A (7:17)

Why would the distance between heartbeats be a good indication of all of that stuff? Why is that an indication of why is that the canary, the nervous system.

B (7:30)

Is having to respond to millions of processes at any given moment. So it's having to make adaptations at any given moment again to keep us in that state of homeostasis. Otherwise we become disregarded, regulated, and we experience what's called allostatic load. In other words, our nervous system can't keep up with all of the input. It's, it's basically too much, it's too taxing. And so therefore, when we look at heart rate variability and the distance between successive heartbeats, and I think that actually probably I should offer that definition now and explain why those distances relate actually to dysregulation or regulation of the nervous system. It gives us insight into is it making those fine tune adjustments and adaptations. So let me back up now and explain heart rate variability from a definition perspective and the way I like to explain this through the heuristic of heart rate that most people understand. So, for instance, Chris, you know, if I were to look at your, you know, a wearable that you have on, let's say with your whoop and I open up your phone and in your phone I see that your heart is beating at a rate of 60 beats per minute. So we take some really easy math here and we say, okay, so if your heart is beating at a rate of 60 beats per minute, that's one beat that's occurring every single second. And so therefore we're approximating that across a 60 second window, your heart is beating once every single second, 60 beats per minute. Easy math. Is that actually what's going on? And the answer is no. The heart actually doesn't operate like a metronome. When this starts, when the heart starts to operate like a metronome, that's actually when we run into some struggle, when we run into trouble because the thermostat is starting to adjust to say there's a lot of chaos that's going on right now. I need to kind of like hone in back in and regulate the system to kind of a consistent constant beat because I've got other things that I've got to attend to. There's threat that's kind of within my environment. So what we'd actually say is that, no, the heart, during that 60 minute or 60 second window that we were looking at, wasn't just kind of holding a nice even beat actually, it was going up and down and up and down. And if you look at a heart rate of someone just kind of at rest at baseline right now, it kind of looks a little bit chaotic. Like it doesn't actually have a nice little sinusoidal pattern or rhythm. It actually looks quite chaotic. And that's because there are many processes that are occurring in that time that it's causing your heart rate to speed up and to slow down and to speed up and to slow down. And so with that across that, let's say, cycle of speeding up and slowing down, the time between successive heartbeats, which is what we're looking at with heart rate variability, is shrinking kind of as we inhale. So that time is going down, down, down, because heart rate is increasing. And then as we exhale, it's going longer, longer, longer. So the space between successive heartbeats is actually elongating now the difference between those heartbeats. So when we look at what is the amount of time and we look at that in milliseconds. So for instance, we wouldn't say like there's 1 second or 1.2 seconds in the world of heart rate variability research, we would say there's a thousand milliseconds or 980 milliseconds. That variance tells us something about the fine tunements that your nervous system is making to adjust to its environment. And when it's having a really hard time adjusting, then we see that variance start to decrease. So it may go from, hey, I'm in a really perfectly relaxed mode and my heart rate variability is a hundred milliseconds to it may actually start to shrink pretty pretty substantially when we're experiencing stress because our body's having a hard time adapting.

A (11:02)

So when you say it's a heart rate variability of 100 milliseconds, that's the swing, that's the distance between shortest and longest.

B (11:12)

So it depends on the metric you're using. This is actually kind of a misconception that people have with heart rate variability is they think that it's a singular metric, when indeed it's not actually a singular metric. It's a whole compilation of metrics. So there's generally around 12 to 15 HRV metrics that people Use. I know. It gets compl. It gets complicated.

A (11:30)

We don't need to make it over complicated. It explains whether you are making the distance between heartbeats longer or shorter and how much of that occurs across a given time period.

B (11:43)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly so. And that variance that occurs between heartbeats, the reason that's so incredibly valuable and so important for people to understand is because, as we examined whether or not your nervous system is truly adapting to its environment, we can take that number and plot it across time and see whether or not it is changing or is it staying the same, or is it decreasing. And this is again, another misconception that people have is they believe that heart rate variability is this metric that I should always see going in an upward direction. It should always be progressing in an upward direction. When in fact, and this actually comes from my really close friend, his name's Dr. Marco Latini, Italian researcher, brilliant in this space. He actually says that a good HRV is actually a normal hrv. It is a HRV that doesn't change across time very much. So it's actually one that remains stable. And we can get into that if you. If you want. But HRV is a metric that shouldn't just be taken out of context and looking at just what is it right now, but what is it across time?

A (12:46)

Is a high HRV always good and is a low one always bad?

B (12:49)

Then if I had a dollar for every email I got asking that question of whether or not, you know, my HRV is good because it is said number or bad because of said number, I'd be a very rich man right now. So I would say that this is a little nuanced. High HRV is good, but it's only good when it's relative to you. It's not good when we're saying, hey, I want to compare my HRV to someone else. That's actually where we can get into trouble. High HRV as it is relative to you could be good. That could be a sign of adaptation for you. So let's say, Chris, for instance, easy math. Your HRV typically is 50 milliseconds. So if we see that across time, that number is going from 50 to 60 to 65 to 70, well, relative to you, that's pretty good. But I may look at someone, you know, else whose HRV is. Their baseline is 100 milliseconds, and over the course of time, it's actually gone from 100 to 90 to 85. Well, the absolute value is still much higher than yours, but I would say that you're showing way better adaptations from a nervous system perspective than they are. So high isn't what we're aiming for here because this is not a, it's not a metric of virtue. And I think that this is where people get into a lot of trouble. They see whoever health influencer posts their aura or whoop score on their Instagram page and they've got a heart rate variability score of 150 milliseconds. And like shit like I've got, mine is like 25. And that's when I get the email like, am I going to die? Like, am I going to have like some cardiovascular issues or panic attacks that are going to cause me to die? And I always say, hey, let's pump the brakes, let's pump the vagal break here and just relax for a second. Like what's most important here is not looking at whether or not it's high or low, it's looking at stability across time. And one metric that's not used very often, but I use this a lot with my, within my clinic. So I work with a lot of pro athletes, you know, ranging from individuals in the mlb, NFL, Formula one, et cetera. And one of the metrics I use for them with recovery is actually not looking at just the daily absolute value score that you might get from whoop, aura, et cetera. I actually look at a number called HRV cv, which is the coefficient of variation of heart rate variability, which is a long winded way of saying from day to day, how much does your HRV vary? So when we look at it across the seven day window, is it varying significantly, indicating that it's having a hard time adjusting because it's going up and down and up and down, maybe due to stress over training, overreaching, or is it nice and stable, indicating that the nervous system is always rebounding, it's always doing what it should do. So I know that's a long winded way of saying is high good low bad? The answer is yes and no, but mostly no.

A (15:35)

Right. Why, why do certain people have different HRVs to others? Because I've got a whoop team and on my whoop team is a bunch of pro athletes. And I have a weightlifter friend whose HIV I've seen in the 200s, 210, I've got a professional cricketer friend, is, is regularly in the 150s. And then there's me and the rest of my degenerate friends that are kind of scrabbling around in midlife.

B (15:59)

There are a lot of different factors that come into play here. So you have to think about a couple things. I think the biggest thing are what are the non modifiable factors that influence heart rate variability and then what are the modifiable factors? Because I, that we place a lot of pressure in a day and age where there's like so much, I guess, biometric hypervigilance. We place a lot of pressure on ourselves to have certain metrics meet whatever our standards are. Typically, they're pretty arbitrary standards because people are just like, again, I saw somebody who had a 200 millisecond HRV. I probably should have that, because they're a pro athlete. We're comparing apples and oranges here. We're using the same metric, but we're comparing two different physiological presentations. So let's talk then about first non modifiable influencers, because I think that that's the one that people need to hear more than anything. The first one's age. Like, age is one of the primary non modifiable factors that we see within the literature. Like if you go and you look at the literature that compares normative values across longitudinal time in these, in these studies, we see that there is a distinct negative slope. And one of the things that's happening is that generally around ages 40 to 50 or so, or even like in the mid-30s, we start to see a pretty steep decline in baseline heart rate variability. This is due to a lot of reasons. I mean, we have things like autonomic efficiency is reduced, so the ability to kind of like actually handle stress is reduced, likely due to compounding stress. And we're just disillusioned by like all the stuff that we've experienced in life. The second is like vascular stiffening. So as we get older, we actually know that we have vascular stiffness stiffening, whether it be due to things like atherosclerotic plaque buildup or like the hardening of arteries like that can occur. So we see this steep decrease. The great news though is that even though we see declination in HRV across kind of the longitudinal studies in regards to age, we actually know that the ceiling for HRV isn't reduced. And so what I mean by that is that just because it declines doesn't mean that we can't increase it and doesn't mean that there is some ceiling. That it's like, okay, when I, once I hit 60 years old, I'll never get over 30 milliseconds. So that's the good news. So age is one non modifiable factor the second one would be genetics. And I guess given kind of advances in technology, like crisper and stuff, people might argue that you can now influence this aspect. But I would say that currently with what we have, we cannot influence it. It's just genetics. Like, some people are actually just born with a genetic predisposition towards lower heart rate variability. So when we look at twin studies on heritability of these genes related to cardiovascular structure and nervous system structure, like, we find that there is a pretty moderate to high influence of genetics on hrv. And kind of as a, as a story, like I see this all the time with my, my pro athletes actually. Like, I'll have a pro athlete come into my clinic and I'll have one come in who's an Olympic sprinter who is in the best cardiovascular condition that you could ever imagine, VO2 max, like out the roof. But his, but his actual HRV is like in the 30s, 40s. And then I'll have another guy, like an NFL, let's say lineman, who maybe isn't in the highest degree of cardiovascular shape, but it's still in good shape to be able to take on all that they do. And genetically they just have a high predisposition towards HR, high HRV. And it's in the 150s, 160s. And so it's like, okay, is one healthier than the other because one has a higher HRV versus low hrv? And the answer is, is that we have no evidence in the literature to suggest that, that, that HRV should be seen, that number, absolute value should be seen as a longevity metric.

A (19:40)

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B (21:37)

Yeah, the, the answer broadly is no. Their experience. If you were to jump into say someone who has a 200 millisecond, 250, 300 millisecond RMS SD value in their HRV baseline reading overnight, you wouldn't necessarily inherently experiencing anything different purely just based on that baseline reading. Now that person may have really strong, let's call baro reflex gain or a really strong adaptive nervous system to stress because maybe they've been training it or some other things are influencing their ability to be resilient. In terms of a nervous system perspective, you may notice it then depending on kind of your baseline level of stress and anxiety. But just purely based on feel. No, it's kind of like I, I think this is kind of analogous to blood pressure. Right. So if, if, if you were to have let's say a standard blood of 120 over 75 and then you were to hop into the body of somebody who has like let's say a 145 over 95, you wouldn't necessarily experience it just kind of at baseline a difference in feel between those and so that, that's kind of synonymous or I guess I would say analogous to, to hrv. But if you got somebody who's got a very well dynamically trained nervous system to adapt to stress and so their inherent physiology knows what to do when it encounters stress and almost does it subconsciously, you might experience that especially if you had a high propensity towards things like anxiety, stress, even depression.

A (23:09)

Interesting. What about the modifiable ones?

B (23:11)

Well, Let me, let me mention one more non modifiable because this is another one that I get to pick on females about. So, so there are, there's.

A (23:20)

We don't do enough of that on this podcast.

B (23:21)

Right, Exactly. Another, another tall white guy coming to pick on females. Men. So sex, sex differences is the non mindful again, another one that we can get in trouble. Sex differences. The we know from the literature, men typically have a higher average heart rate variability than women do. And actually 6 foot 5 guy here, taller guys typically have higher heart rate variabilities and actually lower resonant frequency rates of breathing. I'm sure we're going to talk about resonant frequency rates as well. And this is just a sex difference that we see. And one of the main reasons is that women as we know go through a 28 day cycle. And so because of this menstruation cycle that or menstrual cycle that they go through, we actually know that different phases of their cycle can influence different hormonal expressions. So mostly stark drops in things like progesterone and in estrogen, especially during like the late luteal phase, can increase sympathetic drive and reduce heart rate variability pretty significantly. So when you average that out across time, we see that women's, especially pre menopausal women, their HRV tends to be quite lower than, than men's.

A (24:31)

Okay, Modifiable.

B (24:32)

Yeah, modifiable. The biggest one is cardiorespiratory fitness. So we actually know that when someone increases things like stroke volume, when they increase or lower blood pressure, and especially when they lower their heart rate, resting heart rate, that this can indeed increase baseline heart rate variability. I never say that HRV because we should. What HRV like is useful for and what it's not useful for because this is not like a catch all metric that can be used for everything. I actually think it's best use in conjunction with other metrics. So it's kind of like a piece of the puzzle as opposed to the full puzzle itself. Cardiorespiratory Fitness. So as VO2 max increases, we know that resting heart rate decreases, stroke volume of the heart increases. And so therefore we actually see heart rate variability improvements. And this can be, and this can range, it can range from pretty significant changes in baseline HRV to not much at all. I, I don't like to set it as the goalpost. So it's like, hey, I want to raise my HRV then, so therefore I should go get better cardiorespiratory fitness. I think we're thinking about it in the wrong way. It's a bit, bit ass backwards there. I think it's, hey, let's increase cardiorespiratory fitness because we know it's great for health, wellness and longevity and also great for mood and mental health. And then the byproduct of that is that we'll see typically HRV in increase. The other one is chronic health conditions. So we know that people who have chronic health conditions like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, chronic pain, there's all significantly lower heart rate variability. So the one thing that I would say is that if you were battling with any of those kind of conditions, and it probably doesn't even need to be said, is that working on kind of managing those is going to be a significant way to move heart rate variability in the, in the right direction. And then the last one, which is probably what I'd argue and I'm a little bit biased on this and is the most important is just overall stress load. Like if you are someone who is like the typical person in today's day and age, especially Americans, is that we are freaking stressed all the time. And this chronic buildup of stress over time then results or equates to a nervous system that becomes way more rigid, way less adaptive. We're not able to actually have these things that we encounter in a day to day basis bounce off of us as easily. And so therefore we kind of retreat to just kind of this chronic state of stress where we're on high alert, scanning the environments for threats nonstop. And that has a negative, a net negative compounding effect on us. And so I think that if there's anything that people could do is just creating better adaptability to internal and external stress.

A (27:09)

Okay, what doesn't it measure? What does HRV not measure?

B (27:14)

Yeah, HRV is not a measure of direct stress. I think a lot of people will think of, oh, I see, hrv. And that's how stressed I am.

A (27:22)

Right.

B (27:22)

And so therefore then I should.

A (27:24)

You did just say something that sounds a lot like hrv. HRV would be a direct measure of stress.

B (27:28)

Okay, but let me, I can, I can backpedal a little bit and say what I say there. So. And I think you're talking about me saying how do we improve it is.

A (27:36)

By helping if you are more stressed, therefore over time your HIV is going to decrease. Yes, therefore my HIV has gone down. I must be stressed.

B (27:45)

Right. What I should say is that when I think about stress, I'm thinking about the psychological construct of stress. And so there's physiological stress and Psychological stress. And both of them actually manifest in the body the same way. I don't look at HRV and say like, so for instance, if I put a strap on you and I said, okay, let's measure Chris's HRV right now. And it's a singular reading. Now I know a good bit about your hrv, but let's just say I didn't know anything about your HRV and I looked at that data point. What could I tell you about your stress response? The answer is I could tell you basically nothing. One singular reading outside of any context in regards to HRV isn't a signaling window to me telling you I can see how you know on a, on a spectrum how stressed Chris is. I can't gain that. Now over time I can say HRV is showing me how well you adapt to stress, how flexible you are to stress, not how stressed you are, but how adaptable to stress you are. There's nuance there. So there's a difference between those two. So I can't just take that absolute value and number and say, okay, I'm at a 50 milliseconds this morning when I took my HRB reading. And so therefore, like I know that I am stressed. And so when people try to tap into that as a, hey, I'm going to use that as the guide, it sets them up for disaster. Because then we have this nasty, unwinding, like self fulfilling prophecy of people looking at these data points. And especially without context, just looking at singular data points and then using that to drive decisions. Because one reading of HRV should never be used to drive decision making.

A (29:22)

Okay, it seems to me at the moment that our ability to measure HRV is significantly better than our understanding of how to influence it. We've been given a ton of really great tools and you can wear your aura or your whoop or your Apple watch and it will give you this reading. And yet almost no one really understands what it is. It's kind of a complex metric. It's not superbly simple. It's taking you half an hour to kind of deconstruct what it means. And I think if you were to ask most people, even whoop wearers, you're hrv. If I told you that you needed to increase it by 5% next month, what would you do? Sleep more? Maybe they'd say something like that, I know that it's to do with stress, so I'll try and be less stressed, whatever that means. Maybe I'll try and become fitter or something. But directly influencing HRV and sort of what the constituent parts are. So yeah, at the moment it does seem a lot like people have got the ability to detect it, but aren't yet able to influence it.

B (30:33)

Yeah, the I want to give credit where credit's due. It's like these wearable companies. So fill in the blank. Whoop. Or a python, Apple. All these great wearable companies that are out there that people are leveraging. I think I heard like the last stat was like 40% of Americans, I think maybe like even close to like 50% form of a wearable have some form of wearable. So we're all getting this biometric data. The problem is, and so much frustration starts to arise when people wake up and they say, well, I have this data point here that's supposed to drive some level of self awareness, but it's not necessarily driving any type of action. And I think that's where people can get frustrated. So you tell me that my nervous system is dysregulated, you tell me that my sleep is poor, but now what do I do about it? So in that sense, I think that diagnostics have really kind of outpaced the interventive side of what we can, what we can actually do. And so part of me is like, well, now I think it's time to bring to the light, like things that people can actually do that have been proven within the scientific literature to help you make these adaptations to the nervous system. So that we can again take all the great data that we get from wearables, we can leverage that data, but then use it kind of in a way that's applied. And actually if one of the things that I like to say is that HRV is best used in an applied real time setting. And I think that's actually where most people don't have an understanding and then therefore probably not an appreciation for HRV as much as they should because they've never used it in an applied real time setting.

A (32:11)

You wake up the next morning and your whoop gives you a score of what you had last night. And maybe you can work out that you did something yesterday. I mean, if you had a beer before you went to bed, okay, there we go. That's associated in my journal or whatever. But yeah, you're right that everybody has this number that kind of appears and feels almost at the mercy of it. It's down again. I guess I'm not doing something right. But the ability to intervene isn't as educated. Okay, so one of the things that we've kind of hinted at is that there are ways that you can state change and ways that you can trait change. So there are sort of immediate acute ways that you can intervene. And then over time there is a adaptability side to the nervous system. What is it doing longitudinally across the months, across the years, across your entire life? Talk to me about the difference between a state change and a trait change.

B (33:09)

In this context, so much confusion arises because people think or they ask the question to me all the time. It's like, well, is this breathing strategy or meditative strategy just going to affect me in the here and now? So more of an acute transient change, or is there actual evidence to suggest that if I consistently practice this, then I'll have more trait or longitudinal changes? So state changes are things that are occurring transiently so happening right now. And then trait changes are things that are actually occurring across time that are building a more robust system. You can think about it as more of like if we fine tune the engine of a car over time. So maybe we know that there's a little bit of some, you know, some. I'm not a mechanic here, but you know, maybe we know that there's some creaks and some things that are going wrong. We hear the belt, you know, kind of like not working in its proper way. Can we fine tune it over time so that we can create a more robust engine that maybe one day we create this car that we're working on over time to create more of like a race car or something that can actually perform at a really high level. So we know that things like breathing is, is probably the single greatest lever that we can pull. Maybe aside from focusing on sleep, that breathing is one of the greatest levers that we can pull towards state change. But it's also a lever that we can pull more towards trait change. And we have really great studies and evidence based that, that, that I use to kind of base my claim here, here, state change. What is happening when we are, let's say, engaging in something like slow paced breathing or resonance breathing, which we know is an effective strategy for shifting and regulating the nervous system, we start to create this internal environment. We start to distinctively change our physiology so that it experiences a position of safety, a position of security. I always like to kind of share the story. It's like it would make no sense that if we were in face of a viable threat, threat, let's say the mountain lions chasing us, for us to stop and take a moment to do some deep breathing because we need to execute and mobilize all that energy. The sympathetic nervous system needs to be firing on all cylinders. We need to have that parasympathetic withdrawal. We need everything that we can to get out of that or fight in that environment. So when we take the time to slow our breathing down, we're sending direct physiological signals up to the brain and to the central nervous system that says, well, the only opportunity that we would want to utilize this strategy is when we're in a safe and protected environment. And so, therefore, from a physiological perspective, all of these dynamic. All these things start to dynamically change, and we can get into the dynamics of what's occurring in the physiology, if you like. But all these are happening so that we can calm and rest the nervous system in that moment, and that then results in that experience of relaxation. However, the. And that's great. Acutely, like, we want that big meeting coming up that you have to speak with investors. We need to be able to downregulate the nervous system and change that state really quickly. Reduce anxiety, improve mental acuity, et cetera. But that is only going to last for so long. So how do we build a robust system that then starts to translate into basically all areas of life and where we're not having to consciously think about regulating our nervous system? And that is where trait change starts to take place. And that can only come from consistent practice of resonance breathing, of any other type of meditation, whatever it may be, for nervous system regulation. And the interesting thing or the. The analogy I like to make about this is like, it's like going to the gym, right? It's like, I can go into the gym right now and get a really great bicep workout, get a really great pump, and it feels excellent. Blood's flowing in the muscles. Great, great day. But then if I don't ever go back to the gym again, it's like, well, I had that nice, great workout. That was a great state change for that period of time. But I didn't make these adaptations. My muscles didn't get stronger because of that. I. They didn't get larger because of that. The nervous system works in the exact same way. So it's like when I do a lot of these practices that I'm sure we'll get into, I think about me every single time. It's like me going to the nervous system gym, and every breath that I take, that's like a rep. It's like every time I do 10 minutes of this breathing practice, that's like a workout out. And I know that as I compound workouts across time. The research has demonstrated that we actually experience more longitudinal or trait changes or if our, our nervous system's thermostat starts to actually dial in the direction that we're training it. And that's when we can, and that's when we've made a nervous system that's flexible and can handle a lot of the things that stress or that, that life throws at us like stress.

A (37:44)

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B (39:17)

A lot of it depends on how long they've been doing it and how consistently. But let's say, let's take it from this person's never heard of resonance breathing. They've never done a single resonance breath. And I know we have to unpack what resonance breathing actually is, but let's just say they've never done it, okay? They, their nervous system will begin to respond. So vagal firing, the 10th cranial nerve the vagus nerve will begin firing almost instantaneously. And so within seconds, they'll start to make these really beautiful oscillations in their heart rate. They may be small initially, but within seconds it starts to. It starts to respond. Funny thing enough is that the parasympathetic nervous system, so again, the parachute brings us down. The relaxation response works much faster than the sympathetic nervous system.

A (39:59)

So it'd be surprising, given that you think someone fires a gun or a lion comes at you, the sympathetic would turn on very quickly. You're saying that the opposite is true, that the parasympathetic is even quicker.

B (40:08)

It's even quicker. And it's so. So it's not to say that the sympathetic nervous system isn't fast. It's really fast. However, the parasympathetic nervous system is much faster because when we think about the vagus nervous nerve, which is our wandering nerve, it innervates basically every part of our body and sends communication up to the medulla in the. In the brain, which is like basically a control system of our central nervous system. It responds immensely quickly. And one of the fastest ways that we can shift that state is just breathing. So with. For you, within a single breath, you can actually start to enhance that vagal activation, which is a pretty incredible feature that we have as human beings, is to be able to use something as simple as our breath breath to adapt that quickly.

A (40:49)

Well, because you can't go to sleep right now, you said one of the other ways is to work on sleep. Got it. I can't sleep right now. Yeah, but I can breathe right now.

B (40:58)

Yeah, you can breathe right now. And the thing is, too, is that you can do it in a controlled environment where nobody's watching you. And you can be using a device or an apparatus. Great, you can do it that way. But you can also do it, you know, in an environment where there's plenty of people and no one's really knowing that you're sitting there regulating your nervous system. I've been trying to do it here since we've been talking. It's just so slow the pace of my breathing down because as people probably hear, like, I tend to get quite excited and I can talk fast. So when I slow my breathing down, that can actually increase my overall mental acuity.

A (41:29)

And then, therefore, why does it increase mental acuity?

B (41:33)

So that probably takes a little bit of time just to explain the science behind this. And you can kind of like sl. Slap me for going, like, a little bit too much.

A (41:41)

Keep it simple.

B (41:42)

Okay. We'll keep it simple. So. So our body has a natural blood pressure regulation system in it called the baroreflex response. The baroreflex response is essentially like cruise control for your blood pressure. It's always trying to kind of dial up and dial down whenever it needs to based on what it's seeing in terms of physiological change. That baroreflex mechanism is what bridges the gap between our autonomic nervous system system and our cardiovascular system. So it's kind of that bridge or pathway for communication when our baro reflex is not working like it should. So let's say we're experiencing some nervous system dysregulation. What happens within the baroreflex mechanism is that it essentially will identify changes in blood pressure and then immediately it will try to overshoot to course correct. Because it basically is like, I'm on high alert. I'm going to send the signal to the, to the nervous system that we need to really course correct. It's to going like. A great example of this is like the older cars with like cruise control. When they first came out with cruise control, they were like really crappy at like actually doing what they're supposed to do. So the speed would modulate like 5 to 10 miles an hour, and then the engine would just like abruptly like shift and would overshoot. Now we're going five or ten miles over. Whereas like the newer cars, they have better barrel reflex gain because a mile an hour over and it adjusts nicely and smoothly. So you can imagine that when your nervous system is dysregulated and you're having all of these overshootings of blood pressure that are occurring, it causes a lot of different dynamics in terms of how we feel increased heart rate, blood rushing kind of to places really quickly, like when blood pressure goes up. You may not be ne able to necessarily feel it if you don't have a high level of interoception or feeling of the body, but if you do, then you can kind of notice how it impacts mental acuity for the most part part. So why does it impact mental acuity is that that baro reflex response, when it becomes quite disregulated, it changes basically like blood flow dynamics and vagal firing dynamics, which can cause that stress response to become quite heightened and almost like unruly and uncontrolled, which basically will start to flood our nervous system to think that there's a threat that's, that's within, within kind of like distance of us. And so therefore our mind is now trying to pursue all the different ways to kind of fight or flee and get out of there, as opposed to kind of like locking in, getting into this night deep flow state where blood pressure is really nicely managed in the way that it should be.

A (44:20)

So if you think that there's a line over your shoulder, now is not the time to remember the speech that you're trying to present in 20 minutes. You're not recruiting your mental faculties in order to be able to do that. You're busy worrying about this imaginary tiger.

B (44:36)

Yeah, and the problem though is that the tiger may be all the people in front of you. Am I going to embarrass myself? Am I going to get into a situation where I don't land the deal or I don't say things the way that I'm supposed to? And so now it's all this. It's not a viable threat, It's a perceived threat, but it's having the impact on your physiology and your mental acuity like a viable threat would.

A (44:58)

Okay, how about actually changing the underlying nervous system adaptation then? We've talked about kind of the state change. What about the trade change? How long does that take to actually get someone's nervous system to adapt and move over time?

B (45:11)

Yeah, this is all going to come from the literature on resonance frequency biofeedback. So resonance frequency is kind of a long winded way, or a very kind of complex way of saying is that we can modulate our breathing like the speed of breathing, which is frequency, and how fast we breathe to create physiological resonance in the body. The resonance from a physiological perspective is when two or more systems are oscillating at the same speed. So they're working in synergy with one another, they're oscillating at the same rate. So when we do something like resonance breathing, which was coined by a guy named Paul Lair out of, you know, Rutgers Medical School, who found that breathing at certain paces. And for adult humans, this is generally from four and a half breaths per minute, as high as six and a half per breaths per minute when we breathe kind of within that range. And we can pinpoint specifically where our resonance frequency is through, through some different testing. When we breathe at that rate, we start to align what's called our respiratory sinus arrhythmia, which is as we inhale again, heart rate's going up. And as we exhale, heart rate goes down. So it creates this beautiful kind of like sinusoidal pattern pattern. We align breathing and respiration, or respiration with heart rate. And then we also align that with Our barore reflex mechanism that I was referring to just a second ago, when you do one single session of resonance breathing, you can start to make those initial adaptations at about minute 6 to 12. So sweet spot is probably around minute 10 or so from the, from the literature when you do that consistently. So in the research studies, when they've looked at different cohorts where they've compared that type of breathing, resonance breathing, they've generally found that breathing at, for 10 minutes at the resonance rate around four to six days a week actually led to trait changes of the autonomic nervous system in as little as four weeks, as much as 12 weeks. So kind of like split the difference about eight to 10 is when we really see people start to make those changes.

A (47:16)

What was the mean change? Do you know?

B (47:18)

And when you say mean change average.

A (47:20)

What was the average change increase? 5%, 1%, 10%?

B (47:24)

And are we talking about heart rate variability? Yeah, yeah. So heart rate variability is one of the things that they were looking at. So low frequency power, which is, which is basically like how much vagal output, how strong the signal of vagal output. So we saw that change by a magnitude anywhere from, I mean we'd see it go anywhere from 50% to as much as 300, 400%.

A (47:44)

That's during the second session.

B (47:45)

That's during the session, yep. Yes. However, baseline changes, which we're actually looking at more of like fine blood pressure changes that are occurring. So that's actually more the sign of is someone actually making a trait change, which is as we breathe, is blood pressure following very specifically, like a fine tuned fork with your breathing? If it's not, then we have what's called low barrel reflex gain. The nervous system's having a hard time keeping up. It's that cruise control example, really hard time adapting, adapting. But when we have high re barrel reflux gain, which comes from all this consistent training of hrv, biofeedback or resonance breathing, then that fine tunement then results in our ability to adapt quickly. And that quick adaptation then results in blood pressure moving at an instant when you tell it and very smoothly when you tell it. So low frequency power and HRV can increase significantly as well, but high frequency power is another one. So at resting baseline, we're actually looking at changes in what's called high frequency power. And we see that that can change an order of magnitude anywhere from 20, 40, 50%.

A (48:53)

I don't think I'm fully up to speed on what low frequency power and high frequency power are.

B (48:59)

So we, when you are Looking at your whoop score every single morning and you see that number, that is hrv, it's in milliseconds. We call that a time domain indice. A time domain indice is exactly as it says. It's just looking at time difference between successive heartbeats. We can take the data which is all those raw intervals between heartbeats, so all those time intervals and we can apply some mathematical equations and algorithms to it, something called an FFT or a fast Fourier transformation, which is essentially when we take those data, run it through a prism and then get the component rhythm values of that. Best way to explain this, because that's probably very confusing, is to think about this as being analogous to an eeg. So I put electrodes all over your head, I look at your brainwave states and the amount of signaling and power of that brainwave and I get this raw eeg. It can take that raw EEG and I can filter it and start to get the component rhythms of your, of your brainwave state and how strong they're responding. Alpha, beta, theta, gamma, delta and so forth. We can do the same thing and look at characteristics of your cardiovascular system. We just call it something different. In, in, in the HRV world, it's just just three bands that are typically looked at. It's the very low frequency band, low frequency and high frequency. So when you're breathing at a slow paced rate, so you're doing HRV biofeedback for instance, or resonance breathing, you start to create these really long sinusoidal low frequency oscillations of your heart rate. So the peak to trough differences between your heart rate start to change significantly. So maybe at rest your heart rate's just going from let's say 60 up to 63, 64, 65 and then back down. Now we're going from your heart rate's at 60, it's going up to 75, 80, 90, even if you have a really strong barrel reflex gain. And then it's dropping and it's going well below 60 to 55, 50, 40, 45. So that's low frequency power, these real sinusoidal large scale changes in the heart rate. So when we see someone that has a lot of power in the low frequency band, we typically know that they're breathing at a really slow rate. And that's an oscillation that's occurring, occurring, that's in line again with that baro reflex response. And then high frequency power is what we call the respiratory sinus arrhythmia band. So at rest, when you're not breathing at a slow pace, most of the power should be in the high frequency band because that's where kind of just the normal breathing oscillation should occur. So when we look at high frequency power, we know that as someone becomes more attuned to resonance breathing, that number increases. Because your vagus nerve is what is driving the power there.

A (51:39)

Even though you're not directly training the high frequency stuff. Stuff, low frequency work impact the high frequency 100%. Yeah, that's. I mean it's good that it is that way or else you'd have to do high frequency training too. You'd have to do two different types of training, which would be annoying.

B (51:52)

Yeah. And you can kind of bookend it like a lot of companies like who are doing biofeedback will bookend it where they're not doing training but they're doing like pre post analysis. So they're looking at, okay, when you start the session, what is your time domain indices and low frequency, you know, high frequency band look like? And then you do the session. We look at all that data in terms of frequency domains and at the end of the session we look at that data and we say, okay, from pre to post, what was the significant, Was there a significant increase in high frequency power at rest? And then across time we actually start to look and plot, okay, baseline high frequency power has gone from, you know, whatever, it's 10,000 milliseconds squared. It'd be really high. We'll go 2,000 milliseconds squared. And now that's when they started the biofeedback practice. They've done it consistently for 10 weeks and now at rest, it's at like 6,000 milliseconds squared worth of power. That tells us that that delta of 4,000 milliseconds squared of power indicates that there was indeed actual entrain of the nervous system across that period of time.

A (52:48)

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B (53:59)

Resonance breathing. Here's the one thing too that I'll mention. And in an effort not to be too much of like a contrarian cursion like that alliteration there, but uh, in an effort not to do that, I will say that I think that there's been a bit of a disservice and that resonance breathing in and of itself has not seen the, the daylight yet in the health and wellness sphere. And I'm glad that we're having this discussion and bringing it to light because I honestly think that as far as breathing strategy goes, it's one of the most overlooked forms of or interventions that we have for dynamically shifting the nervous system.

A (54:39)

Well, everybody does. Most people are familiar with breath. Breath work. Yeah, almost everybody has done some form of it, even if it's just they use waking up with Sam Harris and he tells you to take a breath in and a breath out at the very beginning, something like that. All the way up to they've gone to do a breathwork class. They've tried WIM hof, they've done holotropic stuff. Maybe they've done slow paced breathing. Maybe they've done box breathing 555 5. Maybe they've done some, some other version of this, whatever it is, the 7383 Circle or whatever, whatever. But this is kind of taking it to a bit of a different level.

B (55:13)

Yeah. What we don't have in the literature is that those other breathing strategies that you used and this is again, I don't want to push back too hard on this whole field of breath work. I do have some gripe with the general field of breath work that I can talk about, but I don't want to be like, I don't want to over index and saying like all of it's bad. I just think that a lot of it's just been. People have taken way too much advantage of it. The one thing that all those breath work practices that you mentioned don't have are robust studies demonstrating trade change. They just, they're, they're just not there, at least to my knowledge. Now I'm more than willing to wave the white flag if that comes out and be a, you know, proponent of those types of strategies. If we see later down the road that they indeed are effective not just in changing people's state change, but are actually going to change people's inner workings of their nervous system adaptation.

A (56:06)

But I think a lot of people when they're doing breath work in that manner, they're not even necessarily thinking about the trait change to their physiology over time. A lot of people are using breathwork as a state shift. In fact, I think state shift is one of the biggest breathwork apps. And they're using it to get themselves more energized and alert or karma in the moment, or they're using it to bypass a few blocks in their psychology to allow them to access emotions that maybe they've been struggling to deal with to do some kind of a release to work with a practitioner to help them through kind of the level zero of the psychedelic pyramid includes you using breath work to kind of just alter your experience of the world a little. And I feel a bit different about talking about that problem now or that fuck that relationship stress that's been weighing on me for a little while. It's come out and I've not been able to stop it. And that felt cathartic or whatever. I don't think most people are thinking about. This is a real physiological hypertrophy training for my vagus nerve IT input.

B (57:20)

Agreed, agreed. And there's nothing wrong with that. So just to be clear, I think that if someone is utilizing some type of proprietary novel way of nervous system coaching or breathing or you know, breath work, if they're doing it because I want to have this state change, I want to experience some relaxation.

A (57:39)

I just want to be relaxed for an hour.

B (57:40)

Yeah, totally fine with it. Now, are they going to necessarily experience the continued downstream effect? Maybe, but we don't necessarily have the research to suggest that many of these more novel practices do indeed have these longer term trait changes. I mean, even something that like is being talked about a lot Today in the health and wellness sphere in terms of breathing, which is the physiological sigh or cyclic sighing, doesn't necessarily have the robust research like definitely doesn't have the robust research that resonance breathing does on longer term longitudinal or systemic change in the nervous system.

A (58:14)

It would not surprise me that for the people who aren't Huberman pilled the, that sort of big breath in, top it off and then blow out through typically pursed lips.

B (58:27)

Yeah.

A (58:30)

How many times are you doing that to think, oh yeah, if I do this twice a day, it's two breaths, dude. Like it really. Is the time and attention sufficient to do that? Okay, your disclaimer about the potential problems with the fucking world of breathwork or I out. Talk to me about resonance breathing and biofeedback. What is it? Why does it work? How do you do it?

B (58:49)

Yeah, so biofeedback was discovered back in the 60s 70s, and it was initially discovered by a lot of Russian physiologists who were actually studying space exploration and trying to get the Russians up to space. And so therefore they were looking at, well, how do we ensure that we get these astronauts in the best physiological shape that we possibly can? And so they just started measuring everything. They said, we're going to measure every single metric that we possibly can. And then they came across and said, well, actually now that we've measured it and we have seen, because this is when they came across heart rate variability, that there are these, there's these interesting characteristics of people's nervous systems that I think we're looking at when we look at hrv, but we don't really know for sure. The only way to test that really is to start introducing different interventions or start introducing different things that we see, you know, in real time are actually moving the needle in terms of people's nervous system response, response. And so then back in the 60s 70s researchers here in the US started to team up with these Russian researchers. They said, okay, we see that there are dynamic aspects of the nervous system that we can measure here. We also noticed that when people breathe, something kind of weird happens with their hrv. Something weird happens with all these dynamics, but we can't fully explain, so we should start to put it to the test. So they started to say, well, what if we manipulate that thing? What if we manipulate things like breathing? Can that then change how the nervous system responds in real time? And then later on, of course, the research says, can it respond? Can it start to respond that way in baseline so where people don't have to consciously move the needle and that's where HRV biofeedback was kind of like discovered. And the word resonance breathing, kind of like we were mentioning earlier, was something that was coined because we saw that again, we're aligning these, these physiological mechanisms of breathing and heart rate and also our blood pressure regulation. When we can align all of those things at the same exact time, we start to create this beautiful symphony, this beautiful pattern, this great relationship. We start to see that instead of just the throttle of the gas pedal, so that sympathetic nervous system being kind of like modulated on and off, and the brake pedal being modulated on and off, just kind of at the, at random, if you will. And by random, I mean because of physiology, we actually start to see that you can use breathing to do the break in and out. So kind of like flutter the break in and out at will. And so resonance frequency came along when Dr. Paul Lair said, okay, I see that there's these fixed characteristics of this baroreflex response of this breathing response on heart rate and respiratory sinus arrhythmia. Let's see what happens. Like when, when we introduced this as a training protocol. And when they started to introduce this as a training protocol and they published many studies on this, they found that, well, not only are we changing someone's physiology, but people are now saying, well, I feel a lot less stressed. I feel like I'm adapting better. I don't feel like stress is kind of like running over me as much as I can. I feel mood lifting, so less of that, like, negative emotional valence there. And so biofeedback has been around for quite some time. Time. And many companies have tried to introduce biofeedback in a way that's consumer friendly. But the problem is, is that there's always been so much friction to doing it. And again, like, we've been talking about it for a while. It's not an easy topic for most people to understand. So what does it then require? Well, you got to pay a clinician. It's really expensive. They got to use all this, like, hardcore software and gear. It becomes quite difficult. So how can we just make this accessible to everybody? Well, these technology companies came out and said, well, we'll just use cloud, kind of like everyday sensors. We'll use like wearables or a chest strap, like a, like an EKG chest strap. And then we'll just have you, like, breathe at this. With this pacer in and out, you'll be able to watch your heart rate variability in real time. And then over time, that will then indeed result in improved autonomic flexibility, better emotional and stress resiliency, and, and so forth. So HRV biofeedback is a tool that we use. It is an intervention tool. So as opposed to just looking at HRV as a data point, where it's actually using HRV in real time to guide the changes that are occurring in your nervous system. So biofeedback being biological feedback in real.

A (63:14)

Time, detecting something coming from the body and then telling you to do something with your breathing in order to maximize that big wave of high heart rate on the in breath and low heart rate on the out breath.

B (63:25)

Yeah, that's, that's correct, yeah.

A (63:30)

Why, why can I not just do some sort of assessment in a lab, find out what my resonance frequency is, how many breaths per minute. I've done this with other wearables and then it says, I think mine is 4.5 breaths a minute. And I think that that's split as 4.9 seconds in, 7.5 seconds out with 0.5 on either end or something thing I can just do that. And then once I've got my frequency assessment done once, go in, like going in for a blood pressure check or getting my teeth done, go in every six months, find out if my frequency's changed. I don't know whether it does. Why can't I just. Why can't I just do that?

B (64:13)

Yeah. So you're saying go do that and then utilize it as an intervention and.

A (64:17)

Just count, count to five and then count down or, or make a track on ChatGPT. That gets me to breathe in and breathe, breathe out at that sort of a pace. Is it, does it not lock in in that kind of way? If I found my frequency, is that not always my frequency?

B (64:33)

Yeah, it's a great question. The, the answer to this is that you could 100% do that. Like you could actually go into a clinician and have them run the full, you know, 12 to 15 minute pole layer protocol, get your resonance frequency rate, tell you kind of like, here's your inhalation, exhalation ratio, the timing, and you could do it by yourself. Like you could 100% do that. Because the intervention is in the breathing itself, it's not in the data. However, what I think is huge here that goes missing is that it's only as good as if you actually do it, so you actually have to be practicing it. And so many people have a hard time with getting into the habit and discipline of doing something like slow pace or resonance breath breathing without having A high degree of accountability. It's, it's so you could, you could do it. I haven't met a lot of people that have been that successful. And me saying, here's your resonance protocol, like, you know, whatever, go time it in your head and, and go do it. I just haven't seen it.

A (65:32)

Well, this is why guided meditation practices have become so good at keeping people's compliance. Now you do waking up. I'm using this new one. Somebody shut Shuckman. Alan Shuckman. Maybe Ferris put me onto it.

B (65:47)

It's called oh, the Way. Yeah, way.

A (65:48)

Really cool. Lovely single path. An actual path that's sort of drawn out. And I thought it was really, really fun. So I'm doing that and I've meditated thousands of times. I'm like, I'm done with unguided for a bit. I want someone to hold my hand as I go through this. So I think that you're right. And dude, I mean, I'm asking you questions that I, I'm interested in, but I already believe in the answer to, which is you got me onto resonance breathing almost a year ago now and I was using some arm strap thing with a induction charger. And then you sent me out an ohm lamp, which for the people that are listening, there's a lamp in between us on the table. And I told Huberman about this in November of last year and I'm completely sold. I think that resonance breathing is probably the next big wave of intervention that we're going to see. We've seen breath work, although it hasn't really. Apart from Wim Hof, it hasn't fully broken through. If you were to say what's the Go to meditation app? You'd say like headspace or calm or waking up. What's the Go to Breathwork app? You go, maybe Wim Hof or something. So some breathwork has. But as you've kind of identified, it's good for some things, but the data behind it isn't necessarily there.

B (66:59)

And well, it's also getting, it's also getting kind of like lumped in there with a lot of woo woo practices right now. Unfortunately, like a lot of people are seeing breath work. It's because so many people are. They're hanging up their shingle and they're saying, look at me, I've got this new proprietary Best in the cla in class nervous system coaching breath work practice for you and this is kind of the path for you. And then when I see it, like I was at a conference a couple weeks Ago and I. They had a breath work practice practitioner who was up on stage and she was speaking about how. And the audience was kind of like jiving along with it. So maybe I just don't. I'm not spiritual enough to understand it. But she kept saying things like with our breathing we create these new realities and holograms of ourselves that we can then manifest and then fill in the blank. And everybody's kind of like shaking their head and I'm back there like, what are we talking about? Maybe I just.

A (67:51)

No, dude, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. You're just the most clinician. Clinician that ever did clinician. It's, it's. Everybody has been to one of these seminars. At least in Austin, Texas, everybody's been to them. A lot of people listening in the uk like, what the fuck are you talking about? I get it, man. You breathwork kind of bridges the gap between the psychedelic esoteric. I'm off to do ayahuasca in the Amazon people. And. And a business guy that's a bit stressed or a pregnant mom that heard that breathwork is good to sort of chill her out. And is this blue collar as they come. And these two groups of people meet at Third Eye Meditation lounge here in downtown Austin or at Sukha Yoga on Altol street or whatever. And it really is a bit of an oil and water situation. Cause you're seeing typically the practitioners that have dedicated their lives to teaching are the ones who have gone down the esoteric rabbit hole a little bit more deeply. We've got a great friend, Aaron Alexander from the Aligned podcast.

B (68:57)

I love Aaron.

A (68:58)

Aaron's great. Aaron is doing a lot of breathwork coaching as far as I can see in Miami at the moment. Yeah, he's in Miami, I think. And I haven't seen. I haven't done any of his stuff live and he's kept it. He's pretty sort of evidence based. But I've seen some of the fucking hats that people wear who attend those classes. I'm like, I know who you are from that fucking hat. I can tell.

B (69:21)

I can tell.

A (69:22)

There's too much. There's too many fucking corks hanging from it. You've got too many beads on and that's fine. That's kind of their thing and their world. But I understand.

B (69:31)

Let them be them.

A (69:32)

It's good when you talk about functionality or I guess, how do you say, like felt sense of interestingly resonance. Like I resonate with what that person's saying and that speaks to me and it's Persona and narrative and mythology and arc. Right. It brings these characters to life. We manifest our reality out there. Strength and resilience and your better self and vibrations and higher and all that stuff doesn't necessarily show up in the data. And that is what your world is. And I think in the same way as we had, even though there's been a lot of pushback, a revolution in Lithuania where evidence based came through. Well, what does the science tell us about the rep range and the pacing and the loading and the frequency and the rest and so on and so forth. The same thing is now happening when it comes to breathing. Yes. And I don't know of any data apart from the stuff that comes out of resonance breathing that says this is how you breathe breathe in order to enact a trait change over time. Everybody that's tried to when you were a kid and you would breathe in and out really fast, you go ah, I feel a little bit lightheaded. Great, you've just done a state change like congratulations. But in order to be able to get to the trait change. And this is where making claims about holographically manifesting your new high vibration reality come into conflict with a little bit of the data. So yeah, I think I've been doing some form of resonance breathing low tech and slightly higher tech now for a while. But you are right, the consistency thing is so tough. And I think that's why what you guys have done with OM and like I said, I mentioned it to Huberman and he completely agreed that he's like this sounds fucking fantastic to be able to give people a way to access pretty advanced tech that what you'd have had to go into a lab to do probably only a decade ago.

B (71:37)

Oh yeah. And it would charge you an arm and a leg. It was like I was mentioning before when I was a resident at the va, we did this within a pain clinic that I was working in. So we're using using biofeedback. And they were very forward thinking. But the people who understood that world were the clinicians and the academics. And so accessibility to something like that, well that was only to veterans. But even in more of like a standard clinic it would cost you so much money to be able to go do that because the clinician it would cost them a lot of money to do it. And now we have accessibility to do it like readily. Like we made obviously ohm so that people could have it live anywhere in their environment and do it at any time. But also it serves another purpose.

A (72:14)

Do you want to explain what it is because I fucking fell in love with it, dude. And I think it's so cool. And thank you for sending me one. It's in kind of still in dark mode. People can keep. People can pre order the lamps or whatever, but. But it's still pretty stealth right now, which I thought was even cooler because it made me feel like I was getting access to the new Batman utility belt before it was actually fully out. But I've been playing with mine and it replaced what I was using previously. But yeah, I guess explain kind of what it is that you've done because I think it's really cool.

B (72:44)

Yeah. So we are, I guess still in a bit of a dark mode because we won't be shipping out anything until the latter half of this year, probably early Q3, so in August or so. But for now we are taking pre orders at Ohm Health. But the. The lamp in and of itself. So I like to think about this as we were trying to reduce as many barriers as we possibly can that caused friction for people not to not do it. So for instance, like with all the other stuff that you used before, you had to have the device that you put on, whether it was a chest strap or arm band, wrist wearable, open up the phone, make sure, like for the love of God, please, Bluetooth connect. That was the problem. You had to make sure all the. And there was all these friction points. And when something went awry, then it's going to lead to what it's going to lead to attrition, dysregulation and then attrition. So you're like, throw it in. So it's going to meet the graveyard of all the other wearables that you have in your shelf. So and then the other component too is that what are you looking at the whole time you're doing biofeedback on a phone? Watching your phone, watching your phone. And how much do we need to really disconnect from our phone nowadays? Like we're so inundated. When I think about my phone, I don't associate that with something that is intended to help me down, regulate and relax.

A (73:59)

That's why I can't read. I was on a plane and I had the book that I wanted to read, Dan Jones, just put me onto it. It's called A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. Fucking sick. So it teaches you how to read Russian literature. So there's a single page of a short story from Chekhov or some other sort of legendary Russian writer. And then it explains how to read. And I hadn't downloaded it on my Kindle, and my Kindle couldn't connect to the WI Fi in the United flight. And I was like, I'll read it on my phone. I watched my housemate read on his phone all the time, bro, I'm not reading shit. I had no connection. There was no Internet, and I still couldn't read on my phone. It's just not the environment for me. And I guess we even talk about sort of digital environments now that, oh, sorry, you had the wrong device in front of you instead of the other device in front of you, which is the Kindle instead of the laptop instead of the phone. But we are just habituated. I am habituated into my behavior on these devices. And when I'm on that, I'm thinking about swiping up and moving stuff like I'm not in the mud. So I agree. And I did enjoy doing the resonance stuff. But even that the previous versions of it were just locking you into a frequency that had previously been tested, correct?

B (75:11)

Yeah, correct. And this actually kind of to call back to a previous question that you had that I actually don't think we answered, is that you had asked, does resonance frequency see, change over time? Like, do you need to go get retested with resonance frequency? And the answer is, is that initially it was thought that it was a pretty fixed characteristic, but now that we're actually, like, looking at more of the nuances of resonance frequency, we actually see that it can dynamically change across time and across context. So if you're breathing at said four and a half breaths per minute, which, which you mentioned was your resonance rate, like it may have been at the time of the testing that you did it. But what if you left and the next day it's 4.897? Well, it doesn't sound like a big change, but what we know in the world of biofeedback, and this is the type of breathing that I really want to hone in on, is that precision always beats effort and intention when it comes to breathing.

A (76:06)

Right. So if you were continuing to breathe at 4.5, but it's actually 4.8, even though you're not that far off because you're not doing it. Precisely. A lot of the gains aren't accruing no matter how hard you try, how frequently you do it.

B (76:18)

Yeah. And it's not to say that you wouldn't have gains, it's just wouldn't. You're not optimizing the gain. You're not gonna gain as much of a robust or significant gain.

A (76:27)

Fragile is if you get it on the nose of the right frequency. Are we talking about a significant difference to being a little bit off? Is it a bit of a knife edge in terms of that?

B (76:38)

It depends on the person. Like I have seen some people that if I were to have them, let's say breathe at five breaths per minute versus 5.2 breaths per minute, we could have a 50% difference, 100% difference in heart rate variability. So precision matters. I mean, even so even with them breathing at 5.2 when their resonance rate was 5.0, they're still gonna have net positive benefits. Slow paced breathing, regardless of whether or not you're measuring it, has net positive benefits. But do we want to optimize those gains for that longer term trait change? That is where precision decision is going to win and that's where OHM comes in. Because we're not running you through like it's, it's a bit annoying to have someone say, okay, well I want to know what my resonance frequency is. Now I've got to sit down and do this 12 to 15 minute test where I do these 2 minute trials of breathing at different rates. And then we'll see kind of what heart rate variability looks like. Like it's a bit of a, it's a bit of a pain to doctor.

A (77:32)

And then hope that it doesn't change over time.

B (77:33)

Exactly. And then also too, it's just like when, when someone wants to use a product that's intended to help as an intervention to calm their nervous system down, they just want to use it right away. So they just want to walk in. So a lot of people just say, well, I'm just going to breathe the six breaths per minute, because that's easy. Five seconds in, five seconds out, or four in, six out. Whereas what OM is doing is it is built with a immensely sophisticated algorithm. If I do say so.

A (77:56)

You wrote the algorithm, dude, don't, don't fellate yourself on this podcast.

B (78:01)

I know, I know, I know. Okay, so scratch that. It's just a really cool device. So the way this works is obviously, and for people who are watching, there's a stone that lives on top. And once you pick up that stone, that is, it's a, it's a really good hand feel. So I mean, it's nice and heavy and it's also warm. Have you noticed that? Like it'll, it'll actually feel warm and it's got a sensor in it, a PPG or photoplesmography sensor in it that when you hold it against your palm immediately it's starting to look at all of the dynamic characteristics of your nervous system changing in response real time. So looking at heart rate, looking at heart rate variability and it's starting to map it and starting to look at kind of those unique characteristics. At the same time, the lamp will start to oscillate just in an up and down direction. So as the lamp goes up, that's as, that's you inhaling. So you're supposed to inhale with the timing of the lamp going up and as the light goes down, you're exhaling. And during that time, within the first few breaths, because we're looking at the unique characteristics of how your nervous system is showing shifting dynamically at that time to that breathing pace, we start to filter that data through our algorithm and start to pace you at your resonance rate so you don't have to sit there and do a whole 12, 15 minute program. We're looking at it and it's not just saying, oh, this is person's respiration rate or their resonance frequency rate is six breaths per minute. So five, five, just throw it on five, five. It's saying no, we see it six breaths per minute. But we want, because of the characteristics of how their nervous system is changing, their inhalation is going to, to be 4.276 seconds long and their exhalation is going to be, you know, 5.834. I didn't do the math right there, but it's probably pretty close actually. And we're going to take that all into consideration. What are we doing there? We're trying to maximize the output of those beautiful slow sinusoidal rhythms of your heart rate that we know are dynamically changing how your nervous system is responding, making it more efficient at any given time. And we're watching it across the session. And if there are these kind of small minute changes that your nervous system is telling us, we will adjust the.

A (79:57)

Rate within the session, within the session.

B (79:58)

We'Ll adjust the ratio of the breathe.

A (80:00)

I've noticed that it does that. If I sort of grab it, especially if I do a long, a long session of 20 or 30 minutes, it will start speeding up and slowing down. The frequency of frequency will continue to change. It's pretty cool. So I guess one thing that a lot of people will be thinking is I already do breath work in one form or another, another, and it makes me feel calm. Does that not suggest, is, is feeling calm not a proof of regulation in breath Work because I usually feel chilled and actually sometimes a little bit spacey when I do resonance breathing. But I don't always necessarily feel super calm. I don't maximize calm. I've done breathwork sessions that have made me feel more calm in the moment. Moment. So is calm proof of regulation when we're talking about other breath work practices or this?

B (80:48)

Yeah. I never refer to HRV biofeedback or resonance breathing as a relaxation tool. And that might be people like scratching their head like what. But I thought the intention was to.

A (80:58)

Help just a 90 minutes on fucking becoming more calm.

B (81:00)

Relax. Yes. The. This is going kind of going back to HRV as being a byproduct number. Right. Resonance breathing producing a sense of relaxation for most people, most sessions is the byproduct of aligning your nervous system. And so the intention isn't that I come in with resonance and with biofeedback. I never come in with the intention that, hey, this is my opportunity to relax. I come in with it with this. This is my opportunity to train. I am training. That is my gym right there. That is my nervous system gym. Today I'm hitting it, I'm getting in the reps. Because we know that this has a wide systemic effect effect on how I respond now and how I'll respond later and how it's translative to how I experience the world after this. And so for me, when I do it, slowing my breathing down inherently typically is going to make me produce a sense of calm. You may even feel sleepy. This is something that we use like with absolute rest. Look at Andy Alpin's company. Like we use this with everybody. Everybody does HRV biofeedback before bed because it can produce that huge level of vagal arousal or what we would just say is like vagal stimulation. That break is being put onto the nervous system which can help you wind down and actually can improve so many metrics as it relates to sleep. This is a well, well found and well studied thing that we can, we can do. But the intention again isn't like I'm going to experience relaxation. Maybe. Maybe you will. Right now I'm working on timing, I'm working on precision, I'm working on training that nervous system to align so that when I leave this controlled environment that I've trained on and I go out into the real world where I don't have this little thing, I want my nervous system to kick into high gear. When shit hits the fan.

A (82:37)

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B (83:55)

I find myself doing it just like instinctively. Like actually when I encounter, let's say I'm like in traffic or whatever, I actually will notice because of my immense amount of training doing this, because I do practice what I preach. I use this every day for a very long time and I have the app to prove it.

A (84:10)

You say that Brian Johnson's the current power user of this thing.

B (84:13)

Brian is killing it. I wish I could say it. Chris Williamson was. Chris Williamson.

A (84:18)

You're killing.

B (84:19)

You're killing.

A (84:20)

I'm doing okay.

B (84:20)

Brian's. Brian's killing.

A (84:22)

Can you say, can you say how many hours a day he's doing?

B (84:24)

I don't know. I don't want to get in trouble.

A (84:26)

Okay. You think that's fucking.

B (84:27)

He's doing a lot. He's doing. He's doing. He's doing a lot.

A (84:30)

A lot of time on the, on the lamp, which doesn't surprise me.

B (84:32)

Yeah, you.

A (84:33)

Well, when you think about the areas that he's covering at the moment, one of the things I Haven't heard him talk about much. Is moving it across into the more nervous system comes psychological side of things. And it doesn't make. It doesn't surprise me that he's managed to find an evidence based, highly metric sort of driven solution for something that could be a bit fucking esoteric. I mean, he did do psilocybin on live streams.

B (85:04)

He did. Which was pretty fun to watch actually.

A (85:06)

I didn't watch it.

B (85:07)

You should watch at least some highlight and clips.

A (85:09)

I didn't shoot. Okay, cool.

B (85:09)

Because it's like, I feel like it's a aspect of Brian Johnson's personality where you're like, I didn't know that was in there.

A (85:14)

Oh, I've seen enough aspects of his personality to know what's in there. He's. Brian's a sweetie. I think he's fantastic and he's a good friend. That's great. Okay, I have a question. Let's say that someone is under chronic stress and that's caused him to have a dysregulated nervous system system. Does that not suggest that because it was top down that caused the issue that they need to go top down to fix it? They should go. Cbt, ACT therapy, psychotherapy, cognitive reframing. You have been in a situation with work or your kid or your finances or whatever for three years and it's just sent you haywire and now you're trying to intervene. The issue was caused this way from top to bottom, but the intervention that's being suggested now is to go bottom to top. Can you talk about. Because you said before, psychological stress is one of the biggest contributors to this. How do you come to think about the relationship between intervening with nervous system work directly with stuff like resonance breathing and what's happening psychologically? Does that make sense?

B (86:28)

Yeah, it makes sense. The one thing to kind of also question here, most of it is coming top down, but there are some actual theories of emotion that are actually looking more at bottom up. So there's James Lange theory of emotion that actually says that we encounter an incident. So let's say we counter an event, an external event. And actually our physiology is the first thing to respond. So we're kind of built and ingrained with this, this like unconscious kind of scanning of the environment to determine threats. That's really not driven by our cognition, that's just really primal. And it's the thing that when we see the snake that's lying there, maybe we haven't been taught to be afraid of the snake, but something inside of our, of our physiology Says no danger, like don't, don't go there. And so then we receive that signal from our body up. So it's bottom up. And then now we're starting to make an, a cognitive appraisal with that thing that we just experienced. Experienced.

A (87:19)

Turn that into a modern example story for me.

B (87:23)

Oh, sure, yeah, sure. So I can give you a clinical example or a performance example.

A (87:27)

Which one?

B (87:28)

Which one? Okay, let's go both. So clinical example. So this would be someone, for instance, who is experiencing. Oh yeah, please do a session. Get it, get into some, you're doing.

A (87:37)

A long answer, so I'm going to do this.

B (87:39)

All right, so clinical example. So let's say someone who experienced like some actual trauma. So my background is how I've worked historically with operators, special operators in the DoD and also with veterans for these individuals, you know, they're encountering so many different types of external events that put them readily on high alert, as they should be. They should readily be on high alert. So they experience kind of all these things that they know should be associated with danger. And so therefore like engage kind of this protective mechanism to kind of fight off kind of what they have. Tune in, walk in. So I had a, had a veteran kind of back in the day when I was working with, within the va and he has had all these experiences kind of like within kind of war. So he was over in Battle of Fallujah, kind of like the early times of us being over, you know, in the Middle east during the, during Iraq and Afghanistan war. And he came back and he was like, I know that my nervous system is. You just got into a state of resonance. So I do want to comment before going on with my story, that the lamp is now blue, indicative that Chris Williamson, during our communicating just now, or me communicating a little bit one sided, got into a state of resonance. And now that I'm bringing it to his intention and calling it out, he's exiting resonance. Did he kick me out? I kicked you out because I brought attention to it. But no, anytime you go into blue there, you're in a state of physiological resonance. Your nervous system is responding and firing on all cylinders in the best way possible.

A (89:08)

This is great. It's like story time with nervous system training. You're telling me about this guy?

B (89:13)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we haven't gotten to the good meat of it. So exposure to all these things. So he comes into clinic and he says, you know, I've noticed that like every single time, like I go out to drive, like I, I lock up the entire body locks up. I can't think straight. I get tunnel vision. Like, all of these things are occurring kind of within my. My nervous system. He didn't coin it that way because he didn't know to use the language. Nervous system. But he said that everything just feels really difficult, disruptive. And it's gotten to the point now where, like, I actually have a phobia of getting in the car and driving anywhere. Like, I just. I can't do it. So that's caused me to be socially isolative. I'm a hermit. I just kind of live by myself, do my own thing. The only time I come here is when I get a taxi, because Uber wasn't a thing back then. Am I aging myself here? And he would go to the. To the VA to. To receive help. Okay. So then when we started to unpack and explore, like, what was going on here, basically what he would say is that he would walk out and he would have. He would just. He wouldn't even actually, like, be looking at a car, but he would know that he was kind of, like, moving towards a car. And all of a sudden, his physiology would just ramp up. Heart rate would increase. Everything would just kind of, like, become immensely excitable. And so. Yeah, okay, well, we have. Well, there's this association that he's making, but we don't know, like, what the association is, why it's there. And so as we kind of backpedaled and unpacked a little bit of things, because, as you do in therapy, which I am a psychologist, so of course, like, that's kind of part of what I do, is that we realized that he was making just these really broad associations with hitting IEDs kind of out when he would be in Humvees during his time over and associating that with the car. But that wasn't something that was cognitively manifest. It was really his physiology that would ramp up and send that signal directly to, kind of to his brain. And then he would get into this tunnel vision, highly sympathetic mode and not really kind of know what to do in that moment. So it would be like, well, I'll just avoid. I'll go inside. I won't do, like, anything, because that keeps me safe. Then that becomes, obviously, a really vicious cycle. So he's experiencing kind of like, all this flood of. Of changes within the physiology that's sending this signal to the brain that this is a dangerous environment. This dangerous environment is now connected with previous experiences. So I experienced kind of all these nasty things that happened over in the Middle East. And so now for. I've created this vicious physiological cycle. And so this is where like yes, we want to leverage something like top down cognitive processing or therapy with him and that's important. But actually starting from the body up and helping him just learn how to regulate that physiological response was the best place to start. Because trying to change the mind with the mind. I've heard Huberman talk a lot about this and I really agree with Huberman on this. It says trying to change the mind with the mind is a bit like tug of war. It's very difficult. You can kind of get into these nasty impasses and you're just always butting heads. But changing the mind with the body tends to be a lot more efficient. And it is the thing that can bridge the gap and segue us into doing the top down processing. Because all the things that you mentioned before cognitive behavioral therapy act all of these evidence based psychotherapies are immensely valuable tools. Like they are 100% needed and they are efficacious. But if we can use something like this to augment what we're doing there and also allow us to open up from a nervous system perspective. So this is why I might get a tiny bit esoteric actually, which is not typically much my thing. But if we can leverage a tool like this, let's say before a therapy session, to open up the nervous system to receiving and saying, okay, I'm in an environment with my psychologist or my therapist. This is a very safe environment because I'm communicating this with my body, with my nervous system. This might be a really unique and amazing way to start really transitioning from just purely talk therapy and psychotherapeutics to now going more into using psychophysiology.

A (93:19)

Well, I think the fascinating. That was wonderful, by the way. I got a four minute resonance. Thank you. That's what I need my fucking breath coach to say. It makes a lot of sense to me, even though it sounds kind of counterintuitive. You have a sense in the body that gets shot up to your breath. I am not safe. This is not good. For instance, let's say that you are in a relationship and something about the way that your partner showed up made you feel unsafe regularly. You don't really know what it's like. What is it that they've done? Maybe they took a bit longer to text back. Maybe they didn't put a kiss at the end of the message. Maybe they. Maybe they seemed a little bit more distracted. Maybe they something something about them. The way that they show up, your conception of them makes you just feel a bit activated or agitated. And then you start to tell yourself stories about why I don't feel good. It's like, why don't you feel good? So I'm not really too sure. So you have some sense that is hidden. That's kind of like the relational equivalent of a snake, right? That's perhaps something patterned from your past. Mum also seemed to be a little bit distant and you had fears of threats of abandoning or you feel like you need to perform in order to win your partner's love. And that was just the same way that your grandma or your father or your school teachers or some story that you've told yourself. Not even from childhood, you don't even need to go back to childhood. Like some part of your worldview you has a fissure in it. And this relationship with your boss or your new co worker or the fucking bus driver, whoever it is, is getting to you in a manner that seems to sort of really pierce your programming and that is making you feel away. Well, you're gonna. The only place you can experience that is in your brain. And you go, well, I'm now gonna start to tell myself a story about why I feel this way and that the first time that I heard that, it makes complete sense about how emotions do move in both directions. I can absolutely manifest myself by thinking about stuff, completely imaginary situation. Allow me to just come up with this potential catastrophe or good thing and it go top down. But I can also feel something in the body, body and it shoot up and tell myself, great example of this. I was working New Year's Eve eight years ago and I know this because my business partner text me about it over Christmas in Manchester. And I was partway through the night and I was being so catty with all of the staff. I was like, you know, there's 20, 25, 18 to 23 year olds that are working for me in Manchester. And I've driven down there and it's New Year's Eve and fuck, I'm working. But I'm a club promoter. I've done it for 15. I didn't have a New Year's Eve for 15 years. Like Fin, this is my job. That's what I signed up for. I'm a different city and we've sold out and we've made some good money and it's whatever, whatever. I was being so short with everyone and I get a text from my business partner and he said, I'm locked in the disabled Toilet at Riverside, which was the venue that we used to run in Newcastle. I'm like, I'm 150 miles away. Have you lost the key? Has someone else locked you in there? Is there a shooting going? Like, what is this? Turned out that he'd got norovirus. He'd got a 24 hour stomach bug. Brutal. And we'd been to his son's first birthday party in between Christmas and New Year. Turned out that that was a super spreader event for fucking norovirus. I'd been super short with all of the staff that had been on site with me. And it turned out that I also had norovirus. I was about to, to an hour and a half later, feel nausea and feel like I wanted to spend the rest of the day in the bathroom. But my behavior had been. I'm being short. Why am I so irritable? I'm feeling this sort of a way like if that doesn't say that you can have a sensation that I literally didn't have an explanation for until I started to do the fucking Sherlock Holmes corkboard thing of piecing together. We went to the kid's birthday and he's in the toilet and oh my God, this means I'm going to be in. And I'm 150 miles away from home and I have cream leather seats in my fucking BMW. This is gonna be. Sure enough, I had told myself a story about what it meant. Well, maybe it's because this thing wasn't organized with DJ Booth or he didn't bring his microphone or I found out that the fucking DJ that night wasn't going to do the countdown because nobody had prepped him that he needed to use the mic. And he was being a purist and I was like, I guess I'm gonna have to fucking count down from 10 at my own event while I'm trying to hotwire the pyrotechnics using two 9 volt battery. It was a fucking nightmare. But I told myself all of these stories about this little adventure that I'd been on.

B (98:05)

Yeah.

A (98:05)

That had nothing to do with how I was feeling.

B (98:07)

Yeah.

A (98:08)

And it was exclusively because I was going to shit my pants in two hours time.

B (98:12)

Yeah.

A (98:13)

And yeah, that sense, it completely tracks.

B (98:18)

It's. It's a method of self preservation. I'm trying to put together a piece of your story. Hell, kind of like you creating that is a bit of self preservation. But maybe there's something that I could link there. But we're doing it all as a method to make sure that we continue our survival and pass on our gene pool. Ooh.

A (98:35)

Do you know lassitude? Know what lassitude is? The sort of emotion of being unwell, being sick, like physically sick. And I did this episode with Diana Fleischman and she was telling me about lassitude. And some of the interesting elements of lassitude are you want to be around friends and family, family more. You don't want to try new foods. You prefer bland foods if you've got the flu or something. Bread and toast like butter on toast and. And cups of tea. My Britishness is showing it so. Showing wanting to be looked after by mum or partner or whatever. Well, why? Because if I try some new food that might have pathogens in, if I try and make friends with someone, they might not be able to look at after me. So you have these. These behaviors that are impacted by your physiological state, by your medical state. Right. Your sort of current health system is leaking out of you into your behavior.

B (99:34)

Yeah.

A (99:35)

And that's a longer version, more protracted version of what I had.

B (99:39)

Yeah.

A (99:40)

And the less protracted version of what your special operator had.

B (99:44)

Sure.

A (99:45)

Which is I have patent match matched this thing with another felt sense. And now I've begun to tell myself a story. Paul Conti told me this thing about how people that have travel anxiety, especially for being in a serious travel road accident, you can retrospectively go back and tell yourself, oh, I never liked driving. Actually. Never. I never enjoyed. You could have loved driving. But the narrative gets smooth.

B (100:10)

Cognitive dissonance. 100%.

A (100:12)

Yeah, 100%. So, yeah, this sort of. I don't even know what you'd it call. Call it this bi directional nature of emotions than moving both bottom up and top down. And it makes complete sense to me as well to think, well, if you can get your nervous system into a state where it feels really good and calm and regulated, although maybe not super calm, but at least resonant.

B (100:34)

Yes.

A (100:35)

You would be a little bit more open to maybe talking about things that are difficult.

B (100:40)

Yeah. Can you imagine a world. And again, obviously I'm very biased in my statement that I'm about to make because I have something to make from om in this. In this process. But I can imagine a world where every single psychotherapeutic session starts and ends with some resonance breathing or biofeedback. And again, let's take ohm out of. Out of leaving the discussion. Doesn't have to be ohm, but just starting with resonance breathing as a way to open up to what we. What. What we're about to encounter in terms of our discussion. Because for many psychotherapeutic discussions, they're very difficult processing to get through. And then maybe the back end is saying, okay, well now we're releasing you back out into the world. We've gotten our 50 minute sess.

A (101:18)

Safe again.

B (101:19)

Safe again. Use time to assimilate all that information and carry on.

A (101:24)

It makes me think about kind of like microdosing ketamine or mdma. Ketamine assisted psychotherapy or MDMA assisted psychotherapy. This is resonance assisted psychotherapy.

B (101:33)

Yeah, that's right.

A (101:34)

And what you're trying to do is just give a little bit of a safety cue. And I suppose that's in large part what MDMA is trying to do, right? Opening the heart up. It's. You can talk about this thing without reliving it in the same sort of scary, dangerous way. You're being comforted by someone. Okay, so for resonance breathing, what is a good starting point that's realistic to get good progress? Like how much, how often, how long, what's the protocol?

B (102:02)

Yeah, if you want state change, if you're like, hey, I need something right now, just a couple minutes. I mean, even a minute to three minutes will get you a really good solid effect. What we. One of the things that we know is that resonance breathing in and of itself, itself, its efficacy is so immensely high that we can safely say that every time you do it, you have a net positive benefit from. In terms of a nervous system perspective, it's a nice little gentle hug. We know that when we get to around that 10 minute mark, and as much as 10 to 20 minutes, that's actually kind of like the sweet spot for starting to really entrain the nervous system. You had mentioned ago a little, you mentioned a little bit ago, what if we just walked around and constantly breathed at our resonance rate. And it's like in theory, I love that idea. However, what I will say, and that hasn't been tested for obvious reasons, but what I will say is that the research does demonstrate that going above about 20 minutes of resonance breathing, like the return on investment, like it starts to, it starts to drop. It's not, there's no deleterious or detrimental effect, but you're not gaining any more significant appreciable gain, like from doing longer than 20 minutes. So I always tell people the sweet spot is pretty per day, 10 to 20 minutes. And that is not 10 to 20 minutes compounded over the day. It's doing sessions like the com. The compounding. Like If I did 10 minute two, sorry, five two minute sessions equals 10 minutes. You're not going to receive as nearly as much of the longitudinal benefits as you will with a singular 10 minute session. We do have research the because the nervous system doesn't start to really entrench train in a single session and make those larger scale scale barrel reflex changes until about minute 8 to 12. The minute 8 to 12 is when we start to see them making those more robust changes. It'll change. The nervous system will make significant changes before then. But the adaptations don't occur until that point in time. So that isn't to say, oh hey, if I get an ohm or I get do some other breathing practice that I should never do anything less than 10 minutes. Not at all. I do it all the time. Like in between meetings I'll do three to five minutes. Is that having necessary the compounding effect? Not as much as the 10 minute sessions or the 15 or the 20 minute sessions. So I tell people like if you really want to get the effects and this is coming more from the literature and biofeedback, 10 minutes done four to six times a week. And if you do that in as little as four weeks, but probably more around eight to 10 weeks, you're going to actually see significant train changes. Now that can result in. I look at my whoop and my baseline heart rate variability is increased. I'm not using that as like my marker or my goal post kind of like my source of truth. But we see that quite often in the research and the literature. We do see that baseline heart rate variability for people that practice in that type of protocol can actually see pretty vast improvements. What I'm actually looking at are a couple of things. First, I'm looking to say subjectively, do I feel more resilient? I think that goes, that goes missed man. Like in the day of again, biometric hypervigilance where we're all like so data driven and using it as our decision making. We're becoming increasingly poor at checking in. Subjectively, how do I feel? I wake up in the morning, yeah, my wearable says that I'm in the red and I feel. And it says I'm a 29 out of 100. But how do I actually feel like bypassing that is a huge mistake. So we know in the literature that people that do this type of protocol, one of the main things that they see is that they see better emotional regulation. Okay, so maybe my fuse isn't as short as it once was. Maybe I have a little bit more lenience like in this, on this, in this business call or working with, you know, Deborah down the hall. She doesn't piss me off as easily. Or maybe she does piss me off, but I don't fly off the cuff with her. They see better sleep. We actually see improvements in sleep metrics and markers. We see more resilience to kind of other things like recovery. We actually see that we improve things like physiological recovery, recovery. So for instance, like, I know a lot of people at a lot of the pro athletes that I work with. Every single time that they are working out or they'll do like a training session, they're downregulating their nervous system with ohm for about 10 minutes or so, like post that session.

A (106:17)

That's the protocol. So let's say there's someone who is a. A high performer, creator of some kind. Maybe they give presentations at work. Maybe they're a salesperson. Maybe they're trying to learn something. They're a student. How would you say stack resonance breathing with skill acquisition practice, game time. Are you doing it before? It feels like. I'm not convinced that it's great for everything. If I'm an NFL player, I probably just want to be listening to Creed before I go out. I don't necessarily want. I want to be hyped. I don't know if I want to be doing this.

B (106:49)

It depends on their level of autonomic dysregulation. So for instance, I had an NH player that I worked with and he had an amazing player, great player.

A (107:00)

He told me about this guy, but just could not control his game nerves significantly.

B (107:05)

Like he would get in practice.

A (107:07)

He was like the generational talent. Didn't do it on the ice.

B (107:10)

Amazing. But when you get out on the ice, one bad touch, one bad whatever, and the brain goes, the nervous system goes, heart rate fluctuates, can't sleep the next night. Like perseverating on things. Things. And so for that individual, I'm going to structure a protocol that looks quite different for him than I am going to be. Let's say someone who's like, man, I need to get amped up. Because I have worked with multiple MLB players, like pitchers especially, who the day that they're pitching, some of them are like, I'm just not feeling it. There's like this lack of energy. Like, I need to like amp myself up. I'm not going to have them probably do as much resonance breathing before they.

A (107:46)

Go out, but they might do it afterward in order to bring themselves back down.

B (107:50)

Exactly. Well, because they're on a bunch of, you know, whatever. Nicotine and whatever else.

A (107:55)

Whatever else.

B (107:56)

Yeah, exactly.

A (107:57)

Okay, let's add in now. Let's say that somebody wanted to. By the end of 2026, I want to make as many great improvements to my nervous system and also my hrv. I'm. I'm just gaming the HRV game. Right. I want to piss all over everyone else in my whoop group. What would you struggle? Structure as a pretty easily compliant broad spectrum protocol that includes the cardiorespiratory work. What would that look like? Something that's relatively easy to stick to but will have. It'll capture most of the gains, including the resonance breathing. And then also looking at any other contributing factors. What would you do?

B (108:44)

The first thing that you can do is send a text message to all those in your whoop group and say, hey guys, let's stop comparing our hrv.

A (108:49)

Yeah, you should actually have a beer before you go to bed on a night time. I've heard the humans been talking about it.

B (108:53)

Exactly. Yeah. There are huge proponents of at least like two to three beers.

A (108:57)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

B (108:58)

Right before you go to sleep. So the, the first thing that I would say, and again, I'm trying to think about what are the best levers that you can pull to kill the most birds with one stone. And literally it would probably be just two things that, that come to mind now because I don't want to add, I could, I could create a protocol for you where I add. I have created protocols for you where I can add layers of complexity where there's tons of things. But I think for the everyday individual, if you focused on two things which are both modifiable factors like we talked about to nervous system regulation earlier, I think that you're going to get the most bang for your buck. I think the first one is exercise. I think that enhancing cardio respiratory fitness and getting more on a path to increase things like VO2 max. And again, like you just go listen to any TIA stuff where he talks about, you know, improving, you know, the base base of the pyramid through zone 2 training and high intensity training as well on the top. Like, like just listen to all this of his stuff. I mean, you're improving cardiorespiratory fitness, which is improving cardiovascular output and therefore lowering resting heart rate, and you're going to improve HRV that way. If we're just thinking about improving hrv, is that then equate to improving things like parasympathetic braking or vagal breaking or vagal tone potentially we do have some research to suggest that exercise in and of itself is a great way to actually exercise. Exercise the vagal break. So that way, again, we're kind of killing two birds with one stone. We should be exercising and improving cardiorespiratory fitness no matter what. And the second component, again, this is my bias 100% coming out, is that we need to have dedicated time and practice where we are in a controlled environment and we're downregulating our nervous system. So for many people, meditation is really helpful for them. And I don't want to, you know, poo poo on meditation. I think it's a great practice. I actually think that HRV biofeedback that we've been about, talking, talking about is an amazing thing to combine with mindfulness and meditation. I actually think they work very well in tandem with one another. But the thing about meditation is, is that creating a practice that's 15, 30 minutes a day, that's maybe not as much structured, it's just really hard to create good behavioral habits and routines around that. So for most people, I would say then that's where I would turn to. And again, bias coming out something like om, where it's like we're actually spending dedicated time in a controlled environment to train our nervous system system four times a week at 10 minutes, you know, per, per day, even as little as 10 minutes. If you want to do more than that, do more than that. Like for instance, I aim for 10 for 15 minutes of resonance a day, not 15 minutes of practice. 15 minutes of my time in blue. So when you turned it blue during our discussion a minute ago, I want 15 minutes where I'm holding myself in that now, that doesn't have to be 15 sustained minutes. I'm not sure if I've ever done 15 minutes of sustained resonance, but 15 minutes cumulative and I normally do 10 minute sessions or other small sessions. So again, if we had kind of come back, that's me like maximizing output of the vagus nerve. If we're just saying, well, what's the minimal dose that somebody can do to get started? I think four times a week, 10 minutes a day. So that's 40 minutes that you have to devote to the nervous system. Gym every week will get you a lot of the benefit and certainly provide a good foundation.

A (112:09)

When you've looked at the evidence around resonance breathing, what does it suggest about what people should be doing with that minds?

B (112:16)

Good question. Have you ever noticed, like when you're using it, have you ever noticed that when Your mind starts to go and wander. What happens? Yeah, I've been in the blue so much and then all of a sudden, like, I will catch my mind, go. Here's the great.

A (112:28)

It is kind of mindfulness 100%.

B (112:31)

And you have to be mentally attuned to what's going on. Otherwise it's like the nervous system knows. It's like you're feeding it information. If the mind's going, then it says, well, we need to. Again, sympathetic nervous system. We need to mobile so we can process all that thinking. And so then therefore it's pulled you out of. It's pulled you out. Right? It's pulled you out. So. So there's a direct connection there. That's why I say that meditation and mindfulness is immensely important to include as a layer of what you're doing with biofeedback. Otherwise I think you're going to miss out on some of the other potential mental attunement benefits.

A (113:02)

Well, I think one of the risks that you guys are gonna have as this becomes bigger and there will be, based on how good I think this product is, I think there's gonna be like a million copycats within the space of a couple of years. One of the things I've noticed, because you don't need to look at your phone again for the people that are just listening. It's like a stone. You hold the stone in your hand and you breathe in time with the stone. And the stone can just vibrate. But what it means is you don't need to look at anything. Cause you've linked the lamp in with the WI fi so you never actually have to open your phone again. So I have it next to me and it means that when I'm watching a movie, I watch Die Hard because it's the greatest Christmas movie of all time. Grab the stone and I'm there for 30 minutes, 40 minutes. But I'm knee deep in Die Hard and I care about Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman, so I'm not mentally with my breath work. And I do think that that's going to be something that people are probably going to get into doing because it sounds great. Oh my God, I can train my vagus nerve while I watch a movie. That is fantastic. But how many of the G gains are you losing by not focusing where you're supposed to be? But then also maybe if you were to look at the literature for this, I would love someone to do a study to say, well, this is a more real world applicable situation, which is that your nervous System is doing one thing while your mind is doing another. So can we chew, walk and gum at the same time? Can we chew gum and walk at the same time? Are we able to allow our front brain to be focused on that while our nervous system is trying to regulate from this thing at the side?

B (114:41)

It's a great question.

A (114:41)

I mean that's a really interesting, great.

B (114:43)

Research study that could be done there. Well, what I will say though, and I go back to the statement that I made before, is that I will take precision over effort and intention any day. It doesn't mean that intention and effort with precision don't yield the greatest benefits. But precision is key here because we know that the nervous system, like your baroreflex response and your respiratory sinus arrhythmia, so the characteristics that are contributing mostly to hrv, they actually don't care. They don't give a shit about your intention. They don't care. As long as you're breathing within rhythm, they're doing its work, they're aligning. Now if you want to maximize that benefit, that's when we put them all together and that's where we can start to layer mindfulness. So again, just to make sure I don't get misquoted here, mindfulness and meditation, meditation matter, like they're really important for what we do. I think it's great to layer on them. But is it necessary or are we required to utilize that in order to have some appreciable nervous system benefit with through HRV biofeedback? The answer is no.

A (115:47)

Okay, so to recap, you would say some zone two work. 150 minutes a week, maybe 100 to 150 minutes.

B (115:56)

Yeah, I think a TS typically says around 120 to 150 minutes per week.

A (116:00)

And if you can get some Norwegian 4x4, maybe one session a week, something like that of top end work to get the Zone 5 stuff in. And then between four and six sessions of between 10 and 20 minutes of resonance breathing that is done in a focused manner that together should be from a modifiable factor. I mean this is. Stop drinking so much fucking salt. Like element's fantastic, but you can't have 10 a day. You should be having like two or three a day at most.

B (116:31)

Blood volume is a huge contributor or influencer to heart rate variability. So you don't want to be dehydrated, but you also don't want to over hydrate.

A (116:41)

That will build you about as good in terms of HIV gain. The thing that we haven't Talked about is how this impacts sleep.

B (116:48)

When you were mentioning all that, the one thing that was coming to my mind is that I was thinking, yes, as long as sleep.

A (116:56)

So talk to me about. Because you work with Andy Galpin's company Absolute Rest, which is fucking awesome.

B (117:01)

Yeah.

A (117:03)

We've sleep into this big pattern that we've created so far. We've got this, this massive tapestry of insights about how the nervous system works and what HRV is and what resonance frequency does and how the barore reflex. And what about sleep and how does, how does that guy work in with all of this?

B (117:22)

Sleep is, is the canary, the coal mine. When we start to have significant disruptions in sleep, sleep efficiency, the overall quality of our sleep, when all of those things are happening, it's a signal. It's a signal that the nervous system is experiencing a significant amount of dysregulation. And so if I had to think about like a picture pyramid of health and wellness interventions, or not even interventions, but a pyramid of health and wellness factors or variables that people should focus on if they want to have the greatest longevity and overall sense of health and wellness, the bottom or the base of that pyramid, without a doubt, I don't think there's a close second is sleep. Because we know that sleep, its intention is reparation, it is repairing the nervous system. We receive insults all throughout the day, right? So whether it's psychological insults or physiological insults, there's insults that we are incurring at all times. And our nervous system is doing the best it can. It's like 24 by 7 security, like it's trying to attend to everything. But it gets beat up. And especially as we experience more chronic stressors day in, day out, week in week out, month after month after year, decade after decade. Now we've got all this compounding stress that's kind of living kind of within the nervous system. Its thermostat is really stiff and stuck in a direction that we don't want to have. And so therefore it starts to impact the things like our sleep and our ability to actually sustain longer, deeper sleep. And so we can leverage. This is why heart rate variability is typically given to us on wearables while we're asleep. And that's because when we get really good data of a process that is intended to repair our nervous system, HRV is telling us well, is sleep actually helping us to repair the nervous system or is there some gap there? So without focusing on, on sleep is like you can do all the breathing you want and it's Great. And it's gonna help. And it can actually help improve sleep. Tons of literature on resonance breathing and biofeedback and how it can improve sleep. But if you aren't addressing sleep issues at its core, which can be a wide variety of factors, nervous system dysregulation probably being the foundation of that, then like all the other things that you're doing maybe aren't gonna have nearly as much of a net positive impact. So we have to start with sleep.

A (119:46)

So is sleep where trait level autonomic regulation sort of shows up the most?

B (119:54)

Yes, it does. It can show up in your baseline day to day behavior. So in the ability, let's say for instance, with someone who's got an immensely flexible autonomic nervous system, they have high baro reflex gain. We can actually see that their blood pressure regulation mechanism is really fine tuned and can work really, really quickly, really efficiently and really smoothly depending on what they experience. However, in sleep, we're taking out all the external variables of like physiological and psychological insult. So stress. We're taking all of that out.

A (120:26)

Pretty blank canvas.

B (120:27)

Yep, blank canvas. And we're saying, okay, here's true baseline. Here's the process where like we are working to repair everything.

A (120:36)

You can't fake regulation during sleep.

B (120:39)

You cannot, because you can't manipulate your breathing during sleep. Even though I did watch a video breathwork guy who says that he claims that he can get people down to breathing at five breaths per minute while they're sleeping, which is physiologically impossible. If you wake up and your whoop or your aura says that your respiration rate was five breaths per minute, please go immediately to the er. Something's wrong.

A (121:04)

Wow. Okay, so it's. What would people who work on their fitness and their resonance breathing see in sleep, all other things being equal over the course of 12 months, if they're working on it.

B (121:24)

What I love. So this is again to shamelessly plug Absolute Rest and Andy Galpin's team, they're using a lot more advanced ways of looking at what's happening in the nervous system, a system throughout the night, as opposed to like a lot of consumer based wearables. But that's when you're going from like FDA cleared medical device. We're getting like tons of granularity to like okay, sampling rates a lot lower. We've got a conserve battery. We're just giving you kind of information that we think could be useful to hopefully drive behavior. So what we saw, I kind of want to explain a gold standard because I think that this is the Best way to view it. So like it absolutely. Rest when you're wearing the overnight ring. It's a ring called the sleep image ring, which again, FDA cleared medical device. It's actually looking at the fine, finite, quite granular, high fidelity changes that are occurring in your nervous system through an algorithm called CPC algorithm. Just looking at cardiopulmonary coupling. So how coupled or incongruent is your breathing within your resp, Your breathing and your heart rate when you're at rest? So at baseline they should be higher, highly coupled. You should be creating a lot of what I referred to earlier as high frequency power. So that's what we should see on our charts. We'd have like these really tight big blue mountains that we'd want to see that are occurring across the night when someone is having really poor problems with sleep. And this can be due to sleep disordered breathing. So let's just say they've got sleep apnea or they just have an immensely dysregulated nervous system, really cannot bounce back from stress. They've got other problems related just to autonomic flexibility. We see that that high frequency coupling is really low like, so it looks like they're not getting hardly any restorative sleep. And when they're not getting any restorative sleep, they start to experience kind of like this sympathetic burst at night, what we call fragmentation. And you can't pick up fragmentation on like a consumer based wearable. This is why you got to go to the high fidelity stuff that they have at absolute rest.

A (123:11)

Which is also why these rings have one night of battery. Yeah, yeah, they're, they're, they're sampling what, 100 hertz or something?

B (123:17)

Yeah. Oh, it's a, I think the sampling rate's a thousand hertz. So it's, it's really high.

A (123:22)

As opposed to. Even the best consumer wearables are taking little chunks throughout the small, small bits.

B (123:26)

So small of what we call epics or just small periods of times. Yeah. And so going back to this, if we see that someone's having a lot of fragmentation at night, so the sympathetic nervous system starting to kick into high gear. You know, heart rate is bouncing up. We're starting to see kind of like this pattern that we don't want to see when we're at rest, well, what does that cause us to do? Fragmentation causes us not to get into the deepest stages of like in three sleep or the real restorative stages. Keeps us in very light sleep. And then what does it do? Kicks us out of sleep. As well causes a lot of wakefulness. So we see people's sleep efficiency, which we want to be above 85%, start to drop below 85%. We see the night is completely fragmented. So what do we do? Like, well, at absolute rest, what we would do is we would say, okay, we want to put you on a biofeedback protocol where about 30 minutes before bed, we're going to do 10 to 15 minutes of resonance breathing. And within that kind of timeframe, the whole idea is that we're downregulating the nervous system acutely to try to ease ourself into to sleep, to get that good deep restorative sleep. And that's what we want to see. So we do that. We see that, oh yeah, first night they did it, they did increase a little bit more high frequency power. It might be only at the beginning of the night and the fragmentation kind of kicked into high gear, but we see it start to improve and then they do it week after week after week. And what's so interesting is that almost every client for absolute rest says that their favorite intervention or the one that they feel like is truly moving the needle, aside from like top tier level coaching is heart rate variability biofeedback. Because it is something that they can see. Like you can see. It's. We're not get. We're not. It's not a guessing game anymore, right? It's like I see that my nervous system has actually made changes. Not just am I getting a little bit more of that parasympathetic sleep at the beginning of the night, but it's starting to traverse the entire night. We're starting to see it fluctuate and not fluctuate, but really go across the night and a lot less wake ups.

A (125:14)

What are the limits of HRV's usefulness?

B (125:17)

Mm. I. When people want to use HRV as like a catch all metric for health, wellness and longevity, I think that that is immensely poor way to use it because it can't be used that way. I think I mentioned at the beginning of our podcast that it's not a vanity metric. It's not something you compare to other people. And we've kind of gotten past that, that point. But I think the limit of it is when you start to use it and you say, I'm going to say every single day I'm going to wake up and I'm going to look at that number and I'm going to use that number to now drive decision making in regards to what I do that day in My, in my behavior. And the problem that will ultimately arise from that is that again, you're not taking context in, into consideration whatsoever. And so now you're making decisions just kind of based off of that and you're not actually breaking, bringing in your own subjective experience and subjective feel. So that's, that's one. The other limitation I think of HRV is that the way it is being used now is that people are just using a singular metric and they're not actually looking at it in terms of the compilation of metrics that HRV actually is. And so they misuse it because they say, well, I'm looking at this one number and I'm either comparing it to something I shouldn't be comparing it as opposed to relative to me, but I'm not looking at all kind of like the, the, the minute, high fidelity, really nuanced picture of what this can provide. Which is why for instance, if I'm working with a pro athlete of mine, yeah, we're going to take their whoop data or their aura data, I'm going to examine that and give them some feedback on that. But I'm also going to have them do like a morning reading. So they wake up and the first thing they do in the morning is actually do a 2 to 5 minute basically baseline reading. Not, not a resonance reading, baseline reading. Why am I doing that? Because I'm deriving 12 to 15 metrics that are giving me a much more microscopic view of their nervous system as opposed to that singular one. But I'm not proposing that everybody should like get someone like me to do that or even have the need to do that. It's just understand that there are limitations. HRV is not nearly as robust of a, a metric for telling you something about your physiology as something like VO2 max. Yeah, like VO2 max. I'd put up there as like a metric of like, okay, this is kind of like a true metric of like overall, like wellness and overall like fitness. HRV is not like that. It just doesn't operate like that. And it's not a normative based metric either. It's like we technically do have norms because we've done so many studies to where we know where people typically fall. But we also know that because of the other influencers, genetics, age, sex, that if you don't fall within that normative range, it actually doesn't tell us anything about your overall level of health and wellness. It's like if you know that, hey, for males age 35 to 40, the mean RMSSD value is 56 milliseconds and you know the standard deviation is 10 and my HRV is 2025. So therefore I know I fall multiple standard deviations outside of the mean and so therefore I must be unhealthy. It's not the case. We don't have enough evidence to suggest that. So it does require a little bit of nuance and I think that it's best used when you have someone and again bias like me who can inform you as to what it means. But HRV is best used this way. It's best used in real time as a guide, as a signaling window for training.

A (128:53)

It's fucking cool, dude. I feel like this is the front vanguard of some revolution, some new sort of health revolution thing. And it's cool and it's evidence based and I'm glad that there's people like you who have done the research and spent a few thousand hours in clinic like working on this stuff. It's really, really cool. So where should people go? They're going to want to check out more information about everything.

B (129:16)

Yeah, sure thing. So as you mentioned before, Ohm is in dark mode. However we are open for pre order and so I again thanks for the shout out that you gave with Huberman because people actually got introduced to the world. Not just. And it's also, it's not just about Ohm, it was about resonance breathing and I think that that being brought into kind of the limelight is huge and so I appreciate that. But Ohm Health go on over there pre order will be shipping out in August. So I just want to manage people's expectations that like you can't order it and get it now. You just happen to be a friend of the family here. So, so, so you got one. Check us out there. Love to get some feedback from people and get resonance breathing out there to the world.

A (129:55)

Okay. Appreciate you man.

B (129:56)

Absolutely bro.

A (129:59)

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