Good Life Project - Sara C. Mednick, PhD | How to Activate Your “Ease” Button

Episode Date: April 18, 2022

When was the last time you felt truly at peace? Relaxed, physically and emotionally at ease? How can you downregulate your mind and body and reclaim control over everything from your current state of mind to your sleep, risk of illness and even how fast or slow you age? What if you had so much more control over these than you imagined, no matter what seemingly breathless circumstance swirls around you? Turns out, we do, and it’s all about understanding our nervous system and how to actively bring ourselves into what my guest today, Professor Sara Mednick, calls the downstate. Sara is a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine and author of the powerful new book, The Power of the Downstate: Recharge Your Life Using Your Body's Own Restorative Systems. She is passionate about understanding how the brain works through her research into sleep and the autonomic nervous system. In fact, her seven-bedroom sleep lab works literally around the clock to discover methods for boosting cognition by napping, stimulating the brain with electricity, sound and light, and pharmacology. Her research findings have been published in such leading scientific journals as Nature Neuroscience and The Proceedings from the National Academy of Science, and covered by major media outlets, in no small part because of their importance and practical application in helping us feel better, and live healthier, more vibrant lives.You can find Sara at: Website | TwitterIf you LOVED this episode you’ll also love the conversations we had with Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor about understanding your brain to live a better life.Check out our offerings & partners: My New Book SparkedMy New Podcast SPARKED.Visit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The autonomic nervous system is actually an integral part of us as human beings and us as self-regulating, self-control, self-actualizing human beings. And that's a very new way of thinking. So when was the last time you felt truly at peace, relaxed physically and emotionally at ease. How can you down-regulate your mind and body and reclaim control over everything from your current state of mind, your sleep, your risk of illness, and even how fast or slow you age? What if you had so much more control over all of these than you ever imagined, no matter what seemingly breathless circumstance swirls around you. Well, it turns out we do. And it's all about understanding our nervous system and how to actively bring ourselves into what my guest today, Professor Sarah Mednick, calls the downstate.

Sarah is a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of the powerful new book, The Hidden Power of the Down State. She is passionate about understanding how the brain works through her research into sleep and the autonomic nervous system. In fact, her seven bedroom sleep lab, yes, that's right, seven bedrooms, works literally around the clock to discover methods for boosting cognition by napping, stimulating the brain with electricity, sound and light and pharmacology. And her research findings have been published in leading scientific journals like Nature Neuroscience and the Proceedings from the National Academy of Science and covered by major media outlets around the world in no small part

because of its importance and practical application in helping us feel better and live healthier, more vibrant lives. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. We'll be right back. The Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X.

Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. You've invested a substantial amount of your time, of your life, in the exploration of how the mind, how the body works,

how especially the brain works in the context of sleep and recovery and rest. And I'm always curious if there was any particular reason especially the brain works in the context of sleep and recovery and rest. And I'm always curious if there was any particular reason that you're drawn to that particular pursuit to sort of like the range of questions that you have been locked into for quite a substantial amount of time. Yeah, I've thought about this a lot. You know, there's this idea that in psychology, people are drawn to the question that they have kind of their own issue around, right?

So people with anxiety, studying anxiety or eating disorders, you know, like those kind of things. And I've been for the, you know, for my whole life as a scientist drawn to this question of can we get smarter? Can we improve? Can we get better? And I have always thought, is that some insecurity thing? Like, what remember in fourth grade, this teacher, Mrs. Spindle called me a dumb blonde. And I think I've been like, somehow trying to just prove her wrong. All those years ago, but I mean, I definitely I've worked in so many domains of seeing the question,

can we get smarter? But also what's the mechanism, right? So I've done electrical brain stimulation, I've done pharmacology to see, you know, what is the neurotransmitter system and what kind of things can you take or what kind of things shouldn't you take to get smarter using Ambien. I've looked at psychostimulants, such as, you know, the kind of ADHD medications that people are now taking or non-medical use. And, you know, use naps, looked at how these things change across aging and looked at, you know, the hormone cycle to see like, are there times where women are more powerful, you know, during with the fluctuations of hormones across the menstrual cycle and then across both sexes? How does it change when we age and what is kind of falling

apart as we get older? So yeah, I'm sort of, I guess, obsessed by that question. Yeah. I mean, it's a fascinating question. And you mentioned a couple of times, you know, like you're, you're fascinated with this question of how do we get smarter, which begs another question, which is what does that actually even mean? Yeah. I've gotten a ton of money from the military to do a lot of research. Well, the drug research was both military funding, but also NIH funding. But I had this thought of, could we create the superhuman? And I think that's something that DARPA and DOD have been very interested in is can you create something that's better than yourself? I've actually come to the sort of decision and I write about this in the book. I have a chapter that's everything you wanted to know about the down state, but we're afraid to

ask. And I start off with this question of like, you know, can we actually become superhuman? And I think I've come to the position of saying, I don't think it's possible. I think that when you're taking care of yourself in the best possible way, you're at your peak and no amount of drugs or stimulation or external stuff is going to, it's that inverted U-shaped function where the Yerkes-Dodson, right? So when you're really maintaining your down state and you're really taking care of all of those restorative processes and making sure you're well rested and making sure you've exercised and eaten well and your autonomic nervous system is in the right ratio, you're at your peak. And if you try to push yourself past

that, you're actually going to go to the start going down on the other side of the U-shaped function and getting worse. But I do think that if you're in a depleted state, that's when these interventions can help. So if you are not well rested, if you are dealing with some sort of medical condition, if you are aging, in those cases, I think that's when you really see the benefits of these different interventions. Because when you are depleted, you're on the left side of that upside down you, right? And then a little bit of stimulation can just put you into your peak. But in general, you know, I had this incredible opportunity to talk to Glover Teixeira, who is an MMA world

champion, is the oldest world champion of MMA fighting. And the way he did it wasn't by any drugs. He took himself by with two hands and just decided, I need to work on my recovery processes. And he basically started working on improving his sleep, improving his heart rate, you know, improving all the things that are not about working out. They're actually about not working out, you know, they're about really resting deeply. And he's become a world champion only after that happened. So it wasn't any of the stuff that people do to themselves now that kind of push themselves beyond what they think is superhuman. It's actually getting into the most natural state

of your most natural recovery. And when you really maximize that, that's when he found his own championship. Yeah, which is so, it's almost like a counterculture message because so much of the culture for so long now has said, you know, how do you quote, get ahead? How do you get smarter? How do you get more accomplished? How do you succeed in all the different domains of life? You know, and we're told it's about hustle. It's about working, you know, endlessly push, push, push, push, push. And it's those who can endure the relentless push longer than everybody else that ends up in that place. Right. It's amazing how, how the exact opposite is actually true. Like it's really, it's astonishing

to me. You know, I feel like I grew up in the eighties and that was like, you know, cocaine and bright lights, big city, and just pushing yourselves. And then that's where like the nap book, I have a book called Take a Nap, Change Your Life. And it's all about my research on how to use napping as this tool to be smarter and stronger and all this stuff and came out of that mentality of we need to find things that are healthy instead of just caffeinating yourself or taking Adderall all day and, you know, whatever it is that people were doing to try to jack themselves up and keep going, like that's not working. So let's try something else. I mean, the mentality wasn't, this is out of balance. The mentality was push yourself harder.

Here's a nap. And I think now, you know, post, I don't know if we're post pandemic, but in the ending, you know, years, hopefully of the pandemic, I think we've kind of hit this place where we're not in that mentality anymore. And so we're finding even that message of push yourself harder is just, it's so tone deaf. It doesn't speak to who we are and what we need and what we need and what we want anymore. Yeah. I mean, I feel like I agree with you. I think this window has just, for a variety of reasons, has led so many of us, you know, if we weren't asking the existential questions, if we weren't really looking at our life and our choices and how it was affecting us

before, I feel like so many are now. I think in no small way, you know, this phenomenon called the great resignation, the big part of that is just people looking broadly at the choices, the bargains that they've made that have led them to this place in life, not just in the context of work, but more broadly and saying, huh, I'm not entirely sure I want that to be the bargain that I keep making for the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years of my life. And that's leading to a lot of re-examination and sometimes wholesale change in the way that we move into the world. So it's an interesting moment for sure. Yeah, I feel like this process of the great resignation, I'm so impressed by it because there's a whole American dream that's actually the American short sale or whatever you want to say. It's not for most people possible, right? But we still have been given that idea. And I wonder, how is it that people are getting to that place where they're putting aside all that they've been brought up to believe and taking such big risks? It must have been a major transformation that happened during this pandemic that made people

be so brave to step outside of all of our norms of what we thought we were supposed to be doing. Yeah, I'm so fascinated by that same question. And it's interesting because I think the early wave of all of these decisions, I was asking that question more. Now I feel like the big risky move has actually become so normalized that it's sort of like you find a level of social support and acknowledgement that this is a valid thing to explore, that it feels less risky. It's like all the norms that stopped people from doing it beforehand have been blown up to a certain extent. And now a lot of people are saying, huh, I'm the only one in my social circle who's not doing this. So maybe I actually need to, like, what am I missing here?

Like, am I genuinely happy? Am I satisfied? Or am I deluding myself? So it's a really interesting shift. But then of course, like for that population who isn't changing their jobs and isn't creating a major transformation, it's obviously, it's always good to question things and just, there's nothing wrong with, if you were happy before, there's nothing wrong with sticking with the program that you were on. Completely, completely, right. I can imagine people are like, well, wait a second, maybe I should throw everything away and like try something new.

Yeah, no, I completely agree. You know, and I think that brings us sort of like nicely into the work that has become the focus of your most recent book. This sort of like notion that we tend to oscillate between various states as we move through life and not just like emotionally, physically, but our actual, our nervous system, which regulates so much of everything else that goes along our body. We have this, what you call it, an upstate and a downstate. and it influences everything. It influences when we're making decisions about great resignation or about where to move or about everything. When we're trying to, as you were talking about earlier, access the greatest amount of cognition and creativity, or whether we're just trying to feel well or alert and alive. These two states are just, they regulate so much on an almost sort of like under the radar

way. So take me into this world of these two states a little bit. Yeah. So I have been studying sleep for most of my career. And then at some point there was an, after the time of the nap book, my first book, then sleep science really shifted to becoming a much more technologically savvy environment. It used to just be, you know, you saw there was just a paper trail of the EEG and people would just have to sort of like move paper aside and say, okay, this is, you know,

slow wave sleep and this is stage two and this is REM. And then we started using more engineering skills to do signal processing of the EEG. And once you can do signal processing, you can start to see information in the EEG that is blind to the naked eye, that you can't just see visually. And that's where we discovered this idea of the slow wave. And the slow wave is the slowest activity of the brain in any time across your day or night. And what it really is, and this is where I got the word upstate and downstate, where there's an upstate which lasts for half a second. And that's where all of the brain activity, all of your neurons actually come together and start firing on all cylinders during this upstate. And it's where all of the major brain communication

happens. It's where the long range communication from frontal cortex to the back of the cortex, across the cortex, this is where all the longest, most sort of usually difficult kind of, you know, complex kind of thoughts occur. And then after the upstate, you have this sudden silence, the whole brain goes into basically what I call your brain dead for half a second. And that's called the down state. And we realized through a lot of research on this upstate down state cycle that this is where all of the restorative work of sleep happens. You have all of your muscle repair with growth hormone, you have decrease in cortisol, the stress hormone, but you also have protein synthesis only during this time.

This is the time where the rest of everything is completely shut off and your brain can go into deep repair mode and deep creation mode, really. You also have this plumbing system that clears out the toxins that are developed across the day from activity. And you have this plumbing system that goes through and just washes these toxins out of your brain during this slow wave. And also all the learning, you know, all the memory stuff that I've been studying really goes on by the fact that the slow wave is creating this period where you have all the brain areas communicating. And so the consolidation or sort of the laying down of long-term memories

occurs during that upstate followed by this deep rest. So then once we discovered that, I was also interested in, you know, it was clear that there was more to us than just our brain. And I was looking at all this work in HRV, heart rate variability, which is basically the rest and digest system of the autonomic nervous system, the parasympathetic system, which in the book I call restore, because it's actually the most restorative system that we have. And that is matched by this other system. That's the sympathetic system or the fight or flight system. And in the book, I call that REV. And what I found was that just like there's an upstate and a downstate in the slow wave, the REV system is the upstate of the autonomic nervous system. That's where you have all of your power and your energy and all your glucose utilization and your thinking is super intense and focused during that sympathetic rev activity. And it's followed immediately by parasympathetic restore

activity to write all of those, you know, to sort of write the boat, to write the ratio between this excitation and this restorative response. So then, you know, then I started thinking, you know, wow, are there other systems that have this cycle that seems to follow this rhythm of an upstate and downstate. And it just seemed like, oh, wow, like what a light bulb to go off was. Yes, in fact, every system, everything nature has created us to work with rhythms, you know, the underlying framework for all of our processes are rhythms. And the reason why is because it groups all of the things that all the activities that require energy into one period of time where you have the energy, you know, so the brain and

the body has better metabolism during the upstate and the metabolism and glucose utilization and the availability of glucose is highest during that upstate. So you are able to function better and you are able to do all those energy requiring activities during the upstate. And then immediately following that, you find these restorative downstates that then the rhythm also provides time for the restoration. And if you don't provide time for that restoration, the following upstate is not going to be as powerful, right? And so that's that coming back to growing up in the 80s,

where it was just go, go, go, do, do, do. And, you know, moving into that period now where we're sort of in this place of, was that working? Was that a good thing that we were doing? No, it wasn't, right? Because, you know, the metaphor I use is it's a crashing wave, right? The wave has to draw into itself and kind of work up all of its energy before the crashing part of the wave. And there is no wave that just crashes and crashes and crashes, right? You always have to have the other side of it, which is the restorative downstate side. So that's the world of the upstate

downstate. Yeah. I love the 80s reference too, as also a kid of the 80s in New York. I often wonder what you're describing. I'm like, huh, maybe that's why people not only called it the go-go 80s, but also the sort of like cocaine was the thing that was sort of like everywhere during the 80s. It's almost like it was, if're never allowing yourself to rest that so many people were relying on substances during that particular sort of like cultural moment to just keep pushing, pushing mean, it's big, but it's sort of like it's fast and small in the brain. And then that ripples out into this awareness that like, oh, actually, every single system in the body experiences this same cycle in different scales in different ways. And even when you move outside of the human body, it's nature. Nature has its own upstate and downstate and probably thousands of different versions of that. And what happens when sort of modern culture intervenes and using your language actually hijacks the rhythm? You know, what happens when we become predominantly upstate, when we're predominantly hyper activated and we never have that recovery knowing that it's in the recovery that so much of the

progress, the growth actually happens. What happens when you strip that from the experience? Yeah. I mean, I think one of the things that became super clear to me, and I write about it a lot in the book, I have a chapter that my editor was like, oh, this title is really harsh. Guess what? You're aging now. And it's really this idea of aging is that rapid aging and the pathological aging that we see with this super increased rates of chronic diseases and cognitive chronic diseases such as dementia and Alzheimer's, these are because of our letting go of the restorative work that is so natural for us in our 20s and make us these superhumans in our 20s. And then as we get into our 30s and 40s, they start to, we just sell them. Like we, you know, we sell them off because we think more caffeine. First of all, we have all

of the stresses of having a family and a career and parents and children and all the different things that keep us out of our basic rhythm, our natural rhythm. And all of the prioritization is in the upstate stuff. How much can you give? How much can you push yourself? And none of the prioritization is in the upstate stuff. You know, how much can you give? How much can you push yourself? And none of it is prioritizing the downstate recovery. I mean, almost never do you see, you know, moms like saying, well, hon, I mean, I can't take you to that football game right now because I need to take a walk. It doesn't happen, right? You sell everything

first before you think about yourself. And that's just the culture that we're pushing. And what happens is, you know, there's studies now that show that the poor sleep that people have and the lack of these slow waves that people have in our 40s can predict onsets of dementia and Alzheimer's in our 60s and 70s, right? So what we're doing now when we are letting go of our exercise programs and our nutrition, good nutrition, and deep breathing practices, inversion poses, whatever it is that is, that there's a whole fleet of things that you could be doing on a daily basis to keep yourself in a right ratio of upstates and downstates, but we sell those off, right? But the crazy thing is that those things that we're doing now in our 30s and 40s are going to cost us in our 60s and 70s.

Yeah. And we're not drawing that line very directly, if at all, because we kind of feel like, well, this is the moment in our lives where we push and then we earn the right to pull back, not realizing that all the pushing now is actually, it's increasingly hardwiring the circuitry, which is going to make that window, if we get there, when we think we can kind of like pull back and enjoy more, potentially far less functional and not like the fantasy that we have. Yeah. It's a daily wear and tear. And I think that's what is, I think at first super daunting to hear, but that there's a daily buildup of toxins in your brain, right? There's a daily buildup of fatigue in your muscles and it doesn't work to sleep on the

weekend late, right? And it doesn't work to sleep when you're old because you never make up for that. What you didn't take care of last night or what you didn't take care of by exercising or by eating well, you have increased inflammation, you have increased free radicals, oxidative stress, all this stuff builds up.

And so no amount of sleeping in on the weekend or taking one walk a week or, you know, getting yourself to nature for a two week period once a year, it's not going to recover what happened every single day leading up to that two week vacation. Yeah. I mean, that makes sense when you lay it out that way. It's like, well, yeah, sure, that makes sense. And yet it's so really ripples into the choices that we make on a day-to-day basis. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping.

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Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing called the autonomic nervous system, which so many of us learned as, you know, like kids when we're taking bio in high school or middle school, was the part of the nervous system that you quote, it just happens automatically, you know, and there's really nothing that you can do to influence it. And I think a lot of us still hang on to that mythology. But in fact, now, decades and decades of science show, well, that is not really entirely the whole story.

I think that the truth is, is that many scientists don't understand the autonomic nervous system. I mean, I have this review paper that is going to be published in PNAS and it's under review and the scientists who are reviewing it are super uninformed about recent research on the autonomic nervous system, right? And it's because science is slow and knowledge is slow to accumulate and then to spread. But there is this kind of old idea that the autonomic nervous system is just for the stress response and also for basic plumbing, heating, water, you know, like basic functioning, keeping our temperatures correct and keeping our water levels correct inside the body. It turns out that the autonomic

nervous system is integral to every moment that you're experiencing your day. It's tracking the things that are arousing to you, not necessarily scary fight or flight, but just things that are interesting, the things that you might want to think about later and do some deeper processing on. And it's also integral for learning how to self-regulate our emotions, learning from when we're babies, you know, we come out of the womb screaming and we are in absolute fight or flight mode, right? And there's this idea that I talk about in the book that was developed by a scientist who's actually at UCI named Julian Thayer and his colleagues.

And it's called the Generalized Unsafe Theory of Stress, is GUTS, is the acronym. But the idea is that we come into the world as super stressed. We're all rev, we're all sympathetic. And it's over through experiences of being loved by our parents, you know, parent or parents, by caretakers, right? Being loved, having our food and our safety and our community providing for us that actually builds up the restore system, which is the other

half, right? The parasympathetic system that builds up this strong sense of I can calm myself down, or I can get help calming myself down. And that also builds up the connections in your brain, particularly in your frontal cortex, that allows you to tamp down your stress response. That if something happens that is a trigger or is something where you feel unsafe, as you get older and as you go through normal life experiences, your restore system and your frontal lobe start working together every time you basically can right a wrong or learn something that was hard or achieve a goal that you didn't think you could achieve. All of these are formative experiences, particularly for that frontal cortex that not only is taking care of regulating your emotions, but also what we call executive

functions, right? Your attention, your focus, your ability to make wise decisions, your ability to stop yourself from doing things that might not be wise decisions. Inhibition, really important. Working memory, your long-term memory even can be related to that. So the autonomic nervous system is actually an integral part of us as human beings and us as self-regulating, self-control, self-actualizing human beings. And that's a very new way of thinking about this system that is, I think for a long time, just kind of been put in this kind of plumbing department. Yeah. Not only does it sort of show how its tentacles reach so much farther into all different aspects of life than I was ever taught when I was a kid, but also the notion that

we come into the world all rev, and that it's through exposure and behavior and environment that over time, we not only develop the skills to activate the restore, but it sounds like we actually were literally building out that restore system in real time to counter this initial state that kind of blasts us into the world in this hyper activated state, which makes me wonder what happens to the infant who comes into the world where they don't have a certain amount of family support, of social support, of resources, of privilege, of the opportunity to actually have the circumstances and the social support to develop this other side of the system.

Like, does that actually end up creating just these long-term patterns of inability, disability, harm? And if so, do you reach a point of no return there? strong data to show that your early life experiences predict how well you do later, right? Like how successful you are and specifically how much control do you have over your ability to navigate life's up and downs. So even infant levels of scarcity, poverty, abuse, lack of safety, lack of sort of structured environments can have effects on your adult brain and your ability to function as an adult, you know, that is able to handle stress and is able to have strong executive function. And these early life hits has a direct effect on the balance between rev and restore and can make you somebody who is highly rev and which is a really a system out of balance, right? Hyperarousal, which leads to high blood pressure, which leads to chronic diseases of cardiovascular system and, you know,

diabetes, a whole sort of host of metabolic disorders that can come from this inability to tamp down rev. And so a huge aspect of thinking in terms of, you know, how does early life experience impact you as an adult is really at that biological level of, are you privileged enough to have the amount of safety in your life that tells you that you are safe, that you do have people looking out for you, that you do have the ability to make wise decisions when you're a teenager and, you know, and have long-term goals that make that kind of initial sort of promise of some potential joy, maybe you could say, well, I don't necessarily need that because my long-term goal is I want to go to college or my long-term goal

is I want to have a career, right? It's major because it really fits into the thinking about what does poverty do? What does systemic and structural racism do? And just those inequities at birth set people up to have a harder time balancing and a harder time growing that strong connection between the frontal cortex and your ability to control that autonomic system. Yeah. Before we both start sounding too fatalistic. You know, like, yes, this is an issue. And yes, these are big questions. And they're important questions. And at the same time,

and this is a lot of what you actually write about and then sort of like your recent research is that there are these things and they're sort of like domains and categories of things that we can proactively do, regardless of what brought us to this moment in life, regardless of what choices, what circumstances landed us here and shaped our systems in the way that they're shaped now. There are, in fact, things that we can say yes and no to,

and maybe to develop practices and tools that can really make a difference, not necessarily instantly or overnight, but over time, they can really make a big difference. And you sort of like drop them into four major categories. And I thought it'd be interesting to just touch on these. And the first one really refers back to a term that you brought up earlier in our conversation, which is heart rate variability or HRV, which like, as we sit here right now, I'm wearing a little thing on my hand that tracks HRV and all sorts of other, you know, like biohacking type of metrics for my body that I'm fascinated by. And it gives me readiness scores to step into the day or exert myself really intensely or not based in no small part on this thing called heart rate variability, which kind of tells me, are you ready to go hard?

Do you really just need to chill out and restore? I would love to better understand what this thing is because I see this metric, heart rate variability or HRV to shorthand it. I'm seeing it coming up over and over in a lot of different domains. And it seems like people are focusing on it more and more and more as a thing that can measure sort of like where are you in this upstate versus downstate thing? And that can then you can rely on to guide your behavior. Talk to me more about what this actually is and why it matters.

Yeah, it's HRV was my first entry point to thinking about how the autonomic nervous system is related to all these other areas. And so let's just take apart the words heart rate variability. If you think about what we've just been talking about, about, you know, life throws at you a whole bunch of stressful experiences. And in any one moment, you need to be able to mobilize your resources and get either, you know, in the pre-modern times way, get the hell away from whatever tigers in the forest, right? Or calm down, right? Or calm down, right? Then immediately, so you need to be able to have a huge rev response and then a huge restore response to calm yourself down, right? So the people who were the most able to roll with the

punches and get themselves revved up and mobilize those resources are the people who have the highest heart rate variability. Because what that means is we're looking at, you know, your heartbeats, and the heart is not a metronome. It is not just a standard beat. There's differences between the intervals between each heartbeat. And they could be just, you know, 100 milliseconds or so of difference. But that variety matters because what it means is suddenly if you have to mobilize your resources, you can get that blood pumping super fast and have this super fast heart rate. And then the second that there's okay signs everywhere, you can calm yourself down. So the more variable your heart rate variability, the more variable of

your heart rate, the more you're able to adapt your physiology to the environmental demands, right? The more you're able to sort of run when you need to and calm yourself down when you need to. So that's sort of the basic thinking around it. How it's being used now by the Oura ring that you're wearing and all these other systems is the system that is restoring you after that big rev, the autonomic, the parasympathetic restore system is what you're measuring usually with that heart rate variability. So you're measuring your body's ability to recover from this huge insult. Insult is just a clinical term, but that huge experience, stressful experience that you had. So when that ring is telling you your heart rate variability is where it was before you had that hard workout,

that means that you fully recovered from that hard workout and you're ready to go hard again or, you know, really push yourself. But if your heart rate variability is not quite recovered, that means that your restore system is still working to get you back to where you were or even get you back to a better place, right? I have this concept in the book that I call Recovery Plus. And it's not because the idea of getting you back to baseline is not really what we're trying to achieve. Like when you're exercising, you're not always trying to stay unfit. You're trying to keep your fitness continuing and get fitter and run a little bit longer, run a little bit faster and be able to pull more weight. And so if you can use the heart rate variability as a metric for where the restore system is on its recovery, then you can actually not just get back to your baseline, but get back

to that plus, get up to a plus level, which is the next level of restore. So you haven't just replenish your fluids to the amount that it was before you exercise, but even you've topped yourself off a little bit more. So it's like your body's insurance plan. Like, you know, once you work out, you feel really bad afterwards, your muscles are aching. And for days, it's hard to walk up and down stairs. Your body doesn't like that feeling. So it actually gives you more resources. It replenishes you with more energy so that the next time you work out, you actually have more resources that you can expend so you can get even stronger. You know, you can reach a higher plateau. And that's what that idea of Recovery Plus is,

is that you keep, by really focusing on your recovery, you can keep yourself building to be stronger and faster or more fit as you go in your exercise plan. Yeah. And I love that concept because I think it's pretty native to us when we think about fitness. You know, I'm going to keep raising my baseline level of this and, you know, like my per minute mile if you're a runner, whatever it is, you keep elevating the baseline of where you feel comfortable, but it is not. So it's a little bit foreign for people to say, I'm going to keep raising the baseline of where my sort of like recovery set point is. And over time, you know, it gets better and better and better. And using HRV,

I've actually seen that over time for me, if I'm really sedentary, if I'm just going through a season of work or life where I'm really stressed or really sedentary, if I'm just going through a season of work or life where I'm really stressed or more sedentary than normal or not sleeping the same well, I'll see a trend down in my heart rate variability. And then once I start moving my body more and I remember, I know I need to actually go out into the mountains and hike around three or four days a week. It's not an instant thing, but over time I'll see the average, the trends start to go back up to a better place. And it's like what you're talking about. I'm training the recovery side of the equation to see growth and improvement that is sustainable over time as well. And I think it's fascinating

to focus on that as a very intentional and deliberate thing rather than just the go, go, go side of life. Knowing that in fact, even if the thing that you care about more than anything else is the go, go, go side, it's always going to be stunted by the restore side. You will never be able to go harder than you have restored yourself beforehand. Yeah. Just think about it as like a car topping off. I mean, it doesn't really necessarily work with the car metaphor, but you can't go far on an empty tank of gas, right? So that is true. But if the car was a learning machine, and it could continue to take more and more gas, it's kind of... But what's amazing is, you know, talking to Clover Teixeira, you know, he was like 36, I think he said when his performance started

to fail. And that's usually when MMA fighters retire because they just can't keep up. And a lot of them are just trained to just go hard, push the red line limit every single day and work themselves into a fury. And then they're supposed to just kind of somehow fall asleep and wake up the next day and do it all over again. And he realized like, you know, his lifetime goal was to be a world champion and he was losing that opportunity. So he thought, I need to really change everything. He started reading Deepak and he started reading, you know, The Power of Now and just all these things about that you could

be in a flow state of, you know, this effortlessness of letting the world actually come to you in a way that isn't so aggressive, right? That isn't so much about pushing yourself. And then he started going to this place called the Performance Institute, which is a elite MMA training center. And they gave him training regimens. And he told me like, when, which is like, here's what you do every day. And this is the only thing you can do. And then you got to not do anything. And he said that he was embarrassed. And like, at first he wouldn't do it because it was like a third of the training that he would normally do. And he, you know, was like, I barely worked out yesterday and now they don't want me to work out at all. And then the next day they want me to do like a short run, like what's going on here? You know, he, it was such a, a block for him because he hadn't been raised that way,

none of us have, but he started doing it and it worked. So doing less was his secret to success, even to the point where for him, he has to work out only in the morning because his workouts are so intense. He told me he can drop seven pounds in a single workout. And then if he works out, he has to stop at 1 p.m. because if he doesn't, then everything, his restore system is completely thrown off and he's so aroused for the rest of the day that he can't go to sleep. And sleep is one of his main things. He thinks about along with nutrition, but he uses HIV all the time. Like that's, you know, his system is by heart rate. So he's constantly looking at his heart rate. And so even if he's not necessarily sleeping, he stays in bed every day, 12 hours. But during the

fight week where he won the world championship, he stayed in bed every day for 20 hours, just lying there, sometimes sleeping, but just also like anything that would raise his heart rate. He says like, even when he goes to feed his birds in the bird feeder, he's like, that's going to, that's going to raise my heart rate. And I'm in, I've got to just be focusing on completely being in restore mode. It's so amazing to just think of restoring as such a central part of even a performance is a whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes.

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the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. It ties in a really interesting way into, you know, the years of research that K. Anders Ericsson did on greatness as well, where he looked at the top performers, the people who are world-class in a wide array of domains. And most people would make the assumption that if it's chess or if it's violin or whatever it may be, you're probably practicing 10 to 12 hours a day. And in fact, the best of the best in world, on average practice somewhere around four hours a day and in blocks of almost rarely ever more than an hour and a half or so. And then, you know, they did two or three of those and then they were done. You know, the whole rest of the day was enjoying themselves, recovery, like whatever it may be. But, and, and, and those are the people

that, that attain that level of, you know, like being the absolute top in the world at what they do, which tracks really well with this story. HRV is a really interesting indicator when you're thinking about it. And clearly, so much of your research has been focused around sleep also. And I think it's probably easy to see how sleep is such a critical part of this downstate of the restore phase of things well. Interestingly, you also talk about of this down state of the restore phase of things. Well, interestingly, you also talk about nutrition. And one of the things that you mentioned there, sort of like when we eat as being a factor in how we restore and how we access this down state.

Talk to me more about this. Yeah, I think that was actually the chapter that I knew the least about. I didn't even know what happened when we put food in our mouth. I just, I had no idea really what happens when we eat. And I felt like, well, I'm not an idiot. And I feel like, how did I just not learn this? And I thought about like, there must have been some place where some biology class that I didn't pay attention to,

where they taught you like what happens when you eat. But then I also realized there's a lot of new information out there. You know, what we maybe learned in that intro biology class in high school, we know so much more now. And what's interesting is, you know, everything you put in your mouth excites rev and it causes a little blip of inflammation because basically it's a foreign object, right? And your body is, it's a protective immune response to respond to anything that's foreign being put in your mouth. So once you start thinking about it in that way, you realize how important it is what you're putting in your mouth, because the food that you're putting in your mouth is either going to incite a really big rev response and a huge inflammation response and create this bunch of free radicals that can

end up causing oxidative stress. Or you can be eating food that creates a smaller inflammation response and a smaller rev and less free radicals. So that was like the what we're eating. But then I turned to the question of when we're eating, because obviously, luckily, I was at the Salk Institute doing my postdoc at the same time that Sachin Panda was doing all of his work on time-restricted eating. He was doing it in rodents, and it's actually called time-restricted feeding. I always thought of it like that, but then I guess he changed the word when he started moving into human research. So time-restricted eating is intermittent fasting,

is all this idea that somehow it's really magical that if you restrict your eating window to a shorter window, all of your metabolic measurements go into the healthy range. You can lose weight, but you can also decrease your cardiovascular stress and have better cardiovascular function, can decrease your risk for diabetes and obesity and all these. So he was showing all this amazing stuff. And of course, people have gone really deep into that world of fasting and all the different modes of fasting.

But I thought, I guess the piece for me that has been missing is why, like why it works. And, and if you think about feeding or eating as being just another rhythm, it makes perfect sense, right? Because we have this upstate during the day when our metabolic system is primed to eat. We have the highest amount of insulin production, which is the process that allows us to get the most amount of energy from our food. It's at its peak in the morning to the midday, and then it starts to decline. So when you're eating in the evening, your insulin levels are so low that you're actually leaving a lot of the sugar from the food in the bloodstream, and that gets turned into fat. It gets stored as fat.

Also, we have the heating mechanism that heats our bodies up that is based on rev response or even our heating mechanism in response to food up that is based on rev response or even our heating mechanism in response to food is at its height during the day and it shuts down across the night. So when you're eating during the day and you confine your eating to that upstate period, you're really in sync with the best time, the optimal time for you to be eating. And you're in resonance, which is this idea that one system has an upstate and a downstate. And if another system is in phase with that, where their upstates are happening during that other system's upstate and the downstate's happening during that other system's downstate, both of those signals

are amplified and they both get stronger. So when you're eating during your natural upstate, your circadian rhythm upstate, you're more able to get, you're able to get more out of your food and your metabolic system is more primed to work at its best because that's also where you have highest rev is during the day, right? So all these systems that are primed for eating, primed for exercise, primed for thinking, they all happen during the upstate day. And then during the night, you're in restore mode, the down state. And if you start eating at night, you're waking the bear, right? You're basically trying to jumpstart a system that is at its most dysfunctional state. So you're eating out of phase with your natural rhythm, right? You're eating

in sort of in opposition with your natural rhythm. And that's why, you know, it's probably the most unhealthy thing you can do is like eating, you know, opening that ice cream at midnight, right? It's just, and so when you start thinking about it in terms of these rhythms, then it kind of all makes sense. Yeah, that does make a lot of sense. And I think intermittent fasting has become this major buzzword, I think, for a lot of different reasons. And very often people are, you know, like the version of it that you hear being adopted is, well, I'm going to do all my eating within an eight hour window. And that window that I've seen most often is noon to eight for most people. What's interesting because what you're saying is that even if you say, well, let me try this thing called intermittent fasting. Let me take the

approach of a kind of eat everything that I have to eat in an eight or 10 hour window, that the sort of what has become sort of like the day record, you know, like noon to eight window is probably actually not the most optimal window. You may be better off actually going sliding that earlier by a chunk of hour. So it matches more of the organic upstate and downstate in a more linear way. Does that make sense? I mean, that's exactly what I believe. There's strong evidence that front-loading your day with the most amount of your calories, at least 50% of your calories in the morning to noon time is the most healthy way of eating. Because not only do these systems, not only does metabolism have an upstate, downstate, but you are one whole body and all of your systems interact. So your ability to generate

the right circumstances to get good sleep depends on when you stop eating. So if you're eating actually influences your melatonin levels, which is the hormone that tells you it's time to go to sleep. If you eat later, your melatonin levels are delayed. The onset of melatonin, which starts around six in normal cases without, if you're not paying attention to screens and getting a lot of blue light in the evening, your melatonin levels will start to slowly rise around 6 p.m. around sunset time. If you're eating later, your melatonin will be delayed by hours. So your eating affects your sleep. Your exercise affects your eating.

Your exercise affects your sleep. All these things are interacting. Yeah, one giant feedback mechanism. I also want to ask you about breathing. It's something that you speak about and that you write about and in no small part in the context of HRV also. But it's something that I learned about. I have a background for many years now in yoga and breathing exercises and Eastern traditions.

And you see breathing exercises as a part of almost every healing tradition in literally almost every culture for going back thousands and thousands of years. I have learned and studied and practiced all sorts of different breathing modalities. And I always found it was, while I meditate and I do other things, and over time, I feel that those practices will have this accumulating effect. Breathing has always been this one thing where it is as close to an intervention level effect for me as anything that I've ever found, where if I feel like I'm in that upstate, that stress state, that rev state, that agitated, active state, I know that I can turn to a particular type of breathing and within a matter of seconds feel profoundly differently. And then I know that if I have a certain practice that I do every day for months or years, I

feel like it has this accumulating effect in my nervous system and in my body that allows me to sort of almost, you know, like on a momentary basis decide that I want to access that down state through the vehicle of breath. And I can get there a lot faster. That's my personal experience of using breath as a tool in this way. Does that track with the actual research that you're saying? Yeah, I mean, it's perfectly aligned. Think about yourself when you're in a REV state, right? The first thing that happens is your heart starts racing. And that's REV's response to get the blood, nutrient-rich, oxygen-rich blood to your extremities in case you need to fight or flight or flee, any of these kind of reactions. experience, specifically with the strengthening the connection between your restore system and

your frontal cortex, right, which is that executive at the front of your brain, that is based on breathing. So the second, when Rev is in control, Restore has let go the reins of everything in order to make sure you have all the resources to mobilize. But once you realize that actually, no, everything is fine and I need to calm down, restore mode, the first place it goes is to your breath. And the ability to regulate your breathing, doing the slow, deep breathing, is the restore function telling you, and actually it's your frontal cortex telling the rest of your body, I'm safe. I'm okay. I have control of my environment. I have control of my body. You know, what is a panic attack? A panic attack is rev, you know, that you start breathing

super shallow and heavy and fast and calming you down is taking these slow, deep breaths. Over time, you're building up. You know, there's amazing research by a woman named Mara Mather at USC, University of Southern California. And she's showing that HRV biofeedback over time increases the strength of the frontal lobe. And not only just the strength, but also I think she's showing some myelination increases. So the functioning of the neural networks of the frontal lobe are stronger the more you engage in this slow, deep breathing. And can I just say one kind of technical thing about the slow, deep breathing too? One of the things that was really inspiring to me, thinking about the power of rhythms, is from slow deep breathing. And it's really about this idea of resonance. And of course,

you know, being somebody who studied breathing, you've heard of resonant breathing. And what that is, is that your heart rate has a natural rhythm, where your heartbeats go, you know, faster, faster, faster, and then slow, slow, slow, slow, faster, faster, faster, and then slow, slow, slow, slow, faster, faster, faster, and then slow, slow, slow. And that's the upstate, downstate of your heart rate, of your cardiovascular system. Your respiration has its own rhythm. And when we're talking, moving through our day, we're actually breathing very quickly. We could breathe up to 15 breaths a minute, right? So it's actually quite fast. And what that means is that when you're taking your inhale and you're filling your lungs with

oxygen, you may not be syncing up that inhale where you're getting all the nutrients from the air into your lungs with the time in which your heart rate is going fast, right? Because in that time, your heart rate's going fast. It's gobbling up all of the oxygen in the lungs. And so your breathing and your heart rate are out of phase with each other. And they're not efficient. They're not working at their most efficient. So the magical part of resonant breathing is this idea that you can slow your breathing down to a pace so that it matches that natural increase, you know, upstate, downstate of the heart rate, so that when you're inhaling at six times a minute, your inhale is in phase and matching the heart rate time where it's gobbling up all the oxygen

in your lungs. And then the exhale matches the time when the heart rate slows down. And it makes this whole system more efficient, right? Because you're getting the most amount of nutrients from both systems amplified, basically, right? Because they got into resonance with each other. And so you're getting the most amount of nutrients from both systems amplified basically, right? Because they got into resonance with each other. And so you're getting the most amount of nutrients. And that is why you see really huge increases in HRV when you practice resonant breathing, right? This kind of slow,

deep breathing, because you are engaging your frontal cortex to slow your breath down, calming yourself down, but you're also at this place of most maximum efficiency of getting the most amount of oxygen to your brain. Yeah. No, that makes so much sense to me. And I've experimented with that cycle and it does. There's something that feels just very, like everything is synced up. I'm curious what your take is on this also. One of the things that I've discovered about breathing over time also is that it's not just the inhales and the exhales, it's the spaces between breaths. And for me, for some reason, there's something just stunningly sacred and stilling about the space in particular after the exhale. So much so that I sort of like developed just my own breathing exercises over time where I will linger without force, without a closed

glottis, just with an open throat. I will linger in the exhale often for quite a long time to the extent where I'm actually reduced my breathing rate to two breaths a minute. And I feel completely comfortable doing that by the way. I can do that indefinitely. There is something where I almost feel like there's this transcendent state that I reach momentarily for 10 seconds or so in the space after the exhale that I've always wondered physiologically and psychologically, what's happening there? By the way, do not do this at home. This is something I've sort of been practicing and developing for years just on my own. And I'm constantly experimenting with how these different things make me feel both physiologically, like psychologically and physically. And there's something, I've heard a lot about the regulation of the inhales and

the exhales and a little bit of lip service too. And yes, there's a space between those two things, but much less about what the potential value is of that space between breasts, if any, that I have for some reason experienced. We know so little scientifically. I mean, there's just no, there's so few scientific studies that examine different types of breathing. And there's a lot of the studies that do exist are discredited because they're not put into sort of the central framework of our thinking because they come from small journals from India and places where this practice has been going on for thousands of years. And there's a huge amount of knowledge around this exact question, but they're

not published in sort of like the canon of what we think of as being kind of respectable journals. And so people don't pay attention to them. And people, Western medicine does not have, you know, hardly any appreciation. There is more and more now, but there's hardly any appreciation of the kind of stuff that you're talking about. And you can see that from the lack of understanding of the autonomic nervous system, the lack of understanding of breathing techniques. And that's why, you know, my favorite books from, I think it came out in 2019, is Breath by James Nestor. Yeah. James Nestor. Sure. So he's actually, he wrote the quote on the top of my book, but he blurred my book.

And then he's actually also going to do the interview with me for my book opening. So I'm super excited that he sees that there's some alignment with what I'm talking about and what he's been talking about. But I think he's sort of one of the first people in Western culture to create some connection that people can get. Somehow he really got the voice that people need to hear to say this stuff that people have been saying for centuries. But luckily he did, right? Because I think people are really reconsidering breath because of his book and his own kind of guinea pig-ying himself to see what would happen if you only

breathe through your nose or what happens if you only breathe through your mouth. Like, what is this whole mouth breathing phenomenon, right? And the problem is, is there isn't a strong enough push in kind of Western medicine, NIH level funding for this kind of stuff, even though it's ridiculously powerful. And you can say the same thing with just sleep, right? That you go to a hospital and it's the worst place to get sleep, right? And even though sleep is the most natural healer that we have, you can't sleep when you're a patient in a hospital and doctors don't, nurses don't sleep, right? So there's just these really huge blind spots that we have around these natural restorative systems, particularly in Western medicine and science.

Yeah. And sadly, I think often people don't revisit them on a personal level, let alone fund them at scale until you hit some sort of breaking point. But I love the fact that you're so focused on this and that you're finding ways to weave these ideas love the fact that you're so focused on this and that you're finding ways to weave these ideas into the work that you're doing. And then not just in a laboratory setting, but also then turning around and sharing them in popular conversation, because I think the moment is now. Yeah, I completely agree. I feel like there's a window that's been opened and we're all sort of saying, huh, what else should we be looking at? I completely agree. I feel like the world is hungry now for an alternative to the way we've been living. Yeah.

Which feels like a good place for us to come full circle in our conversation as well. So sitting in this container of the good life project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? I guess being in, in a state of balance and awareness, being in a state of understanding yourself and understanding yourself as a living being in the universe that has these natural structures, that if you fit yourself into these natural structures in a kind of, you know, one of the pieces of the puzzle that your own system will resonate and it will create that good life that I think that we're seeking.

Thank you. Thank you. It's been such a great conversation. Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode, you'll also love the conversation that we had with neuroscientist Jill Balti-Teller about understanding your brain as a way to live a better life. You'll find a link to Jill's episode in the show notes. And of course, if you haven't already done so,

go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app. And if you appreciate the work that we've been doing here on Good Life Project, go check out my new book, Sparked. It'll reveal some incredibly eye-opening things about maybe one of your favorite subjects, you, and then show you how to tap these insights to reimagine and reinvent work as a source of meaning, purpose, and joy. You'll find a link in the show notes, or you can also find it at your favorite bookseller now. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. If you're at a point in life when you're ready to lead with purpose, we can get you there.

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