WHOOP Podcast - How to Regulate Your Nervous System with Dr. Jay Wiles

Episode Date: December 6, 2023

On this week’s episode, WHOOP VP of Performance Science, Principal Scientist, Kristen Holmes is joined by Dr. Jay Wiles. Dr. Jay is a clinical health psychologist, currently working as the Health Behavior Coordinator at WJB Dorn VA Medical Center in Columbia, SC and the Greenville Outpatient VA Clinic. He also shares his insight and tips on his podcast titled, Mindhacker’s Radio. Kristen and Jay will discuss how mental health impacts the autonomic nervous system (6:08), how stress influences HRV (11:50), behaviors enabling the balance of the nervous system (18:00), the relationship perspective (24:45), controlling your own nervous system (29:23), self-regulation techniques (35:24), residence frequency breathing (44:18), the power of mitochondria (46:52), and Jay’s hormesis research (52:04).Resources:Dr. Jay's Website Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

What's up, folks? Welcome back to the WOOP podcast. That's right. We sit down with top athletes, researchers, scientists, and more. Learn what the best in the world are up to. I'm your host, Will Amit, founder and CEO of Woop. We're on a mission to unlock human performance. We've got a great episode today.

But before we get to that, it's a special episode, folks. because it's our 250th episode. Yeah, it's pretty wild. I remember five years ago now saying, okay, we'll do 10 and see how it goes. And just like that, we're on our 250th episode. We've had over 10 million downloads. So thanks to you, our amazing listeners,

we wouldn't be doing this without you. If you keep tuning in, we'll keep recording. And I think it's been an amazing outlet for us to share stories, not just about whoop data, but really broadly about health and fitness and performance. And for me personally, it's been an amazing experience to learn what it's like building a podcast network. And I have to thank Kristen Holmes, Emily Capitoulopo, two of our regular interviewers

on the Whoop podcast, who make it all possible. And a big thank you to all the amazing guests who have done this. You know, we wouldn't be able to do it without you. All right. On this week's episode, Woop VP of Performance Scientist, our principal scientist, Kristen Holmes, is joined by Dr. J. Wiles. Dr. J. is a clinical health psychologist currently working as the Health Behavior Coordinator at WJB. Dorn Medical Center and the Greenville Outpatient VA Clinic. His specialized training in health behavior coaching, health assessment, and nutritional interventions for mental and physical health.

Dr. Wiles works as a consultant for companies and individual patients on nutritional psychology, health behavior change, applied psychophysiology and disease prevention. He also shares his insight and tips on his podcast titled MindHackers Radio. Kristen and Jay will discuss the connection between HRV and the nervous system, the behaviors that can help balance the nervous system, the power of self-regulation, taking control of your nervous system will now allow you to manage stress better, residence frequency breathing, the power and importance of mitochondria in the body, and why Jay is obsessing over hormesis research. if you have a question you want to see answered on the podcast email us podcast to whoop.com

call us 508-443-4952 and your question may be answered on a future episode. A huge happy holidays to everyone right now celebrating if you're looking for a gift for your significant other or your family, your friends, check out whoop.com. We've got a bunch of great stuff, accessories, apparel, and of course, Woop memberships. Here are Kristen Holmes and Dr. J. Wiles. Dr. J.T. Wiles is a clinical health psychologist who is passionate about education and consultation with patients and organizations in an effort to increase health outcomes through focusing on prevention and well-being as opposed to just disease and symptom

mitigation. He was responsible for the inception of the nutrition clinic and the Veterans Integrative Pain Center at McGuire VA Medical Center in Richmond, Virginia. The center is a self-management, non-opioid prescribing clinic for veterans with chronic pain, looking for alternative means to pain reduction. Dr. Jay shares his knowledge through his practice as the health behavior coordinator at the W.J.B. Dorn VA Medical Center in Columbia, South Carolina, and the Greenville Outpatient VA Clinic. He also gives tips and best practices on his two podcasts, titled, mind hackers radio and the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. Dr. J.T. Wiles, it's such an honor to speak

with you. Thanks for coming on. So glad to be here with you, Kristen. I know when we spoke a couple weeks ago, I think I revealed to you that I've been following your work for a very, very, very long time. And you're in fact, you know, one of the, you know, I think you've been really one of the original thinkers around how to really apply heart rate variability in a clinical setting with patients and how to use that as a, as just a marker for understanding how folks are adapting to, to, to stress. And so I just, I'm so excited to dig into the relationship specifically we want to talk about mental health and how we can leverage, you know, biomarkers like rest and heart rate and heart variability to better understand, you know, how are folks

adapting. And I think most importantly, and where and how those biomarkers might indicate a decline potentially in mental health. And then I think most importantly, really leveraging all of your knowledge and expertise, applied knowledge and expertise. So we can dial in on strategies. We can deploy to kind of stay ahead of the mental health curve. So I know this is an area that you think very deeply about and just appreciate all the work that you've done in this space. It's been, you've really impacted my thinking around hearty variability and, yeah, just super grateful for all the work that you've done. Yeah, I really appreciate the kind words.

I feel like I have a lot to live up to in this podcast right now. I know, I know. I'm really setting you up, but I know, having heard you on so many podcasts, I know you're going to nail it. So perhaps let's start with just to kind of create a framework because I think, you know, we traditionally associate hearty variability with the physiology, right? of course, but I think more of like how we're training and, you know, when we're working out hard, like, you know, what's how that's going to impact our heart variability.

But I don't think we necessarily associate our mental health and psychological functioning and how that actually might impact our heart variability. So maybe start, you know, how does mental health impact that on a nervous system functioning? You know, Kristen, one of the greatest things about the accessibility of heart rate variability through, of course, a product like a Wube, is, that we have the ability to have a quantitative measure of the human stress response. And I think a lot of times people think of the mind and body as being somewhat disconnected when in fact they couldn't be any more interconnected. And so in the mental health domain, it's so interesting

how we silo things, right? It's like we want to silo mental health into its own kind of bucket and then we have kind of physical health or medical health over on this other side when in fact, And I think that reason that happens is because people think, oh, well, we can quantify everything in terms of medical health, in terms of physical health. You can't really quantify things right on the mental health side of things. And the fact of the matter is that that's not true. We actually can quantify changes in people's stress response that are very much related or interconnected to mental health.

And heart rate variability just happens to be the single greatest non-invasive proxy that we have for stress response and mental health functioning. So I think that I, if anything, I like people to take a step back and acknowledge that we do have objective measures and ways to quantify changes that are very much associated with mental health. And yes, it just so happens that that same metric is associated with recovery and is associated with performance from an athletic standpoint, the one interesting thing about HRV, and I'll dance around it a little bit more, and then I'll speak specifically. The one interesting about HRV is that I think a lot of people also misunderstand that it can be used in other ways other than just simply like let me check

it, you know, overnight or in the morning time. It can be used actually as a dynamic mechanism of training your stress response, training control over the nervous system. At its core, heart rate variability is the key metric that is assessing all of those dynamic shifts that we have in terms of our stress response. In other words, it's saying, are we effectively adapting? Is there stability in our way of adapting as far as our nervous system goes? Or is there instability, demonstrating that the nervous system is being overly taxed? Our resources are overly taxed. We can use that then as a guide to say, my nervous system is overly taxed. And so therefore I need to pay specific attention to how I mitigate that response, how I come in

and do a little bit of damage control, if you will. And so for me as a psychologist and how I've used it kind of just throughout the last G's, it's been close to 15 years I've used this metric way, way prior to any advent of wearable technology where we were hooking people up to, you know, 15 lead, 24 lead EKGs. The way we've used it is that we can use it. as a sign or a signal of what the nervous system is doing at any given time and then train people on how to exert control over their stress response at the snap of a finger because it's all about conditioning training it's all about taking the time to learn how is your nervous system adapting to stress how is your mental health affected by your physiology and your physiology

affected by mental health and then train resiliency through through training and we call that biofeedback, we can dig a little bit deeper into that, of course. But it's just a different way of using HRV. Well, definitely come back to biofeedback because I think all of your work in residence frequency breathing and how you utilize that in a clinical setting, I think is so fascinating. And I'm a huge fan of RFB, I like to call it, and have been practicing it, as does my family. And I find biofeedback to be incredibly powerful for all the reasons you just kind of outlined in terms of training the autonomic nervous system, which is, I think, really what's exciting is that we do actually have the potential, the ability to exert control over our physiology.

And I think when we exert control over physiology, we change the state of our brain, right? And I think that connection, I think, is so important for folks to understand that as, you know, we both have backgrounds in psychology, of course. And, you know, I think talking yourself into a better our future is probably not the best path. I really see that the, I guess it's my belief that the most powerful entry point is through our physiology in terms of impacting our psychological state. So I think there's just this really powerful dance, as you kind of called it between the two that I think we need to understand if we really want to exert control over our performance levels and our flourishing and all that. We have, I'm just going to throw a little bit,

data at you to kind of frame up the next, as we kind of move through this conversation. But when we see, so data from our members have shown that hearty variability and reported stress unfavorably impacts hearty variability at a 63% frequency. Women are slightly more affected by the stress than men. They're at a 64% frequency. Men are 62%. And the average change across the board is a decrease of four milliseconds, which I think clinically is pretty significant. So maybe you just talk about the clinical significance of that. And then, you know, how is, is stress kind of influencing heart variability at these population levels? Yeah. It's really interesting data for sure. I think it demonstrates the significance that stress has on

overall autonomic nervous system functioning. I mean, these are, again, HRB is a proxy. for nervous system functioning, specifically the autonomic nervous system. What we see, I think that's probably the most interesting data point than anything, is that, again, we have, and this just speaks to, we have an objective, quantifiable way of looking at the impact of stress and what it does to the body. So what's so interesting about this, Kristen, is I've had a lot of patients, professional athletes, high-end executives, who will come to me and say, I'm not stressed. Like, this is not really impacting me. But then we start to do an analysis of their nervous system functioning and we see a little bit of a different story being painted. You can't lie,

like your physiology doesn't lie. You can try to lie to your physiology, but it doesn't lie back to you. So what that means then is that we have to listen to it to an extent. I mean, there's, and there's a lot of specific nuances that I want to make there because I think sometimes people will over really rely on the objective data without checking in subject. objectively. So there is this kind of, this balance that you have to have there. But I think that if you're not checking in objectively with quantifiable data, the problem happens that, you know, we can talk ourselves out of anything. Like, I'm not stressed. Like, it's not impacting my mental health and my mental acuity and my cognition. And that in and of itself is another problem that that we end up having. So when it comes to utilizing that information, what is that information actually telling us, we have to remember that heart rate variability is examining how effective and how much fortitude your nervous system has at any given moment. And when we are experiencing stress, we're experiencing anxiety, when our mental health is being taxed, if you will, our nervous

system is going to do everything it can to recruit as much energy and resources to protect you as humanly possible because in order for us to continue to evolve and pass down our genes as a species, we have to have a level of self-protection. And what that means is, is let's dial it up. There is a perceived threat. And again, I use the word perceived because there may actually be a threat or it may be that we are conjuring up a threat or a bit of both. That's the problem that can end up happening there. But the laundry, the laundry that's piling up isn't, isn't necessarily going to, you know, kill us. But we perceive it to be stressful. I mean, all the time. And that's the biggest killer, right? It isn't kind of the actual threat that's there. It's our perception of that

threat. And it's our perception of how well we can battle through that threat. And if we have this perception that we're unable to take on, we don't have the resources to take on that threat in front of us, this is where we start to see the degradation of our nervous system and our ability to function as human beings. So again, this comes back to this point that we can use this objective measurement to say, like, am I recruiting like all of this energy as a way of self-preservation? And the answer would probably and likely be yes. But the problem that happens if we don't exert control over it is that that dial just stays locked in and then it crinks up. even further and even further and even further. And now we're talking about a slew of

detrimental physiological effects that are occurring that make us feel more anxious, feel more depressed, feel even more stress. It's this nasty, vicious cycle and feedback loop. So our goal here is to exercise and use that data as a mechanism to say, I'm stuck in this negative feedback loop. Let me come in and exert some control over the nervous system because what it needs to hear from me at this time is that things are okay or at least things are manageable. It needs stability because again, if it stays cranked up, if the fighter flight sympathetic nervous system stays cranked up, this is where we can have significant mental and physical health problems. So I think that when we see changes in heart rate variability, they're indicative

of the stress response being turned on. Again, this is, I always tell people this is not inherently a bad thing. Stress is actually inherently good. Our nervous system is inherently going to come in to inform us that something is going on where I need to dial it up. There is a threat, perceived threat, fill in the blank there. I need to dial up. That isn't the problem. The problem is when it gets cranked up and it stays up without us doing anything about it. And then there is a slew of psychological and overall physiological health declamations that can cause significant concern and problems for so so it's all about identifying how can we take that information and use it to help guide better training of the nervous system i tell people like you go to the gym

and you train you know your body you go and you exercise to train your physiology also training the mind as well but we need to to actively train the nervous system too we have to go to the nervous system gym just like we go to you know to our to our local gym i love that uh the nervous system, Jim. So we'll talk about training the nervous system in a second, but maybe just dial in on just the influences, you know, what are the kind of core behaviors, both kind of physiologically and then also psychologically, you know, what is that framework that we need to be, that we need to have that kind of keeps, that helps enable the balance of our nervous system. So this will kind of get into some of the, we'll use this platform, I think, to kind of go into strategies in just a second.

But yeah, like, what's the taxonomy? So if somewhere to come to your clinic and you're trying to, you measure, okay, we've got a suppression and hearty variability, what is the laundry list of things that could are really impacting heart rate variability? Yeah, yeah. This is where I'm probably most excited about because when I have somebody come into, let's say, my clinic and we're doing a full-on nervous system evaluation and assessment, this is very comprehensive.

We're using a lot of different biomarkers and biometrics. For these individuals, what we're looking at is baseline functioning, and then we're using that to pair it, I should say, with their health behaviors. So the first thing that we're looking at is exercise, and we're saying, how sedentary are you throughout the day? How active are you throughout the day? And one of the main contributors we know to baseline heart rate variability is someone's cardiorespiratory fitness. So we actually know that VO2 max is very closely associated with someone's baseline heart rate variability. And we know that as people become more sedentary and VO2 max drops, that we also see this degradation and overall nervous system functioning and heart rate variability as well. So I know that for many of the audience that's listening to this, that's kind of a no-brainer in the sense that, yes, we want to make sure that someone is not sedentary, that they are actively engaging in different, whether it be resistance training,

cardiovascular training. There are a lot of aspects there that I'm looking at. So exercise is a key component. The second one, which probably would be, I guess I could even argue it being the foundation of one of the things that we're assessing is overall quality and quantity of sleep and rest in general. I think rest is another word that I like to put in there. If someone is indeed having really low quality sleep, so a lot of early morning awakenings or maybe difficult with the onset of sleep, busy brain, kind of when they're trying to sleep. Of course, you know, clinical disorders like insomnia. Then we know that this significantly impacts overall nervous system functioning, but obviously mental well-being, the human stress response

is very heightened for these individuals. And I would say that, again, this is where a lot of people will come into my clinic and they will say, I don't think I have that much of a problem with sleep. And then when we look at their data, Kristen, as you probably have seen this with other people too. It's like, you wake up like 12 times a night. You're getting four our total hours of sleep. And then, you know, you get in bed at like 12 o'clock, but you don't fall asleep till two. So it's like there's all these problems that we see arise in people's sleep data. So we really want to, and again, I know this is not yet strategy talk yet, but that's an area that we're going to really focus on, is overall quality and quantity of sleep.

The next one, and this probably shouldn't come as much of a surprise to many people, is is nutrition. People who are eating extremely calorically dense diets are eating at, let's say, a massive surplus to their energy expenditure, are eating a lot of overly processed foods, are not timing their meals really well. So they're eating at, you know, 11, 12 o'clock at night. We see this significantly impacting their stress response and very reflective in overall heart rate variability. The single greatest impact of any, we'll call it nutrient, or we'll call it a chemical maybe is probably the best word to use is alcohol bar none and we see that even minimal doses of alcohol and again i'm not someone who's going to sit here and preach like

never drink alcohol i'm not one of those individuals but what i will say is that the data are undeniable in terms of how even minimal amounts of alcohol i'm talking about one drink of alcohol can significantly impact overall heart rate variability and nervous system functioning so if you make this a nightly thing, we can see huge detriments to people's nervous system. So alcohol is one that I'm absolutely assessing. The other chemical compound that's very important to assess, and we use this as a strategic mechanism as well, would be caffeine. Caffeine is the other one that I see that when individuals drank either too much caffeine, especially or they time it incorrectly, this is another one that will significantly impact central nervous system and

autonomic nervous system functioning. And so there's been plenty of individuals, Kristen, who I've had in my clinic who are drinking, you know, four or five, six, seven cups of coffee a day. We get them down to a quote unquote normal person's like one or two cups a day. There's probably a lot of people chirping out there. Like, it's kind of like four or five. So we get them down to, you know, one or two cups a day. And we'll see 20%, 30% increases in heart rate variability just by that adjustment in and of itself or alcohol. We'll get them down to, you know, just one or two drinks a week as opposed to one a night. We'll see significant improvements in sleep architecture and heart rate variability. So it's not like these are super difficult things to do, but if you're breaking

a health behavior, if you're breaking a habit, it can be difficult on that in. The other thing that we see, which I think goes probably under the radar a lot of the times, is relationships. And when I'm talking about relationships, I'm talking about relationships with your spouse, with your significant other, with your family, with your work. Work is a really big one that I've honed in on, both on my research, but also clinically. I see that when people become too enmeshed in toxic work relationships, this impacts, obviously, there's stress response, and we see this manifest in nervous system change. Heart rate variability, it becomes significantly suppressed. And so we tell people, that's an area to focus on and work on as relationships and processing and not kind of

throwing it under the rug as something that is quote unquote soft, if you will. And then I would say that the last thing in general would just be overall mindset. And this goes back to when I was talking about perceived threats and perceived harm, is that when individuals come in with more of the mindset, I would say it's maybe more of a paranoid mindset, more of a kind of the world is against me mindset, that, you know, I am a victim to my external circumstances and environment, these individuals typically have immensely suppressed heart rate variability and impacted nervous system. So again, I'm assessing all of those things as kind of like broad categories when I see somebody. There's a lot of other things that I would throw

in there, but I would think that those are the bigger buckets. I love it. That's such a great run down and I think we we probably I wonder with relationships like where do you see people go wrong you know what or you know what is the what is the real point of friction that seems to get in the way of kind of nervous system health from a relationship perspective this comes down to one word it's control it's control every single time because when we feel like we're not in control within the context of a relationship, when we can't dictate the outcome of the other person's emotion or behavior, it strikes this evolutionary nerve for us. And it ramps our system up. Because now our lack of control has hit on this inability, I would say, to feel like we can

force function the result that we want. That is a perceived threat to our survival at times. Because if we could have it our way, we would control everything. Oh, I would have this outcome go this way. I would have this person act this way. I would have them say this thing. I would have them do this, this certain way. But when we get that pushback and that doesn't happen, well, now our expectations are shattered. And then our perceived ability to control the event is now been just completely obliterated. And what that ends up meaning is, well, is that my problem? Is that a their problem? Is that a their problem? problem doesn't really matter the nervous system sees it both as the same way amp it up time to fight or time to get out of there we see that we see that dial up so i think it all comes down to control and i'm thinking about this yes within a let's we'll call it a romantic partner relationship but this could happen within a friend's dynamic this can happen within the work dynamic for for sure i've seen this so often with high performing executives that a lot of times it can get to their heads that I've got the control, I'm calling the shots, and then when a subordinate pushes back on

them, it is a threat to who they are as a person and their stress response just gets so dialed up. And now we've got tunnel vision. Performance just gets tanked. They're not sleeping. All of these things are impacted because of this relationship dynamic that centers around their inability to have 100% full and complete control. So that's a thing to work through. And I think that this is where it can be really important to have these open conversations with individuals that this is not something that just gets brushed under the rug because again you can optimize your exercise your sleep you know let's say stress response to an extent and even you know your nutritional all that you can you can optimize all those things but if you still have these poor relationship dynamics these toxic

relationships where control just doesn't feel like you don't feel like you have that aspect then it really can just disregulate your nervous system aside from all those great things that you're doing for your health. So it's got to be addressed. I love that you highlighted that. Yeah, a few years ago, I was really pushing Woop to include psychological measures in our journal. So people could track, you know, you know, you just identified that, you know, one of the core psychological needs is feelings of control, right? And when we're not tracking about that and aware of how that manifests in our life and we don't have a clear framework on how to think about control across, you know, workplace and, you know, romantic relationships and friendships, then, you know, we kind of end up

flinging ourselves in all sorts of directions. And to your point, that manifests in our nervous system in really negative ways. If folks want to, they can track purpose efficacy and control in their journal and kind of see how their feelings of control might relate to. how much load they put on their body. I see a really strong relationship. When I do not feel control of my situation, I actually move a lot less, which is so interesting. Like, I almost get paralyzed. And this was a few years ago. I was analyzing my own data. And I saw this strong relationships. Like, wow, this is really interesting. And we see it. I also saw this in a study that we did with paratroopers in US Army, Alaska. We saw a relationship between feelings of control

and workplace resilience. So I think being aware of what these courses, psychological needs are and how they move around our ability to, you know, adapt functionally to life's challenges is really important. Let's pivot here. I guess, you know, one thing, you know, if you're to identify, you know, if there's one aspect, you know, from an educational standpoint around stress, HRV and mental health, like what would be, what do you think is just the biggest opportunity, I guess, for educators to really have. help people think about this relationship. I think this is actually going to come back to control, which is kind of funny.

Okay, good. Because, but it's in a different way. Okay. What I mean by control in this aspect is I think a lot of people don't realize how they can train control of their own nervous system. I don't think that they realize that. I think that sometimes we feel like we're falling victim to our nervous system. Physiology just responding that way.

And so therefore, hands are off. Well, what can I do? like my physiology is just directing me in in this way. Sorry. I mean, you know, I'm just a victim of it. And I'm speaking somewhat facetiously here. However, what I will say is that I think the biggest thing that we can take from this objective data point, that is heart rate variability, is that we can use it as a dynamic guide for training. And here's what I mean. If we feel like we're a victim to kind of like our physiology and we can't control it, well, what is that going to do? That's going to to change our mindset. I'm just going to, I'm just going to kind of let let it run its course.

I'll get over it with time. Maybe there's some truth to that in one sense, but it typically comes paired with poor decision making and poor behavior, whether that's stressed, victim on my physiology, might as well go get those donuts because that typically makes me feel better, or might as well sit and binge Netflix for three, four straight hours. It can lead down this poor decision making pathway. Whereas if we flip the mindset and we say, well, I actually can train resiliency and control over my nervous system, and I have the data that proves it, that can put us in a different direction. So one of the things that I guess I'm mostly known for is kind of both my research, but also experience as a clinician in working with people with heart rate

variability biofeedback. And what HRVB or heart rate variability biofeedback does is it teaches people that they can control their nervous system as easily as a snap of a finger, essentially. And what that means is that if we can actually see through these different training and strategy techniques, how in real time heart rate variability can be elevated by 10% to 20% to 50% in a matter of one minute, two minutes, five minutes of training, then that for people can allow them to come back and say, I now see the objective data. I see the true physiological change that can occur. That was me doing it. I was able to change inherently my nervous system without a ton of inherent effort. And the more I do it, and there's so much research to back up what I'm

about to say, the more I do it, the more I can condition this response so that I become better and stronger at training resiliency in my nervous system. And it becomes also natural and a part of who I am. So I want to speak a little bit in less nebulous terms in case people are like, what is he talking about? What does this mean? So I think a lot of times when people are offered different strategies for training, resiliency of mental health, whether it be breathing training or meditation or all of these

other great empirical and evidence-based practices, like I'm a huge advocate of mindfulness. I'm a huge advocate of breathing and breath regulation training. Love these strategies. I think a lot of times for people, they'll engage in that behavior or that strategy and they'll say, yeah, you know, I think it was helpful for me. And that's good. We want people to feel that subjective relief. They want, we want them to feel that change. But we see that in the research that if we add a data layer component to that, we show people how that practice is inherently changing their physiology and they understand what heart rate variability is and they see it change in real time.

for these people, a light bulb typically will go off. And they say, oh my goodness, this is real. I can do this. And it didn't take me a ton of effort or time to learn how to control my nervous system. So it takes this mindset of, I'm a victim to my nervous system. I can't do anything about it to, oh my goodness, I can control this. And it's not that difficult to do with some time and some effort and some training. That mindset shift there, Kristen, is one of the biggest things. that we can give people is just to see it happen and to say, oh, look what I can do to my physiology. I can speak to my physiology and tell it what to do and it follows suit. Now, for some people that does take a lot of training, for instance, for someone who's got like trauma, complex trauma,

PTSD, it can take a little bit more training for these individuals because their nervous system might be experiencing a lot of dysregulation. But for the everyday individual that maybe hasn't had a trauma background, these people may have lost a little bit of control over time of their nervous system due to compounding stress. But we give them some training and we allow them to do some things like biofeedback. And it doesn't take them very long to help to retrain the nervous system to respond at will. So I tell people, a stable nervous system is one that will respond to you when you tell it to do something. An instable one is one where you try to crack it and doesn't listen very much. So what I would say is that if I can have anything, a message be perpetuated around, you know, the inner webs and anywhere, it's this idea that we can train control over the nervous system and use hard science and evidence from our physiology as a guide for helping people to learn better regulation.

That's amazing. So maybe just explain what you think are some of the best techniques in self-regulation through biofeedback. And, yeah, and then just see, maybe talk about some of the data that you see in terms of changes in hearty variability because it's my understanding that a technique like Residents Frequency, for example, is one of the most powerful techniques one can deploy in mediating heart rate variability. So, yeah, we'd love to hear your thoughts on that. I know you've done time. Yes. Yeah, yeah. This is my bread and butter.

This is what I love talking about. Yeah, glad to be able to speak to it. So this is what I think is so compelling for a lot of people is that what I should do is let me back up just a little bit. And just in case people aren't exactly clear on when I was talking about biofeedback, let me kind of paint the picture of what biofeedback is. So biofeedback is using your biology as a source of feedback during specific types of training. So for instance, I always tell people, a lot of the biofeedback purists out there, a lot of them were, you know, my mentors might critique the next thing I'm going to say, but I'm okay with saying it anyway, is that

a lot of times biofeedback is like a tech savvy form of like breath regulation training or breathwork, what a lot of people are calling it today. It is a way of watching the changes that are occurring in your biology or your physiology during different types of practices like breathing or like meditation and so forth. So it's using your biology as a source of feedback and then adjusting or fine-tuning what you're doing based on those changes that we're seeing in your physiology. So biofeedback is not something that's new. It's been around for quite some time. It's been interesting because biofeedback over the course of time in clinical psychology is kind of common phases. It's like in and out and in and out. And I think a lot of that,

unfortunately is just due to the field being stuck somewhat in the past. But we see a lot more modern advancements now with consumer-based wearables and modern technology that has made biofeedback readily available and accessible to everybody. It used to not be. You had to go into a clinic and you had to see someone and pay a lot of money to do it. And you can still do that and get really great benefits and results. But you can also use consumer-based technology now for biofeedback. But in terms of strategies, the most, I would say, robust research that's out there right now for different strategies for enhancing nervous system control and fortitude and resiliency through biofeedback is something called Resonance Frequency Biofeedback or, you know, RF biofeedback. Now, RF biofeedback, a resident's frequency biofeedback was a term that was coined by Dr. Paul Lair and his associates and colleagues, I should say, out of Rutgers universe. And Dr. Paul, Lara, one of my mentors is a brilliant individual that is published, you know,

well over 200, you know, articles on resonance frequency breathing. I mean, it's insane. But he's looked at, and essentially what resonance frequency is, and I'll explain it in as easily understood terms as I can, but feel free. Kristen, if you think I need to clarify anything, resonance is talking about the resonating of the cardiovascular and autonomic nervous system. In other words, if you were to strum a violin with your fingers held in an awkward position

and maybe you didn't strum the bow in the right way, you would get this awful screeching, nasty sound. But if you had somebody who wasn't me, who knew what they were doing and they could place their fingers in the right position with the right pressure and then strum the bow in the right way with the right pressure,

you would hear this beautiful, resonating, reverberating sound. So when we talk about resonance, we're talking about what is that beautiful resonating sound that we get as a signal from our cardiovascular and autonomic nervous system. Frequency is the frequency or pacing of your breathing that initiates that resonating sound in our nervous system. So what Paul Lair and his associates found is that everybody has a resonance breathing rate as low as four and a half breaths per minute to as high as six and a half breaths per minute. develop the protocol that runs you through the different paces. It's trials, different

paces of breathing, to find what breathing rate, what frequency of breathing rate resonates with your autonomic nervous system the most, what amplifies heart rate variability the most when you do it. And so for him, again, years and years, decades and decades of research, he has found that there are different protocols for breathing at this specific rate, that is, or resonant rate, that over time, the more and more that we do it, it amplifies the effect of our ability to control the nervous system at will. So basically when we say vagus nerve activate, the vagus nerve activates, and it listens to you via the pace of your breathing. What does this look like in real time? My heart rate variability in real time, we'll use simple math or simple

numbers, I should say, might be 50 milliseconds. But the time I do, you know, a minute or two, minutes of resonance breathing, I might get it up to 75, 85. What is that saying? That's saying that your nervous system, your relaxation response is really kicking into high gear. Your vagus nerve is listening to your breathing. It's listening to that rate of breathing. And that, again, can have this compounding effect of helping you to dial in and control your nervous system, both in the immediate, but also it will adjust to your baseline. We see that as people practice heart rate variability biofeedback on a consistent basis, we actually see baseline heart rate variability begin to increase as well. The thermostat of your nervous system changes based on these types

of biofeedback practices. Do you see a relationship between as you see these increases in heart rate variability? Do you also see potential changes in subjective measures of resilience and just mental well-being, just kind of wondering what that relationship looks like, if there is one. 100%. This is both from a research perspective and anecdotally or clinically that what I've seen. So from a research perspective, what we see is that even, again, outside of any other types of training, outside of any other types of health behavior change, when people are actively engaging in biofeedback, they see a subjective sense, or they report, I should say, a subjective sense of relaxation, of reduction in anxiety, improvement in overall mood, improvement in motivation,

improvement in energy. And I've seen this same exact thing also, both anecdotally and clinically within my own practice. I have worked with so many professional athletes, executives, high performers who have started to execute these biofeedback practices. And what they will say is, is that I feel like I can with the snap of the finger get into an immediate it relaxed flow state. That is one that is heightened awareness like you would do with mindfulness, but also I feel like I am in control. And when that clicks, Kristen, when they say, I finally feel like I am in control over my nervous system, that's what I'm listening for. When someone says that, I say, yes, we're dialed in. When someone says, I can, within three breaths,

I can get into flow state because I know how to amplify my nervous system, given those three breaths, that's it. I mean, I've worked with professional tennis players who will execute resonance breathing prior to each serve. And they say every time that they do it, they feel way more in the zone, relaxed. And it sounds simple. And which is the beauty of it is that we're just again, going to use your body as a guide and then just train, train, train, train. Just like if you're trying to get stronger, you're going to train, train, train. We're trying to develop a stronger and more controlled nervous system, which is why you've got to consistently train it. I think, you know, one of my, you know, the whole reason why I do research is to try to figure out,

you know, what, what of these practices are most efficacious in terms of their impact on heart rate variability and rest and heart rate and, you know, just feelings of well-being. And so just really my life's work is, is to try to create a taxonomy. And so I think for me, like when folks ask me, you know, what do I do? I'm like, I do resident frequency read. Like, I don't know of anything that is more powerful in mediating heart rate variability. I think it impacts your sleep. It impacts how you, your ability to be present and engaged. And it is, it is such a powerful intervention. And I guess I don't want to lead this question, but I, you know, I think folks are really busy. Right. So everyone you, you work with, they're extraordinarily

busy. There's lots of modalities out there. And, and frankly, tons of noise around, you know, what modality is most efficacious. And, From my perspective, I put RFB at the residence frequency biofeedback at the very top of the list. For me, personally, in terms of its impact on me, it's impact on my physiology, it's impact on my mindset. But really curious to kind of hear your thoughts. If people were to, hey, do I try this? You know, what would be your sales pitch? I suppose. And you know what? My biggest sales pitch is the research, right? Because you and I are both research nerd. It's the research. It's like, overwhelming. Yeah. Indeed. Indeed. You can't deny it. And it's one.

one of the great things. It's like, there's no possible way we can sell snake oil on heart rate variability biofeedback because there's so much research to back it up. And it just makes sense from a physiological training perspective and what it's doing to your physiology. So, you know, here's the interesting thing. When people come, let's say, to my clinic here in South Carolina, and they want a full workup of their nervous system, yes, we're looking at, we'll do a brain map, a quantitative QEG. We'll like look at like a psychophysiological stress profile. In other words, it's kind of sounds a bit sadistic, but we stress them out to see how their body responds. And then we would and then we adjust accordingly.

But the thing that I find that most people find the most value from is when we run the full resonance frequency protocol where we find their resonance frequency. And Kristen, I'll train them in resonance breathing for like five to 10 minutes. And most people will look and understand the data. And they'll say, are you kidding me? Like I did not realize that I could take my heart rate variability, which always made me nervous at like, whatever, 20 milliseconds, and I can use this type of training and increase it by 50, 100 percent

in a matter of, you know, five minutes of training. And I'm like, yes, like, isn't that crazy? And I always tell people, like, keep doing it more and more and more. Yeah, imagine what that does over time. The compound effect is just. Exactly. So I hate to sound too preachy on resonance frequency breathing, but listen, I didn't create it.

I don't make any money from, you know, resonance frequency breathing. It's what I teach and what I train and assess. But for me, it's just like, it's so compelling when you see all of these people who are saying this benefits them, including you and I, but also when you just see the hundreds and hundreds of published research articles and peer-reviewed, you know, really high-quality, you know, journals saying that this is an effective strategy for learning control over the nervous system. And nowadays, what's so great about it is that, yes, you can go into clinics still, but you can also do this, you know, with really inexpensive, you know, consumer hardware and software, which is really awesome. Totally. Let's talk a little bit about mitochondria. You talk a lot about the power of mitochondria being, you know, one of the keys to mental health.

Just talk about, you know, how you think about that in your clinic and, you know, what, what in flu and if you can, yeah, just kind of unpack all that. Sure. You know, mitochondria is an interesting one because it's funny. Mitochondri is one of those ones that kind of gets, comes in waves, right? It's like a lot of people are like really on mitochondria and talking about, you know, energy preservation, conservation, and expenditure. And then like it kind of goes away. And then it comes back and it kind of goes away. But the sheer fact of the matter is it never really goes away. We just may kind of not talk about it as often. I always think about mitochondria and, and its relationship to stress.

because, again, obviously, as a psychologist, everything is kind of framed in terms of mental health and neurological functioning. The interesting thing that we see, both in research studies, but also what we've seen in clinically, is, again, that as we see someone who has a taxed nervous system, which would therefore mean taxed mitochondria, we see this impacting overall health and well-being, but we see this manifest in separate physiological biomarker change. So we might see this as affecting kind of change in cortisol. We might see it affecting changes in nervous system functioning related to the parameters of heart rate variability. We know that at the core, a lot of this is because of

stresses damage that it has on cellular functioning, including mitochondrial functioning being part of, you know, cellular functioning and cellular respiration. I think that, you know, a lot of the times I don't try to get too much into the weeds when I'm talking to clients or patients about mitochondrial functioning. I think a lot of people, a lot that come to me typically have a baseline understanding of it. But what I, the point that I try to drive across to people is that when we experience immense psychological and physiological stress, this impacts and damages us on a cellular level. And again, this comes back to indisputable research. We see indisputable research in this domain. So I think the biggest kind of takeaway home here is that, number one, we can utilize

stress in a way that can be helpful and productive. I'm going to talk about that first. But also, too, we have to make sure that we're self-aware of how stress is impacting, you know, our functioning. Physiological function, cellular functioning. I tell people, the big thing here, too, is that we have to have two key components to really continue to build and optimize. And number one is, great self-awareness. Number two is great self-regulation. Without self-awareness and self-regulation, I think we're going to be in a heap of trouble. So how can we use stress as a way to actually impact cellular functioning, mitochondrial functioning, in a way that, yes, stresses it out on the immediate, but can actually help down the road and in the future? This is things like what we eat.

eating food can stress our cellular functioning in a way that is both productive and not so productive. So we know that a huge caloric surplus that is not balanced out with an appropriate amount of energy expenditure can actually cause significant mitochondrial damage and disregulation. Overfueling, yeah, overfueling is a huge area to be aware of. So that's way that can impact us negatively. Well, we can also use stress in ways that we know impact mitochondrial functioning, but also helps with longer term reparation. So this would be exercise is one of them, right? Like when we exercise, we actually are stressing our cells. We're stressing our mitochondria, but in a way that ultimately leads to reparation that enhances

cellular functioning. And that's because this is transient. And that's, That is a big key component. This is acute and transient, meaning it's a hard, short burst of stress to the cells that you crank it up, stress the cells, then it gets cranked down. And then over time, you have the ability, again, as long as you're recovering well and repairing,

that this is, that's kind of the cycle you need. If it's constant stress of the nervous system, the constant stress of cellular functioning and mitochondria, even if it was with something like exercise, where we're not understanding the amount of overstrain on the body. Well, this is obviously damaging. So a little bit of, or so too much of something good can actually have a detriment on the body. To speak to one extra point on there is that if we see a downward trend in heart rate variability,

indicating that there's a lot of stress and taxation on the body, this is impacting us at a cellular level. We know this. So, again, we may not have a direct, you know, non-invasive biomarker of mitochondrial functioning out there. Right. But we do have a secondary proxy of that, which is looking at changes in things like resting heart rate, body temperature, as well as, of course, heart rate variability being the more specified, granular way of assessing those changes.

So, yeah, so we can gain really good valuable information based on these kind of like secondary proxies. Yeah. Now, in terms of hormesis, and I think this is where we have a lot more research to do, but the research that we do have that's preliminary is very compelling is the state of inducing, you know, these short-term burst of transient stressors on the body that can help with, you know, cellular reparation in the end to make us bigger, faster, stronger, essentially, or more healthy, enhanced longevity.

These are things like sauna exposure, so heat exposure, and then cold exposure. some of the most compelling research that I've seen for nervous system functioning is looking at subjects. There was a study that was done that looked at subjects who were given a cold plunge. And this was around 40 degrees. So not down into like the 30s, but still really cold. 40s, very cold water. These individuals were tested before, during, and after in terms of nervous system functioning. As you would expect, during the cold plunge, we see sympathetic activation like crazy HRV just drops like a rock where you know heart rate goes up we see everything that indicates sympathetic functioning and overload however what they saw is around 30 to

45 minutes later something crazy happened where they didn't just return to baseline heart rate variability they actually went above it for a period of time we saw the same thing in research studies with sauna as well so what is this saying this saying is that this isn't a very acute transient stressor that we're experiencing, something that sucks when you're doing it, it's stressful in the nervous system. But then later down the road, the body has almost like this bounce back effect, this rebound effect that not only gets us back to our baseline, but also helps us to go above baseline. Well, the only explanation for that is that it is activating our parasympathetic nervous system. Our vagus nerve is saying that there was something

about that stressor and then there's many different hypotheses we have again a lot of research in this area to go down but what we see is that the vagus nerve was responding in a way that really says no this is actually good for me i liked it this is something that is actually helpful i think that that is probably the most i'm i'm more interested in that area of research than just about anything right now because i think we have a lot to learn about it and then also figuring out kind of practical strategies and protocols around that area, I think are going to be fascinating for high performers, but also how can we use it in a general public's perspective as well? I couldn't agree more. Yeah, I think there's such an opportunity. And I think, you know,

especially cold, it's generally available to us all. So it's, you know, it's, we can have access to this modality, you know, that is seemingly, seemingly has a pretty huge impact on our physiology and in our mindset and just our mental health resilience. Okay, well, this has been just wildly insightful. Such a conversation. We've got one last question. Jay, what are you obsessing over right now? Oh, man. From a research perspective, hormasis, cold and heat exposure, and the effects that it has on nervous system functioning, recovery, and mental health in particular, that's my research side of things. I would say that from like a personal side, of things it's there's kind of two things that I'm bouncing past or are bouncing between here but

I'm going to I'm going to say kind of the number one the number one thing is actually using biometrics so like to like actually tracking different changes in physiology in a relationship's standpoint so what so what I mean by that is that there's new technology right now and this is more of like in marital therapy that we see that allows individuals to be hooked up to different, it sounds crazy, but you get hooked up and we're looking at things like respiration rate and temperature and skin sweating or what we call galvanic skin response, heart rate variability. And during therapy, we're kind of looking to see how interconnected people are with this, with these biometrics. It's fascinating because people may be like,

oh, I didn't realize like you were stressed right now when you're talking about this, but I see like on the screen, your body's really responding to it. And it helps people to connect and click. And I'm like this, this is a really cool new wave of marital therapy. So other people were like, what in the world are you talking about, dude? But for me, I'm like, this is really cool. I think there is something there. It would be really interesting to look at the data of people who stay together versus people who don't end up making it and what relationships might be embedded in the physiology. I think there's something there probably. You know, but just even, you know, morningness versus eveningness, you know, like people who have, you know,

know, just I think there's a ton just in the kind of circadian rhythms, you know, perspective in terms of just our preferences, right, of when we want to eat, when we want to sleep. And, yeah, I think all of that is really, really fascinating. I love it. Yes, I agree. I'm like, I could see how it could result in a lot of benefits. I can also see how it might cause a little contention as well. But it's very interesting.

It's very possible. Very possible. Well, Jay, I appreciate your time so much today. This has been so much fun. And yeah, hopefully we can have you back because there's like so many other questions that I want to ask you. Hey, you give me a call and I'm ready. I appreciate that, Jay.

Thanks. Big thanks to Dr. Jay Wiles for joining the show to discuss HRV stress and peak performance. And a big thank you to our listeners. Once again, we love you. All the WOOP members, all the WOOP podcast listeners for supporting now over 250 episodes. If you enjoyed this episode of the Whoop podcast, please leave a rating or review. Please subscribe to the Whoop podcast.

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