technology that actively improves energy, focus & relaxation, using a novel touch therapy that signals safety to the brain.This is one of the reasons I’ve been so excited about our partnership with Apollo so I can’t wait for you to learn from David, he is an amazing human being.In this conversation, we discuss how powerful the human mind is – why we’re uniquely suited to adapt to and overcome adversity and why it’s possible to rewire our brain’s to get a better handle on anxiety and other mental disorders._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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stay present and engaged with my thinking and writing. If you wanna slow down, if you wanna work smarter, I highly encourage you to check them out. Visit remarkable.com to learn more and grab your paper pro today. When we ask ourselves, what is wrong with me that my life is so hard? We make an assumption that everyone else's life is easier and that there's something actually wrong with us. And then that creates these negative patterns that literally takes apart, it pulls apart our confidence and our self-esteem from the inside out. It facilitates learning patterns, as you were saying earlier, of self-deprecation, self-criticism, self-hate,

and really at the core, self-fear, rather than what we would hope we would cultivate for growth, which is self-gratitude, self-forgiveness, self-compassion, and self-love, right? And so it's understanding the duality of every moment is that all of these things exist in every moment. In every moment that we have in our lives, there is fear and there is love. And then there's everything that stems from fear and there's everything that stems from love. And we have a choice to make a decision to what we choose to pay attention to. And that is the mind. And what we choose to pay attention to manifests into our reality through our minds. What could be more powerful than that? Okay, welcome back, or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm Michael Gervais, and by trade and training, I'm a sport and performance psychologist.

And the whole idea behind these conversations is to learn from people who are on the path of mastery, to better understand what they're searching for, their psychological framework, which is really how do they make sense of themselves and the world around them, especially when things aren't going according to plan. And then we want to understand the mental skills that they use to build and refine their craft. Finding Mastery is brought to you by LinkedIn Sales Solutions. in any high-performing environment that I've been part of, from elite teams to executive boardrooms, one thing holds true. Meaningful relationships are at the center of sustained success.

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David, D-A-V-I-D, protein, P-R-O-T-E-I-N.com slash finding mastery. Now, this week's conversation is with Dr. David Rabin, a neuroscientist, board-certified psychiatrist, health tech entrepreneur, and inventor who has been studying the impact of chronic stress in humans for more than a decade. David has been fascinated by consciousness and our inherent ability to heal ourselves from injury and illness. In particular, he has specifically focused his research on the clinical translations of non-invasive therapies for folks who are resistant to traditional therapies, who just don't quite fit in what science would suggest as a best practice. So he's looking at that atypical non-invasive therapies for folks

that don't quite fit the mold. So he is a thinker that thinks outside the box for sure. So David is the co-founder and chief innovation officer at Apollo Neuroscience. And what they've done is they've just said lightly scientifically validated wearable technology the first scientifically validated wearable tech so this is this is not a tech that you wear that is reading information from your body this is a tech that is actually helping promote a state change so this is the reason that i'm excited to have him. And I'm excited to have a partnership with his company, Apollo. And I can't wait for you to learn from David. And not only is his technology amazing, but waiting to hear from the human. And in this conversation, we discuss how powerful the human mind is. And we dig underneath and

you're going to hear how he thinks about the human mind. And we talk about some frameworks and literally how to upgrade both the mind and the brain. And why we are so uniquely suited to be able to adapt to and sometimes overcome adversity. And why it's possible to rewire our brain to get better at working with anxiousness and depression and other challenges that are on display right now because of 2020 and 21 challenges that we're all facing. And so I want to call this next decade, the decade of the mind. And this partnership and this conversation is materially important because it's disruptive, it's innovative, it's grounded in good science.

And I'm not interested if you don't have both. I'm not interested in people or solutions that aren't rooted and grounded in science, that also aren't taking that and applying things in the frontier that are solving things that need to be solved in ways that the laboratory cannot. And with that, let's jump right into this week's conversation with Dr. David Rabin. Dave, how are you? Great, Michael. Thanks so much for having me. You know, you're quite remarkable.

So you've done some stuff that has been disrupted in tech, disruptive for potentially wellness and vibrance for people. I'm super stoked to meet you, but you've been on this path for a long time, both from an educational standpoint, then turned business slash entrepreneurship. So maybe let's just give a quick hit on PhD, MD. What are you compensating for there? What are we doing? That's very kind of you. You're quite remarkable yourself. I really appreciate you for having me and for bringing the work that you've brought to, to, you know, athletic performance world and recovery, which is so needed.

So I think part of what drove me into this field was something similar that drove you, which is number one, just trying to get a better grasp on what is consciousness, right? Like what is this world that we live in and how do we make meaning from it? And number two, which is when I realized how hard it was to study consciousness in science, at least, you know, when I was doing my training 10, 20 years ago, or over the last, you know, 20 years, thinking about really resilience, right? So what is resilience? Resilience is this opportunity for growth where we face challenge, and then we overcome challenge with whatever we have as tools in the moment. And then whatever that challenge has pushed on us,

we push back and we bounce back and overcome it, right? And similar to what Nietzsche said, you know, or what Obi-Wan said, right? That which does not kill us makes us stronger is really, I think, this incredible approach to challenge that sets apart those who are incredibly successful and leaders in their fields from those who decide not to take more risks

and to run from challenge rather than to face the challenge as an opportunity for growth. And I started to see these patterns. And so studying chronic stress became fascinating to me, right? And studying, this is where I started in, actually in college and with my PhD graduate work

at Albany Medical College, looking at neural stem cells and aging neurons and dementia and disorders of blindness, which are really interesting because why do some of us go blind as we age? And some of us don't, why do some of us become, you know, why would some of us suffer from Alzheimer's and other dementia types when we age and others don't? It obviously doesn't affect everyone. And there are some people who are more resilient biologically to that for any number of reasons that we didn't really understand. And now I think we have a much better understanding of that, which is fascinating in that there's a chronic stress response that happens all the way starting here in terms of how we cope with stress mentally, emotionally, and physically, and then goes all the way down to our individual cells and our neurons and how all of our cells

interact, and then how our cells talk to each other, how we talk to each other using stress response hormones, reward response hormones. And sometimes these are working really well, and sometimes they're working not so well. But the interesting part is that, you know, the work of Eric Kandel and many others, Eric Kandel won the Nobel Prize in 2002 for discovering how we learn and store memory, which is like a 300 million year old biological pathway that has been, you know, documented in different ways for many, many years. And Eric Kandel kind of put the whole picture together. And it made us realize that practice makes perfect, right? And so we have this unique opportunity to actually retrain our nervous systems and our bodies to function at a higher

level, to prioritize not just sustained peak performance, but that to sustain peak performance, we must prioritize peak recovery. And so after working with cells for a long time in this capacity and studying the cellular mechanisms, I thought, you know, this is really fascinating, but I really want to work on whole people. I really want it, no matter how much we fix somebody's cells in any particular organ, people are still going to, are still struggling. So how do we help them up here more to change the, change the way that their mind-body interacts to facilitate resilience. And that led me to my work at the University of Pittsburgh,

studying Apollo and the autonomic nervous system, and really a focus on treatment-resistant mental illness like depression, PTSD, anxiety, substance use disorders, and that kind of thing. I mean, you just dropped some serious knowledge. So I want to slow this down a little bit because you hit a couple things that are really important that I want to pull on and unpack. Practice makes perfect. I would reframe to practice makes pattern. Right. There's no such thing as perfect.

Yeah. And I think that that's really important, though, because at some level, even if you're not doing deliberate practice, which is a important word for the development of skill, we are practicing. Psychologically, we're practicing when we're walking down the street, we're practicing something the way that we are engaging and interpreting external stimuli, the way we're entertaining internal stimulus, thought patterns and emotional recognition. So we actually are always practicing. And that practicing is grooving patterns. And it's either challenging or reinforcing psychological framework, emotional

pattern recognition. And then I also want to get over to like, why chronic stress for you? It is the thing that happened in 2020 that was most alarming for humanity is our inability to deal with multiple acute stressors on top of an unhealthy amount of chronic stress. And so chronic stress, meaning that the inability to manage multiple acute stresses. So we already had this kind of three quarter of the cup full of stress. And then we had these multiple acute stressors in 2020 where people's mental health was recognized to be a real issue. So I think this next decade, Dave, is going to be the decade of the mind. And I'm really excited about finally culturally, maybe globally investing in mechanisms, one of the ones you're fascinated by, as well as some of the psychological skills that we can help people with. So, okay, those are big ones.

And you may disagree, but I think we've actually been trapped in the decades of the mind for a while. And what I see as the current decade we're in is the decade of the mind body, right? So this is, to me, this is a decade of convergence, not a decade of separation or duality, where we're just talking about the mind or just talking about the body as if they're separate. One of the things that is so important that we have learned, not just from the work that I've done, but from the work of so many scientists and physicians before, is that when the mind is sick, when the mind is not well, or when we're not well emotionally or spiritually, it can have a negative impact on our bodies and make our bodies sick. And when our

bodies are ill or not well physically, it can make our mind sick. It can make us emotionally ill. And these are irrevocably and intricately interconnected systems. They are not separate, right? So can, pause, let's calibrate. How do you think about or define or articulate the mind? So I would say that the mind is the part of ourselves that has control over what we pay attention to in the world. So there are lots of ways to describe this. I don't purport to say that my way is more right than anybody else's, but I think that with my psychiatrist and neuroscience hat on, I will tell you that I firmly believe that the most important thing to think about when we think about the mind is free will, which is by definition, or I should say that the most helpful interpretation of free will is the ability to say yes or no at any moment to what we allow in here

via our attention. So whether that's allowing the feeling, the feel, allowing the feeling of our clothes on our skin to come in, you know, versus habituating to it. So we ignore them. So they're not distracting in our day to day, whether that's allowing negative self-talk to come in, like what's, what's wrong with me that my life is so hard, right? That's not a helpful thought because there's nothing wrong with you that your life is so hard. Life is hard for all of us right now. Right. And, and having those thoughts and paying attention to those thoughts is something you alluded to earlier is actually dictating our reality. Because when we ask ourselves,

what is wrong with me that my life is so hard? We make an assumption that everyone else's life is easier and that there's something actually wrong with us. And then that creates these negative patterns that literally takes apart, it pulls apart our confidence and our self-esteem from the inside out. It facilitates learning patterns, as you were saying earlier, of self-deprecation, self-criticism, self-hate, and really at the core, self-fear, rather than what we would hope we would cultivate for growth, which is self-gratitude, self-forgiveness, self-compassion, and self-love, right? And so it's understanding the duality of every moment is that all of these things exist in every moment. In every moment that we have in our lives, there is fear and there is love. And then there's everything that stems from fear and

everything that stems from love. And we have a choice to make a decision to what we choose to pay attention to. And that is the mind. And what we choose to pay attention to manifests into our reality through our minds. What could be more powerful than that? Yeah. Okay. So we are speaking about the mind in the same way. And so oftentimes people go, well, there's people in our field that would say, oh, God, what are you guys doing? A neuroscientist, psychiatrist, and a psychologist, like, you guys are talking about this invisible stuff. Why don't you just talk about the brain? Why don't you just talk about that the mind is the artifact of neurochemical, neuroelectrical output and this other consciousness thing? Didn't we solve that in 1990, that there isn't one?

And I'm being trite, but you are saying consciousness is a thing, volitional control of attention is a separate and related function or feature of being human. It's our best way that we can participate in consciousness. How about that? It's our best way to participate. Okay, I like it. But for simplicity, are you separating the mind and the brain? Obviously, everything's embedded and interwoven, but are you separating the tissue that creates and produces electrical exchange and chemical exchange from the consciousness of the mind? Or are you embedding those two? Like we can't separate them. Why would we do that? I think, I think the separation of these things is one of the most fundamental mistakes that we've

made in the field of science. You know, the idea that we try to separate the tissue from what's actually, what the tissue manifests is, is the most disingenuous thing that we could do to tell ourselves, right. About, about life. And it's not to say that we could do to tell ourselves right about, about life. And it's not to say that we don't all make these mistakes. That was what I was taught, right? I was taught that these things are separate in my Western rigorous medical training. This was the way that we approach things. However, looking back now that I've been trained, now that I've been trained in multiple specialties and that I see my patients, you know, everyone from people with severe treatment, resistant mental illness on the civilian level to elite

athletes, to tactical athletes, to veterans, to people with all these different walks of life. And I see that, that there's a whole lot more to this in that, that, that the, the fundamental separation is what actually causes trauma for a lot of people because it is disempowering to us to feel like the tissue is determining our future. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentus. When it comes to high performance, whether you're leading a team, raising a family, pushing physical limits, or simply trying to be better today than you were yesterday.

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Just good design, great science. And if you're ready to feel the difference for yourself, Felix Gray is offering all Finding Mastery listeners 20% off. Just head to FelixGray.com and use the code FindingMastery20 at checkout. Again, that's Felix Gray. You spell it F-E-L-I-X-G-R-A-Y.com and use the code FindingMastery20 at FelixGray.com for 20% off. It is an embedded relationship between our mind and our brain, right? There's an embedded nature to what we're talking about. And for the record, the brain is that three pounds of tissue that sits in the skull, the spinal column, spinal cord, but then all of the nerves that are moving in and out, it is phenomenal. I mean, it really is phenomenal. And they touch pretty much every

part of our entire bodies. And there's gaps between all of them where electricity and chemicals are at play. I mean, it really is bizarre. I oversimplify by separating. And I'd love for you to give me a better mechanism because I say, okay, listen, let's oversimplify this just so you can get, you can grok it, that the brain is the tissue, the hardware, the mind is the software. You can change both of these actually, but let's start with changing the software, upgrading your software because the software that you built from the age of, let's say six to 12 might have been kind of shoddy. You might have had some things in there. Your parents might have done some things. Maybe you got bullied, maybe whatever,

whatever, whatever. And so we can upgrade from that. Most people don't upgrade until they reach their 20s or 30s, if then. And where do you go to get an upgrade? Well, you turn to your buddy in a bar. That's a problem. No, where do you go get an upgrade? You go to the most amazing sacred place you can imagine, which is a spiritual leader or a psychologist, or in your case, a psychiatrist. But you go to this amazing conversation over time with a learned person, but there's a taboo around it. So we're shaking the taboo. That's fading away. But can you give me a more, maybe a better handle to think about how to not pull apart, but also give people the handles to say, listen, you can upgrade the software

and that materially will impact the hardware as well. Absolutely. That's a fantastic question. So I think this really is the heart of Eric Kandel's work. And for those of you who have not checked him out, he is an incredible psychiatrist and neuroscientist who's still alive. I think he's 90 years old and he's at Columbia. And he is just an incredible scientist um and he really teaches us that when we upgrade the software we actually upgrade the hardware

at the same time oh he was a game changer for me yeah yeah and his book is in search of memory in search of memory is his by auto He has a bunch of books, but that's his autobiography, which I think is the best story of this journey of discovery of learning and memory that was the most impactful for me. This is where I'm wrestling. We're still using the old, I feel like I'm using an old model hardware software, but I can't find a better way to translate the complications between this embedded nature that there's an invisible invisible. And so can you up level the way that, you know? I will do my best.

Okay, cool. So hardware and software is an interesting way to think about it. But I think the problem with that in the context is when we think about hardware and software, we're thinking about, again, two separate things, right? The software is stuff that we install on a computer's hardware, and then that computer's hardware is static. It's not changing, right? a physical system that we're modeling accurately the human mind and the brain relationship, because the mind and the brain relationship is all the parts are changing at the same time. It's not the hard, what we call the software, what we call the hardware is all so connected that it literally changes in every moment. As you were saying earlier, every time we practice

doing something, whether it's positive and constructive for us or whether it's negative and destructive for us in the short, mid or long term, we get better at it because we're actually shaping the structure of our neural networks in our brains. And one of the most common ways to think about this is with, as you said, like bullying in school, right? So it's an experience almost all of us have been through. You're in school. Maybe you just started school. I don't picture you being a bully. I was bullied. I was bullied. No, I'm joking. Were you bullied? I was. And that was actually one of my personal biggest traumas in my life that I had to overcome was, was the, the, the,

the catastrophic destruction to my own self-esteem that occurred when I first went to school and was picked on because I was different from the other kids. I had different interests. I was more, I was more sensitive. You know, I had, I, I, I embodied characteristics that our society deems as not necessarily masculine. They were more like sensitive, vulnerable, feminine qualities, wanting to listen to other people, wanting to feel feelings, right? And those kinds of things were not valued in my schools growing up. And so what was I taught? I was taught that I need to shut those parts out of my life, right? That those parts, as early as I can remember, probably around three or four, when I first went to preschool, I remember learning that those parts of myself were not valuable to society. Whoa, specifically what happened? Make it concrete if you can.

Just, I mean, you know, having, I mean, there's dozens of interactions, but basically like having interaction with a kid where you're talking to some other kids in your grade and they ask you like a personal question about yourself. Is this what happened to you? Yeah. I mean, this is one of the earliest things that I can remember. Unfortunately, I don't remember the exact details of the conversation. But I do remember that there were certain things that I, you know, the other kids already knew each other, they had gone to school together before I was new. I was in kindergarten, I think, or preschool, I think was kindergarten, must have been four or five years old. And I was new to the to the school, it was a Montessori school. So it was much more accepting

in general of other kids. Of course, there's no bullying, no bullying rules, all that stuff, but kids still naturally will find a way to create a hierarchy in their own environment. And I remember that the kids would ask me these questions about myself that I didn't realize were things that they were trying to learn about me to use against me. And things that even things coming down to like the TV shows that I like to watch, the books that I like to read, the things that I like to do, like I like to do, I like math, I like science. These kids were into video games, right? They were into these other things and that I did not, They were into these other things and that

I did not, they were into sports. The fact that I didn't know as much about sports as they did all of a sudden became something that made me a target. And then I was like, okay, now I have to learn about this and devalue the things that I'm actually interested in and not talk about those things with these people. Right. And so even though it seems like a relatively small thing to most people, because it's not what we typically consider to be, you know, big T trauma, to me at that time, that said, you can't be open and vulnerable with these people who you don't know, right? You have to make sure that you can, you get to know people way better and that you trust these people. And that was my first interaction with other kids outside of my own, my own like neighborhood community. And so I was thrown for a loop because all of a sudden I was an outcast. I was like excluded from the, from the

other kids in the, in the school. And because of things that I didn't even know were things that were not valued or that were things that were worthy of me being picked on for, whatever it was. And that led me to take the sensitive parts of myself, the parts of myself that were interested in math and science on the surface, the parts of myself that were maybe more sensitive and more openly willing to share and empathize with these kids and say, that's not serving me, right? This is actually resulting in me feeling like crap. It results in me feeling sad, angry, alone, frustrated. So why should I value those parts? And so I literally take those parts like many people and I shove them down to not come out

unless I know that I'm actually safe to allow them to come out. And this is like, and this is such a common experience for so many people, but that over time trains my ego. It's it trained my survival system in my brain, which we call in terms of neural networks, the default mode network, which is entirely, it's a, it's a region. It's a network of many regions in our brain that talk to each other when our minds are at rest, that's consistent with ego and survival-focused states, preservation-focused states. And it trained that network to devalue these sensitive parts of me. Yeah. So the default mode network, essentially, if we make it really pedestrian, is like, am I okay? It's this chronic. Do they think I'm okay? Is this okay? Am I okay? Is this moment okay? Hey, do they think I'm okay? Is this okay? Is this, am I okay? Is this moment okay? Hey, what do they think I'm okay?

Is this moment okay? Are we okay? So it's really the self-preserving, uh, self-preserving checking in to make sure that we're safe. So that amplified, uh, the default mode network for you. And what we found, uh, just to pull it out of science for a minute, but I want to stay on your thread because I want to ask how you solved it is, um, one of the ways to damp down the default mode network is mindfulness, you know, extreme focus, you know, so doing something intently and on purpose actually quiet down, quiets down the default mode network, which is awesome, right? Because you give yourself a break, you know, from checking in to see if I'm okay. So how did you solve it? Did you try to tell anybody? And maybe, maybe there's some parents here that can listen, me included. I've got a 12 year old that like, is there, is there a message that you,

you know, try to wave the flag that you tried to wave that didn't get heard? Yeah, without a doubt. I mean, I think I, I told my parents, you know, and like many parents in our generation, you might have experienced this too, you know, my parents were like, those kids' words can't hurt you, you know, just ignore it, right? Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me kind of approach, right? That never worked. What did you want them to say? What did you want them to do? So in retrospect, what I had to figure out on my own that I would have loved my parents to do was to say that the opinions of these other kids around you don't matter, you know, and that, and that you, you know, and to help me recognize that, and I think more than, and I think they did kind of try to convey that these opinions of these kids didn't matter, but, but more to help me recognize that the feelings I was having were very legitimate and, and that to validate those feelings and to help me explore them more

and recognize that I was feeling this way because there was a lapse in trust between me and these other kids in my community that made me feel like outcast or excluded and picked on and less than, which really hurt my self-esteem. And the fact that that was allowed to kind of continue over for years and years took me until college to really start to figure out that. And I think maybe it started in the end of high school as well, when I started to get more confidence for playing sports and through, you know, excelling in those domains as well and becoming a real competitor with my, with my, with my other, you know, compatriots in school. But I think that in college, you know, I really started, I was on my own for the first time And it really started to force me to recognize that I have the

opportunity to make, to make myself whoever I want to be. And that's kind of like what the default mode network is, right? So when we're stuck in this default mode, it's, it's not to say that those experiences amplify the default mode. It's that my default mode, what all of our default mode network does, all of our egos do is they try to preserve our identity. They're self-preservation states that are always active. And so those states used to be activated when we were running from a lion or we were running out of food or running out of water or shelter or what have you, or we're in acute danger. But when you have to go to school every day and feel like that system is always getting

activated by people who are questioning your sense of self, questioning your identity, your self-worth, your validity as a human being, then that stress, that threat starts to perpetuate over time. And it literally causes us to dysfunction, right? It takes resources away because when our bodies perceive threat, it doesn't, our bodies don't know the difference between a lion and between kids picking on us in school. Our bodies, that system that Eric Kandel discovered and really explained is a system that's 300 million years old. Ancient sea snails with 12,000 neurons respond to threat and safety signals

the same way that we do, right? So ultimately, and we have over a billion neurons or a hundred billion neurons. So ultimately understanding how that I had the ability to decide what thoughts, and this took a while, right? And really spending time with other people who had struggled in the same way. I went to an engineering school. A lot of us had picked on growing up. A lot of us recognize that when we're together, that we had similar upbringings and that we didn't have to feel that way anymore, right? We were able to have camaraderie around similar experience and recognize that in every moment, there is an opportunity to change the way that we see ourselves by questioning the patterns that

we've been taught from before. And that is what literally rewires our default mode network is that initial recognizing the opportunity to question, recognizing the opportunity to make a different choice, and then making a different choice, and then practicing over time, making those different choices, starting with just the way we think about ourselves, is fundamental to rewiring and retraining our brains over time. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth. Over the years, I've learned that recovery doesn't just happen when we sleep. It starts with how we transition and wind down. And that's why I've built intentional routines into the way that I close my day. And

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With Caldera Lab, it's not about adding more. It's about choosing better. And when your day demands clarity and energy and presence, the way you prepare for it matters. If you're looking for high-quality personal care products that elevate your routine without complicating it, I'd love for you to check them out. Head to calderalab.com slash findingmastery and use the code finding mastery at checkout for 20 off your first order that's caldera lab c-a-l-d-e-r-l-a-b.com slash finding mastery therein lies why the value of self-discovery and the value of awareness trading call it mindfulness, are extraordinary. I'm not sure how we get to a state of flourishing, consistent flourishing in high stress or pressured environments without it. And I'm not even sure that we have to even frame it about high stakes,

high pressured environments, because once you do this work deeply enough, we end up dissolving pressure, which is a remarkable experience. But I want to pull on this one more level, which is your unique history to attending to and giving high value to other people's opinions. If you take your unique experience, how do you answer this question? Like, why do people in general care so much about the opinions of others? Because we don't want to be alone. You know, I mean, I think we're very capable of being alone, which is also something that we should teach children at a young age that we are capable of being alone. Humans are miraculous creatures, right? Like if we're

going to learn anything from Castaway and learn anything from Robinson Crusoe and all these other incredible works of art that have existed, and then the real, the true stories as well, right? That humans have a unique ability to adapt to adversity. That is like our core strength. And I think, you know, in my personal story, what I realized was number one, that we didn't, we didn't evolve because we're so good at, at, at maintaining and achieving stability. We as humans evolved where we got in the world from an evolutionary scientific perspective, because we excel more than anything at the ability to adapt and overcome adversity. And overcoming that adversity requires two things, one of which is working within ourselves to do whatever we can to optimize our system, feed ourselves the highest performance fuel

for our high-performing car of our bodies, right? Feed ourselves the best knowledge and the best wisdom, surround ourselves with the best role models to help us understand. Like we used to have elders in our communities to help us understand how to cope with stress. It's hard to figure this stuff out on your own. So having those people around us that are better than us and that are stronger than us who have been through it before is exquisitely helpful. That was a huge help to me.

And many of my friends who actually had the best success overcoming this kind of thing actually had older siblings because they saw their siblings go through it. They saw their siblings come out. Okay. And they're like, okay, my sibling can do it. I can do this too. I was the oldest. So I didn't have that. Um, but I know that it benefited my brothers that I was, that they had seen me go through it. And our youngest brother by far, like my, me and my middle brother, we struggled. My youngest brother, our youngest brother, he's seven years younger than us. He's a superstar. He's like, I don't care.

I don't give a crap what anybody thinks about me. I know that I'm at least as good as everyone else, right? And so that is the other thing that I think is really critical for us to understand is that we all have incredible untapped potential that is available to us at any time. And we just have to acknowledge that, you know, perhaps we don't really know what we're capable of, right? Perhaps when we are told that we have to know what we're capable of, we have to know who we are based on what other people think, based on satisfying others or based on satisfying this idea of what we think we should be, then we will create the box that we get trapped in,

right? And it's acknowledging that we don't know what we're capable of in this lifetime that allows us to tear down the walls of that box and really open up all possibilities to step out of default mode, to step out of making choices because of fear and start making choices from a standpoint of strength and recognizing that, you know, ultimately as humans, we have a hell of a lot more in common than we do different. And that if, if Michael Jordan can do it, then we can do it, right? Michael Jordan is human. He's not an alien. He's not Jesus, right? He's not God. He's a human being. And so are all of these other incredible people, these incredible athletes, these incredible role models that we have. Those people are sources of knowledge for us, right? They're role models. And so even if we don't have those role models in our immediate vicinity, we can find them in other parts of our lives to inspire us to recognize that we may be capable of a hell of a lot more than we think we are. And when I came to that realization, in large part, just through my own path of self-discovery

and really just not taking no for an answer, not giving up, just really constantly seeking to know what I could get out of life. And then that combined with, in 2018, studying Peruvian tribal medicine and really understanding their, what they call the four pillars, which are, we mentioned, I mentioned earlier, self-gratitude, self-forgiveness, self-compassion, self-love, which really, when you practice these core emotional skills, form this foundation of trust in ourselves again, which was, again, that trust was ruptured often for many of us as children, which is what trauma does when it's unprocessed or in general, that we practice these

skills, we rebuild our trust in ourselves, and that literally nurtures our self-confidence and our self-esteem to open up that full potential. And if there's any single thing that I could say made the biggest difference in my life to get me to where I am today, since I learned those four pillars, and those four pillars, something similar exists in Buddhism and something similar exists in Ayurvedic and Hindu yogic medicine. These are thousands of years old. That single thing made the biggest change for me in the last three years, bigger than any other single change that I had done in my life. I love it because this is a natural segue over to chronic stress because what you're describing are mechanisms that will actually damp down and give you regulation processes to be able to deal

with chronic stress because there is a, not to confuse it, I don't want to use default, I'll use gold dust. The gold dust of those practices is that, oh, I'm actually good. Oh, I can figure some stuff out now. So that self-trust piece, in the course that I built, the eight-week online mindset training course, self-trust is, we use the word trust as a pillar, but we're not using trust of others because that's where psychology tends to want to go. And it's too complicated. It was baked in. Our levels of trust of others were baked in pre-verbal before the age of two. And I'm not trying to undo that at this point. I'm saying, listen, let's figure out the mechanisms to help

you trust yourself so that you can go boldly into a condition, an environment, a situation, be like, hey, listen, I don't know the outcome. So that's that uncertainty leads to anxiety if we're not careful. I don't know this outcome, but I'm going to lean in, I'm going to figure it out, and I'm capable to figure it out. So how do you practice those four just as a top hit? Now, I want to get into why chronic stress led you to the technology that you built. I want to get into that as soon as we can here. But how do you practice those four?

So I think it starts with self-gratitude, right? I always listen in order because the order is intentional. And going back to what we were talking about earlier, these four pillars are so critical because they are mind skills that we have control over when we approach life, when we approach our thoughts, when we approach our feelings, anything from the inside or outside, we have the choice to choose to face challenge with frustration and annoyance or anger, or we have the opportunity to face every challenge with gratitude, right? So when we face something, whether it's just getting up in the morning, whether it's trying to fall asleep at night, or whether it's a challenging work project or a challenge that is unexpected from some other part of our lives, we have the opportunity to say, oh God, why me? Right? Or which many of us have been taught. I was taught that. Or we have the opportunity to say, I am grateful for this

opportunity to grow. Right? That is resilience. Practicing that great gratitude expression is literally building an emotional muscle in our minds, or really between our minds and our bodies, that reminds us that we're safe because we're in control of how we relate to this challenge we're facing. The source of most anxiety, as I think you alluded to a second ago, the source of most anxiety that most of us face on a day-to-day basis is spending our limited attention that we have in every day, our limited amount of time to attend to any number of things. We spend more of that time thinking about things we don't have control over than things we do. The more time we spend thinking about things we don't have control over, of which there are literally infinite, right, the more we feel out of control.

The more we spend time thinking about things that we are afraid of and thinking about from a fearful context, the more we feel afraid. And the more time we spend feeling gratitude, the more grateful we feel. The more time we spend expressing forgiveness to ourselves for things we've done wrong, because everyone makes mistakes. Mistakes and failure are the best way to grow. The less shame we feel, right? The more we express compassion to ourselves, knowing that we will make mistakes in the future, knowing that as much as we feel like we need to be moving faster, we're moving at the pace that we were meant to move at. And everything will come in time with patience and with work. Just like we didn't get here overnight, we're not going to get to the next stage overnight.

Then that self-compassion pushes back against our self-critic and balances the negative self-talk with self-love, right? And then that trust that we build in ourselves with these practices literally allows us to form this foundation of trust in ourselves, which allows us to trust others. And we can't truly trust or love others and be vulnerable around others until we're truly comfortable with that trust and vulnerability within ourselves. I love it because what you're doing is you are using a set of practices to increase agency, dampening down stress. And then you said, I'm going to build a technology that's going to also help people instead of medicine. And I don't know your position on medicine as a psychiatrist. But not maybe... You got to use medicine sometimes. It's not all bad. It's just not necessarily the best first choice. Yeah. So that's where I thought you were going to go is that, hey,

there's a gap between psychological skills training, psychotherapy, and medicine. There's a gap in here of recovery practices that are really important. And if I could amplify that through a technology, we might get some massive wins for people. And so is that close to how you got there? Absolutely. So actually taking you on that journey. So the four pillars are these mind tools of teaching ourselves how to self-soothe and how to self-induce safety states. Safety is the trigger of our recovery response parasympathetic nervous system. Safety literally triggers our vagal parasympathetic nervous system to turn on and allows us to divert resources to recovery, sleep, digestion, metabolism, immunity, creativity, sexual reproduction, all the stuff that is deemed unimportant when our body thinks we're running

from a lion, right? Rightfully so. We do not want our resources diverted to any of those things I just mentioned when we are actually running from a lion. Right? You know, it's really... I'll just share a personal story is that everything that you're saying, when my wife and I were like, okay, it's time. Like, we're really interested in having a son or a child, ended up being a son, that

we... Until he tells me otherwise. I learned that phrase from Glenn Doyle. It's really cool. That we, that it wasn't kind of like happening. And so one of our docs friends was like, oh, you got to go on vacation, dude. So in other words, I thought I was dealing with stress pretty well, but apparently both of us, you know, our sympathetic nervous systems, the on fight, flight, freeze mechanisms were too activated. Go on vacation, bang, parasymp, our sympathetic nervous systems, the on, fight, flight, freeze mechanisms, were too activated. Go on vacation, bang, parasympathetic.

You let your hair down a little bit, and what do you know? And that's the most common reason anxiety and that overactive stress response is actually the most common reason for infertility in men and women. Yeah, there you go. So the other side of this is we talk about the mind tools, right? So where Apollo comes in is Apollo is a body tool. And just because the mind and the body are connected doesn't mean you can't do things, specific nutrition, healthy nutrition, not trying to reduce toxic load in terms of the amount of BS that we put into our bodies. Trying to focus on soothing things like soothing stimuli. So soothing music boosts parasympathetic tone, helps us feel safe. We've all been there. We've all walked into a room and heard our favorite song come on and on a stressful

day and just been like, oh, yeah. I don't even remember what I was worried about, right? Soothing touch, getting a hug from a loved one or a friend, having somebody hold your hand, getting a massage. And so all of these tools and stretching, yoga, right, these are the body tools. And so all of these tools are important on their own. When you combine them, you get a maximal synergistic effect because they reinforce each other to remind us that we're safe. That's the core of all this safety turns on the recovery nervous system and reminds us that we're not running from a lion because that's what our bodies are trained with chronic stress to do.

We've been practicing being in this chronic stress state. Our bodies get really good at being in a chronically stressed state. Inflammation goes up, metabolism gets dysregulated, our immune system gets dysregulated, we get sick more often, we sleep less, and then all of that gets compounded over time. Then we start self-medicating to try to make it better. It's a nasty little snake eats its tail, isn't it? It is problematic. What is the number one stressor for people in your mind? Right now, I mean, it's different for everyone, but I think that COVID, for one, right now is probably the biggest political turmoil and division within our society between the extremists on one side and the extremists on the other side

is a pretty big issue that I think a lot of people are facing right now. Honestly, one of the things, I mean, and without all that into account, one of the things that I hear the most that really upsets people is the news and that, and that, you know, limiting our interactions with, you know, it's one thing we have a lot of stress in our local lives, right? It's another thing to start having all of this existential worry about things that are not even going on in our immediate vicinity. And that's not something that our minds are really, or our bodies are trained to do.

And it just sets us off because we don't know how to deal with it. Right. There's not, it's not like we can do anything about it. So again, it's giving our attention to things that we can't control and that, and spending time focusing on those things we cannot control that literally takes us into that anxiety, stress, constant chronic stress, worry state. PTSD, in traumatic brain injury, in folks who have a lot of these issues in either athletic communities or in the military communities, especially. And this was the big populations that I worked with at the University of Pittsburgh from 2014 to 2018. And so during that time, we're really trying to say, okay, we get that you guys are struggling and gals, we get that

you're struggling. We get that you are having trouble feeling safe. Your, your signs of your autonomic nervous system are totally out of whack. Your sympathetic stress response is way up, resting heart rates up, respiratory rates up, heart rate variability is in the pits. We don't, we, and then we, and you're, you're telling us you feel unsafe. Your body language is unsafe, right? It's closed, protected, guarded. How do we get to the, and when people come into the office, just having an empathic conversation with me, all of a sudden they calm down. They feel like they can make change in their lives. They feel like they're not afraid of change itself, right? They're not afraid of newness because they feel safe with me. All of a sudden they leave the office and they're right back to

the old patterns. And so what we were trying to do with Apollo was create a technology that we could give people to take out of the office and they could take and on their own time at home using in their everyday day-to-day lives that delivers a frequency of gentle soothing vibration to the body. And Apollo looks kind of, it looks like this in the current generation. This device delivers a very gentle vibration to the skin that, just like somebody holding your hand or giving you a hug on a bad day, reminds that reptilian amygdala in the center of somebody giving me a hug right now, or the feeling of this gentle soothing vibration on my skin, or the feeling of the air coming into my lungs with a deep breath, that I can't possibly be running from a lion in this moment, which is actually a subconscious loop, meaning it's typically beneath our level of awareness. We don't know that safety feedback loop is happening, but every time we take that time to direct our attention to that soothing stimulus, that loop gets activated. And then we can learn to consciously activate it over time.

And Apollo serves as a tool to help us train ourselves to self-induce safety states more often in our every moment of our whole lives by helping us recognize that the body can be calm. And if the body can be calm, we're not in a life or death situation. Does that make sense? Oh, you know what? I wish that I would have freaking beat you to the punch, okay, with your technology. Because when you first introduced it to me, I was like, holy moly, like he did it. And so it's so intuitive. It is so disruptive as a positive, passive, almost intervention that I thought, ah, like, so that was the reason I wanted to have this conversation with you. I love that we're partnering to be able to amplify your

voice and your technology. And it is disruptive in the way that it's helping people deal with chronic stress. Now, I think, I don't want to be obtuse here. I think it's a game shifter, but not alone. So I think that there's other skills and practices that need to accompany it that are massive accelerants. I think that on its own and tell me, wave me off if you've got some evidence or some research otherwise on its own, I think it's going to work, but no different than you have this amazing conversation with your psychologist, psychiatrist, and you, and then you feel great. And then you, you take off the band, you leave the office and you kind of, if you're not careful, you'll go right back and revert to an old operating system. So wave me off if you found some evidence.

But I think that we probably should precede part of this conversation with HRV, just define it quickly, why resting heart rate is so important. And I can help you out. Obviously, you're an expert in this stuff. But resting heart rate, if your heart rate doesn't come down there's a reason you know if it's an and it's elevated stress or the maladaptive response to stress is a more accurate way to say it and hrv if hrv is too low by the way my hrv on a regular basis is 30 and you know what i'm it's too i wish it was 70 like some of my friends are in the 60s, 70s in my age group. But consistently, I find myself in the 30s, which is problematic for me.

I am tripling down on recovery strategies. And so my resting heart rate is like 49, 46, in that range. So it's really low. But dude, what's going on with a 30? And I'm working out on a regular basis. I'm sleeping like eight hours and I'm doing my work. All right. So anyways, get to me later.

Do the resting heart rate, HRV, and then the vagal nerve, why it's important and how your product is maybe solving some of this. And do you agree that you need some other modalities to support the outcome that we're looking for? Sure. So I'll take the last question first. So interestingly, I think we thought when we made this technology, we don't have any expectations for what was going to happen. Most research fails, right? I've been doing research for a long time. I have never made anything that worked this well. And most of my colleagues haven't either. So we just expect by default, it's not going to work. Right. And so even if we do the clinical trials in the lab, which we did to start in 2017, 2018, we did our first double blind randomized placebo

controlled crossover study to show that without a doubt, this was either doing something to the, to the heart, uh, heart rhythms, to HRV, to the heartbeat under stress and performance, cognitive performance, or it's not doing anything. It's just placebo, right? And in that study, we showed without a doubt that Apollo frequencies, specifically the vibrations that we developed for the Apollo device, which was not Apollo at the time. It was just an idea in a science lab at the University of Pittsburgh, but the company was started after the test results came back. But basically we developed these waveforms and we wanted to see, can we improve performance? Can we improve HRV

under stress? Because usually under stress, all of these things go down, especially intense, repeated chronic stress, right? So we'd use a well-validated task in the lab and we showed without a doubt, these Apollo waveforms were working way better than placebo, way better as in we're seeing HRV boosts of roughly 25% under stress within, or I'm sorry, within, yeah, it was roughly like 25% under stress within three minutes, right? So HRV, as a real-time measure, HRV was increasing. Right. And specifically high-frequency HRV, which is representative of the vagal parasympathetic system.

Okay. Now, vagal parasympathetic nervous system, do you want to hit on the vagal tone for just a minute? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So basically, in short, and the reason why this is all important to understand is because, as we were talking about earlier, the stress response system, which we call the sympathetic nervous system, which responds to threat, and then the parasympathetic vagal system, which is that rest and digest recovery response system that responds to safety, these two systems are constantly both coexisting in our bodies all the time. And in almost all animals that we know of in this world. And so when we are in a threat, threatening situation, forget about whether it's actual or real, but when you're under threat, we want our bodies to recognize that quickly. And we want our heart rate to go up.

We want our bodies to recognize it even before we consciously recognize it. We want our heart rate to go up quickly. We want our respiratory rate to get faster and deeper, to feed more oxygen to our skeletal muscles and our motor cortex, to be able to either fight, flight, or freeze to get faster and deeper, to feed more oxygen to our skeletal muscles and our motor cortex, to be able to either fight, flight, or freeze to get us to survival and safety, right? And less known submit, which is an interesting psychosocial response. Right. And that can kind of be, some people would put that into like the, you know, one of the other categories, right? Freezer or flight. But it doesn't really matter. The point is that our bodies know that when we're under threat,

we boost resources to the skeletal muscles, we boost resources to our motor cortex and to our heart, to our lungs, and to get us to safety, right? That being said, once we get to safety, once we're in a safe environment, the threat is gone. And we know cognitively, consciously, that threat is no longer around. That we should have a quick drop in our heart rate back to resting. We should have a quick drop in our respiratory rate. And we should have a quick drop in our blood pressure. And a quick slowing down of the speed of our thoughts, for instance.

That doesn't happen for people with PTSD. It doesn't happen for people with PTSD. It doesn't happen for people with many mental illnesses, actually. And it doesn't happen to people with insomnia or chronic pain as well. And so that can be measured as heart rate variability, the speed with which everything goes up to stress and calms down to safety. Low heart rate variability is almost unanimous across people with severe PTSD and treatment-resistant mental illness, which is fascinating. It is fascinating. And we're not sure what chicken and egg, is it mental illness or sleep?

There's even some debate right now about that snake eating its tail, like how those two work. But I want to offer this as well, just to be clear. High variability is what we're looking for. Okay, so that means your heart goes boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. There's a variability. Low variability is like when you're walking on stage or you see a snake or a rat like at eye level and your heart goes bang, bang, bang, bang, there's no variability.

So that's what we're looking for, because it's easy to get twisted. Like, am I looking for high variability, low variability? No, we're looking for high variability as an indicator that you have responded eloquently to a stress and recovered properly. We want low variability in the right moments. Right. When we're running from a lion, our heart rate goes up to like 160. We want that HRV, the heart rate variability, which is, as you were saying, the time between each beat to drop, which it naturally will under threat. But when we're not actually under threat, like we're going

on stage to give a talk, that is not the time that we want to be in a low adaptability state or in a threat state. We want to be at our peak. We want our attention to be under our control. We want to have all of our emotion regulation capabilities at our fingertips. We want to feel as present and focused in the moment as possible. I'd like to add something to what you said. Fight, flight, freeze, well accepted. I think flow as well. And so flow isn't happening in parasympathetic dominant states. Flow, the most optimal state we can be in where action and awareness merge, and there's this as if you've been there, this fluid nature to it. Athletes call it the zone. You know, musicians- A lot of good names for it.

Yeah. There's being in the pocket, the good shit place. Like there lot of good names for it yeah there's being in the pocket the good shit place like there's lots of names for it but i think that uh we underserve that it's that that mechanism in our brain for fight flight freeze uh there's also another let's call it um well let's call it flow you know i was going to say a positive adaptation but all of those other ones are positive adaptations just maybe overused in modern time but But so anyway. And flow is important, right? So I would say flow is really, and we mischaracterize it a lot, but I think what it is, is really a balance between sympathetic and parasympathetic. It's not more, if you have too much fight or flight activity, you will not be able to enter flow. And if you have too much parasympath flight activity you will not be able to enter flow and if

you have too much parasympathetic vagal tone you won't be able to necessarily you can't get in there and and we also know that from the neuroelectrical standpoint that you know alpha beta uh theta delta gamma as the electrical uh brain waves that we're most interested in there is almost like a accordion um i don't want to say predictable because each brain is a little different, but too much theta, we're not getting in. Too much beta, we're not getting in to flow state. So there is this gamma alpha interesting mix that is almost a bit of a signature. And this was research I did probably eight years ago with a gentleman, Leslie Sherlin,

who did some amazing work. And so that might be old at this point. Actually, hopefully it is. Hopefully people have added to it. But I haven't seen any of it. Well, I think what we're adding to it, right? And directly to your work, I think what's really fascinating is taking it a step And directly, you know, to your work, I think what's

really fascinating is taking it a step further is how do we reliably induce a flow state, right. And that is the most fascinating outcome that came out of this work with this original study with Apollo is that we improved the, we significantly improved the efficiency of performance, meaning that the normally when we are really under stress in a cognitive task, like an intense math task or intense work task we have to do, at some point our stressful thoughts overtake our ability to focus on what we're doing in the moment. Like, oh no, I missed the last question. Oh no, I missed two questions. Oh no, I left the stove on at home. And then all then all of a sudden, these stressful thoughts start to invade our awareness. And so it takes us out of the moment, which takes us out of flow. So the goal is how do you optimize our attentional capacity with sympathetic and parasympathetic balance, which many people, you know, athletes, tactical or professional, they all use pretty

much many of them use breath work, right, to willingly enter those states, especially people who do like archery or shooting or things like that. They time their shots between breaths, right? And so I think that's really fascinating because flow is accessible to all of us through these techniques for free. However, just like concentration, just like meditation, if you've never been taught to do these things, you've never been taught to access those states, and they only seem to happen by random chance, then how would you ever willingly take yourself into one? So that study with Apollo waveforms originally was so fascinating because we showed

that when you deliver a specific vibration to the body under stress, you can nudge people into flow, nudge people into maximum peak performance, present focus. All of a sudden, the more effort they put in, the more performance they get out, and the calmer they feel under stress. When does that happen? I think it was our first conversation. After that, you sent over some research. I was like, damn, you know, like not only did he crack the idea that was game shifting, that it's one of those ones like, why didn't I think of doing that to a coffee bean? You know, like a tea leaf? Damn, why didn't I think of doing that? And, you know, it's surprising to me this hasn't been done yet.

And it doesn't seem like it's a function of technology catching up. This is like good intellectual research-based insight that you cracked. Because the technology is, like I said, it's passive. You put it on. You know how I'm using it? And by the way, thanks for giving everyone a discount on Finding Mastery. Just to be clear, 15% off first purchase, apolloneuro.com forward slash Finding Mastery. Just to be clear, 15% off first purchase, apolloneuro.com forward slash Finding Mastery.

And I appreciate you giving us a discount. I really do. It's my pleasure. I'm using it right now too. It's been a game changer, especially during the pandemic. I mean, I can't even tell you how much of a help it's been

to just keep me focused during the day. I'm a distractible character and I work very hard doing a lot of different things. So having that extra boost to remind me that I'm safe and that all the things that I'm doing are not a threat to me, which can happen, right? We get overwhelmed by too many responsibilities that can be perceived as a threat. So are you using the, I'm using only the down regulation modalities. So I'm using, after I work out, first thing I'm doing, right, is.

Rebuild and recover. Yeah. I'm just putting that thing on. So I don't wear it all day, every day. Some people that I know are doing it. I put it on right there. It's a go-to as to accelerate my down regulation. Right. moderate my down regulation, right? To the recovery. And then right before bed, and then, you know, I got a bad pattern right now. I've been waking up like at four in the morning, which is not, it's not good for me. It's not when I want to be waking up. This is actually a common thing for a lot of us right now who are in these very high performing careers where we have a leadership role. I think a lot of us I've noticed are frequently waking up in the middle of the night these days with a lot on our minds you too okay so but i'm using your tech and so i put it on at night and i fall asleep using it and so that's the sleep uh sleep mode and it's a gentle

kind of like soother and then if i wake up in the middle of the night let's it's like this pattern between three and four at night and um if i instantly have that thought loop about things I need to solve for business, and I'm like, damn it. And I could feel my kind of vasoconstriction taking place, you know, a little heart bump. Yeah. Feel your muscles tensing up. Yeah. And I'll get like a little sweat that I feel, you know, it sounds miserable, which it is. You know, I go, okay, you know what? And I reach over and I put, I've got red light on my phone. I know some people are going to be, oh, you've got your phone in your bedroom. Yes, I do. But I put a red light on it, you know, and then so I, but I click on your thing,

Apollo Neuro, and it's a nice little hum that I don't know how it's working exactly for me, other than the science that we've talked about, but it's like, damn, that's good. So listen, I, and I will tell you in case I didn't tell you earlier for everyone who's listening, you don't actually need to go to your phone to do this in the middle of the night. We purposely designed it. Yeah. We purposely designed it to use the buttons to reactivate the last mode you were on. So one of the, one of the most favorite use cases is people will wake up in the middle of the night. And instead of having to go to your phone, just tap both buttons for one time together and it restarts the sleep mode and you both buttons at once. Yep. Both buttons. It's just one single tap, single tap, both. Okay. Perfect. And it'll go to the last one that I used.

Right. So that's the most useful sleep. I personally use the social and open and the, which I'm using right now and the clear and and focused more than any because that helps me stay straight and narrow during the day, keeps me on track, helps me get more done. I don't get as distracted. It's great for pre-workout as well. And also just staying even when you're tired, but you need to be awake. Yeah. I think my cortical arousal is pretty high. So when I use that one, it's naturally a pretty high level. And so when I use that one, I was like, Whoa, what are we doing? But, um, but every once in a while I flip it on and I'm like, yeah, that's, that's a good zone right there. I needed that. So I'm, I feel like I'm a hype man for you. Like, that's what I feel like, but I don't want

to be, I want to be a grounded scientist, but your science holds up. And where are you? Are you saying pilot? You know, are you beta? Are you like, no, double blind placebos, we're cracking it, we're in it. Like, where are you on the evolution of being able to stand in a proper proceedings to say this is game changing from a laboratory science standpoint as well? That's a great question, because there's a lot of stuff out there. And I think that, you know, it's really, really important to know that, you know, this isn't, this wasn't our only gig, you know,

we didn't have a company when we did this research, we did this research because we wanted to help people. And if this turned into something that helped people, you know, we were going to, we were going to take it by the horns and see where it goes. Right. Which is ultimately what we did based on the, the double blind randomized placebo controlled trials that came back with the results that came back, which is now under review. Which, which for, for, for clarity, for folks listening that that jargon means it's the highest standard for research, double blind control, placebo effect, like that

letter, not effect, but that's the highest standard. Yeah, placebo-controlled crossover. That means that every subject in the study, 38 subjects, experiences every single condition, not that you have one group of subjects experiencing the placebo and one group experiencing the active, which is still good, but it's even better when you do a crossover where all subjects experience all conditions, and then you compare within each subject's change, and then also to the whole group. So it basically, with a 38-person study, it's as if we were doing like a 100-person study. So I can tell you without a doubt that Catherine and I and our whole team would not be here if this didn't work. And not just if it didn't work

subjectively. I mean, if we didn't see those results come back in 2018, I would not be sitting here with you right now because we had other stuff to do. I have a very busy practice, a clinical practice. I'm the executive director of the board of medicine, and I work on democratizing safe therapies for vulnerable populations. There's a whole lot of other work that we do. Catherine has her own career that she left to do this. So we really waited. And we waited even to start the company until we saw those results came back. And when those results came back, we said, OK, this is actually worth pursuing because you just don't see stuff like this come through every day. And then after that, we actually took it one step further where Catherine raised the initial money to build 400 prototypes. We distributed to over 2000 people in the real world in 2018 and 2019

before we actually launched a product, which is another step that I think people miss in this area of science often, which is if it works in the lab, it doesn't mean it's going to work in the real world. And there's actually two features there. Work in the lab, cool. But then for it to work in the real world, it actually has to work in a noisy environment. But secondly, the person has to want to use it. Right.

And so you can have the greatest thing, but if it's a bad form function or it's too much friction to get the data out or whatever, there's lots of reasons it breaks down. And I think one of your challenges is that I don't feel instant. Like if I have caffeine from tea or something, it's working like within minutes. Like, oh, okay. I don't feel that on the down regulation. I did from the up regulation.

Okay. But on the down regulation, maybe I am, but it's really hard because it's like, how fast can I recover as opposed to, oh, I'm recovering because my body's already kind of going in that direction. So I think that's one of the challenges is that it's not instant and immediate on the down regulation. It's not instant and immediate on the down regulation. It's not instant and immediate for everyone. It is for me on the up regulation. Right. Yeah, for you too.

That's a great, yeah. The interesting part is the more you use it, what we found is the more sensitive people get. When I first started using it, I didn't notice it right away. It took 10 minutes, 20 minutes, maybe some time for some of the waveforms. It took a couple of days for me to start to really see a difference. Now I turn it on. I feel it instantaneously. See, I thought that for me too, but I thought that was just a priming.

I thought that was good old Skinner at play, behaviorism at play, like, oh, I'm putting it on. Oh, it is. That's exactly what it is. Oh, okay. Yeah. It's conditioning. It's classic conditioning. Because when I put it on, my mind, my non-conscious going, oh, I know what

we're doing now. Oh, we're getting ready to shut her down. Cool. So I feel like I'm getting a massive competitive advantage on it. Okay. And just to answer the other question that's really important that you brought up earlier is that does Apollo work on its own? It absolutely does work on its own. That being, and we showed that in multiple lab studies and multiple athletic clinical trials, we've seen Apollo works on its own to induce an effect in the moment. In the body in particular, you know, within that study I described to you, within three minutes, we saw these boosts in HRV, boosts in performance under stress. That was a three minute timescale, but that's in a highly controlled laboratory clinical setting, right? In the real world, with all the noise, things are

very different. So in the real world, one of the major things we learned from our users, which is our huge source of knowledge, is that when Apollo is combined with other techniques, the effects are much greater and longer lasting. So if you combine it with anything from the body techniques, like stretching, breath work, mindfulness, meditation, good nutrition, good healthy exercise, it works way better. And if you combine it with the mind practices, the self-gratitude, self-forgiveness, self-compassion, and self-love, it works even better. And the goal is to help calm us down enough in our bodies to feel safe enough to embrace these new techniques. Because if we've never been taught the new techniques,

the change from our routine, our existing routine itself, can be scary and triggering. Change itself becomes something we fear when we're in a state of chronic stress. Because what happens, we get what you referred to earlier as misappropriated threat. We start to attribute threat to things that aren't actually threatening. So change itself becomes a target and Apollo helps to calm us down enough to embrace the opportunity for change by helping us be more present, which we can all do ourselves with breath. But again, many of us

haven't been taught to then take a step back and say, wait a minute, I've been doing things the same way for years, decades, whatever. I've been following this default mode, even if you don't know the words. I've been doing this pattern forever. Is this pattern of behavior actually serving me right now? Or is this an opportunity for me to choose a different path? And I think we all have this fundamental decision to make thousands of times a day, call it a micro decision. Is this moment an opportunity or a threat? Is this set of circumstances an opportunity or a threat? And if our cup is full, call it chronic stress, the cup

is full, we're going to see it as a threat to spilling over. I can't take another drop of water because my cup is going to run over. And to kind of mix Zen metaphors with a little science in here, if we have some liberties. But let me be uber concrete. So another thing I'll do on high, heavy kind of workload days, whether I'm sitting a lot or standing a lot, where I've worked out a bunch, is that I'll throw on some recovery boots. Normatech is what I'm using. I love that they're one of our partners right now too. But I don't want to use Apollo and Neuro at the same time. Tell me if I'm weird about this, because there's a specialness to Apollo that I want to hold for itself. So do you think that that's a little wacky? Have you ever done

Norma tech? I have not. I've heard of them, but I haven't done it. Let's, let's talk afterwards to get you set up. Cause I think you're going to appreciate it. There's a compression, the big compression boots that squeeze blood flow. Yeah. They're medical grade, but now they're for athletes and now consumers for the first time time they squeeze blood flow up and down throughout your legs and it it's like oh these things are freaking working like it's there's a constriction here and there's a throbbing and it's you know and it's so high in body sensation that i want to save the neuro down regulation for a special moment but i can i can think about stacking things like meditation with Apollo or breathing work with Apollo or Norma Tech with Apollo, but I feel like I'm just

keeping it for a specialness. Is that inefficient or do you say, no, you're actually onto something? I mean, I think it depends on the intervention, right? I think you can absolutely stack. I think, I think when we, we often, again, we often think that there should be one answer, right? There should be one thing that we can do that's going to make all the difference. And I, and ultimately that's almost never the case. It's usually a concert of things, right? Imagine life, like, like, uh, like, like, uh, a symphony, right? If only half of the musicians are playing or a quarter of the musicians are playing or all the musicians are playing, but they're playing different stuff,

it's gonna sound like shit. So thinking about this in that way is really about cultivating our ecosystem inside and outside of ourselves in our immediate local vicinity so that all the musicians are playing together, right? They're all playing roughly the same volume and intensity when they should. They're all playing in tune, right? They're all playing in the same rhythm. And when we do that, whether with combining these different techniques, and again, Apollo is based on music, right? It's basically music composed for your skin instead of your ears. And so this is fundamentally, music is such an important metaphor because music is in a lot of ways, our go-to to help us shift from one state of energy or mood to another. And it's such an easy tool to access and has been for a long time that many of us just

totally take it for granted. So there's a really interesting opportunity in that that Apollo helps to activate that system and helps to align our actions with our intentions, right? That is where the win is. The win is alignment. It's being in tune and having our actions in tune with our intentions. If we want to go to sleep and sleep well every night, but we're drinking coffee or some stimulating caffeinated beverage in the afternoon, some of us are so sensitive, we're taught to drink in the morning,. It still affects us at night. There's like an eight hour half-life on that stuff, right? Or a four to six hour half-life that continues on and still in our bodies when

we go to sleep. And then we're like, well, why can't I sleep? I must need a sedative. There must be something wrong with me, right? We're feeding that negative cycle. So Apollo helps us to recognize that you don't necessarily need all that stuff. If you like coffee and you enjoy drinking it and you enjoy drinking alcohol, have a little bit once in a while, but don't do it because you feel you need it to wake up or fall asleep. Do it because you enjoy it, right? Align actions with intentions. Don't drink coffee. Don't stimulate yourself if you want to go to bed. And don't put yourself to sleep if you want to wake up, right? Bring it, bring it together. And so, so the, so the boots, you know, going back to that, I haven't tried them, so I can't tell you, but I would say combining the techniques is almost always more

effective than using them individually. And they're not mutually exclusive, but that being said, the timing can also be important. So sometimes, you know, like Apollo, I think when you post workout, Apollo works the best on rebuild and recover right after a workout in that five minutes after a workout, you turn it on, rebuild and recover. We've shown in studies that heart rate comes down within two to five minutes, very much more quickly than it does when you don't use it. And HRV goes up much more quickly within two to five minutes than people who don't use it. This was done in NCAA and collegiate elite athletes. And we know that that's a reliable effect that shows the body's calming down more quickly. So if you time it in that way and use the Apollo for that five minute recovery post-workout,

and then you throw the boots on, or you throw the boots on while your Apollo's on, by the time your Apollo comes off or turns off, you start the boots, you know, there's different ways you can time things together. Yeah. Okay. Brilliant. I really appreciate what you're doing, the commitment you've made. I mean, I just really appreciate it. And then if we could just pull on one thread really quickly, which is what are you seeing the future of technology for human flourishing? Where do you start to get interested in? Oh, big question.

Well, so I think the short answer to that question is I see the future of technology as technology that empowers us to heal ourselves on our own, right? Which is really like a Hippocratic approach to medicine, which is not making our patients dependent on us or dependent on a healthcare system or dependent on medicine, but actually using the medicine and the healing practices and the tools like technology to help teach us or remind us of our innate inborn ability to heal ourselves. So where we're going with that is I think wearables are a perfect example, right? So Gen 1 wearables that came out 10 plus years ago, they just track numbers. They track steps. They track activity. They try to track sleep cycles. They don't give us any input

other than the numbers. Gen 2 wearables, we're looking at Oura Ring, the new Apple Watch, the new Fitbits, the new Garmins, the Woops. They actually give us, they measure a whole bunch of stuff. Then they give us actionable insights that say, here are some steps that you can take to fix these numbers, right? However, the effort is the major effort is still on us. We still have to change our behavior. Again, change can be threatening or be perceived as threatening when we're already in a chronic stress state. That requiring the user to make the change is a huge effort and a huge bottleneck in this healing process. Gen three of wearables, which Apollo, I would say, is the first of, is a wearable that actually changes the body to help us change our minds more effectively, right? You just put it on, you turn it on,

and it does stuff in the background. It does its thing while you are doing whatever it is you were doing in your day-to-day life. And then it helps you to optimize your system functioning, mind-body system functioning, so that when you come up against stress, when you come up against adversity or challenge, you're already in a better state to adapt to that and address it from a standpoint of safety and growth rather than a standpoint of fear and shame and guilt, et cetera, right? And I think that where that's going, which is to answer your question, the part I'm most excited about is what we call closing the loop. Right? So, Apollo right now works for the way the way it's described in the app, it works for about 90 to 95% of people with all the iterations that we've had so far. We're now in like gen three or four of the experience. And every time we

improve it, we improve the number of the percentage of people who respond to it. The next generation, which I am so excited about, that we actually have been working on since the early days is learning about you as an individual, learning about what works best for you, not just in terms of your, your, what vibration patterns are best for you, but what, um, what timing works best for you. When during the day are you under the most stress? When is your heart rate the highest? When are you sleeping the worst? When are things in your life going, when are you being triggered to access a stress state when it's not necessarily warranted or needed? And then turning it on, turning the Apollo on automatically for you. So to retrain your, our brains to help us recognize, hey, I didn't realize, as you were saying earlier, right? I didn't realize I was stressed out right now, but the Apollo is sensing something that

is detected that I might be stressed out and it's sending me a signal that's helping bring balance to my body so that I can perform more effectively in the situation. And the best example of that would be like abating a panic attack, right? Recognizing that there's certain movements, certain heart rate numbers that are going to be consistent with when people have a panic attack, and we can detect that and then help people abate that panic attack. And this is probably going to be, again, 2022 for when this first starts to come out. But I think that is the future of all this technology, and it is so exciting. I love it. Dave, what a pleasure to know that you're working on solving this. Pleasure for me to know you and this conversation is just rich. So I want to say thank you. Thank you for making

it real and personal to give some history of why this has been important to you. It's been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me on. Oh yeah. Very cool. And again, apolloneuro.com forward slash finding mastery for the 15% off. And again, I really appreciate you giving a discount to our crew. Absolutely. It's our pleasure. Thank you again. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community. And if you're enjoying the show, the easiest no-cost way to support is to hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you're listening. Also, if you haven't already, please consider dropping us a review on Apple or Spotify.

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