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Beyond Blind Blaming
The Power of Heart Coherence to Boost Your Health and Performance | Rollin McCraty
00:43:50
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The largest unrecognized source of stress across humanity is that lack of alignment between the heart and brain.
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Today I'm joined by Dr. Roland McCraby. He's the director of research at the Heartmath Institute, a pioneering organization studying the science of heart brain coherence and its impact on human performance, well being and consciousness.
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If we look under the hood of stress, it's always an emotion and emotion runs the show in our physiology. Just feeling frustration for five minutes suppresses the immune system for six hours. Then we add judgments and blame and drama and significance to the little things, often that really don't matter. Then all you're doing is activating those systems that basically increase the aging process.
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So how do people reset or how do they move the needle to get from completely stressed the eff out, as we say these days.
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To grateful the first step of most of our techniques.
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Welcome to Beyond Blind Blaming. This is the place where we explore how easily hidden truths can hold us back, trapping us in cycles of frustration and blame, often without realizing what's truly stopping us. I'm your host, Kevin Saint clergy. And today I'm joined by Dr. Roland McCready. He's the director of research at the Heartmath Institute, a pioneering organization studying the science of heart brain coherence and its impact on human performance, well being and consciousness. Dr. McCrady, welcome to the show.
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Thank you, Kevin. It's great to be here.
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B
And you mind if I call you Roland?
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Oh, please do.
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B
Okay, great. Well, you've dedicated much of your career to studying heart brain coherence. Can you share what led you to this work and how it's evolved over the years?
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The short answer is personal experience. You know, my original career was a communication engineer, used to work for Motorola. Well, I guess I just came into the planet this time around with a deep curiosity about a lot of things and sense of adventure. Actually. I was always questioning what is a magnetic field or a gravitational field. And I always get, well, no, here's the formula that describes its behavior. No, no, no, I got that. What is it? And it was always kind of brushed off of don't ask that go away. I mean, maybe not quite that bluntly, but that was the failing. So that curiosity eventually led me to actually discovering a book in a bookstore at the University of Nebraska at that time, which started having some hints at some of those deeper questions. And that led me to throw my toolbox and move to California to get a degree in consciousness studies. This would be back in the 70s. That's where I got introduced to a lot of new things for a young man from the Midwest, like consciousness and meditation and chakras and all this stuff I had no idea about before that. And radionics, which is study of subtle things, dowsing subtler fields, these types of things. And to make a long story short through that I got introduced to spirulina or helped actually introduce Spirulina to the world, to the western world anyway. And the mission and goal behind that at that time, this would have been late 70s, early 80s, was to feed the world's hungry populations. So it was kind of my first step into more truly humanitarian efforts and things. Actually, National Enquirer did a front page story on Spirulina back then. It said, really interesting doctors praise safe new diet pill, Lose weight and never be hungry again.
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B
Sounds like something going on right now, but yeah, that's good.
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In the next two week period in the company that I was managing as a young guy, sold about $20 million in orders of Spirulina. That's a whole substory how we pulled that off. But we took the profits of that and went to the deserts of Southern California to prove that you could go out in the middle of a desert and grow spirulina and feed people, right? So pulled it off way ahead of our time a lot of ways. I mean, it's a solar powered, big three story high spray dryers and all this stuff. And that, again, I'm trying to keep this short, went absolutely nowhere in terms of feeding hungry people. And you know, in hindsight, Kevin, it's when I look back and say my idealism bubble got popped because it's all about consciousness, right? Well, no, it really was because it wasn't blocked because we didn't have the technology we did. There it was sitting there in the middle of the desert working. It was bureaucracy. It was the consciousness of government leaders. People didn't want people to be fed. I mean, just on and on it went. So long story short, I said to myself, more or less, the heck with this humanitarian stuff. I'm going to go make money again. So I started another company with a friend of mine and became pretty successful pretty quickly actually in the field of electrostatics. And another sports car in the driveway wasn't kind of doing it for me, you know, I had a great time, don't get me wrong, it was a beautiful ride, starting literally in a garage. To go into a multimillion dollar company in just a few years with offices around the world and all the stuff we were doing. But there still was something missing in my life. But I had also a lot of this is in hindsight, I have the clarity now that I wasn't going to get involved in something again unless it had the power to change consciousness, evolve consciousness on a mass scale. And that's when I met, through some mutual friends actually tying back to the Spirulina days, a guy named Doc Childry, who's the founder of HeartMath. So I thought I'd go spend. He was on the east coast at that time. I had business back there. I'll go stop by for an hour and meet this character I was hearing about. I spent three days that first meeting. And that's when I learned that I really had no idea about what the heart really was, even though I had studied it in consciousness research. Facilitated process, elevated into my own higher self and a higher level of awareness and got some real insights to what my mission was really about this lifetime.
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B
It sounds like you really want to make an impact on people's lives. Lives, yeah.
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So I basically sold that company to my friends and employees to get out of it fast for a fraction of what it was really worth, but then helped Doc along with some other people that found HeartMath. Part of that story was after that meeting I came back and started integrating some of what I'd learned. This is long before HeartMath existed in the formal tools, techniques into my life. And I can honestly say I made more personal growth and progress on multiple levels in three months than I had in many years of meditative practices. I followed my own heart.
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See, I love stories like that. I think that at the core of some people's unhappiness is they're not doing what they were meant to do, but they're not really sure where to go next. Or they just haven't gotten the courage yet.
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Yeah. Or don't have the clarity.
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Or the clarity.
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We're programmed so much from not just parents, but peers and parents and the hand me downs from their parents.
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Yeah. When we dig into the blind blaming book, we call it an ODA analysis. It's a obstacle Deep Nexus analysis is what I called it. And we're diving down into five areas. Health, purpose, relationships, growth, resources, and purpose is when you don't have really a sense of purpose, sometimes it doesn't make sense to get up in the morning.
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I mean, I had a purpose. If I think back in my own life, I mean, I grew up in a poor part of the world. My early years were on a Poor farm, we grew our own food and outdoor toilets. All that, the whole scene. Right. Which I didn't know any different. But I had a goal to be a millionaire by age 30. Right. That was my purpose. I made that goal. But it also wasn't aligned with my deeper purpose. So I think purpose can be either more from the mind or from our deeper core of who we really are when we're more aligned with our. I'll say your own larger self is what I tend to think of it, but our higher self, what people tend to call it sometimes.
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Well, do you think you were really ready to find that when you were younger? I mean, it's. What did I read the other day, it's like 20s is you just want to be with a significant other. Your 30s, it's money, money, money, money. Your 40s, you're starting to figure out that maybe there's something more to life than what I thought.
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You're right. That's the typical trajectory, but it doesn't have to be that way.
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Yeah, agreed.
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Probably true for a lot of us as we get older to kind of look back and say, wish I had known then.
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Right. Well, the Heartmath Institute has pioneered some groundbreaking research on the heart's role in human consciousness and emotional well being. What do you think is the most surprising discovery you've made so far in your research?
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Oh, that's a hard one to answer as well, because there's been a few pivotal surprise discoveries. I would say, you know, if I'm really honest, looking back to when we started the research center here in 1991, in that era, I'm coming from an engineering communications background and having to learn, you know, I eventually got a PhD in psychophysiology and all that, but in the beginning, I didn't know what we were doing. You know, we were going over to Stanford and getting books out of a library and what is all this stuff? And in hindsight, I think that was really good or advantageous the way that worked out because we didn't know enough to know what wouldn't work.
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Makes perfect sense. That's a big part of the book because sometimes when we know too much, it keeps us from seeing a different way or a different thing.
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Yeah. So we tried things that if I had had a formal education at that era, at that time in my life, we probably wouldn't have done it because now that won't work. You know, stuck in the paradigm of the day and things did work. A lot of things didn't, but a lot of things Did. But to answer your question, probably it wasn't necessarily a bit of a surprise, but not really. And this would have been in the later 90s. One of the things we kept hearing from people who were practicing the heartmath skills. This is after we kind of discovered our physiology shifts into what we now call a coherent heart rhythm state and techniques to do that. But then what we were hearing from just. And well still to this day we hear this that people say, all right, my intuition's on steroids. I mean it's radically different. And then number two, they usually talk about synchronicities having become a way of life. So we figured out with some help with some colleagues and things how to do some pretty rigorous lab based studies of what I ended up calling when I first published the first papers the electrophysiology of intuition. And what those series of studies, and this has all been replicated by other labs now as well found is that the heart is the first organ to get the information about say in this case it was a future event that was supposedly unknowable. And then the heart sent a measurably different neural signal to the brain and then a body response where we feel it. So the gut gets the credit. It's more of an effector organ, but it's really heart, brain, body, where it becomes a conscious feeling. So the way I got that published back then was in peer reviewed scientific journals. Right. Was to say that the heart appeared to have access to a field of information not limited by the boundaries of time and space. Perfectly acceptable language at that time was.
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B
That kind of what during the quantum physics kind of stuff?
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Yeah, yeah. I mean quantum physics had provident entanglement and.
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Yeah. What the bleep when that movie came out back in the.
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Yeah. So this was all you know like in line with findings. Right.
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Okay.
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Only at that time that was only supposed to happen at subatomic scales. That's not true anymore. That's all been blown. We're into macroscopic scales and quantum physics and I'm not a quantum physics guy. But anyway what that was really code for us. About the only thing I could say and get it published at that time. You know these days I'm a lot more out of the box that box of the scientific paradigm because I'm. I'm an old guy now and pretty well published. So can't do much with me. I can kind of say what I want. But basically what I meant by that if you think about what is a field of information not bound by time and space. That's kind of what I was alluding to earlier. A lot of people would call it your higher self. Others, depending upon your culture and background, your spirit, your soul, God within different terms, I just call it your larger self. Because from my perspective, we are multi dimensional beings. We have to be. Any living system has to be. We have an energetic component that's kind of the glue that guides and holds us together. So that's what we were tapping into. So those two hearts from this perspective, the physical heart and the energetic heart, which I'm suggesting is very real with real structure, it just exists in the energetic domain. And it's not a big jump to understand when we're talking about our energetic system, which is magnetics and photons and all that, that it's the master coordinator of everything that goes on in our physiology. So it's really the bridge too that you're the larger part of yourself at that higher dimensional part of your undivided wholeness. To steal that from David Bohm.
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In your research, have you seen people misunderstand the sources of, say, their stress or emotional struggles?
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Oh God. All the time.
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Talk to us about that.
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Let me ask it this way. And Kevin, maybe for you to think about this or anybody listening, but has there been a situation, maybe even recently where you were maybe asked to do something or wanted to do something, you know, kind of like a mind directed, could have been buying something new or whatever, but you had a deeper inner feeling or sense that it may not be the right choice?
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Yes.
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Right. And can you remember times when you followed the mind thing even though you had that feeling that don't go down that path?
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Yep.
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And what was the outcome?
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Typically I should have gone with my gut.
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Well, I'm going to say heart or heart.
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Yeah, I made a mistake when I felt that when there was that disconnect, I made a mistake and I was like, ah, should have listened to how I felt.
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To me, the biggest problem we face as a human species is disconnection. It's that disconnection within ourselves from that deeper part of who we really are, that larger self level, that lack of alignment and disconnection with others, which then results oftentimes from that inner separation from who we really are.
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And do you think that leads to bad decisions?
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Absolutely. Leads to bad decisions. I would go so far as Stan, and I do say this in some of my writings, that the largest unrecognized source of stress across humanity is that lack of alignment between the heart and brain.
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I started the medical field As I talked about before when I accidentally said here instead of heart, that's where I got my start, my beginning. But we're doing a lot of work in other medical professions, urology, obgyn, primary care. And I'm running into a lot of physicians who are just burned out. And they're blaming this and they're blaming that. And I think you nailed it.
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And that's what a lot of people, including myself, would call 3D consciousness. It is standard. It's just part of blaming. Judging comes from really our deeper vanity structures. Right? It's never our responsibility. Right. It's them. They.
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I think many people blame those external circumstances or people, workplace pressure, difficult relationships, past trauma for their stress. But tell me if I'm wrong. HeartMath talks about self regulation and coherence. Can you explain how taking control of your heart rhythms changes our ability to navigate those challenges?
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Here's a science story to answer that. And that starts with understanding that the heart sends far more information neurologically and energetically to the brain. And the brain sends to the heart. Now that's not some new discovery, Kevin. This has been known since the late 1800s. And in fact, the founder, who's considered the founding father of psychology, knew this. And psychology was based on this understanding until about the 1930s. And then it all became about the brain. And that's about the same time the first hormone was being discovered. When you look back on this in hindsight, it's kind of, wow, did we go wrong there? Anyway, in the 70s, the paradigm of that day was it's all about the brain, you know, in the 60s, 70s and that theoretically, if you could give the brain the oxygen and the blood flow it needs, it doesn't need the body. The body was there to carry the head around, more or less. I mean, people believe that. I mean, that's totally nonsense. Nobody believes that anymore. But what started that paradigm shift back to one of a more balanced perspective, at least in that silo of research, was that they were finding that the information sent from the heart has profound influences on brain function and our perceptions. And they introduced two terms long before me being in this field. One was called cortical inhibition and the other was cortical facilitation, depending on what the activity of the heart was. And they even found, although they didn't emphasize it in the original data that era, that the heart somehow knew ahead of time what the brain was going to need to do next and shifted its neural information to the brain to facilitate or reject different activities that the Brain function. So along comes the field of neurocardiology. I should also add here it's kind of fun to read the research literature of that day, right, because this was a paradigm shift and the people who were first publishing this got a lot of flack. They were proven right and won all kinds of career wars, I'm sure.
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But in the moment, though, it was pretty tough.
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Oh, in the moment, this was heresy. Because really they were suggesting the heart has an important term here, a causal role on modulating perception. What they didn't know then that kind of helped ground all this in modern science is starting in really the 1990s, a little before that, but was the field called neurocardiology. So now we know that the heart actually has, if we're talking just plain physiology now, what's called the intrinsic cardiac nervous system, or been nicknamed the heart brain now by that field of one of the leading neurocardiologists because the neurons in the heart are very sophisticated neural system. It's now been proven these neural structures have short term memory, long term memory, neuroplasticity, neurogenesis. And the way they're functionally wired, we can legitimately say it's its own functional independent brain. So we've got the neural pathways that go between the heart and brain, and it's not just. But one of the primary nerves is called the vagus nerves. There's two of them come down through the front of the body, and the vagus nerve is the longest nerve in the body. And each of the two vagus nerves has thousands of neural fibers communicating information between brain and heart, brain and body. And 90% of those neurofibers are what are called afferent or ascending neural pathways. They're carrying information from the body to the brain. Only 10% are brain down, and those have been ignored for years. Right. And the majority of those are coming from the heart and cardiovascular system. So there's no question the heart's sending far more information upstairs than the other way around. And now we now know that those neural structures which are coming from the intrinsic cardiac nervous system, a lot of them and other parts of the cardiovascular system, go pretty much one synapse away to directly every major brain center and have a lot to do with informing, let's say, emotional experience. I mean, why do we feel the way we feel? You mean, kind of a classic example, hopefully. Kevin, when I assume you're married, I am dating somebody.
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B
Seriously?
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Yes. All right. Dating somebody. Well, do you say I love you with all my brain?
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I have not said that yet, but I hope not.
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That probably would have told me because we. But we instinctively know there's something more deeper about the heart in terms of higher emotions for a reason. Right. So the brain is largely interpreting the signals from the heart and then labeling them as certain feelings. That physiology is pretty well understood and mapped out now, at least in certain circles.
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B
Well, it's interesting, you said when they first did the research that it was rejected because that's part of the blind blaming. Whole concept is that when you have these. And I went through and renamed a lot of the paradigm paralysis and some of the other terms you've heard, and we came up with preconceived perceptions and behavioral bedrock, which gets deeper and deeper and deeper, that it's almost physiologically impossible for you to see something that's outside of your paradigm or your way of thinking.
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Absolutely.
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In fact, I used Ignat Semmelweis, you know that story which.
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I'm sorry, what's your name?
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His name is Ignat Semmelweis, mid-1800s. It's a fascinating story. Basically, what he discovered was he was delivering babies. An OB GYN doctor. And back then, I think it was like 30, 40% of women were dying after giving birth. But what he noticed was in another ward where the midwives were delivering babies, they had much less death rate. And what he found out was the doctors were delivering babies, the women would die, then they would immediately go back and do an autopsy, and then they would come back and deliver more babies. He was shunned. He ended up dying in a mental institution. I mean, it was really, really. It was a bad, horrible example of how when new ideas come to fruition, that we're very quick to say it's not right.
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Oh, and that's still going on today? It is still going on today. I have several friends that have just had their careers tried to be trashed and shut down because of.
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That's a shame.
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Going bucking against the paradigm of the day and have proven to be totally right. Right. But it's. There's a lot of forces that want to keep things the way they are.
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B
Well, what are some common misconceptions that you see that people have about stress and resilience and how do you think heart brain coherence offers a different perspective?
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I guess a good place to start with that is that if we look under the hood of stress, it's always an emotion. It's interesting if you. For many years, you know, in these surveys that are done, you know, in the United States, Europe, Western world, anyway, that the number one source of the stress or perceived stress is time pressure, which is defined as the feeling we don't have enough time and it's usually work related stress as a stressor. I guess the thing outside of us these days, what's kind of rising up to the top sometimes is dealing with difficult people. What we perceive as difficult people as becoming a big source of again, that separation that I was talking about. So stress really boils down to the feelings of frustration, impatience, anxiety, overwhelm all emotions. Now that's critical to understand because it's emotions that run the show in our physiology. And that is so easy to prove here in the lab. I mean we can have, this is going back to early 90s for us, but we can have you wired up to whatever brain waves and skin conductance and hormonal and immune system markers, all this stuff that we've done over the years and have people mentally stressed, thinking, doing serial subtractions, all that kind of stuff that we think of as stressors. And not much happens. Yeah, you can make some changes, but once you trigger an emotion, you feel embarrassed because you're not doing well with subtractions or you get upset or angry or. We actually were focusing back in the early days on feeling appreciation or compassion or kindness. Boy, big changes happen quick. Oh yeah, yeah. Your blood pressure, hormonal flows, neural activity, I mean, boom.
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B
So when you hear people say practice gratitude, it's a real thing. Oh, by physiological changes.
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Yes. So the point here is. So stress is emotion and emotion runs the show in our physiology. I mean, just feeling. God. It's an early study we did back in the, again, early 90s. Just feeling frustration for five minutes suppresses the immune system for six hours.
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B
Really? Oh, that's fascinating. I love that. So that's why stress, people get sick.
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Yeah. And then we tend to like you're talking about here. Then we add judgments and blame and drama and significance to the little things, often that really don't matter. Then all you're doing is activating those systems that basically increase the aging process.
- [24:05]
B
Are you tired of feeling stuck in your business, career, relationships or your health? Are you frustrated by problems that just won't go away no matter what you try? After coaching and teaching thousands of people for over 25 years, I've discovered something powerful. Every unresolved problem has a hidden solution you just can't see yet. That's why I created the From Stuck to Breakthrough challenge, a free five day live experience where I'll show you exactly how to uncover what's really holding you back and finally break free to the results that you want. Whether it's in your business, your health, your wealth, your relationships. I'll help you discover the real root cause of your challenges and give you the blueprint for permanent change. Join me and a community of like minded people ready to break through. Go to blindblaming.com again, that's blindblaming.com to sign up and we'll see you soon. Well, let me switch into a different area. One of the most fascinating aspects that I read about of your research is the idea that our heart's electromagnetic field can influence those around us. Can you talk about the implications of this for leadership, relationships, teamwork, society?
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A
This is one of those things where it shouldn't have worked, but did. And it was actually easy to show. Having a background in communications engineering didn't hurt here. But here's the short version. When we put electrodes on the body, if you put them across the chest to measure the electrocardiogram or we stick them on your head to measure the electroencephalograph, brainwaves, it's called electrode because you're measuring electricity. Literally you're measuring current flow. Now, whenever there's a flow of current, this is Physics 101. We learned this back in I don't know what grade these days. You create a magnetic field. That's why it's called electromagnetism. But electric and magnetic fields are very different things. You can make one out of the other, but that's why they called that. So that flow of current, you create a magnetic field. Now, one of the properties of a magnetic field is they go through things. In fact, this is why your cell phone works indoors. You can be in an elevator and make a cell phone call. Well, it's the magnetic field that goes through the windows and the walls and out to carry the information, your text message, your voice, whatever, from your phone to the cell tower. Well, nature beat us to all this, right? No, it really did. So when the heart beats and we measure that current flow, the electrodes don't see the magnetic field at all. They're measuring current flow. You need a different device called a magnetometer to measure this magnetic field. In fact, most larger hospitals have what are called mcgs, stands for magnetocardiogram, where you never touch the body, you have these sensors around the body and you measure the heart or you put them around the head and megs in that case. So they're just measuring the magnetic field. Now you can Take a magnetometer and start backing it up from the body. Just, you know, normally you wouldn't do that because you want a good signal to noise ratio, but you start backing it up. Well, how far away can I get before I lose the capacity to detect that signal? With the heart, it's about three feet. With a brainwave, it's about an inch.
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B
No kidding. Three feet.
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A
Yeah. Now that doesn't mean that the field doesn't go farther. That's the sensitivity of the instrument. As the instruments get better, that distance gets farther.
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B
But still, if somebody's within your. Anyway, I'm stealing your thunder. But if somebody's really close to you now, it makes sense, right?
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A
Yeah. Right. So what we did, and this was one of those things that shouldn't have worked, but did, and it was actually really easy. So back to my Motorola days, right. We used the same techniques that I used to use to decode or demodulate some the information being carried by a radio wave to the field of the heart. And sure enough, the emotional state information for sure is being carried by that field. We can look at the, I call them vibrational information patterns now. So that's what they are. You can see them change in real time as people change their emotional states. I was really surprised that nobody ever done that before. Right. But they hadn't. That I can find anywhere in the scientific literature. So then the next question to your point, Kevin, became, well, okay, that's cool, but so what do other people's nervous systems detect and respond in a meaningful and measurable way to these different energetic, I'm going to call them energetic magnetic fields, information patterns from other people. And that was actually really easy to do too. Again, nobody ever thought of looking at it. That has now cascaded to a lot of people duplicating that work and, and studies even showing that when, let's say that we're in a heart rhythm coherent state, which by the way, I should have mentioned earlier, we naturally go into when we're actually feeling, not thinking, feeling things like appreciation or gratitude, kindness, compassion, these qualities of love, I like to think of them the octave of dimension of love, that the nervous systems of other people do indeed detect those in a measurable way. So when people are coherent, it helps lift others into a more coherent state. So it's been replicated. Again, this is not kind of old news for us.
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B
Yeah. But for some of our listeners, I bet you're kind of getting under where I was kind of going next. So how do people reset or how do they Move the needle to get from completely stressed the F out, as we say these days, to grateful.
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A
That's what heartmath's all about. And the various techniques, once we started to understand this stuff scientifically and what a heart coherent state is, we've actually invented technology that made this really simple for people to measure their own level of heart coherence. So there's several apps out there now that allow you to do this very inexpensively or in some cases for free, to actually see your own heart rhythm and analyze how coherent or incoherent it is. And so you can practice that with techniques. The first step of most of our techniques is real simple. It's called hard focus breathing. That alone can be just profound in the shifts it can make in one's day to day life. And that's simply you focus your attention in the area of the heart and you imagine your breath is flowing in and out of your heart or chest area right here in the center of your chest, and you breathe a little slower than deeper than normal and find the slower rhythm that's the most comfortable. So that focus of attention in the area of the heart is important because we're wanting to shift the rhythm of the heart. And there's a whole industry based on the fact that where we focus attention, we can cause measurable physiological changes. In this case, we want to shift an incoherent heart rhythm to a coherent heart rhythm, which is actually reflecting quite literally now the inner synchronization of the activity in the neurons in our higher brain system and what's going on within our autonomic nervous system. So this is, that's step one. And if you want to go even deeper with it, you then consciously self activate feelings of appreciation or kindness. Right. Or care. And you breathe as you're doing the heart focused breathing, you breathe in and draw in that feeling of appreciation. Or it can be a feeling of just inner stillness. Depends on the context you're in. Then it goes on from there.
- [31:13]
B
But that's, no, that's a great two step. I just love people to walk away with stuff they can practice now and at least you're getting them started on what they can do. And I wonder if it's gonna help with. I've had AFIB issues in the past, but it's always around stress. And when you say, yeah, in fact.
- [31:27]
A
There was a study done at one of the Kaiser hospitals quite some time ago in people with severe arrhythmias, both atrial and ventricular arrhythmias. So you have an atrial that I won't get the numbers exactly right. It's been too long ago, but this is over 100 people with severe arrhythmias. It was out of their pacemaker clinic and it was something around 80 some percent had significant reductions in both the severity and frequency frequency of arrhythmias. And I think it was 14% of that population was able to get all their antiarrhythmic medications really well.
- [31:59]
B
I'd love to see that one because the medicine I have to take for the arrhythmia is awful. The beta blockers, they didn't publish it.
- [32:05]
A
For stupid reasons, but they allowed us to give the results. That's on our website under frequency questions about arrhythmias. The one thing I wanted to circle back to that I should have said earlier around stress with heartmath there is one, I call it heart focused meditation. But the vast majority of our techniques and practices are really about how do we navigate day to day life with less stress. Those moment to moment situations and encounters like dealing with a difficult person or traffic jams. Literally or figuratively. We're in a meeting and that person you know is going to do what they always do does it. And there we go, right? Those are the moments we really need to self regulate and physiologically shifting into that heart coherent state. And you can learn to do it in a heartbeat literally to make that shift. But the reason that's so important is this neural information coming up from the heart to the brain goes, I mentioned earlier, to all the major brain centers. But one key one in this respect is the thalamus. The very core of our brain. It has a lot of important functions. One of the most important is that it's the part of the brain that synchronizes globally all the electrical activity amongst the neurons in the brain. The neurons in our brain have to be synchronized for information to flow through smoothly and accurate perceptions. And you know, all the things, even be awake and conscious requires neural synchronization. So when we're in an incoherent heart rhythm, which is what the rhythm looks like when we're feeling, you know, like we named them out earlier, frustration and anger and anxiety, that incoherent pattern goes directly to the thalamus and it basically interferes with or blocks, inhibits the thalamus's ability to synchronize electrical activity of the entire brain globally. Hence that term I mentioned earlier, cortical inhibition cortex part of our brain. We get paid to go to Work for. Now, if we're in a coherent state, that's the signal going to the thalamus, which actually now facilitates global neural synchronization. Now we're in a more synchronized state than our normal walking around state. Normal, we're somewhere in between. Now this has been shown in all kinds of studies. You know, reaction times, coordination, visual field, nothing with hearing yet. We should try that.
- [34:20]
B
Oh, it'd be interesting. I know a lot of audiologists, so.
- [34:23]
A
Yeah, that's why I mentioned it. But the most important part of the brain that this is affected by is the frontal and prefrontal cortex, which I'm sure you're familiar with what I learned. Give credit here to one of my mentors, a guy named Dr. Carl Prebram. Really famous neuroscientist, was head of neuroscience at Stanford and then retired and then opened another research center on the east coast. He's considered by many the father of modern cognitive neuroscience. I learned a lot from him. But the way that to think of the frontal part of our brain, that frontal cortex is what that gives us as humans that our beloved pets don't have. They have great memory of the past, but that part of the brain gives us foresight. So there's a lot under foresight, right? Setting a goal, planning, abstract thinking. But especially it's the key of self regulation. The capacity to self regulate, to understand how our actions and behaviors in the now are going to affect the future. Not a good idea to yell at your boss if you want to keep your job, right?
- [35:29]
B
Or your spouse if you want to be in a relationship.
- [35:31]
A
Exactly. Right. Happy wife, happy life. So you get kind of the drift, right?
- [35:36]
B
Yeah, I love it.
- [35:37]
A
One of the things that drives me nuts sometimes in these different programs, all moniker every now and then about stress management, is that it seems like we get reduced so often to fight or flight or freeze. Those things are all true. And there's a modern day version of those. It's not just about I'm yet to be. I'm 70 years old and yet to be chased by a saber tooth tiger. But we have our modern day versions of that right in the office dynamics and workplace and all that. But that is not what we're limited to. We also can self regulate and activate what's called the social engagement system, which is that frontal cortex down to the subcortical amygdala areas and down into our body and nervous system. We can inhibit ourselves, our reactions and behaviors. I may not agree with you, Kevin, but I can self regulate. And let's Talk, maybe we can agree to disagree, but still like each other, right? You know, that's that frontal cortex self engagement system. So it's not just about fighting or fleeing. That makes sense.
- [36:34]
B
I mean, it makes perfect sense. No, I love it. The reason I'm smiling is because there's three sections in the book. The first one's called awareness and I think that's what you're describing, just being aware of different things. And that's the first step to any.
- [36:47]
A
Movement in self awareness. I talk a lot about that too. I mean, and that's something that we mature in as we grow up, you know, I mean, I think back to when I was a kid, life was so much different. You know, the backyard was our boundary at a certain age, right? Then it grew to the block, but you couldn't cross the street, you know, so that was a huge expansion. But then once we had the self awareness to not run out in the street and get ran over by a car because we weren't paying attention, I mean, literally, then the. For me, it became the town, right? A lot of us, I think that journey stops somewhere along the way because self awareness is something that continues to grow and it's not just becoming, it does become the next kind of, I would say, level of that self awareness past what we're just talking about, those very practical things is starting to be more aware of what are we actually feeling, right? Thinking and feeling. And for us men in particular, we tend to ignore a lot of that species, you know, like what feelings?
- [37:44]
B
That's what did somebody tell me recently that sounds like a bunch of tree hugging hippie crap?
- [37:48]
A
Yeah.
- [37:49]
B
And I started laughing. I was like, look, I used to think that too, but I'm telling you, this stuff's real. I've had too many podcast guests that I've practiced what they've preached and it's made a significant difference in my life.
- [37:58]
A
Right? So we can't self regulate something and grow if we're not aware of it. That's an important step. But then it goes deeper and then we start becoming more self aware of who we really are. As we start connecting more with a larger part of self, then that starts unfolding our true purpose and who we really are. Right? And along with that becomes, at least in my experience and many others who practice getting more coherent, an inner security and confidence that we can handle whatever life brings our way without the anxiety and fear.
- [38:31]
B
We're going to have to talk more after this. But because that health, purpose, relationships, growth, resources, those are the five Areas we try to help people dig and find that one thing. But it really sounds like this hard stuff that you've been doing could be that one thing that creates a ripple effect across their life. That's what I'm hearing you say today.
- [38:48]
A
It's the rapid way to evolve our own self awareness and consciousness which leads.
- [38:52]
B
To better health, better relationships, better work, more fulfillment, less stress, more fulfilled careers.
- [38:59]
A
I mean it goes on.
- [39:01]
B
Well, you spent decades obviously studying how to optimize human resilience and consciousness. Looking back, what's one personal practice or insight that has most transformed your life? You've talked about a couple, but what do you think is the most important or the most influential for you?
- [39:16]
A
I'm going to sound like a broken record, but it has been for me personally the discovery of my own heart's intelligence and having the courage to follow it. This stuff sounds simple, but it's remembering to actually do it and having the courage to follow through because you're having to kind of go against the paradigm of the mind. I mean the mind's used to having its way so it sometimes wants to kick and scream.
- [39:40]
B
And I loved emotional intelligence when all that stuff came out. I used to teach classes on it and everything else. But you seem to be talking about heart intelligence.
- [39:47]
A
I mean I like, you know when Daniel Goldwyn came out with his books and some of the researchers for friends of mine actually that was based on. Now I mean what all that really boils down to is the capacity of self regulation.
- [39:57]
B
Sure, yeah, absolutely. All emotional intelligence really is right.
- [40:01]
A
How do we self regulate but self regulate from a our own inner intelligence? Not because some guru said we need to do that or you know, pun did, but that it's in our own best self interest to connect with. So when we, once the mind starts to get onto that really aligning with our, it's because it's really part of our us. You know what I say about your larger self? It's us. It's just that higher vibrational part of us that we're cut off from and that we're disassociated from or as I said earlier, disconnected from. If you start to build that bridge, then life gets a lot more adventuresome and a lot more fun both externally, but also our inner world and inner experience.
- [40:42]
B
You didn't sound like a broken record, by the way. I loved what you did. If you could give one piece of wisdom to wrap it up to someone who feels stuck or they're struggling with blame or they're disconnected from their Purpose or a relationship, what would it be?
- [40:54]
A
Well, it's actually one of our techniques called freeze frame would be a great place to start and that it's a technique that's really designed to help us connect with our larger self and that intuitive intelligence. I think it's free on our website for people who want the science. There's one of my books called Science of the heart. So you can get it for free on our website, heartmath.org if you want to really get into more of the practical stuff, a very inexpensive path forward would be to read the book titled Heart Intelligence. Oh.
- [41:23]
B
So I didn't even know. Why did I miss that? I just named it and I didn't even know there was a book. I missed it.
- [41:27]
A
Yeah. Yeah. And then if you want to go a little bit deeper yet, get one of our apps to actually start monitoring your own heart rhythm and start being a self scientist, you know, and observing yourself and what happens in your own heart rhythms when you're feeling stressed and when you use like one of the techniques to make that shift and how you can start to see how you feel different when and it actually plays out right in front of you in your own physiology, how you can see it in real time.
- [41:52]
B
I'll definitely be getting the book. Yeah. What we'll do is we have underneath the podcast and even when we get this on YouTube, we have a resource section. So we'll make direct links to your resources for people can go to get them. I'll get the book today because I love to read. I'm just sick of reading my own book.
- [42:05]
A
Available is on audiobook or hard copy or ebook, whatever, whatever you want.
- [42:09]
B
Great. And if people want to get a hold of you, what's the best way to get in touch?
- [42:12]
A
Just go to the HeartMath website, infoArtMath.
- [42:15]
B
We're all on incredible information. You and I could talk for hours because I love what you're doing.
- [42:20]
A
And we just covered tip of the iceberg here. Yeah, I bet.
- [42:22]
B
Yeah. No looking at your website, just trying to prepare for the podcast, a few hours of research. I was like, oh, I got to reread this and I got to read that. I don't know how I missed the book because I usually try to get the book ahead of time, but we missed it. We'll get it next time.
- [42:34]
A
No problem.
- [42:35]
B
But thank you for being here and thank you for taking the time. I know you're busy.
- [42:38]
A
My pleasure, Kevin. And it's nice to meet you. You as well.
- [42:40]
B
Take Sam.