The Dr. Hyman Show - Heart Rate Variability | Why Your Nervous System Needs This.

Episode Date: July 15, 2026

We all experience stress. The real challenge isn't stress itself—it's whether we recover from it. Over time, chronic stress can quietly affect everything from inflammation and metabolism to sleep, digestion, and healthy aging. This week on The Dr. Hyman Show, I talk with nervous system educator and HRV expert Salim Najjar to explore what heart rate variability (HRV) can reveal about your body's ability to recover from stress and build resilience. Together, we unpack: • How to use HRV to better understand your body's response to stress • Why some stress makes you stronger while chronic stress wears you down • How to get more value from your wearable without obsessing over the numbers • Five daily habits that can help your nervous system recover and become more resilient • How your nervous system influences inflammation, healing, and healthy aging Our bodies are constantly responding to the demands we place on them every day. The good news is that resilience can be built, and the strategies in this conversation can help you recover from stress more effectively and support long-term health. To help you get started, Salim has created a free HRV guide that includes a personalized quiz and AI coach exclusively for listeners.View Show Notes From This Episode Sign up for Dr. Hyman’s Brainshaping Academy to learn how to nourish the biological systems that support your mental, emotional, and cognitive health https://drhyman.com/products/brainshaping?utm_source=dr_hyman_show&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=may_27&utm_content=linkGet Free Weekly Health Tips from Dr. Hymanhttps://drhyman.com/pages/picks?utm_campaign=shownotes&utm_medium=banner&utm_source=podcastSign Up for Dr. Hyman’s Weekly Longevity Journalhttps://drhyman.com/pages/longevity?utm_campaign=shownotes&utm_medium=banner&utm_source=podcastJoin the 10-Day Detox to Reset Your Healthhttps://drhyman.com/pages/10-day-detoxJoin the Hyman Hive for Expert Support and Real Resultshttps://drhyman.com/pages/hyman-hive This episode is brought to you by Perfect Amino, Cozy Earth, Timeline, Sunlighten, Made In, and Seatopia. Get daily protein support at bodyhealth.com and use code HYMAN20 for 20% off. Head over to cozyearth.com to save 20% and upgrade all of your daily essentials today. Support healthy aging and get 20% at timeline.com/drhyman with code HYMAN. Discover why so many people are using sunlighten.com and use code HYMAN to save up to $2,100 today with free shipping. Upgrade your cookware at madeincookware.com and save 10% off your first order with code HYMAN-HIVE. Find a cleaner source of seafood. Check out seatopia.fish and receive free shipping on your first order. (0:00) Introduction to HRV (3:43) Introduction to Salim and his HRV expertise (4:18) What is HRV and how is it measured (5:32) Chronic stress, stress regulation, and sovereignty (9:52) Why HRV is an important health metric (20:31) Deeper dive into HRV as a health indicator (25:43) Salim's HRV coaching, website, and personal journey (28:49) Salim’s framework and steps for improving HRV (30:07) The role of sleep and hormetic stress in HRV (33:12) Tools and tracking for HRV measurement (37:22) The art framework and five pathways for HRV (38:17) Salim’s injury, reframing, and HRV improvement (46:22) Viktor Frankl, intentionality, and alignment (51:46) Community and its role in health and HRV (55:02) Practical steps for building community and emotional regulation (58:18) Emotional processing, elite athletes, and HRV performance (1:00:35) Sovereignty, compassion, and daily nervous system practices (1:03:18) Awareness, parasympathetic activation, and reframing HRV (1:05:01) Closing remarks, social media, and gratitude (1:05:51) Disclaimer and sponsor acknowledgments

You've said that HRV is the language of the body. How did that help us understand what's actually happening inside? If it is measuring that gap or variance between each beat, let's say your heart rate is 72. H.RV is the measure of each of that variance between the 72 in a minute. The higher variance between each of the VETs, it indicates a more malleable and resilient nervous system that could handle the ever-changing environment that we are always seeing. And just like there's no two fingerprints in the world that are the same, there's actually no two heartbeats in the world that are the same, meaning your H-RRRRRRRR,

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Get your first box at cedopia.fish and use the code hymen for free shipping. Before we begin, I'd like to note that today's conversation explores one perspective of an area of medicine that continues to be actively debated. And while we discussed emerging evidence and critiques of current psychiatric practice, treatment decisions, especially involving

antidepressants or other prescription medications should always be made in consultation with your health care provider. The views expressed by my guest are her own and reflect her interpretation of the available evidence. My goal in hosting conversations like this is to explore different perspectives, to examine the science, to encourage thoughtful discussion, not to provide individualized medical advice. So if you're currently taking medication, please don't stop or change your treatment based on this conversation alone. Instead, use this episode as a starting point for an informed conversation with your healthcare team. My hope is that these discussions encourage curiosity, critical thinking, and shared decision-making between patients and their clinicians.

So before we wrap up, if you found today's conversation on Lyme disease helpful, be sure to check out my upcoming conversation with one of the world's leading Lyme experts, Dr. Richard Horowitz. We go beyond Lyme disease itself to explore why so many people remain chronically ill. We explore his groundbreaking Emson's framework for understanding chronic disease. And we also look at the biggest drivers of chronic inflammation and what it really takes to help the body heal. So be sure to check it out on this Wednesday. Here's a preview. If you enjoyed today's episode, don't miss my upcoming conversation with Lyme disease expert Dr. Richard Horowitz. We dive into why so many people stay sick and we look at the hidden drivers of chronic illness and a whole new way of thinking about

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So if you want to learn more, head to BodyHealth.com and use the code Hyman20 for 20% off your first order. That's bodyhealth.com and use to go to Hyman 20. Celine, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me, Mark. Truly a pleasure. So good to be with you. You've been coaching me on my HRV, which I appreciate because I got work to do. And for those of you listening who don't know what HRV is, it means heart rate, very And we're going to get into what that means, why it's important, how it's a reflection of your nervous system state, and why you need to pay attention to it so you can actually improve your overall well-being in health and longevity and all the things we care about. So, Salim, for someone who's first hearing about HRV, what is it and what is it actually measuring? Great question. So HRV stands for heart rate variability and it's measuring the gap or the variance between each of your heartbeats. And what that gap is indicating is how your nervous system. in heart is perceiving its ever-changing environment.

So essentially, your relationship to your stress and a direct reflection of the health of your autonomic nervous system and its ability to shift from a sympathetic to a parasympathetic state. So essentially it's like, if we're trying to say like, I'm stressed, like, what's the biomarker of stress? You know, you can check your cortisol level. That can be helpful. And I do salivary cortisol testing, but that's a little bit cumbersome pain in the ass.

And it's not really a day-to-day metric. you can follow and track. But now with all these devices and wearables, we're actually able to measure this, and there's no things you can do as a computer. I mean, I was involved with heart math a long time ago that it was very much about this. And I remember at Cleveland Canyon Ranch

when I was working there 30 years ago, we actually were measuring heart variability on all our patients. And it was, like, fascinating to see, you know, what happened in over time. This is an important biomarker, so it's something people can look at, track, and measure for themselves

and then create change. in their life to actually improve their stress resilience. Absolutely. Tell me why this has become more of a hot topic. Why is HRB now a thing? It's just going to you can measure it or the scientists and longevity researchers paying more attention to it. Like what, why should they care?

Yeah, well, it's great to hear that you were measuring it and knowing about it 30 years ago. It's been around forever, right? But I think now because of what science has proven, which we were talking about this earlier, science has proven that the root cause of all aging, disease and eventually death is cellular inflammation, right? If you peel the onion back enough, I know you and Dr. Eric Verdon, we're talking about this on a recent podcast. Cellular inflammation

is at the underlying cause of all mortality. Science has also proven that the number one leading cause of that cellular inflammation, chronic stress, meaning prolonged sympathetic activation, which we call chronic stress. So if you care at all about longevity, then being aware of your internal state being aware of if you're in a prolonged stressful state is important. And guess what? HRV is a biomarker reflecting the health of your internal state. So that's why it's becoming a thing now, which I am so, so deeply grateful for. Yeah, I think I just want to double click on what you said around chronic stress because stress is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, there are many good stresses that we call hormesis, which we'll get into, which are stresses that don't kill you that make you

stronger. And most throughout most of our evolutionary history, humans have only been subjected to acute stresses. It comes and it goes. And there was a wonderful book written by a crazy wild scientist from Stanford, Robert Sapolsky, who has been on the podcast called Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. And basically the thesis is that zebras just go about eating their food and then the lion comes and they run like crazy as fast they can to escape the lion until the lion catches one of them. And then the lion goes about eating their friend and they just kind of go back to eating the grass and chill. And so they've gotten all the stress out of their system. And we don't do that. We just have this unremitting, chronic, prolonged stress from the way we live, from the lack of

our circadian rhythms, from the living indoors, from not being in nature, from not having good relationships, from eating crappy food, which makes our body stress. I mean, there's so many reasons. So we have way more to deal with than we ever had. And I think that, you know, people don't really have a clear idea of how to shift that, but there's meditation, there's yoga, there's breathwork, there's all these tools, but you talk about each of a bit of a different way than most people. You talk about this idea of, instead of nervous system regulation, nervous system sovereignty. I don't really know what that means. And why does it matter more than regulation? Because you seem to have like a little bit of a thing about regulation. I love the question. And it's, I love nervous system regulation. I love

that people are talking about, people are aware of it. That's kind of what we hear in the ether so much. But what I've come to find in my own journey is, I believe as humans, we did not come here to be regulated all the time. And if we're regulated all the time, we actually can't increase the capacity and resilience of our nervous system to go handle more stress or to go have a bigger impact on the world. So what I've come to find is more important is awareness of your internal state agency over your internal state. And that's what sovereignty is, being aware. So that way, when a stress happens, you have the ability to consciously choose how you want to respond to that stress versus automatically responding based on an old program, a prior story. a stuck belief from your limbic brain, because that's actually how the nervous system works

physiologically, right? It is just programmed to react when the mind perceives a stress. So sovereignty or agency over your internal state allows you to be aware that we're in a stressful state, and if we so choose, get ourselves out of it. Yeah, so it's essentially a way for us to kind of recalibrate with awareness. A hundred percent. Instead of just being in it. Yes. A friend of mine talks about this idea of being in it but not of it. Most times we're in it and we're of it. Yes. Which means we're like in the kind of unconscious swirl of our life rather than stepping out and going, hey, is this the right response for me in this situation? How do I get back to a more authentic, maybe call it sovereign way of relating to my own experience rather than being constantly

in a state of trigger or stress or reaction? And you're kind of inviting people to kind of pay attention to this metric as a way to, as a doorway into understanding their home biology and how it's affecting them. As a compass to what their body actually is resonant with versus what the story that they're playing out is, right? Because we're just projecting these stuck emotions, these stories from the past, your beautiful analogy of a zebra, right?

They shake it off. They move that emotion, and an emotion on a quantum level is literally just frequency, it's energy. They move it out so they're not stuck, exactly. So they're not stuck to that story, and then they can live in the present moment, which all that is.

is. I actually remember being in Africa and seeing this. I'm like, wow, the lion's right there and the, like, zebras and stuff are all there, and they're just eating one of those sunbathing, relaxing, chilling. And the zebras are just, like, hanging out with the lion while he's eating another zebra. It was wild, and they're not freaked out or anything. And it was, I mean, I'd be pretty freaked out. So, you know, maybe he's like, wants an appetizer or a dessert or something, you know. I want to kind of double click on the idea of, the biology of this chronic stress. and why the HRV metric is so important, and why understanding how to use it and regulate it

and actually reset it is important. But before we do that, I kind of want to people understand when you say chronic stress, drives inflammation on a serial level, like that's a big mouthful. Can you kind of unpack that and what's actually going on and how it works? Absolutely.

And as an engineer, when I understood that, that science has proven that, I needed to understand why, how? What is happening internally, physiologically, right? And that has everything to do with Again, the autonomic nervous system, which is such an intricate system that governs 90% of our voluntary and involuntary function, meaning our heart rate, our breath, our digestion, our reproduction.

All of these vital organs are being governed by this incredible electrical system that we know so little about that we're not fully aware of. And if we look at evolution, which you talked about a little bit, right, evolution is always happening for us, for our survival. And we evolved at creating this sympathetic, activated state for. for our survival. Because for most of human evolution, we didn't have the luxury, like you said, of homes, of running water, of food. And so we had real life or death threats, like a predator, or like the weather. And so our brilliant bodies develop the sympathetic activation to support that

survival. So what's happening internally? If the mind perceives an external threat, the amygdala fires off and all of these signals go to the organs. Our eyes dilate to let in more light. Our saliva production slows down, which you may not think is a big deal. I know you know it's a big deal, because that's where our whole nutrient absorption comes in, right? Our heart rate goes up, our lungs slow down. But most importantly, all of the vital oxygenated blood that's normally flowing to our visceral organs, meaning our lungs, our digestion, our reproduction, it gets diverted to our extremities, to our hands and legs to support run, fighting, or freezing, which is brilliant if we need to run from a tiger, right? But back for most of our evolution,

that would happen for an hour, maybe two, and then we do what you just said all the zebras were doing. Relax, right? Fast forward to today. We wake up from our deepest parasympathetic state of sleep. We look at our phone. We read an email. We get in an argument. And we go into a mind-made, perceived stressful state for eight, 10, 12 hours a day, day over day, week over week. So what is happening internally? All of that vital oxygenated blood is flowing here instead of our visceral organs. So they can't maintain the homeostasis in the body. They can't repair. And downstream of that, cellular inflammation begins. And when my mind realized that that's what was happening internally,

I was like, oh shit, I really need to be aware of if my mind is perceiving a threat, even if it's just an email, and then get my body out of it at least temporarily, so all that oxygen can go back here, and my organs can maintain the homeostasis in the body. Yeah, it's so important. And I think the quote that I once heard

that really kind of stuck with me about the definition of stress, it made so much sense to me. Stress is defined as the real or imagined, and this is a big one for most of us. I say it's imagined. Yep, yep. The real or imagined threat to our body or our ego. So it can be a real threat to your body,

like a lion chasing you, or it can be an imagined threat to your ego, like you think your husband came home late from work because he's having an affair, but actually he was just going to buy you flowers, right? And so you have this whole spin out, and the body registers it all exactly the same. 100%.

As like a life-threatening emergency. that you have to gear up for. Totally. And the thing I want to double click on is you said so beautifully, stress, this is how I call it to. It's your actually best friend and ally if you learn to dance with it and not stay in it. Because we didn't say stress was the number one leading cause of inflammation, cellular inflammation. We said chronic stress, staying in that prolonged stress, we'll say in that story in whatever you're perceiving. During the summer, when I'm moving between work and everything else life throws at me,

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healthy aging from the inside out. Visit Timeline.com and use the code hymen for 20% off your order. You kind of mentioned this sympathetic nervous system and this sort of chronic stress as being the problem. What's the other part of our nervous system, the parasympathetic, and how does that work and how do they kind of work together? The other side of the autonomic nervous system branch is the parasympathetic side, known as the rest or digest.

And this operates in three primary stages. And what's so important about this is they correlate with our development mental years, right? It's where our nervous system foundation is being built. So we start out with the delta state when your brain is oscillating between 0.5 and 4 hertz and that's synonymous with sleep when it's a total reset on the nervous system. And it also correlates to babies when they come out the womb for about the first, they say 12 to 18 months. Their baseline brainwave state is delta and their nervous system foundation is being built, right? They're so susceptible to all energies and nervous systems around them. Then we go to the theta.

a state known as that meditated between conscious and unconscious state when your brain is oscillating between four and eight hertz and you are a sponge you are hypnotic susceptible to all energies around and this is the important one for our youth because it correlates to the ages two to seven that we call our formative years because they quite literally form us we don't have a prefrontal cortex developed at that time so we don't have the ability to discern reality ourselves so if a caregiver or parent yells or does something unintentionally, our body doesn't know how to process that emotion and it gets stuck in the body because we just literally absorb it. There's an incredible book, The Body Keeps Score that literally talks about how we're like grownups living in this adult meat suit just projecting

all of our stuck emotions and stories. Then you go to the third, the alpha state of the parasympathetic side, known as the flow state, right, like into an athlete in their zone. This is when the brain is oscillating between 8 and 14 hertz. The monkey mind is quiet. You're focused on one thing. You're awake and alert, but quiet, and you are still susceptible, right? This correlates with the ages of seven to 14, which is when we send children to school, because your prefrontal cortex is being developed, and you have the ability to retain all of that information. So that's the parasympathetic side. What's really interesting to me, and as I've studied all this over years, is that the sympathetic activation happens automatically. Like, you don't really have to go into that on purpose. You don't

go, oh, there's a tiger chasing me. I need to go get into a stress response so I can run. It just happens in an instant, like almost, almost milliseconds. And most of us have felt that. If you're almost like in a car accident or something, you get that like whatever jolt, your body just goes, boom. What I realize is that entering into a parasympathetic state is a very deliberate active process. It's not something that just happens to you.

And often, we can go through life never reaching that state. In a way, this is why HRV is so important, because it is an indirect indicator of the health of your autonomic nervous system and the way you regulate between stress and relaxation or between sympathetic and parasympathetic response. Your agility. Yeah. Yep.

It's like the flexibility. And we know, for example, that if you look at people who are chronically ill, they have very low heart rate variability. If you look at heart failure patients, they have very low heart rate variability. The most healthy heart rate is the most complex. The simplest heart rate is the most dangerous. Other words, a flat line.

Yep. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, right how have you ever. Exactly. And so what we see is in heart failure patients, actually when they look at their HRV, it's quite low. And then one of the interesting things I saw in science years ago that kind of got my attention was that if you do saunas,

in heart failure patients, they actually increase their HRV. Wow. And so there's a lot of tools to regulate HRV. We're going to get into all those, but you kind of need you to kind of help us understand what's actually happening with HRV because it's described as the beat-to-beat variability. In other words, your heart rate is in like 72.

It's 71 and a quarter. It's 16.9 and a third. It's 73 and 4.8s. It's like, and the more that is happening, the healthy you are, but if it's like 72, 72, 72, that's bad. Yeah. So that's kind of the simple way of thinking about it. But you've said that HRV is the language of the body.

How did that help us understand what's actually happening inside? If it is measuring that gap or variance between each beat, let's say your heart rate is 72. That means it's beating 72 beats per minute. And HRV is the measure of each of that variance between the 72 and a minute, meaning it is so variable and changes so much. So it's not about your real-time HRV because that's fluctuating 72 times in a minute and you want it to be variable, right? So what is important is the higher variance between each of the VEats, it indicates a more malleable and resilient nervous system that could handle the ever-changing environment that we are always seeing, right? On the flip side, a lower variance, meaning less of a gap between each beat

indicates a more rigid, nervous system, and that which is rigid eventually breaks. So that's that analogy you said, like a death patient connected to a hormone, a year, beep, beep, beep, beep, right before they go. There's no variation between that beat. That's not what you want, right? Rigidity will lead to breaking. So that's what's super important. Now, no. that, everyone's like, okay, well, then what is a good HRV score? Yeah, the question. And this is where science, which has researches for so long, has yet to publish a range. The only thing that they have said scientifically is that it is so uniquely individualized to the person.

And just like there's no two fingerprints in the world that are the same, there's actually no two heartbeats in the world that are the same, meaning your HRV score is solely meant just for you. You said that yours was like 32 and you increased it to 100 by doing practices, right? So you could change it. Oh, yeah, and we'll get into that. So I can't change my fingerprints, but I can change my HRV. You could train your HRV, right? But me training it to 100, 170 doesn't mean that you're...

Wait, are you 170 now? I got to 10070. You know that. And I'm not that now. And we'll get into why that's what matters. Because again, it's unlike... Can I have a few? I want a few.

Yeah. You're like 50. I would happily give you all. You know that. You know that. What's more important, right, is to utilize this buyer, Marker as a language, right? And this is what I'm trying to share with the world. And when you think of languages, you don't think English is better than Spanish, is better than French, right? What's the intent of a

language? A language, the intention, is for an ecosystem within a community to communicate, right? The sole intent of your HRV score is only for your nervous system, for Dr. Mark Hyman's body to communicate with you, right? The second you compare it to my hundred or to a number you need to chase, what are you doing? If HRV is measuring how your nervous system is perceiving its reality, right? How do we perceive our reality? Through our senses? Through our touch, through our taste, through our smell, through our eyes, through ears.

But most of all, through our thoughts. Yeah. Through our relationship to our environment. And if you are relating to you thinking you have a low HRV score and Salim has a high HRV score, what are you telling your nervous system? You're not good enough you need to be better. And so what's going to happen. That's exactly what I'm telling myself.

It's going to stay in this quote unquote lower. thing. So yes, a higher HRV is a healthier nervous system, but higher for me is totally different than higher for you is totally different for higher than whoever is listening. So that's why I like to look at your HRV baseline. And I define your HRV

baseline as your average HRV score over the last 30 days. That is a good snapshot of the overall health of your nervous system in whatever you've been putting it through. And so if you're wearing a wearable and you wake up and you see your morning HRV score, let's say it's 40, right? And your baseline is

60. That's not a bad thing. Yes, it's a lower than your baseline, but that's not bad. That's simply a language of your body saying whatever you did the day before is more of a load than your nervous system has been used to the last 30 days. The best thing you can do, listen to it, honor it, do something that nourishes your body that gets you in a more of parasympathetic state versus what we're also conditioned to do in this modern society, push harder, work out harder, stay up, like doing the same thing that you're doing. Listening is the key to seeing over time the baseline maintain and go up. However, we know it has been proven as you age, your HRV is going to decline because of all the stresses that you're putting it through, right? So ideally you want to

see your baseline maintain and if possible start to go up as you age because in general, it will go down. Yeah, I noticed when I, during COVID, I went to Maui and I just stayed put and didn't travel and had a clear routine and went to bed at the same time, I'll cup every stay at the same time. And my HRV actually doubled. And doubling at a lower level, That's massive, right? Going from whatever it was 16, 20 to 40 is as good as going from like 100 to 250, right? It's not like, that's how you need to think of it. But you say the score isn't the point. You say it's sort of like a different way of thinking about a biomarker and not like that it should be like this perfect number. Totally. And that's what I find the biggest thing in clients and talking and seeing is that there's this like score, shame or judgment because you think you hear someone have 100, 170, you think you need to be there or you're not healthy. And that's not how it works. It really is a unique language and listening to your own body, because you notice better than

anywhere, the body is the temple. The body knows how to heal itself if you just give it the tools and technology and nutrition to do so, right? And HRV is just a compass guiding you to what is resonant with your body. Yeah, amazing. So you work with clients and you help them coach them on HRV, and we'll put a link into your website. What's your website? Thathrvguy.com.

Thathrv guy.com. Okay, and you can learn more about Celine's work there. But what do you do with your clients to help them improve their stress resilience? Because it's not about the number, like you said. It's just really about understanding how to work with stress in their nervous system. So it's not so much of a chronic problem. Totally. So what do you do with your clients around this?

Yeah, so this is the question of, okay, how do you increase your HRV? What is the thing to do so? And to answer that question, I think I want to just give a little background on, like, how I got to being so passionate it about HRV, right? So I grew up in upstate New York and I'm the oldest of three in a first generation Lebanese family and I lost my father from cancer at a young age of seven, which very much, that was a formative years, right? So that was shaping all of my programming and conditioning around how I go about. And it led to, you know, my caregiving, my belief I can't let people down, the sacrifice, which were all beautiful gifts that supported my journey, right?

Are you people pleasure too? Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's why we, that's why we're so good friends, brother. And so I went to school for engineering and I graduated and I worked at a nuclear power plant that powered most of New York City. And it was during that time. Wait, was that three mile island? Indian Point. No. Indian Point. I was like, oh, are you radioactive?

No. It was during that time that my grandmother, who was up my second mom, got diagnosed with breast cancer. And I was like, what is going on in the world in this thing called cancer? And that's when I went down the rabbit hole of health. I started listening and learning about you and all these incredible people who were sharing a different perspective on health and nutrition. And it was the first time that I realized, wow, we see what people want us to see, and there's so much more out there, right? So bring curiosity to it. And so I started with diet, with food, with exercise, right? And I came across ketosis about 18 years ago and fell in love with the energy and the clarity from cutting out sugar. And so I would just drink water and unsweetened tea for like three, four years. And a colleague at the power plant of mine loved bubbles. And we drink our Yurbamate every day together. And one day we decided to brew a matte, cool it, put it in a soda stream, and we made the first unsweetened, sparkling tea, sound, my last company, which you know all about. And so we quit the nuclear engineering job and went all in to launch

a beverage, rather challenging industry. Wow, from nuclear power to a beverage company. Yeah, yeah. And it was at the time that the beverage company launched at the biohacking movement emerged with the legs of Dave Aspery, Ben Greenfield, all these people. So my engineering mind went down every rabbit hole obsessed with biohacking, wanting to optimize to the point where I was showing off, I was hacking my way to five hours of sleep a night, running 10 miles every other day, listening to three audiobooks a week, raising money from 170 people in New York City, thinking I'm winning this game of life, right? I did that for five years until my body broke down and my knee gave out,

and that was the beginning of my inward journey, and that's when I read Dr. Joe Dispens' book, Becoming Supernatural, and it was the first time in literature that I saw this biomarker, HRV, described relating to stress. And the second I read that, the light bulb went off from my research around knowing what science has proven that chronic stress is the number one lead cause of cellular inflammation, which is the root cause of aging disease and death. And so the past six years of my life have been a journey on understanding this biomarker HRV. And that led me to creating this framework

that I call the art of the heart. And art stands for awareness, regulation, transformation. And this is a three-act arc that isn't a ladder you climb once and you made it to the top. and you're regulated forever and your nervous system set and you don't need to do anything. One and done. No, that's not how real life works. No, it's rather a daily act of devotion towards listening to your nervous system, towards utilizing HRV as a biomarker to support understanding what your body needs. So this is the framework that I bring to clients that I go talking about.

And within this framework, there are five pathways to HRV growth to support nervous system sovereignty that I talk about. So the first pathway is sleep as the foundation, which I know you know all too well. You talk about it on the podcast all the time. And has everything to do with actually what you shared in the beginning of the podcast, really honoring your circadian rhythm from a nervous system perspective standpoint, right? And if you are jipping that deepest parasympathetic state, that delta state of sleep, it's going to be very hard to see your HRV go up and to have sovereignty over your nervous system. So this kind of all relates to my story over the last six years. rewind to me showing off I was hacking my way to five hours of sleep,

it was really not honoring my nervous system. It wasn't until I started honoring my sleep, revering my sleep, that I started seeing my HRV baseline, which when I started was 30, begin to go up step by step. And so outside of honoring your circadian rhythm, so many other things I know you talk about in terms of blue light exposure and eating, you know, how long to eat before bed. So so many different tools that you can utilize to support your sleep.

And if you weave the art framework, that awareness, regulation, transformation to how you sleep, you could see what works for your body. So that's sleep the foundation. Second pathway is hormetic stress, the catalyst. And you talked about hormesis. And for those unfamiliar with it, hormetic stress is the philosophy of intentionally eliciting a stress on the body and then consciously getting your body out of it. Training, right?

The best analogy I give for that is weight training. When you go to a gym to lift your biceps, right? You're lifting more weight than the muscle can actually handle tearing the fibers in your muscle bicep. What do you do the next day? Right. Yeah. So that the following day, you can go lift more weight.

Yeah. Same thing with your nervous system. Put it in a conscious stressful state, contrast therapy, all these different things, hot cold, then consciously get it out of it. And the thing is, most people don't complete the equation until you go to sleep, right? And so back to my story, I decided to continue running the beverage company, putting myself in arguably one of the most challenging industries continuing to raise money, but throughout the day multiple times, I would consciously drop my body into parasympathetic states using all of the

biohacking technologies with the intention to bring a parasympathetic state to my body, whether it was contrast therapy, whether it was PMF, whether it was binaural beats. I mean, my house had all the gadgets you could imagine. So I was literally training to be an emotional athlete for about three years. And it was that training that took me from the baseline of 30 to above 170 because I literally was putting myself in arguably for me the most challenging stressful situation. So good news for anybody listening. I don't think any human being as a problem putting themselves in a stressful state. We do it all the time. What I was the most guilty of and most of us are is not completing that equation and dropping into a parasympathetic side until we go to sleep.

And this is where NSDR, non-sleep deep rests, right, that we talk about in the biohacking field. It's so important to do it throughout the day. To take a little break. To take a little break. To take a pause. And it could be as simple as just two minutes of box breathing or just a long, slow exhale, right? Or they know, you know, the psychological side. Right?

That resets the vagus nerve, calms, the body breath is the freest tool to support changing your internal state. So that's pathway number two, hormetic stress. Pathway number three, reframing the shift. Before we go, before we sort of jump up, the hermetic stress, kind of break down on it. Yeah. Yeah. Break down what are the most effective tools in that framework. Any, anytime anyone asks me, like, what is the best thing? I always say, for me, because it's so unique to the individual.

And that's where HRV is such a powerful compass for you to test what actually resonates with your body. Because cold plumbing for me is great. But for some people, especially women, during certain ovulation cycles, it's not necessarily the best thing. So if you bring this art framework and awareness to whatever, the thing is that you're doing, seeing if it regulates your body, seeing if your body's resonant for it, and then consistently showing up with that awareness and regulation will lead to the transformation to support your HRV. And so it's listening. And in a day and age where we are so blessed to be inundated with so much technology, so much information, with AI, helping, do this diet, do this

exercise, right? It's all amazing. But what works for me or for Brian Johnson or for whoever may have the opposite impact for someone else. So experiment yourself. because your body is the guru. Your body knows what is most resonant with it. And if you were like me, I could not, I was not attuned. I couldn't hear. I was too much up in here. And HRV supported getting me to listen to my body.

It was a biomarker that was objectively telling me what is resonant with my body. Like, what are the most things effectively like, is it a cold plunge? Is it a hot sauna? For me, the number one tool that I know I've shared with you and I think you still do, newcom, that app, it's an app with a patented technology. guarantee to get your body in a parasympathetic state through binaural beats. So it essentially uses frequencies to guide your brain into a desired theta state. And for me, while I was running the beverage company, it was so hard for me in the middle

of the day to sit and meditate, right? When you're in it, it is so challenging. But they have this 20 minute power nap that Tony Robbins says the best power nap you could do. You listen to this track for 20 minutes and your mind slowly goes from that high beta state through alpha into theta and then gets you right back out of it. Yeah, I use it. It's fun. It's good. So there's binaural beats. There's contrast therapy. There's breathwork, meditation, dancing, swimming, running, whatever is resonant. So many different things out there that I know you talk about so many. There's so many technologies. And to use the technology, like I love all the biohacking technologies, but I was guilty to first five years of using it to do more and have more energy instead of to bring internal stillness, calmness, sympathetic side, to balance the equation. You talk about this idea of nervous system load and your baseline and the trends over time. And now there's all these tools to measure all its wearables and watches and rings.

And what should we be kind of looking at and what should be people paying attention to and tracking? Great, great question because we didn't talk about how to track it. And most people nowadays, like myself, through wearables like O'Ring, whoop, Apple Watch, right? The thing to know, all of these wearables... They're all different. They're all... Like, if you do, if you measure multiple ones at the same time, you're going to get different numbers on everyone. Totally, because the aura and the whoop use RMSSID versus an Apple Watch, which uses something else, so it'll be slightly higher, versus athletes you use polar H straps that give you actually like the real time.

But no wearable gives you real time HRV. What you're getting in your morning score is actually your average nightly HRV reading, right? And what that's a good indicator of is the overall health and load you put your nervous system through the day before because it's being taken when there's no external simulation and you're lying down, right? And so that's why listening to it and comparing it to your baseline is the best way to utilize these wearables and to not wake up and say, oh, I have a low score. That's bad, right? That is where then you stay perpetually in that low state because you are thinking it is bad. It's not bad. It's your body saying, hey, yesterday was more of a load than I'm used to. Why don't you nourish me a little more today? You know, you can use any of these devices and it's sort of an internally consistent metric. But if you jump between devices, you're going to see different measurements. You're going to see, so what I say, the best device to use is the one that you'll use consistently, right? The one that's the most consistent that you could actually take day to day and understand what your baseline is. All right, I want to go back to your art framework and the five pathways.

So we talked about sleep as a nurse. Awareness, regulation and transformation. Those are the three, right? Those are the three that you weave between each pathway, right? And so Pathway one, sleep we said, pathway two, hormetic stress. Pathway three, reframing the shift, right? And so if we go back to my story, I, for the Lex four years, continued running the beverage company,

taking my HRV from 30 to a 170 baseline, thinking I'm winning this game of life, right? Good HRV score on the outside. The beverage company was doing great. We were at a number two beverage and Whole Foods on the East Coast, opening up in 3,000 retailers. Outside, amazing. Internally, to keep up with that demand in the beverage space,

you need a lot of capital. And I was struggling, raising enough money to keep the beverage going, getting myself in a lot of debt and internal stress. And it was my birthday about three years ago, and in front of all of our community, I declared and asked, I wanted to step into less doing more being. A common statement echoed amongst entrepreneurs approaching burnout. And I got gifted from everybody, Allie, pooled together the community to give me a super 73 electronic bike,

this Burning Man bike that I wanted so badly. And I take said bike for its first spin on the Venice boardwalk. The sun is setting. And I'm like, oh, it's going to work out, take a deep breath. The money's going to come in. It always happens. And I get in the silliest accident that anteriorly dislocates my right shoulder, tears my labrum and fractures 30%

on my shoulder socket off. I had to go to the ER for them to dislocate to relocate it. I wake up the next morning still in pain but more importantly my mind's like how can this happen now? How am I going to raise money? Why? Why? Why? And my HRV which at the time baseline 170 dropped to 30. My body screaming, it was not happy, right?

Thankfully, I had a call with my coach that day and I tell him the story and he breaks out laughing and I go, what the hell is so funny? And he goes, let's break down the body spiritually. The arms represent the doing. The torso to body represents the being. The shoulder connects the doing to the being. What did you ask for on your birthday? Less doing more being. What did you get exactly what you asked for from the gift in front of everybody that you ask for it? How can you not laugh at the cosmic joke of what I call the educational simulation?

And the second he said that, I broke out laughing. I was like, oh my God, my body is screaming for me to let go of this beverage because I had poured every ounce of my soul into it nine years, but I was running on the story of I can't let people down. I can't let my investors down. I can't let my family down that I was not letting go of it. I had started talking about HRV, coaching HRV, but I blindfolded not letting go of this business. And I was like, you know what?

Okay, I'm going to listen and I'm going to let go of it. And I shit you not. 24 hours later, same dislocated shoulder, same pain, but my HRV tripled to 97 simply from changing. my relationship to the injury happening for me. Yeah. That is the power of reframing and how much your relationship. You always said to me.

It didn't happen to you. It happened for you. I'm like, yeah, shut up. I did. And I'm going to keep saying that to you, right? And so that's the importance of reframing in that pathway, which is very underestimated. It's the center. It's a center.

Well, that goes to sort of a deeper, a deeper framework of understanding your life, which is often we fight against reality. um, and Pyrin Kady talks a lot about this, you know, arguing with reality and, and, and, and,

the opposite of that is loving what is. And it's such a, it's such a simple, obvious framework, but, you know, it's hard for us to do. It's really hard for us to go,

not why is this happening to me, but why is it happening for me? And I, I'm guilty of that like everybody else. Me too. And, and I'm like, oh, God, you know,

things are hard, like, this happens, or that happens, like, why, and then go, oh, this is actually in service of something that I can't quite see yet.

It sounds kind of woo-woo and crazy, but I think the more I've lived and I'm kind of old now, so I've had a few turns around the sun. It's true every year. It's like when I can relax around what's happening and just trust in the unfolding, even if it's a difficult moment and not fight it, but just feel it, it's a huge life hack.

And it doesn't mean you don't mean you don't go through pain or suffering or discomfort. It just means your relationship to it is different. And it's the relationship that matters. And that's why I intentionally call it an educational simulation for my mind to realize, especially when it's a more challenging thing. Like, oh yeah, what is the medicine in this for me to learn? I allow myself to be in it, to grieve to whatever, but then pull back and bring awareness, that art framework, awareness to wait, why is this actually happening for me? That is where the importance of this art framework, especially in the reframing, to bring awareness to what is actually happening

and then learning to use different tools to support regulating what is going on in the internal state. So that's reframing. Next, Pat, so we have sleep as a foundation, hormetic stress, reframing. Before you jump out of the reframe, the reframing.

Yeah. I think this is really about perception, right? It's about how we interpret reality and how that affects our nervous system. Like I said, stress is the real or imagine touch of your ego. So it could be a real threat to your body or an imagine to touch your ego

that you're making up in your head has nothing to do with it's actually happening. And so you talk about this idea of metacognition about kind of awareness of your thought patterns and how to really kind of look at your emotions from a different perspective. So, you know, I think it's important for people to understand this because it requires a bit of like this witness consciousness they talk about in meditation where you're sitting, like I've, you know, done 10-day meditation retreats. And after a while you're sitting there and you're like, yeah, there's my crazy mind going doing this thing.

And so you have like the awareness of the awareness. And it's like this meta framework of seeing yourself doing your thing. and it kind of takes you out of identifying with the experience and being in it. It's more of the being of it, not in it. And that of not in is a really interesting framework. And this is kind of what you're talking about, right? It's a thousand percent what I'm talking about. And metacondition now is proven to be the highest form of intelligence than intellect, right?

And metacognition, meaning awareness of your thoughts, awareness of your internal state, right? And by doing so, it totally changes the dynamic of your nervous system, just looking at it from a nervous system perspective. because all a nervous system ever wants safety, right? You talked about how we don't need to turn on the sympathetic state. It automatically happens because it's programmed in us for thousands of years to automatically, if we see a tiger, oh, fired that, right? We know that, right? So it's a pattern that's there.

And it's an on-off switch, right? I liken the nervous system. I have an analogy to hospitals in Florida. They have this fail-safe button where if a tornado or hurricane is coming, right, metal shades and come down to protect everybody from getting hurt. Brilliant program put in place. to save people. What happens if a shooter's in the building

and someone hits that button? Not so brilliant of a program, but it was birthed from a brilliant place. That's how our nervous systems want. When that amygdala fires off, no on-off switch, no access to the prefrontal cortex to all of our knowledge,

our intuition, everything we know, we go back here. So the more we can bring metacognition and awareness and be like, oh, actually, I'm spinning over this email. I'm okay physically. I'm totally fine. Let me take a breath.

Let me go respond to the email, but let me respond to it from this place versus the limbic automatic replace place that we're so used to firing. Whether I'm having a demanding week, pushing myself through a tough workout, or simply trying to keep up with everything on my plate, I know my body is constantly an ass to respond and to recover. And that's why I think resilience is one of the most important markers of long-term health. And one of the best tools I found for that, both personally and clinically, is infrared sauna use. I think about the same way I think about exercise. It's a beneficial stressor.

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Go to Maidenware.com and use the code hymen-dhive for 10% off your first order. So it's helpful. It's helpful. And it takes practice. Like, I think to be aware of your mind and not identified with your mind is a tough thing. You know, Viktor Frankl, Mansich for meeting, talked about this simple idea where he, he didn't let his Nazi captors in Auschwitz control his thinking in his mind. And he's like, you know, he says in between stimulus and response, there's a pause, and that pause lies a choice, and that choice lies your freedom. And what he means is, like, you have a pause.

Yeah. And that pause doesn't happen for most of the. of us. It can be a millisecond between stimulus and response. But what you're talking about is trying to figure out how to sort of exercise the muscle allows you to create more than a millisecond, that allows you to create a pause between your stimulus and your response. And the stimulus is the stimulus. That's just going to be what it is. But how you respond to it, as opposed to react to it, is a very different framework. And it's likened to the space between each heartbeat, which is your HRV, right? And for me, the biggest practice that has supported my journey that I work with

clients, I know I've worked with you on is a morning practice to get you to remember that, right, to tether to that. Because I had a mentor once to say so beautifully, as humans, we all came here to remember and forget, remember and forget, remember and forget. The mastery comes from shortening the gap between remembering and forgetting, right? So the more consistent you do that, the more consistent, you remind yourself that, oh, yeah, it's happening for me. Let me ground in today. Let me go out in the world. I'm going to forget.

That's what we're here for to forget. But let me shorten that gap between forgetting and remembering. That's the third thing. Yep. The fourth pathway is intentionality, the alignment, right? And so back to my story, I said, okay, I'm going to let go of this beverage. But I wanted to see if there's a way I could still salvage it for myself and the investors. And it took about six months, but we ended up finding a whole.

company that acquires the stress beverages. We put an APA and asset purchase agreement together. So they purchased our brand and asset. They took our cap table and our 170 investors who owned some of the new company. They took the debt to continue from the suppliers to continue producing. But the rest of the debt fell on the company's shoulder, which we dissolved and literally fell on my shoulder. So I had to go through personal bankruptcy, right? Which was the last attachment of my beautiful mind and ego to its identity. And so I did what most people do. That's your going to be a multi-billionaire founder of a beverage, right? Oh, that's what I had my mindset on. And then all of that goes away. And so I go to Bali to eat, pray, love, and find myself, right? And every morning in Bali, I contemplate my

beautiful wish, less doing, more being. In every morning, my beautiful incessant mind would come on and say, but we love doing. We're so good at doing. What are we going to do if we're not doing? Until one morning, I have an epiphany. That statement, less doing and more being, is mind made and dualistic in nature. and it implies that doing and being are mutually exclusive. When the reality is, we're always being, even though we're unaware of it, 99% of the time, and we're always doing, even if we're sitting

or sleeping or breathing. So it's actually not about doing less and being more. It's about the intentionality in your doing, the why behind you're doing. And the how you're doing it. And the reason it came to me was I was reading the Bhagavagata Gita, and one of my favorite quotes from the Bhagavadigita is you have a right to you.

your actions, but never your actions fruit. Act solely for the action's sake and don't be attached to inaction. Meaning, we all came here with a right to act, to create, to do. We don't have a right to the outcome of our doing, and we must solely act for our intention for our why. And what I've come to find with HRV is it is a compass telling you how aligned you are with your body and your highest self and your ultimate purpose. And a compass needs three points to triangulate. So for HRV, point one, one is what you're perceiving. Point two is how you're reacting, how you're responding to what you're perceiving. And point three is something to compare it to, your why. And most people, I was so guilty of running on an old why, I can't let people down. I need to sacrifice,

I need to support. And I wasn't auditing, what was actually resonant with my body in that time. And so to intentionally take the time, which I do in my morning practice, to audit your why, to ground into your purpose and then go about doing actually. that align with that, your HRV will go up because your nervous system is resonant with the actions that you're taking in life. So that's the important of intentionality in your path toward the HRV. We're really talking about as integrity, like integrity with yourself. With yourself, with your word, with your body. And alignment is sort of how you get into integrity. 100%. And most of us are somehow living in the world where we're doing things for others.

We're listening to our, we're up here. We're in our story. We're in our ego, which again was birthed from a brilliant place and needed, right? I needed my ego to think I needed to support, I needed a sacrifice, so I could build everything I built and be on this journey, right? Your biggest wound is your greatest gift, always, always. It's just not allowed, it's about not allowing it to be in the driver's seat 99% of the time, bringing awareness and sovereignty being like, actually, this is good here, but I'm going to laugh at you the other 99% because it's not needed anymore. Okay, the fifth. The fifth one, you're going to love this one. Community the amplifier. And I notice comes as no surprise, especially to you, every blue zone in the world,

a pillar is community. The longest study in human history to 80 year, Harvard study, right, that followed 72 youth from Boston, age 18 in every aspect of their lives, from medical records to interviews with spouses, colleagues, children to find out what led to a longer, healthier, happier life, right? And after 80 years, three generations of scientists, all this research, they came back with one thing, and that was relationships. Yeah, community. And not quantity, but quality. And from a nervous system perspective, that has everything, again, to do with all the nervous system wants is safety. And one of the best ways that we feel most safe is being authentically seen by a mirror, by another human, right? Not needing to wear a mask, just being our most authentic self and resonating with other people who are on that

similar frequency. So community is the amplifier. It's huge. But here's a question, Insulin, you know, it's easy to say that. And I obviously say it a lot. And community is medicine. Yeah. It's as powerful as food is medicine. Yep. But creating it and having it is not as easy as saying it.

Yeah. I mean, it's easier to change your diet than to instantly create a community that you belong to. Yeah. And to create a sense of belonging and connection. And this is such a good question. And every time I get asked this question, I go back. My sister, shout out to her. She's a big fan of you, a functional medicine doctor, Christine.

And she reached out to me when I, I moved to LA because I had somehow just got this beautiful community all around. And she's like, Salim, I miss you. You're not here. Like, I'm so desperately seeking community. Like, what do I need to do? Like, how come? And I responded saying, this didn't just happen overnight.

And the reality is, again, I believe this is an educational simulation. And I believe in quantum science and physics have proven what we are perceiving, we are creating, right, via the double-slit experiment and the observer effect. Right? Like we are actually turning the electrons from a wave into a particle with our perception, right? And so essentially everything is a mirror. And if you want community, you need to first and foremost cultivate whatever you're seeking internally, right? That is the most important thing. So whatever, if you're saying I'm seeking community first, and I had a mentor tell me this, when I went to him asking, Irwin, he was like, well, what is it that you seek in a community?

What do you want? Have you ever thought about that? And so I journaled about it. And then I would spend time intentionally getting myself into that frequency, into that state. And then I end up materializing beautiful humans like you in my life. Wow. That's a little big. I love it.

Essentially, be, materialize me. Okay. Be the thing that you want in a community. And then you end up putting out this vibration of other people who are matching that resonance. Try to come in a needy place. Nourish yourself. Yes. cultivate your own inner well-being.

Yeah. And that will naturally attract people. In the time, if you are authentically doing that. So the first step that I give to someone ask this question is actually write down, what do you want in a community? Because most of you're like, oh, I see Mark with this bread of the computer. Like, I want that. What is it that you actually want, right?

Journal about that. That would be my step one. And you have to be deliberate about it. You know, we invest so much time in all sorts of things, work and emails and whatever. but, you know, it takes a conscious, deliberate, consistent set of responses to your life to actually cultivate and develop friends and community. And to me, as I get older, is the most important thing in my life. You know, everything else is sort of like, whatever.

And I think this is such a, it's such a key framework. So we've got, we've got sleep, right, the foundation, hormetic stress, like saunas, cold plunges, stress training, reframing the shift. So looking at your thoughts and being the awareness. to your stories, yeah, being in integrity with your purpose and alignment with who you are, and not living somebody else's life, and then building community, which helps sort of cultivate all the response. So this is a good roadmap. I love these five pathways. They're great. On a day-to-day basis, when you're coaching someone, like, what are you doing with them?

Like, how do you kind of help them go through and, because the point isn't to like get your HRV number better. It's to help your nervous system become, as you say, sovereign. How do you coach people to do that? So it's essentially weaving that art framework, awareness, regulation, and transformation into each of these pathways in their unique way. So it's first getting a baseline of kind of where they're at and what the stresses in their life are and really changing their relationship to understand, you know, we talked about, I mentioned the educational simulation, right? And so I want to just break down what is happening in your body when you perceive a stress or a threat, right? And the reality is when we're

when we see a stress or a trigger, beneath what you, when we see a stress or a trigger, beneath what we are perceiving, what we are seeing, there's always an emotion or multiple emotions associated with this challenge, right? Yeah. And directly connected to that emotion is a physical sensation that's stuck in the body. And if you peel the onion one layer deeper,

and emotion, as we talked about on a quantum level, it's just a scalar wave of energy, it's frequency. There is no such thing as a good or bad emotion, and as humans, we're actually meant to feel every emotion on the spectrum. Grief, anger, love, joy, feel it, for they say about 90 seconds

until the wave moves through us. Yeah, instead of staying stuck in it. Instead of saying stuck in it. However, most of us, and especially in that formative years, when the baseline brainwave state is theta, and we don't know how to process the emotion and we don't have a prefrontal cortex to discern it ourselves, that scalar wave of frequency that's supposed to move through us,

freezes, and I like to think of it forming a glacier in the fascia in our body, right? And so all the emotion wants is to be felt, but now we have a whole story around it, you know? You mentioned zebras, And there's this analogy I give. There's a YouTube video of a deer eating grass on the side of a road and getting clipped, right? And the video stays on the deer and for about a minute it looks like it's dead.

Then all of a sudden, it gets up and it does this kind of like tremor thing and you think it would run for its life. Instead, it goes right back to eating grass like nothing ever happened. Why? Because that tremor was it moving that stuck frozen emotion out and then there's no more story and they just get to be in the present moment and they're eating grass like nothing happened. But we as humans, we love story. So this frozen glacier that's in our fashion, we create a whole world around it that we project on our friends, on our relationships, on our business. And all it wants us to be felt, right? And so, you know, the number one fear in humans documented stage fright, public speaking, right?

It was a big, big fear of mine. And I used to get on stage or do podcasts and I get this knot in my stomach. And I used to think the knock came because I'm on a stage. The reality is that I co-created this stage and this experience and this podcast. to feel what I am calling an uncomfortable knot that really is just a stuck frozen emotion about my self-worth or whatever the story is. So if you can feel, and you said that earlier, if you can feel into your body, that is what gets the emotion to move. But it is very challenging to feel when you are triggered in a stressful state, right? That on-off switch. So what I work on is

learning to train to be an emotional athlete and feel these stuck frozen emotions before it actually happens in real life. And that looks like essentially in whatever practice you do sitting and intentionally with your mind eliciting the stress or to trigger or whatever it is story you're stuck in. And as soon as you feel that emotion, that stuck frozen glacier elicited, you drop out of the story, you drop out of the visual, you drop out of your mind, and you drop into a somatic awareness practice where you are just physically describing the sensations in your body. And by putting your attention on the sensation without the story, you're giving this emotion all it wants. All it wants is to be felt and not judged and put in this box. And if you do that over time, the glacier melts. And then when the thing

happens in real life, the on-off switch is in as strong and you have access to your prefrontal cortex. And this is the grown up in the room. That's the grown up in the room, not the little child in the room. And this is why athletes, you know, I got approached by a sports agency because they're like, our Hall of Fame best athletes, they all have much higher HRVs than regular athlete's like, why would that be the thing? And I was like, oh, that makes so much sense physiologically. Michael Jordan, when he used to approach a game seven free throw, right? He wasn't there thinking what everybody outside is looking at. Like, oh my God, this is such a high-stakes stressful thing. He was like, this is just another free throw. I'm cool and calm, which means he was using his

prefrontal cortex. His amygdala wasn't firing off. So he had access to all of his muscle memory, because your muscle memory is in the prefrontal cortex of the thousands of free throws he took versus another athlete who isn't as cool and calm as Michael Jordan approaches that same thing. His amygdala fires, he's back here. Guess what? He could have taken more free throws than Michael Jordan, but he doesn't have access to that muscle memory. So your agility to shift states, your sovereignty over your internal state is so important to how you go about responding to the external world.

A lot of us just kind of push through it, right? We don't we don't really stop to reset our system. We just kind of, and I'm guilty of this, you know, just kind of go, go, go, go. the home's guilty of it. And override my body's sensations, override my body's signals, don't listen to the feeling. And how do you help people sort of unlearn that habit?

Asking for a friend. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, and Mark, the reason why I talk about this and I work on this, it's funny, I think the thing, and I've told you this, the thing that we do and we're most passionate about is the thing we need the most.

So I need nervous system sovereignty more than anybody else else, hence why I'm so passionate about it. And it is really just discipline and showing up with compassion for yourself when that happens. Because, again, people are like, I can't believe I said that again. I can't believe I did that again when they react automatically in situations.

You need to have compassion because that's just the little kid in you running their old program. So if you can train outside of the stressful situation to learn to feel that stuck emotion, you will have more sovereignty as the next time that it happens, right? Yeah. So it's really about developing like a, training like if you want to lift weights i mean i you know you can't start with like 50 pushups you have to do five right and and so it's really about the training that you're talking about and the daily training

and i and i've been doing this every morning i do breath work i do meditation i do some chigong practices and it really helps me to kind of ground my nervous system every day and easily come back to that throughout the day you were going to teach me some Tibetan breath thing i want to learn that I think there's all sorts of tools and techniques and practices out there, but it's important that people take this seriously because if you don't learn how to actively relax, it sounds almost like a kind of oxymoron, like to actively do nothing. But it's really hard to activate your parasympathic system unless you're really deliberate about it. So I think different people can be attracted to different practices, but it is something you have to be deliberate about,

whether it's breathwork, whether it's yoga, whether it's meditation, whether it's chigong, whether it's simple box-treathing. This is whatever, and that's where the art framework, bringing awareness to what works and resonates with you to get your body in that parasympathetic activation, right? And so there's not one right thing, and I'm not here saying, do it. I'm saying just listen to your body and what's resonant with it. And HRV for me has been an objective biomarker that is telling you what is resonant and supporting, guiding you to flex that muscle.

And you'll say, you know, maybe you do the same thing, but how you feel inside is different, right? So they say, you know, in the Zen Buddhist say, before enlightenment, chop would carry water, after enlightenment, chop would carry water. It's just your relationship to it is totally different. It's totally, totally different. So, yeah.

Amazing. So, Celine, thank you for diving into this whole field and getting it out there. I think it's important people understand this, because people hear stress, they don't really have a framework for understanding what to do or how to navigate it and how to track it. think people can go to that hrb guy.com or more about you your work your coaching platform

get help if they need it um find you on instagram and what is your same thing that hrv guy thanks to alli uh t hrv guy yeah and you can find all all social everything through that and the one thing i guess i'd leave the audience like the cable guy like that hrb guy yeah the one thing i think my favorite um you know uh philosophy that a that a mentor teacher taught me that really supported you know that reframing way and just cultivating a different relationship with life. So intentional with your words and your thoughts, right, because that's what creates your reality. And instead of saying, I have a good HRV score or bad HRV score, this person's good or bad or right or wrong or blue verse red, I use dissonant or resonant, right? Because everything's just frequency. And if something is

dissonant for me, it could be resonant for you. And if something's dissonant for me today, tomorrow I could wake up and it's actually resonant. But by not labeling it bad today, tomorrow my nervous system won't lock up because I didn't label it bad. I labeled it dissonant and it is open and more malleable to being, seeing how I feel in that moment. Right. So anytime I catch myself or someone saying, oh, that was good. That was like dissonant or resonant. Beautiful.

Beautiful. Well, thank you, Celine. Thanks for your creativity around helping people frame this differently and think about it. And thanks for your work. And everybody to check out your stuff. Thanks for being on the podcast. Man, thank you for having me and thank you for all you've done in this world. Such an inspiration.

I love you, Mark. If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman. Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to the Dr. Hyman show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Dr. Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in.

We'll see you next time on the Dr. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic, and Function Health, where I am chief medical officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guest's opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, please seek out a qualified medical practitioner. And if you're looking

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