StarTalk Radio - Hacking the Head & the Heart with Leah Lagos, PhD.

Episode Date: April 9, 2021

Can we hack our bodies and our minds? On this episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Gary O’Reilly and Chuck Nice talk about how to optimize human performance with performance and sport psychologist Leah Lagos, PhD. NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/show/hacking-the-head-the-heart-with-leah-lagos-phd/ Thanks to our Patrons Eugenio Barrera, David J Rechtman, Umran Koca, Roy Nyaboga, Chris Merritt, GetPLayeD, Jacob Montgomery for supporting us this week. Photo Credit: ALol88, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk Sports Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. And I got with me, as usual, my co-host for Chuck Nice. Chuck. Hey, Neil. Yeah, a professional stand-up comedian. astrophysicist and i got with me as usual my co-host for chuck nice chuck hey neil yeah a professional stand-up comedian that's just great i think everyone should have their own personal comedian that that's just you know what i do too uh however unlike you i believe everybody should

pay their own personal comedian the you you my, you give yourself away to the world. You're like, I am your personal astrophysicist. Ask me anything. And you say, I'm your comedian, pay me. I'm like this, I am your personal comedian. Now all you need is two drinks and a minimum and a cover and we're good. We're good.

That's your currency, yes. And of course, I got Gary O'Reilly who gives authenticity to this program. Gary, former soccer pro, sports commentator. I've been just delighted and honored to have you on StarTalk as my co-host. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here again, Neil. Excellent. And you're not new. You've been with us for a while, but I feel fresh every time that you come on because when you say things, it comes from places that I've never seen or heard of, and that's always good for me because that means I learn. Well, as do I.

Okay. So this topic is mind and body, all right? And in a sports context, you know, we've known that the mind controls the body. We've known this, all right? But we can ask the question differently. If the mind can control the body, okay, can you hack into your mind and control your body in ways

you could not have previously accomplished? What do you think of that? And we have today someone who has made a career of advising people on how to do this. And I have Dr. Leah Lagos. Did I say that right? Leah, welcome to StarTalk. Hi, Neil. Pleasure to be here.

Yeah, excellent. Great to have you here. Your expertise, let me get your title straight here. You're a doctor of clinical psychology at Rutgers University, and you are a licensed clinical psychologist specializing, this is the fun part, specializing in performance psychology. Oh, my gosh. So most people, when they think, I need a psychologist,

because, like, you're having issues and problems, you're saying, these people don't have problems they want to become super human in their mental capacity that's that's that's badass right there I didn't know you can get a degree in that well it started Neil as a sports psychologist and then the rest of the performance world came and wanted to do what all the athletes were doing. And so it rendered itself to a larger type of elite competitor outside of just sports. But it's a lot of fun. And we certainly focus on treating the mind and the body simultaneously for the most expedient and effective trainings and treatments. trainings and treatments. So I've got you, you conducted risk assessments for NFL teams.

What did you do there? What did that involve? So that particularly involved for many years going to the NFL Combine and working with a cohort of three to five other psychologists that the team also identified, selected, and brought in to do things like identify risk, do character profiles. And essentially, the head coaches wanted to know, who am I bringing on my team? Oh, interesting. So it's a psychological profile of... And they would ask us specific questions to answer. So some years they wanted us to find out. There was a year my main job for one of the teams was to identify the risks that each member brought on. Okay, but what I thought it was, maybe it still is, is are they risk takers so that they might put their health and their physiology at risk doing something that you might say is stupid if it fails or brilliant if it succeeds. Oh, that makes sense. Remember when Roethlisberger

had a motorcycle accident and the whole city of Pittsburgh was PO'd? They're like, who let that guy on a motorcycle? Why would they allow him to be on a motorcycle? Yeah. And you find out is that the very psychological state that has him do that is what made him great in other things. Is that a fair way to think about this, Leah? It's absolutely fair that sometimes someone's gift can also be their danger and you have to be aware of what those may be. Let me just get your full resume out here. So you wrote a book, Heart, Breath, Mind. It was subtitled, Train Your Heart to Conquer Stress and Achieve Success. So you're trying to give a person complete control of their mind, body, and soul. That's audacious. And the fact is that that's

even possible, right? I mean, so you've figured this out? Well, I want to explain to you because it's just such a dynamic world. And Neil, I've been doing this for over 15 years. Not only do I love it, but my clients have made it my specialty. So first, I worked primarily with golfers and tennis players. They sent me all their friends and family. Lo and behold, I'm traveling on the PGA Tour. Now I'm working with teams. Then the business world came in. They knew the golfers.

They knew the tennis players. And they heard about being able to control your stress response to control how you make decisions. Like Wall Street traders on the spot, decision-making business. Oh, my gosh. So everybody needs you. And everybody who's anybody needs you. Wow, you are the eat, pray, love of performance.

Thank you, Chuck. So what are the, what are you, and then I'll pass off to my co-host here because I don't want to hog the mic. But what's your origin story at bringing sort of the physiology to the psychology? Where did that come from? So I attended graduate school just the other day, 15 years ago, at Rutgers University. And Paul Lear—

You got enough degrees on your damn wall there. You better be an expert at something by the time we're done here. I love it. On her wall, she has degrees. I have sunflowers. Both make people happy. Yeah, good.

Okay, so go on. And Afghani Meshilo and Paul Lear are really at the core of heart rate variability biofeedback identifying that a specific rate of breathing produces a rhythm throughout the body known as resonance frequency and what this does it stimulates large blood pressure oscillations that give you control over your reactivity your ability to recover and get this, your brain and what it's doing. Okay. And so I went up to them during a presentation for years, they had used heart rate variability biofeedback to treat autonomic disorders, anxiety, depression, blood pressure

issues. The Vashilas, interestingly enough, came from Russia. They treated cosmonauts. And I asked them, Neil, can we use this? I'm a sports psychologist. Can we use this with athletes to enhance performance? Little did I know that would lead to the next 15 years of my research and practice. Well, so, you know, the true side of genius is seeing what everyone else sees, but thinking of genius is seeing what everyone else sees, but thinking what no one else has thought. And so you took this very active field and gave it a whole other life. And so just congratulations to what you've done and what you've forged in these efforts. And the other thing is you clearly must be producing positive results because you still have a job with sports teams and they give zero Fs about anything but a bottom line and results. Everything else is absolute

shite, as they say, because all they care about is performance results. Yeah. Did we win or did we lose? It's pretty simple. So, Gary, you had a question. What was it? Oh, it's just going back to the risk assessment. Just to put it in a nutshell for everybody watching and listening, the teams need to know whether the pin they're about to roll into the locker room, or the grenade, rather, about to roll in the locker room has a pin in it or whether it's about to explode because they don't care if you blow yourself up it's whether you blow everything else they've spent years building up and that's the big deal it's not just you know are they going to cost us money are they going to bring the empire down and i've seen a couple of guys who actually have done that because nobody did risk assessment so here's a

question for the two of you how does one person come into a group dynamic and ruin the group dynamic with such toxicity that the team starts to lose yeah leah is there are you figuring also the interplay of psychological states if it's a team sport as opposed to just a golfer? A hundred percent. But what's really fascinating, and it answers your question and Chuck's, is that the inability to regulate your physiology means that you are impulsive. You can't control what's happening in your body and often what's happening external to your body. And I would say those are the people that have some of the highest risks,

not only of choking under pressure and not being able to perform consistently at their optimal level of ability, but those are also the disruptors, the people that get in trouble off the field, the people that can't get along and engage pro-socially. And interestingly enough, high HRV is also correlated to pro-social behavior. So now- But HRV, heart rate variability, HRV?

Yes. Heart rate variability is correlated to pro-social behaviors. So you begin to not only answer your question, Neil, but also Chuck's, and consider the physiological basis for not only health disruptions, but performance disruptions, the inability to connect with other people, being disruptive, engaging in behaviors that can bring risk to a team, choking under pressure. These all have physiological bases. Because we've seen some very famous players, high paid, choke when they shouldn't have. And the opposite, very players that you rely on in exactly those times.

So you're saying you can fix the choking. I can certainly make a significant impact. I had a golfer on the tour and I had permission to talk about this particular piece because he found it so meaningful to him. But we would get to the 18th hole and he would look up at the sign and start counting how many putts he had to make or not make to get to a certain number on the leaderboard. Guess what that did to his physiology? His heart rate would jump up and I could see it, but it wasn't until I showed him on a heart rate measure, what was happening with his heart rate, how it correlated

with dismantling his performance. He psyched himself out. Not just psyched himself out. He basically changed the inner state of his body. So it's not just the mind, but it's his whole body. So tell me, how does resonant frequency graft into this discussion? And when you spoke of it in breathing and heart rate, as a physicist, when I think of frequency, I just think of how many times per second something happens or per minute. Are you thinking of it in those terms or is there some other frequency

we should be thinking about? No, that's exactly the term. So everybody has, the objective of heart rate variability biofeedback is to identify someone's resonant frequency, the rate of breathing that produces these optimal heart rate oscillations throughout the body. Generally, it's between 4.5 and 6.5 breaths per minute.

Neil, your resonant frequency may be different than mine, but that's something we would discover either using a handheld device or going in to see a clinician. But everyone, even if you don't have access to a mobile device or a clinician, can breathe clinician. But everyone, even if you don't have access to a mobile device or a clinician, can breathe at approximately six breaths per minute and derive a fair amount of benefits from breathing at that rate because it's close to most people's

resonant frequency. But what happens is pretty incredible because it realigns the nervous system, the sympathetic, the fight or flight, and the parasympathetic, the breaking action, where you want to be when you're making decisions, you're wanting to perform at your peak. And what happens is the systematic activation through resonant frequency breathing of resonance in the body does really incredible things. We're seeing that it actually changes the amount of connective tissue between the prefrontal lobe, things that inhibit impulses, organize emotions, and the brainstem. We're seeing that this delivers more blood flow to the brain, so the diameter of the blood vessels is larger during stressful situations. Really dynamic physiological changes that are happening as people breathe at resonant frequency.

This is crazy. You know, Leah, I think, do you have like some robot in your basement that you're programming this into? You sound a little scary there. We can dilate your brainstem. It's like, what experiments are going on in your basement? It blows my mind. I feel like we really, as performers, only tapped into what this does.

And I know that your parents, your father was a sociologist and human resource commissioner for the New York City mayor. Your mother was a gerontologist for U.S. health education. health education, these people tend to have really beautiful hearts that they actually, their gift in giving to the world comes physiologically from feeling the world more deeply. We actually see with those type of people, greater heart rate reactivity. Those people in particular are the people that this from a health perspective can be really incredible for because they feel the world more deeply. I have to agree. As a scientist, when I'm not starting out my life feeling anything, really, I'm just thinking things. My parents were definitely, if I were to characterize how they behaved, how they thought, how they emoted and how they interacted with me and my

siblings, in there was a feeling for the world and the condition and the plight of others. I mean, that's exactly what they were. Yeah, Gary, you were going to say something, Gary? Yeah, okay. So we know that we can do these things. That's great. But what is the methodology?

Am I just going to sit in a dark room until I get it right? Or do I need to do a whole lot more than just that? She's going to chase after you on the golf course. Stop looking at the leaderboard. Stop. Given my age and needs, that's what I'll take a toll on. Yeah, so how does this work? What are the mechanics of this, Leah?

So the scientific process of this is 10 weeks, breathing at 20 minutes twice a day at your resonant frequency. Again, if you don't know your resonant frequency, you can just start at six breaths per minute, a four second inhale through the nose gently, and a six second exhale through the mouth as if you're blowing on warm soup. People want to accentuate the inhale, wrong. The exhale is what really stimulates the vagus nerve. We want to have that little itty bit of pressure, like you have a soup spoon in front of you, and you're blowing on it.

Wait, just remind us, the vagus nerve does what? Just remind me. Makes you spend money, Neil, at the slot machine. The vagus nerve is responsible for all of your poorest decisions in life. Thank you, Chuck. Okay. Now we got that out of the way. I've heard of it.

I just don't remember what it is. The vagus nerve does what? The vagus nerve travels from the midbrain, innervated through the heart, all the way to the digestive tract. It's a super information highway that carries information throughout our systems. When we produce a specific frequency, resonant frequency, it generates what's called 0.1 hertz from the heart. And guess what? Thank you, vagus nerve super information highway. It sends those signals to the brain and the digestive track. So when we've done MRIs, this was conducted by my colleagues and friends at Rutgers, they looked at MRIs of individuals who had engaged in a few minutes, I think it was five minutes of resonant frequency breathing. The 0.1 hertz that they produced in the heart from the resonance breath was emitted.

They could find 0.1 hertz all over different spheres of the brain. I would argue that's true. Okay, I just got to jump in here. So audience, Leah using the word Hertz doesn't mean anything caused pain. This is Heinrich Hertz, a German physicist from 150 years ago, who basically pioneered electromagnetic, our understanding of electromagnetic energy.

And the unit of frequency is in his name in his honor all right so cycles per second one cycle per second is one hertz so at so you're you cited one tenth of a hertz so one tenth of something happening per second means it's one thing happening every 10 seconds and that's six breaths a minute. So there you go. I just want to make sure we're all on the same arithmetic page there. So, Doctor, I don't have 20 minutes during a game, which was like, excuse me, I'm going to go and breathe and come back and be in this wonderful state. So is it a pre- post performance exercise? Or can I teach myself to, once there's a little break in a game and it can happen in NFL or basketball or baseball,

can I just dial it up, bring it on, dial it down and move on? Or do I have to go through 20 minutes of breathing here? No. So that's my specialized protocol. And I've been working with athletes and people in the hedge fund world for several years doing this now, getting them to one breath. In one breath, they can access that flow state and we've practiced this. So the 20 minutes twice a day increases the baseline.

Let me tell you what it does. You do 10 weeks, 20 minutes twice a day, nothing else. You're able to reduce anxiety, improve your mood, enhance your focus, increase cognitive dexterity, the ability to think thoughts quickly and let them go. But then in the moment to actually control your stress response and be really precise from flipping from a stress state to a flow state, it's something we can practice and we can train. That takes some clinical work and we do that in my office. But Gary, I've gotten traders and also golfers and basketball players and quarterbacks

down to one breath where they've trained to be able to activate that parasympathetic dominant state in just one breath. And it's really powerful because when you can activate the parasympathetic state, you increase your objective decision-making. You also, as an athlete, increase fine motor skill. You're a golfer, you're a tennis player. This all impacts your ability for precise muscle movement. Well, guys, we got to take a short break, but when we come back, we're going to have more from Dr. Liat Lagos and this heart rate variability biofeedback system that she's talking to us about. But in particular, we're going to see how this applies not just to athletes on StarTalk Sports Edition.

We're talking about mind, body, what's in control of what and how and why. And we've got Dr. Leah Lagos with us from Rutgers University. And this is her specialty. Leah, welcome to StarTalk to talk about this stuff. This is fascinating. And we were just, the idea that psychology and physiology are blended together almost indistinguishably in your work, I think is just extraordinary. And something else we learned about, looking at your background, you've spent many years working on patients who have post-concussion syndrome.

So first, what is that? And how do you rehabilitate them using your methods? So Neil, the majority of athletes with sports-related concussions recover within 7 to 10 days and non-athletes within about three months. But there is seven to 10 days and non-athletes within about three months. But there is a cohort of athletes and non-athletes that simply don't recover. They don't follow the trajectory for natural healing. And as a result, what happens is they can have a year where they're looking at the ceiling, they're not able to read, they're not able to participate, not only in sports, but in school. So at the University of Miami,

I was working with their athletic department and specifically their sports medicine department called me and said, can your biofeedback thing help these athletes from concussion? Can your magic work on us? Because we don't know what to do. We've tried medicine. Can your sorcery, couldn't get it too so what i said to them neil was at the time there wasn't a lot of research that this would help in a meaningful way so i didn't know her promise i said all i can say is this is a process that

absolutely will reduce anxiety improve mood and enhance focus they, we're sending them to you. And lo and behold, my first athlete, her name is Samantha Sanderson. I have full permission to talk about her. She actually has her PhD now in sports psychology, clinical psychology. And guess what? Does biofeedback, because she said it changed her life. She came to me having experienced several concussions, and this time she wasn't healing. She couldn't read. She couldn't participate in sport. In fact, her sport- What sport did she get the concussion in?

Soccer. Soccer, wow. Wait, Gary, you didn't tell us about this, Gary. Gary. I didn't do it. You're sitting on your ass right there, and we're talking about concussions. No, no.

All right, okay. It's not the ball. Sometimes it's an elbow. Or your head against someone else's head. That's exactly right. Yeah, there's a lot of different ways to have things happen. And so you have the physical injury itself, and then you have the other psychological pieces,

like being fragmented or isolated from the team. You've been playing with this team for three years, and now you're in your room with no contact because you can't be part of sport. So anyway, we went through biofeedback. Around week seven, she came to me with tears pouring down her cheeks. I said, Sam, what's wrong?

She goes, no, doc, these are happy tears. She goes, I read my first book in six months, Harry Potter cover to cover. She said, I just kept reading. I was so excited. And she said, doc, it's the biofeedback. And I said, well, let's not get excited. Let's just keep going through this. And her trajectory was that her symptoms, her natural healing process that had been stilted for all this time began. And what's fascinating, and so I've used this with over a hundred athletes with post

concussion syndrome over the years, is there is a whole cohort of research that now supports why this is such an important piece for physiological recovery. That concussion is not just an injury to the brain. It's an injury to the entire autonomic nervous system. You get hit in the head and the entire autonomic nervous system goes like this with sympathetic dominance, very, very high and parasympathetic under activation. The parasympathetic nervous system is injured. And until those rebalance, you are in a stilted place where you can't, the healing process can't actually begin. So I've used this with just many, many athletes. And I will tell you, it's been life-changing for so many that couldn't heal

otherwise. Leah, I've seen Gary stare up in the ceiling and he doesn't read anything. Can you make him your next patient, please? There are some things the doctor can work with and be successful, and then there's me. That's not the case. No, so, okay, so what sort of timeline? I mean, you've answered the question about what's blocking the recovery because, I mean, people must have come to you in the beginning and, like, we don't know what to do.

Yours now. And then you work out what the blockages are and how you move the pieces aside and reconnect. But how long? I mean, we talked about 10 weeks with being able to develop your methodology and techniques, but with a case like this, how long does this take? Well, we see meaningful improvements in 10 weeks. So in 10 weeks, we will see improvements in cognitive functioning. I'm not saying a cure. I'm saying improvements in the ability to focus. A lot of times people to read, I will say pro-social behaviors return. People that have concussion often feel they can't socialize and

connect as a human being anymore. And it's devastating to them. But how much do you expect? How much recovery do you expect how much recovery do you expect in 10 weeks even if you never showed up and and what if you were always an a-hole but even before the question but i i don't know why i don't know why i can't connect i can't seem to connect to people no matter what I do. Maybe you should try not being an a-hole so much and people wouldn't mind talking to you at the cocktail party. So we'll bring it back to science. And I'll say that, you know, I have had many athletes with concussion go through several iterations of 10 weeks. They've been with me for sometimes a year

or a year and a half to complete their recovery, but it's meaningful and it's often individual specific. So I think it's really important to say you can make significant gains in 10 weeks, but often with concussion, it extends beyond that post-concussion syndrome in particular, and that you may have to do several iterations. That's the PCS that lingers. Correct. So now what about those who haven't had a concussion but want to achieve those same results? How do you establish a baseline for those people? Because a concussion is an easy baseline. It's like, this is what I was before, now this is what I am now. do you go from if I'm just Joe athlete who wants to do all those things but just up it to a level how do you as the clinician

establish the baseline so I look at their heart rate variability and what's really interesting Chuck is I think everyone should know their baseline heart rate variability and monitor it. It's certainly used for runners and endurance sport to assess overtraining. HRV will dip about two standard deviations, sometimes less, one standard deviation when people have overtrained. So coaches will monitor it to adjust practice. But if we have that baseline, then when someone's concussed, we can also look at their HRV to have some physiological prediction for recovery and an understanding of what has been injured during the concussion itself. If this is brain-based or body-based. So it's a whole new universe of data.

It really is. It really is. A whole new universe of data. My gosh. Wow. So how do you- Is there a point, sorry, Neil, is there a point, doctor, where if someone's had a concussion, a serious concussion, like anyone's, none of them aren't serious, I understand that. Is it a year, two years, three years? Is there a point where you say, this has been in place too long, I cannot undo what has been done here?

We haven't said that yet, and that's 100 plus athletes. So I will sometimes graduate the client into neurofeedback, particularly if they're having focus issues and neurofeedback. So heart rate variability biofeedback is going to realign the autonomic nervous system, engender greater blood flow and oxygen to the brain. But neurofeedback will help them omit specific brain frequencies that allow for cognitive focus, for greater flexibility. And so sometimes we'll do that if they're still having attention issues. Sometimes HRV biofeedback for concussed patients doesn't mend the focus

piece as tightly as they want. And so then we'll add the neurofeedback. But it's been incredible. Clients that essentially were staring at the room of their bedroom for nine months with no treatment that was working, we worked with for six months to a year using just biofeedback and had incredible gains and then using neurofeedback for just a few months

and they're off to college and justfeedback for just a few months. And they're off to college and just doing brilliantly and sending us letters. It's really, truly incredible. So Leah, what about Wall Street traders? These are high, these are high strung people. They have to make split decisions that could cost millions. And what is the challenge that one needs to overcome here? They're just high, strong people. So where do you come in?

I would exchange high, strong to high brain activity. That's the brain activity all at once. And the ability to think of lots of things at different levels. And that's what they're great at. And that cognitive processing speed. But a lot of them can't turn it off and that's a problem for sleep that's a problem for focus it's a problem for decision making also just people who are making rapid decisions and needing to perform at their peak meaning integrating contextually lots of different information at once to make decisions. People in the trading

world are really gifted at it, but we start to add stressors like losing money and it changes how the brain works. That brain that can take so much contextual information becomes myopic or fragmented because they're under stress. Yeah, and the difference there with an athlete, if they train, they become a better athlete. Whereas when they train, but with Wall Street traders, there's still this betting aspect, this sort of Las Vegas, what are the odds that you'll win aspect to it.

And they will all eventually lose sometimes, if not most times, right so that's not even something that even if you're really good you can't guarantee against it so that's that's a given with every one of them that's right and what's so interesting neil and i've seen it with golfers and i've seen it with traders is after the win that's some of the most dangerous time for the next play whether you're you've just you've just made a birdie or a hole-in-one on the golf course, there's all these neurochemicals lavishing your body, and it actually changes how you think and how you perform.

And the same thing happens with traders on Wall Street. They make this great trade. They make hundreds of millions of dollars. And guess what? It changes how their brain operates for the next trade. So they have to also engage in the ability to have precise control, training to have precise control over their physiology to remove that danger. But what you're saying is objective, consistent decision-making. And

how do you do that? And this goes back to what Gary was talking about in just a few breaths. You have to take 20 minutes? No. During the actual trading day, we get you to a place where you can take a breath and you can put yourself in what's called low frequency heart rate and activate the parasympathetic nervous system in just one breath to be able to engage more fully that cognitive dexterity and processing. I mean, yes, this sounds great because we've got people in charge of our money that we need to be focused.

But what's different from a single mother with two kids who's working two, three jobs and is stressed? And when you talk about a lot of brain activity, they've got to keep those kids entertained. They've got to keep them fed. They keep them alive. Yes.

Thank you. So there's a motivation that my Wall Street trader can go home to their $50 million penthouse. This single mother's got to find the rent at the end of the month. So the brain activity is intense. So what difference is there? Mothers managing lots of different tasks at home and needing to control their reactivity when there's three kids crying and needing to stay calm under pressure. Very, very much kind of the same type of need as someone on Wall Street or someone needing to make a putt. Being in control, having precise control over how your body responds to stress. And it just has so many different applications. So what you're saying, not to put words in your mouth, is that since more than athletes endure stress in our lives, this system of understanding and manipulation of our own mind and body

has no end of applications in this world. Exactly right. And there is even a new application about bias and discrimination. The newest application of HRV is looking at how HRV, heart rate variability, serves as a buffer to the effects of discrimination and engenders empathy so people can control their inner biases when reacting and interacting with the world. Now, are we talking about the recipient of racism or the progenitor of racism? Because those are two different things. Two different sides of that fence right there.

Yeah, but both is what I'm saying simultaneously. The person who has received a racist comment, if they've gone through the HIV training, the effects of discrimination have actual physiological impacts on the body, higher blood pressure, greater heart rate, so forth, cardiovascular disease, hypertension. Believe me, I know. That is because what happens is somebody will say something racist

and you're like, okay, please. It's all I could do to keep from killing this person right now. And the other end, which is fascinating to think about in the world we live in today, is that people have more control over their inner bias because they have more control over their inhibitory mechanisms in the prefrontal lobe of the brain through HRV biofeedback. So what I'm suggesting and research is mounting research is showing is that HRV biofeedback helps people of all walks of life have greater control over their inner bias and also increases their empathy towards the other person. So it works both ways. Okay. I have a practical question before we take our

last break is if I'm a sprinter and I'm on the starting blocks and I'm anticipating the starting gun, they don't use guns anymore, the starting sound, the starting tone. Don't I want my heartbeat to be ready for that? Don't I want, I mean, what's so bad about a high heart rate? I mean, I guess I'm trying to understand how that information is folded back to what you would call therapy in that situation. Sure. So the one piece of this that I think is really important, and I love the question you asked, Neil, is, is this just a calming exercise?

And it's not. It gives you more control over how you react. If you need to amp up, you can amp up faster. If you need to let go, you can let go faster. So it gives you precision in both directions so it gives you control knobs on your body that's right yeah oh my god you just dial it up that's right dial it up or down that's right neil i had an nfl coach a year ago come in and and he came in for a specific reason and but he said to me doc i, you can't make me like I just came out of yoga class.

I need to be able to still yell but have a little more control. I had to promise him up and down he wasn't going to lose that edge. He was going to enhance both directions. And by week seven, he came in. He goes, oh, my God, you're right. I'm so glad I trusted you. But it was so hard for him to trust that we weren't just going to calm him. That's funny.

If the NFL became one big yoga class, that would be funny. But imagine... So listen here. Look, Damien, I know you've had four fumbles and just the last four possessions. I'm breathing now,

and so it's okay. Just want to let you know, buddy, everything's okay. But what I want people to understand is that it means a quarterback can amp up and make decisions and get into that performance state faster and then let go for recovery. And what's so fascinating is by week seven of this process, most of my athletes have greater endurance. Do you know why that is? There's a cardiovascular energy savings because the gas exchange has been optimized, meaning there's less CO2 in your body, more O2.

And more efficient. That's right. And so my Olympians, my PGA Tour players, my elite level collegiate runner come in and they say, what is going on, Dot? I can run faster. I can play my sport longer and I'm not changing my training. It's the HRV. Okay. So let's move over to the psychology of this. Okay, based on what you just said and what Neil just said, as a comedian, I kind of get off on the hype before the show, all right? Now, based on what you just said, all that expulsion of energy and everything, I feel exhausted in such a good way when it's over, but I'm going to say that it's become a bit addictive. It's like the high.

I want to do the next show because I want that high again. I also want to experience the come down off the high, the return to normal. So for somebody like a comedian or a performer, all right, what would that do to me? Because it sounds to me like- Wait, isn't Leah just telling you that now it won't happen spontaneously, you'll control it. That's exactly right. You'll say, I'm ready to go on, let me, it's time to get hyped up. I'm just coming off the stage, now let me come down. That's right, yeah. You're just in control of it now. The spontaneity, though, is what creates the addictive quality to the experience. You don't want to be addicted to anything.

No, I want to be addicted to it. We're going to take a break. When we come back, more with Dr. Leah Lagos. And we're going to discuss whether or not COVID put the whole world in a stressful state and see if she can fix that when StarTalk returns. We're back. StarTalk Sports Edition. We're talking about the mind and the body.

The two-way street that they can be as enabled by the expertise and studies of Dr. Lea Lagos. And again, welcome to StarTalk. And I got Chuck Nice here tweeting at Chuck Nice Comic. Thank you, sir. And Gary, you're tweeting at my three left feet. Is that what it was? Correct. That'll be me.

I got that right. Wow. And Leah, you have a social media presence? I do. Dr. Leah, L-E-A-H, Lagos, L-A-G-O-S on Twitter. Okay, excellent. Excellent. Very, very good.

So in this segment, we just want to sort of digest a lot of what has come before. And so more colloquially, we're just saying we're shooting the shit. When we left off, Chuck, you dropped a question like a bomb, and we didn't have time. So bring it back in. So based on what you guys were talking

about in terms of being able to control the experience, does that lessen the high that the performer feels from the experience itself? The fact that you are creating it. For instance, when I go on stage, that high, it's spontaneous. And so I'm seeking it each time. And I'm going to echo Chuck's point. When I give a public talk, and if there's high anticipation, it's in a theater, and there is this sort of anticipation that I'm not controlling, but it sort of puts me in a place that I want to be and need to be to deliver for that entire lecture.

And then at the end, when it's over, there's this fascinating descent that is actually quite pleasurable, except completely exhausting, just because all the energy was focused in that time. I think I'm saying the same thing Chuck is saying. So are you doing a good thing by removing what happens automatically and spontaneously within us? So I'm not removing it, I'm amplifying. And so in those situations where you're having a state that's desired, this will allow you to amplify that state, even if it's happening holistically on its own. And the energy management piece would just be tighter at the end to the extent that it would help your body to recover. It's not going to reduce the pleasurable

peace. And in fact, I would argue it would amplify the positive, maybe euphoric is too strong, but the positive adrenaline dopamine state in the beginning, and then the descent is still experienced. So what happens with this, which is really phenomenal, is it amplifies desired states. And in states that aren't so desired, the ability to feel them and let go happens faster. The reason you're able to feel wider emotions, and it's really important also for people on Wall Street

to be able to feel a range of emotions because so much of their decision-making, there are somatic cues that will happen before conscious cues come in that they have to listen to. But you feel a wider range of emotions because your body feels that it can let go faster. So my short answer is it would amplify the experience. it would amplify the experience. So Leah, I'm guessing, I don't know for sure, that your book costs less than a one-hour session with you. So for those who can't afford you or can't find you, or if you're too busy with big old fancy sports teams, I presume there's some insights that we get from your book, Heart, Breath, Mind, Train Your Heart to Conquer Stress and Achieve Success. Is that a fair plug for the book? Yeah, Breath, Mind, train your heart to conquer stress and achieve success.

Is that a fair plug for the book? Yeah, thank you so much, Neil. My objective in writing the book was to bring a process that has been so meaningful and by description of my patients as life-changing to the world and the people that can't come into my office. And it allows people to take mobile devices, breath pacers on their phone,

heart rate variability monitoring, and use different types of applications in their own home to still gain many of the benefits of this process. All right, now let's get down to brass tacks. We're coming off a year, if we're still in, an extended year of a COVID pandemic. And it's basically, you know, the year the earth stood still, right? We, industries came to a halt. People were washing their groceries. Kids bouncing off of walls, not in school, in daycare, in nursery school.

This is trauma, for lack of any better word. Do you have a way to heal the world, the whole world, beyond just the individual? Well, I believe we all have been experiencing trauma through COVID. People fragmented from families. People's just daily routines can't engage in self-care in the same ways. Losing loved ones, they can't even hug them on their deathbeds. It's traumatic. It's so traumatic.

And then there's the piece where the uncertainty, the not knowing where this ends, the not knowing what tomorrow brings. That influences our bodies in a traumatic kind of way too. What it does is it engages sympathetic activation, a sustained state of hypervigilance and many people, so people will say, I'm not sleeping well right now. I feel depressed and it's just kind of ongoing or my mood is slipping. There's physiological reasons for that. Many and most people are feeling a heightened sense of not being safe in the world, and that's internalized in their body, in their autonomic nervous system. So it's not just let's fix the brain and your body follows, it's the body can have feedback

onto what the brain is doing. Did I learn anything in this session with you, Leah? And specifically the heart. And so the heart is embedding these experiences as frequencies in the heart that then impact the brain. And it's unique. And I believe it will lead to a paradigm shift in treatment and performance when we start to address physiology first. And then we add the psychological techniques. I can tell you my own clinical experience. I can have you on my couch for three years and we can talk, or I can train your physiology and I can get you to places through talking that are much faster and more effective after we've gotten you to manage how you respond to stress and let go. Okay. Wow. Tim Ferriss talks a little bit on his podcast healing about healing trauma and his experience working with me using heart rate variability biofeedback to decrease his cardiovascular reactivity to stressors that because of of trauma he had a heightened reactivity to specific stressors and what that often engenders people to do then is to go deeper even into other forms of therapy because they're not in that hyper

vigilant fight or flight state they can allow their body to go into that deeper terrain for healing so if we are having a paradigm shift and we're using physiology to work with the psychology are there other areas of clinical medicine that we could move this technique into and be successful? Yeah. How about fears? How about fears? People who are afraid of flying? Phobias. Phobias, especially phobias. Yes, that's a great one. And I have many patients over the years who their phobias have significantly reduced, if not disappeared. And I had one woman who had a

phobia of planes, hadn't been on a plane in eight years. And we got her not only on a plane, but actually able to go through the entire plane ride. It was a three-hour plane ride without a panic attack. I mean, it's really profound. And she had her heart rate variability monitor. She had her breathing protocol. We planned it just like it was an Olympic game. And she had a strategy for how to shift her physiology before, during, and after that plane experience. No, but that is interesting. So that was able to, you were able to overcome that. That's so hopeful. Oh my gosh. So now it sounds, a lot of what you're talking about sounds vaguely or slightly related to mindfulness and mindfulness meditation. Yeah, meditation.

What's the difference between this and meditation? What is the difference there? And can that be kind of a gateway to you or can you be a gateway to that? And frankly, you sound more science-y to me than anyone who I've ever had a meditation conversation with. So if you can just tell me what's the difference and what's the overlap? Meditation, I think, is beautiful and I'm a big supporter of it, but it produces different effects. So I have people who have been meditators for years and they still have high blood pressure or they can't sleep at night or they can't perform under pressure. And so this specifically from a performance perspective is something that you can use during performance moments to shift from that

fight or flight state into a flow state. And that's really important for performers. So meditation doesn't quite yield that effect. The other piece is that what you're developing through 10 weeks is you're transferring the heart rate oscillations. They're like big, beautiful waves when you breathe at your resonant frequency versus just regularly. So let's say your heart rate goes from 60 to 70. So as you inhale, it goes up 60 to 70 and it goes down per minute. Thank you. And then 70 to 60. But when you breathe at your resonant frequency, it goes from 60 to 90 and 90 to 60.

So they're bigger oscillations. And what happens through the 10 weeks is those oscillations that you're practicing systematically 20 minutes twice a day, begin to transfer over to your baseline. So then you start to see increased heart rate variability, like when you were breathing at resonant frequency, but at your natural baseline state. That doesn't happen in meditation. Wow. Okay. Okay. Take that meditation. Take that yogi. Take that, yogi. So this all sounds so hopeful for so many people who might have had intractable problems that don't otherwise yield to simple therapy, medication, or anything else.

So why aren't there statues to you out there? My hope, Neil and Chuck and Gary, is that we really educate the world so they understand the powerful benefits. It's really life-changing for so many people. And we're in a world right now where everybody can use this to thrive in their own personal performance and health domains. Well, I think that's where we're going to land this plane right on that bullseye. Leah, it's been a delight to have you on StarTalk. And as you know,

we try to find other angles on sports that are informed by science and you did exactly that for us today so thanks for being a part of this effort and Gary pleasure is mine always learning always open to that and she'll fix that concussion thing you're still going through just hit me on the other side of the head

that'll balance it out that'll balance it right out and Chuck always good to have you, man. Always a pleasure. All right. This has been StarTalk Sports Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist.

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