Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - Born to Feel – Unraveling The Root of Stress and Anxiety | Psychiatrist, Dr. David. Rabin

Episode Date: August 2, 2023

I think it’s fair to say we all know a thing or two about stress. Hopefully we’ve all found a practice (or several) to help us manage it. Our guest today has gone a few steps further…Dr. David Rabin – Dr. Dave as he’s better known – has dedicated much of his life’s work as a neuroscientist, psychiatrist, and innovative health tech entrepreneur to studying the impacts of chronic stress and developing groundbreaking approaches to stress management, treatment-resistant illnesses, and our bodies’ inherent ability to heal itself. As co-founder and Chief Medical Officer of Apollo Neuro, Dr. Dave led the way in creating the first scientifically-validated wearable technology that actively improves your health by strengthening your nervous system and resilience to stress over time. This revolutionary tech has been a game changer in my life, and it’s one of the reasons I’m so stoked to have Dr. Dave back on the podcast and to have partnered with his company, Apollo Neuro.Last time he was on the podcast, over 2 years ago, we touched a great deal on how powerful the human mind is – why we’re uniquely suited to adapt to and overcome adversity. This time around, we dive deeper into the science of stress, why we may be entering a transformative time for mental health, and some of the non-invasive, alternative therapies he believes can help us in our respective journeys to heal ourselves.With compelling anecdotes and cutting-edge knowledge, Dr. Dave shares hope for the future, where new tools and approaches might finally enable us to use the elusive term "cure" in the context of mental health. He’s a scientist who truly thinks outside the box and I can’t wait for you to hear his extraordinary insights._________________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. And so while we're at one of the worst ever times of mental health in the entire history of Western culture, in terms of number of people who are sick and number and ability to effectively treat those people and give them relief, we're also hopefully entering what could be one of the most transformative times for mental health where these new tools are coming up that are actually showing that we might start to be able to use the cure word for mental health and that's never been a word we've been allowed to use used before. Okay, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm your host,

Dr. Michael Gervais by trade and training a high performance psychologist. And I'm super excited to welcome Dr. Dave Rabin back to the podcast for this week's conversation. I think it's fair to say we all know a thing or two about stress. Hopefully we've all found a practice or several to help us manage it. Now our guest today has gone a few steps further. Dave has dedicated much of his life's work as a neuroscientist, a psychiatrist, and health tech entrepreneur, to studying the impacts of chronic stress and developing groundbreaking approaches to stress management, treatment-resistant illness, and our body's relationship to trauma. As co-founder and chief medical officer of Apollo Neuro, Dr. Dave led the way in creating

the first scientifically validated wearable technology that actively improves your health by strengthening your nervous system and resilience to stress over time through the use of touch therapy. So the Apollo wearable doesn't just read your biomarkers like many other wearables. It's actually helping to promote a state change. I mean, this tech for me and for many of the folks I work with is a game changer. And I don't say that lightly. It's one of the reasons I'm so stoked to have Dave on the podcast and to have partnered with his company, Apollo Neuro. Last time he was on the podcast, that was over two years ago,

we touched a great deal on how powerful the mind is, why we are uniquely suited to adapt to and to overcome adversity. In this conversation, we dive even deeper into the science of stress, why we may be entering a transformative time for mental health, and some of the non-invasive alternative therapies that he believes can help us in our respective journeys to heal ourselves. He's a scientist who truly thinks outside the box, and I can't wait for you to hear his extraordinary insights. So with that, let's dive into this week's conversation with Dr. Dave Rabin. All right, Dave, it's been like two and a half years since you were on this podcast last. And I love your work. I've loved following what you're doing. And can you just maybe almost like push back your chair a little bit and tell us what you've been up to and then give us a sense of like where your head is at now and maybe the state of the union when it comes to stress and anxiety and even mental health from a social standpoint, from a society standpoint.

For sure. I think that's a great place to start. And thank you again for having me back. It's always a pleasure to be here with you. And I've been loving the conversations you've been having lately. I find them very inspiring and at a time where we really do need more tools than we've ever had to deal with the onslaught of incoming stress that we face on a daily basis. It is welcome to hear you bring those insights to the community. And I think that really speaks to the answer of your first question, which is that people are more stressed out than ever right now. And I think one of my friends showed me a statistic the other day that isn't like a perfect scientific statistic, but it was actually very interesting, which is that we consume, the average human being is consuming in the first 15 minutes of waking up and looking at their phones as much information as people were consuming in a week of being alive 50 years ago before cell

phones. And that is pretty profound, right? Just the amount of incoming information that comes in through that little box that we hold in our hands all the time and all, and we're not taught how to feel the stuff that matters and to kind of let the stuff that doesn't matter so much and is not true and useful to us go. And when we're constantly bombarded by information, it causes overstimulation and stress, and that stress has to be dealt with. And I think what we're seeing in the clinical community when, you know, with our clients and more and more people coming to us, especially Gen Z folks, is that people aren't getting taught the tools, right? They're not learning in school or from their parents because often their parents weren't taught.

I know I wasn't taught growing up about breath work, intentional breathing, meditation, yoga, having a good regular exercise routine. That was one of the things that I did on my own because I love sports and athletics and competitive engagements like that. But in general, a lot of this other stuff wasn't taught. And so we're seeing now the downstream effects of overstimulation on a consistent basis, constant incoming information from news, responsibilities, work, children, et cetera. And then all of that without the tools to deal with it. And so I think the call to action that we're trying to really bring forward is how do we get more people the tools they need to deal with what's coming in? And okay, so first of all,

first and foremost, yes, our ancient brain has not caught up with the modern day rhythm. As a neuroscientist, I want to just kind of think about our brains, that the statement that we're making that we've got more information flooding in. And is it the speed of information? Because we've always had information coming, but we're able to look on the horizon. We're able to be outside know, be outside a bit more and our brain has not caught up with the modern way of processing. Is that where you're

thinking about it or is it something else? It's like more the speed of information as opposed to the cadence between outdoor, indoor, horizon-focused processing as opposed to like four inches in front of your eyeballs? Yeah, so it's a great question, right? And I love kind of reframing it that way. And maybe it's even more simple than that. It's that back in the dark ages, back before we had screens as children, back before we had technology soothing us when we were upset, rather than us learning, having to learn how to do it ourselves, we still had a lot of stress, right? Dealing with the Black Plague, big stressor, dealing with all the other adversity of not necessarily having enough food or water or not having acceptance by our community or having actual predators around,

which we don't often anymore, right? These are all very real stressors, but they occur usually in the past. They occurred in bursts and you'd have a period where you don't have food and then you get food and then you have food for a time and you don't have that lack of food stress anymore. And then you, you know, you have a predator, you deal with that predator, and then you don't have predator stress anymore. But it's not constant every moment of every day, like existential kind of stress, like spending a lot of time thinking about things we can't control, or negative intrusive thinking, or resisting experience, resisting what's happening around us. And I think a lot of it has to do with, it's, you know, it's two things, right? Number one, like we, you talk about a lot of like allostatic load, like how much load is there that we have to deal with? And then how well trained are our skills to deal with said load? And I think the big, the bigger challenge, we do have a lot of incoming load now that is perhaps more information load wise than we did before.

And work doesn't just go nine to five now, you know, it continues on to your phone when you go home. But we also have not practiced the same skill sets like the mindfulness and the self-awareness techniques and the self-soothing techniques that many people in the past had to learn because they didn't have smartphones and they didn't have technologically advanced tools that could actually soothe your body for you without or distract you or numb you to stress. And so right now that's what we're seeing a lot. And parents don't know any better because they're stressed out. So they're like,

oh, my kid's upset. Let's give them an iPhone or let's give them an iPad or something, right? And from a psychiatrist and psychologist neuroscience perspective, that's like the worst thing you could do to your child because they need at a young age, at the youngest age possible to learn how to self-soothe. And so if we can teach them how to do that on their own by either role modeling it themselves or kind of helping them understand how to do it, helping them watch other kids doing it, learning how to just focus on your breath, learning how to give yourself a hug, learning how to take it out on the field, go exercise, go run, right? Those kinds of self-soothing techniques get trained and practiced over time so that we can take on more load. But if we haven't mastered those techniques or haven't

even learned how to do them from the beginning, all of a sudden the load starts to go up and we're like, well, what do I do now? I'm completely overwhelmed and helpless. Okay. I love where you're taking this in because you just said a phrase that is, it's specific. Allostatic load is something you and I might talk about on a regular basis, but could you make sure that we're getting some clarity there and how that an allostatic load leads to chronic stress? And maybe just open up allostatic load and acute, moderate, and chronic stress as a clarifying point. For sure. So in general, allostatic load is a word that kind of means and is commonly referred to as like the cumulative overall burden of life events or stress or any kind of like incoming input to us. So it's just like the stuff we have to deal with is another way of thinking about it.

And it is inclusive of everything, physical, emotional, mental, pain, spiritual, everything. Everything we have to deal with kind of falls under that umbrella. And you probably have a more specific description of that term that you use for athletes, but oh yeah, so it's similar. It's the cumulative impact on not being able to shed or work well with a stressor. And so something my dad used to always say to me is like, and I actually don't know the origin of it. I think I do, but I don't know the full origin. This is a good prompt for me to go do that. Maybe you do, but this term gunny sacking, and it's not like one little pebble that you put in your sack is too much, but when you haven't

emptied your sack or to release in whatever said way, we hold on. And before you know it, the bottom of the satchel breaks open and we kind of lose all of our gunny sacks or lose all of our gunny. So can you can before we take it one step further, the state of the union for mental health, are we on a negative slope? Do you think we're trending even? And you and I both know the data, but where are you feeling the state of the union right now? How do I frame this positively? Because it's not all positive. I think the challenge... So number one, it's critically important that we maintain hope as a community that we can solve these hard problems, right? Mental health challenges are probably the single most expensive and most challenging issue to solve of our

generation. And we have not successfully figured it out yet. So the challenge from what we've seen, and just going back a few years to like pre-COVID times to where we are right now, is that pre-COVID, we were going down a very mediocre, we were on a very mediocre trajectory as Western medicine practitioners of mental health, in that the most medications and most tools we were using, while they work for people who participate in them, do not work for probably 50% roughly of people long-term. So that means that over 50% of people, or at least 50% of people who ever receive a diagnosis of a mental illness have that diagnosis for life. And that includes substance use disorders, which went up dramatically during COVID and mental illness diagnoses went up dramatically during COVID,

like depression and PTSD. So that is kind of where we're at in the Western medical model. And we don't have a lot of viable solutions that have really come to the surface, aside that have actually been fully integrated into Western medical care for mental health, except for two things, psychedelic assisted therapy and wearable tech and general like neuro like neurostimulation technology that's non-drug. And that is where things become a little more positive, because if you look at the data that's coming out from these paradigm shifting tools, which are non-drug tools that allow you to like a wearable like Apollo that can deliver vibration to the body that helps the body restore balance naturally or tools like psychedelic medicines where used properly, they can kind of give the brain a bit of a neurochemical reset in therapy that allows people to access states of vulnerability that facilitate healing and unlocking of our potential, that these techniques are actually showing and being shown to be some of the most groundbreaking, most paradigm-shifting tools we've

ever seen in mental health. So it's very interesting because you know that the pendulum always swings both ways, right? And so while we're at one of the worst ever times of mental health in the entire history of Western culture, in terms of number of people who are sick and ability to effectively treat those people and give them relief. We're also hopefully, and what the data is showing, entering what could be one of the most transformative times for mental health where these new tools are coming up that are actually showing that we might start to be able to use the cure word for mental health. And that's never been a word we've been allowed to use before. So that's really-

Whoa, that's a bold statement. Are you thinking about that word? I think about it every day. I'm going to pause the conversation here for just a few minutes to talk about our sponsors. 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. And building those relationships, it takes more than effort. It takes a real caring about your people.

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So if you're trying to hit your daily protein goals with something seamless, I'd love for you to go check them out. Get a free variety pack, a $25 value and 10% off for life when you head to davidprotein.com slash finding mastery. That's David, D-A-V-I-D, protein, P-R-O-T-E-I-N.com slash finding mastery. And now back to the conversation. So this is where I want to get into the conversation about psychedelics. And I want to get into the conversation about technologies that are assisting decreasing allostatic load. And I want to go upstream quickly and see if we can get it down into a sentence for you or two, of course, which is like in your best estimate,

what is the main source of people's stress and anxiety right now? And I'm purposely putting stress and anxiety together, knowing clearly that they are different. But what is the main source for people's stress and anxiety right now? I think the most common answers that I hear or that I would typically give would be news, work, responsibilities, and those kinds of things. But I think that if I were to actually narrow it down to one thing, I would say it's the systematic denial of our feelings. God, I love that.

Because we're made to feel. Like we were born to feel. And everything makes us feel. And so if we deny those feelings, then we get stuck, right? And so it's really about feeling what comes up that allows us to process and then let go, as you were saying earlier, let go of the lead here, the difference between feelings and emotions. And for the community that hasn't done a deep dive here, we had Dr. Antonio Damasio on, which was just a masterclass on what makes humans special, which is our ability to feel. So just quickly, emotions are physiological states that we can observe. And they are responses to internal processing or external cues.

So I could think about something and it could trigger emotions. Now, the emotions, again, we can observe. It's like sweaty hands or pupil dilation or constriction or whatever. We can see it in people. Breathing, heart rate. Feelings are the interpretation of that emotional experience. And, and so what you're saying is the way that you're interpreting your experience is so grounding and so fundamental to a human experience that when you become sophisticated at working with your feelings, you no longer are carrying around one load and another load and the third load before you know it, you're overloaded.

You're actually working well with letting go and shedding and processing that quote unquote load. Do I have that right from your perspective? Almost completely. Okay. So add to it. The only thing I would add is that there's a discrepancy there where feeling is not just what you described. It can be that, but what comes first is the feeling part of feeling, right? Which is just not, it's not thinking. It's not, it's not thinking about what that emotion means to you and interpreting it. It's just feeling it. Oh, cool. Yeah. Nice nuance. That's nice. So it's related and independent that does not have to have thinking to analyze the experience. Right. There's no analysis required

for feeling. That's the beauty of feeling. It's literally just nonjudgmental experience. It's like, I have an emotion. Maybe that emotion is joy, and maybe it's anger, but it's something. And rather than judge it, I'm just going to feel what it is and just try to understand what this emotion is trying to signal to me right now. What is this telling me that is going on inside me or in my environment that I'm supposed to pay attention to? That's what emotions are. They're literally signals that are trying to tell us to pay attention to something in a certain way. And so the interpretation of that gets really messy when we start to interpret too early and analyze too early and prejudge because we're like, oh, I feel angry. I remember what that feels like. I remember my parents telling me when I was a kid that I'm not allowed to feel that way.

So that means that's bad. I must be bad for feeling this way. What's wrong with me? All of a sudden, your ability to interpret that signal has completely been tossed out the window and you've already judged it and judged yourself in the process. You've eliminated your ability to adapt smoothly to that experience. So what we teach is non-judgmental feeling, which is saying reserve judgment. Judgment is part of the interpretation process.

Just feel the emotion first for the signal that it is not good or bad, and then let that guide you towards the interpretation before you've made a decision off the bat. Okay. So let's do that with anxiety. Let's do that with an anxiousness. So I start thinking about, okay, cool. Let's make it like super concrete and we can go two ways, right?

Like we could go like, let's go with a thought stem. So I have a thought and I'm thinking about something that is scaring me. So let's go with like, I'm going to let someone down. Let's just oversimplify it. I've got this thought and I'm going to let somebody down. And can you walk me through a best practice? For sure. So the first thing I would ask you is, what is the circumstance of you having that thought?

Like, where am I having it? Yeah, just give me an example of a situation that might result in you having a thought like that. Well, I'm making breakfast and I start thinking about the decisions I'm going to make in my business. And I've got to lay some bets. And if I don't lay the right bets, we don't grow fast enough. If I lay too big of a bet, you know, it could blow the thing up. And so I start thinking about, you know, the full team here at Finding Mastery. Okay.

And about, and then the thoughts come up about potentially letting them down in the future. That's right. Yep. That's right. Yep. So they've trusted me to make these decisions and I'm making it up as I go. Right. Yeah. And that's a lot of responsibility and it's a lot to think about because you're thinking about yourself and you're thinking about your business and you're

thinking about everybody that business touches. Amen. Right. And that's a huge stress for any of us business owners, startup founders daily, every moment. So you think about that and I'll relate it to the example of public speaking, right? Public speaking is the greatest fear and failure at public speaking is the greatest fear that human beings state they have more than death. They fear messing up while public speaking. And what happens is when you think about that, what other people are thinking about you, for instance, or not being able to meet up to other people's expectations while you are in the act of performing something for those people, like making a really important decision or giving a talk, what are you doing? You're taking energy away from doing the talk or making the decision,

and you're putting it on future casting into what could be. But we're notoriously terrible about predicting the future. It's something that we actually don't have that much control over. What we do have control over, however, is what we do right now. And what we know, right, if I were to ask you, do you think you're going to give a better talk if you have 100% of your available mental and physical resources? Or do you think you're going to make a better decision with 100% of your resources? Or do you think you're going to make a better decision with 60 or 70% of your resources? Or do you think you're going to make a better decision with 60% or 70% of your resources available to you and 30% future casting? But Doc, I know. I know.

I know, Doc. But the thoughts come up and, man, I feel it. And I can work with it beforehand. But then when I'm walking on stage, I'm like, why did I do this to myself? My heart is pounding. This is actually, I do this to myself? My heart is pounding. This is actually, I enjoy public speaking, but like my heart is pounding. You know, that's what happens. Yeah.

And like, I'm not, I don't know what to do with that. And yes, I want to be all in, but it becomes kind of overwhelming and I can feel my hand shaking and, and, and, and. Yeah. And, and so, so it starts with that. So you're, what you're describing is the real experience, right? That's the, the felt experience that the body starts to manifest as a result of spending time paying attention to things that we can't control. So what you're describing when you're talking about future, thinking about the future or thinking about the past and worrying or regretting, right? And what you're talking about your heart is beating fast. What that signal is not

good or bad. That signal is your body signaling to you. I detect threat. I detect uncertainty. I detect things in the environment that I'm paying attention to that are uncertain or unfamiliar to me. And those could be things and typically are things that we don't have control over. And so the techniques that we use, that we focus on, and the way we think about anxiety in general is anxiety is the signal that arises in us that can come up in lots of different ways. It can come up as chills. It can come up as like tension or solar plexus, racing heart, sweating, all the things we talk about, racing thoughts.

And it comes up as a signal there's uncertainty in our environment. Again, it's not good or bad. So what it's telling us is pay attention to what is uncertain around you. Address it. And if it's not a survival threat, then let it go because it's not going to help you right now. But again, this is a very, very fundamental cognitive behavioral therapy technique, which is called thought questioning. And this is something that we should teach to every single human being very young, but we don't. And it just involves doing yourself the respect of asking yourself, when I have a thought, is this thought true and useful to me right now in this moment?

And if it is, and it passes that test, then we allow it in and we pay attention to it. But if it's, and those are usually things that pass are things we allow it in and we pay attention to it. And those are usually things that pass are things we have control over. Like, I'm bringing my best self to this moment. But if we spend and allocate time and resources allowing untrue and useless thoughts into our attention, it's like letting a vampire into your consciousness, right? It just sucks energy away from you so that you don't have those resources to bring your best self and to be your full self when you're presenting or when you're making decisions for your team because you're distracted by what people are thinking about you or what people might think about you or what you actually might think about yourself, right? So the anxiety

is a signal. Anxiety is actually the key to help people start to sift through what is actually making us feel unpleasant. It's not bad. And it's reserving that judgment of the feeling and just feeling it that allows it to actually pass. And I actually addressed my own public speaking anxiety years ago this way, which I could talk about later. But it was through these practices of breathing and presentness that actually helped me realize in the moment that I was one of those people spending like 50% of my time on stage thinking about what the people listening to me were thinking about me.

And I just started to focus on what I was talking about because I knew that they were, I know what I know. And I know they're here to hear me talk. And I'm going to give a better talk if I just talk and not think about them. And of course, I gave better talks and it self-validated for me. Yeah, me, the big unlock was going from I have to be great about them. And of course I gave better talks and it's self-validated for me. Yeah, me, the big unlock was going from, I have to be great for them. They're expecting something from me that like, I don't want to disappoint that narrative

to this is a great opportunity. And what a privilege it is to share and talk about things that I'm still learning and I love learning more about. Okay, quick pause here to share some of the sponsors of this conversation. 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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You spell it F-E-L-I-X-G-R-A-Y.com and use the code FindingMastery20 at FelixGray.com for 20% off. And with that, let's jump right back into this conversation. Before we get to the tech and psychedelics, what are most of us doing wrong when it comes with working and managing stress, working with and managing stress? a lot of things. We're not grateful enough for one. You know, we don't, we don't, we don't operate with grace, right? We don't prioritize grace. I think in his historically grace as a word used to be like an ultimate goal for human beings. It's like an angelic level of being where you're just fleet free flowing smoothly without resistance, like water flowing down a river, right? That's life. That's like Bruce Lee, right? You're just flowing. And that is, I think, one of the things that we have often forgotten about because we spend so much time thinking about what we don't have and spending so much

time watching other people and wanting what they have and then regretting things that we've done in the past and, you know, grilling ourselves and judging ourselves for not doing enough and not being good enough. And there's a constant comparisons, but we're, we're all born great as we are. Do you know what I mean? Like that's like teaching people that they are born great and they don't need to do anything other than just be themselves and participate in the life experience of self-discovery, which is what life is all about, that's it. And that's what helps us be present. And when we're present, we bring all of ourselves to every moment. When we're not

present, we just don't. And so that's this practice of embodied being, right? It's like, we talk about our minds could be anywhere past, present, or future, but they're usually in the past or the future. And our bodies are always in the here and now they don't go anywhere. So that's why breathing and meditation and yoga and all of these like body somatic practices that embody our minds into our bodies, they remind us of their connection are so inherently healing and i think if we all remember to do more of that stuff more often it just makes us more present and like you like you talk about all the time it just brings more of us to every single moment okay like the work grace if if my wife and i were were to have a daughter, we would have, we wanted to name her Grace.

And so we had a son and we named him Grayson. Um, and so the word grace matters, uh, to us. And there's like, um, there's multiple words that I, I encourage people to look up the word grace. Like it's this union with quote unquote God. It is a simple elegance and refinement of movement. So there's a gracefulness in the way that we conduct ourselves. And you can also have an inner grace, which is the way that you do like an Aikido or Judo or a mind like water to quote Bruce Lee in the way that you work from the inside out. And so that word grace, I love that. I've never talked about this. And I love that you bring that up as a first mover when it comes to working with stress. And so all of the psychological skills.

We all need goals, right? We all need goals. So, okay, one more thing. And I keep saying this before we get into Apollo Neuro and psychedelics is being and becoming. I'd love your quick riff on the tension between those two and the ambition of becoming one's best. And I think I heard you say as a first principle, you're already it. You're already, quote unquote, did you say perfect? I can't remember how you said it, but great. You're already great. So that, that tension. And I, I listened to the hustle hard mentality and I put my hands over my head, like what? Like, that's not it. It's not enough. So, but there does require hard work to

become, you know, like it's not enough and, and I'm not saying hard work isn't required. It is. But there needs to be a second kind of beat there. So can you talk about the difference between becoming and being, the tension there? Yeah. I mean, I think, again, becoming is like the future look and being is what we are right now. And we are human beings. So inherently, being born a human being means that we are being first. At least that's what we should teach, but we don't really teach

that. Eastern techniques and tribal techniques do a much better job of it. But in the Western culture, everything is more aligned around what are we becoming, right? What is our trajectory aimed at? And I think the magic is really in the middle between both because we want to be able to be present as often as possible and just be ourselves. But we also want to achieve. We want to, many of us have ambitions and discovery itself is one of the most exciting experiences you can have as a human being, right? Is to discover something new and feel like you did it. Like you were involved in this process of learning something new about yourself or new about the world you didn't know before. That's why kids are so happy all the time.

Every single moment's a new discovery for them. And so it's, I think the balance between being and becoming is like allowing some of that childhood innocence of being and discovery to come through with us into our adulthood, right? And to respect the inner child and to respect play and to not just focus on producing, but to respect play and that balance. And it's the interplay between them where being present allows us to bring more of ourselves to every moment, which increases our ability to self-discover ourselves, which then increases our ability to become what we were ultimately meant to be. The hardest part for people in this process is accepting the premise of all of this self-discovery stuff, which we have to accept in science, which is you don't know what you're going to become. We can't know what we're going to become. We can't necessarily know what we're capable of, and we can't necessarily know what we're discovering. That's why the process is so exciting. Oh, come on. Because I'll tell you what,

like that return to innocence is an important word, a phrase for me and my family. And like, I think about that a lot. So my day, the way I organize my day as I run to the edge, you know, to the frontier, to my best ability, and then I need to return to a place of high ground, a place where I get out of the water, the rapids, and I can dry off. So I'm mixing a metaphor here a little bit. But this is where I use your technology that you introduced to the world a couple of years ago. I use it twice a day. And so I use it every time I do something intense. Right afterwards, I use it to downregulate with speed. And so I use your tech to dry off, if you will, from the rapids of life so that I can return to that innocence,

if you will. It improves my HRV. It lowers my heart rate in general. And it gives me that sense of like, I'm not in threat. So I can be more closely connected to that innocent, playful beginner's mind. And I use it right before I go to bed to help me ease into a sleep state. So I think it's a perfect, it's an eloquent transition to talk about your tech here for a minute and like the research that you're doing around it, the peer-reviewed clinical studies that you've done. So where do you want to take us when it comes to Apollo Neuro? What you're excited about? Maybe we just start with what it does. That would be probably pretty grounding. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you kind of talked about it a

little bit in the way you use it. And Apollo is a wearable device. It can be worn anywhere on the body. I have it on my chest. I think you wear it on your wrist or ankle, right? I wear it on my wrist. On your wrist. Yes. I have it on my chest with a clip. It's a little device that you can wear that vibrates at very gentle rhythms that soothe the body. And they soothe the body in a similar way physiologically as soothing touch or holding a purring animal or having ocean waves wash over you or getting a hug from a friend. And that's a highly conserved, evolutionarily conserved safety pathway that exists in every human being and every mammal that has existed for, oh, it seems like over 200 million years, hardwired into our

nervous systems since the very first mammals were nursing their young afterbirth. That induced this touch relationship that facilitates oxytocin, dopamine, serotonin release, and bonding, mother-child bonding, right? That is fundamentally the safety signal that everyone remembers, whether you can consciously remember it or not. It's a feeling that we all remember. And so studying that, we realized that people under stress weren't getting enough of that. They weren't getting enough of that safety feedback to combat the stress and the threat that was overstimulating people. And we realized that by sending these gentle, soothing rhythms to the body,

you could kind of nudge the body back into its balanced state and back into a state of embodied being rather than a state of up here, thinking about the past or the future, regretting and forecasting all the time, but really a state of embodied presentness. And so that was what the technology does and what it feels like. And we developed it originally for folks with PTSD and veterans who were studying at the University of Pittsburgh in the Department of Psychiatry. And I'm a psychiatrist and a neuroscientist, and I was working at the university at the time doing this work. And then we made a bunch of prototypes and realized that it worked for us and it worked for healthy folks and people who were just having day-to-day regular, busy, stressful lives. And when we started to see how

much our colleagues visit doctors and nurses and business people, accountants and fighter pilots, and all these different kinds of people started using this technology, I think you were actually one of the first to get our early prototypes. And the responses were so good that we realized it had to be a consumer wellness product that everybody could access. And then we started to do a lot more studies and the studies started to show that Apollo reliably improves resilience and recovery and heart rate variability. And that has impacts on sleep and focus and calm and creativity and helps us access just more of ourselves, which is really exciting. Okay. So I take potential conflicts of interest seriously, as I know you do. And

I don't know another way to say it, but when you sent me your tech and I put it on, I was like, oh shit, this is great. And it was one of those moments where I'm like, why didn't I think about this? Not only is it working and experientially I experienced it, which is a good product, but it's grounded in good science. Maybe you can talk about vagal tone for just a moment here. And so the point is, is like you sent it and I was like, this is great. And then I use it every day. And then we are able to have a business relationship where, you know, hopefully we as a community are supporting your business. Like, I don't know if this is a, I don't feel like this is a conflict because I'm talking about it, but I want your business to explode. And I want, because in return, the community of people that are using it are going to feel better, are going to live better, are going to be more

eloquent with the stressors that they experience in life. They're going to downregulate quicker, or, and your tech also helps increase stimulation by getting people geared up and ready to go do something hard, which I don't use it for that, but I use it for the down regulation. And so I couldn't be more bullish on what you're doing. And I just want to say thank you for supporting our community and supporting this podcast and being an innovator in the space using the beautiful science of psychology and neuroscience at service for innovation and product. And so I don't say that lightly, Dave, I really don't. And so I'm stoked on what you're building. And I really appreciate it.

Yeah. And it's not lost on either of us that, you know, according to NIMH, National Institute of Mental Health, like in the US, 31.1% of adults are experiencing anxiety over the course of their life. This is a real deal, a real product that you have that can help with it, specifically with the allostatic load and as a way to keep at bay potential anxiety and also to work with anxious states. So nice job. I'm so stoked for what you're doing. And then can you take, you, you hinted that you built it because of four people with trauma and this is maybe a nice little bridge. It's a gentle little vibration. Like why is the vibration so important? Maybe this is a tee up for vagal tone. And then how does that relate to some of the psychedelics and trauma that you're finding

to be important? That's a great question. So maybe I'll start by just telling you the story about how we actually discover Apollo and the technology behind Apollo and its wholeness. And that'll give you the connection to psychedelics. So vagal tone, which is the parasympathetic recovery nervous system that exists in every human being and every mammal, and actually probably in every single reptile as well, is critical for regulating our recovery response. And it is in balance with

sympathetic tone, right? So just quick recap, sympathetic fight or flight system is responsible for responding to threat, survival threat, or perceived survival threat. Let's throw emails and news and responsibilities into perceived survival threat. And then there's actual survival threats, which are like lack of food, lack of water, lack of air, predators, immediate death, et cetera, right? So those two are very different, but the sympathetic fight or flight nervous system gets turned on in both cases. And we have to be the ones to make sure we remind ourselves what is actual survival and what's not actual survival. Because when that system gets triggered,

vagal tone comes way down, the recovery response nervous system comes down in activity, and our whole body diverts all blood flow to, and this is what happens to people with PTSD all the time, is all blood flow gets diverted to heart, lungs, skeletal muscles, motor cortex of our brain, and fear center of our brain. Why? To fight, flight, or get out of the situation, right? And so we want that to happen. We want all the resources to go to those systems when we're actually having a survival threat. But when we're answering emails, we don't want all of our resources going to our skeletal muscles and our heart and our lungs and our fear center. We want them to go to our thoughtful or empathy parts of our brains, right? Because we're not actually under threat. People with PTSD, their bodies, and even veterans,

veterans are so interesting to work with because they are some of the most highly trained physically and mentally trained individuals that are, you know, live around us. They are some, they're trained incredibly well, and yet they suffer a degree of difficulty with symptoms when they come back from being active duty that they can't function day-to-day, many of them, without a lot of help in regular civilian life. But they were doing way harder stuff overseas or in battle. And so that always interested me because I was like, well, what's wrong with these folks that they can't adapt when they come home to this easier life? And it turns out it's because their stress response system is sending all their resources

to their heart, lungs, and motor cortex and skeletal muscles and fear center. And it doesn't detect safety. And when safety is not detected, the vagal system, which is responsible for recovery, it's responsible for sleep, immunity, empathy, digestion, and food absorption, regulating metabolism, all of those things are resource depleted for sometimes years. And so what happens? Those systems dysfunction because they're not getting the resources they need. They're still being asked to function, but they're not getting the resources they need and they have less blood flow. So there's less waste clearance, which means more waste accumulation in those organ systems. And so of course they dysfunction. And so as we were

seeing these patterns, and you're familiar with all of this, but as we're seeing these patterns in the community, we realize, hey, what actually works for these people? And because none of the medications were working for PTSD, they have like a 30% success rate. So it was very poor. So we, and the NIMH hasn't approved new medication for PTSD since like Prozac and Zoloft over 17 years ago. So we're really at a loss.

And then of course, MDMA assisted psychotherapy comes around, right? And MDMA in the FDA trials right now with MAPS, which MDMA is a methamphetamine analog, 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine that selectively increases serotonin and some other things, but serotonin in particular in the emotional cortex of our brains. And what does it do in therapy? It helps us feel safe. It amplifies neurochemistry in the safety pathways of the brain. And when I learned this from studying MDMA therapy, because it works so well, and by works so well, I mean it's the best treatment we've ever had for PTSD. It has an 88% response rate in the phase three trials with people with treatment resistant, fully treatment resistant

PTSD with just three doses and 12 weeks of psychotherapy, 88% response rate, and 67% of people are no longer meeting diagnostic criteria two months out. Cure, right? Cure is why you're getting... It's the closest thing we've ever had at a glimpse of a cure for a mental illness. And now one final word from our sponsors. 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 Cozy Earth has become a new part of that. Their bedding, it's incredibly soft, like next level soft. And what surprised me the most is how much it actually helps regulate

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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 findingmaster at checkout for 20 off your first order that's caldera lab c-a-l-d-e-r-l-a-b dot com slash finding mastery let's jump right back into the conversation okay so i want to i want to just highlight something quickly this is not

taking a dose of mdma and or three and saying i'm good this is actually at a dose of MDMA or three and saying, I'm good. This is actually at a microdose or the level that you're describing is helping somebody feel safe. And so it's enhancing one of the great tools inside of psychotherapy is the relationship, the kind, empathetic, sometimes challenging relationship with the person. So it's increasing safety and connection. And then when that happens, magically people are like, oh, I'm different. I feel different. So that is a really important part that I don't think it is widely expressed enough. And I'm so glad that you just brought that piece up. Well, and that's what was so interesting to

us, right? Because we're like, how can this medicine with this therapy just in three doses possibly be so effective? And then I was trained to do the therapy myself, thanks to the good graces of Dr. Rick Doblin, who's executive director of MAPS, who encouraged us at the time in 2016 to start studying the mechanism of MDMA in humans. And what we found is that MDMA in the therapy is helping people feel so radically safe by molecularly amplifying safety pathways in the client's brain that we are already setting the foundation for by this relationship, as you said, that they feel safe enough to be vulnerable, right? So think about that.

That's all it is. It's safe enough to be vulnerable. And vulnerability, exposure to vulnerability, it unlocks healing because that's the stuff that's hurting, right? And if we're afraid of the stuff that's hurting or we shame it, or we guilt ourselves about it, or we judge ourselves for it, then we don't feel safe or comfortable exposing that

vulnerability, right? It feels shameful. It feels upsetting. And so the medicine helps to, just for a brief period, four to eight hours, just kind of like quiet that part of the brain molecularly, amplifying the safety of the therapeutic environment. And then that allows people to feel safe enough to heal and to be vulnerable. And so we saw that mechanism and we said, well, what else does that? Soothing touch. And so that ended up going back to the lab years later, years of research experimenting with different vibration patterns. And we figured out how to deliver not the MDMA, full MDMA effect, but at least the safety part of it. Because MDMA does a lot of things, but the safety part of it was something that we figured

out how to deliver by sending these very, very reliable rhythms to the body that are similar to the breath pattern, the breath resonance state that we call coherence that we get into when our heart and lungs are in sync in biofeedback or doing an intentional breathing exercise, which for believe it or not, for all humans, it's like somewhere between five and seven breaths per minute. Like we have a heck of a lot more in common than we think we do, you know? And so if you can get people to five to seven breaths per minute, even under situations of extreme stress, they will calm down and think more clearly and make better decisions and feel better.

And so we just experimented with that and we figured out how to do it by just delivering soothing vibrations to the body and it worked. And then that over time through multiple double blind, randomized placebo controlled crossover studies and real world studies in thousands of subjects ended up actually proving to work and be true. And that became the Apollo product we released in 2020. The linking between your training, your curiosity to solve something at scale, to innovate and create a product that is grounded and to use cutting edge medicine, if you will. Dave, I'm stoked on what you're doing. And I just hope that you feel like this insight that you had is that we're made to feel. I hope maybe you can feel the difference that you're making. And

I really hope that people in our community take a, because we care. This community, the Finding Mastery community, like really cares about living well for one reason, to help others do the same. This isn't, we're in some respects, we're the anti-self-help industry because we are, you know, the pro-help-others industry. But you got to put your, you got to take care of yourself to be able to do that well. And the reason taking care of others is so important is because no one does it alone, especially the extraordinary. So we need each other. All right, what do you say we do like a round two

and just dive deep into psychedelics and the mental health kind of opportunity there? What do you think about that? Anytime. I would love to do that with you. And where can we drive people right now to start, you know, in your ecosystem to be just a little bit better than they are today? Well, you can check out, if you want to hear about any of the stuff that we're talking about here, especially on the psychedelic front, I have a couple shows that I've been putting out that are really trying to translate this information better for the community. Because frankly, I feel like the neuroscience and clinical community have done a pretty poor job of

passing on the knowledge that we've learned over the years, which is quite substantial. And so I've put together a couple of shows with leading experts in the field. One of them is called Your Brain Explained, which is a quarterly show. The very first one is on this exact topic of MDMA-assisted therapy, why it's important, how it works, and how it's changing the way we look at mental health. And that's available on Apple and Spotify. And you can find it at yourbrainexplained.co. And then we also have a show called The Psychedelic Report, which is your single source of truth

for the psychedelic news, which is everything under the sun, technology, medicine, natural ways to access altered states of consciousness for healing, and really rethinking healing and giving people an understanding of everything that we have access to in what we call the psychedelic, which does not mean drugs. It means mind expanding, mind revealing. And to really help people understand that, understand what's going on in the forefront, that's coming straight out of the horse's mouth, straight out of the clinicians and the providers and experts, expert researchers mouths, which unfortunately are voices we don't hear as often as we should. And you can check that out at thepsychedelicreport.com. And hit me up on

socials at Dr. David Raven. I'm always happy to hear from you. And I want to support the commitment you've made to our community on Apollo Neuro. So it's apolloneuro.com forward slash fighting mastery. And you've been gracious enough to give our community a very special discount of 15%, which I know you're not doing for everyone. So we appreciate that. And stoked what you're doing in the world. And I hope our community goes to check you out.

Likewise. And I really appreciate you and all the hard work you're doing and all of the education you provide to the community. It couldn't be done without a team effort. So thank you. Let's create a rising tide. All right. Appreciate you, Dave. See you soon, Michael. 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,

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If you want to check out any of our sponsor offers you heard about in this episode, you can find those deals at findingmastery.com slash sponsors. And remember, no one does it alone. The door here at Finding Mastery is always open to those looking to explore the edges and the reaches of their potential so that they can help others do the same. So join our community, share your favorite episode with a friend, and let us know how we can continue to show up for you. Lastly, as a quick reminder, information in this podcast and from any material on the Finding Mastery website and social channels is for information purposes only. If you're looking for meaningful support, which we all need, one of the best things you can do is to talk to a licensed professional.

So seek assistance from your health care providers. Again, a sincere thank you for listening. Until next episode, be well, think well, keep exploring.