← The Dr. Hyman Show
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- [00:00]
A
You've said that HRV is the language of the body. How does that help us understand what's actually happening inside?
- [00:04]
B
If it is measuring that gap or variance between each beat, let's say your heart rate is 72. HRV is the measure of each of that variance between the 72 and a minute. The higher variance between each of the beats. It indicates a more malleable and resilient nervous system that could handle the ever changing environment that we are always seeing. And just like there's no two fingerprints in the world that are the same, there's actually no two heartbeats in the world that are the same. Meaning your HRV score is solely meant just for you.
- [00:35]
A
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- [02:59]
C
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- [03:15]
A
It gives you all nine essential amino
- [03:17]
C
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- [03:24]
A
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- [03:26]
C
spike insulin levels similar to sugar, Perfect Aminos doesn't. Plus, it can help you hit your protein goals without adding a lot of unnecessary calories. So if you want to learn more, head to bodyhealth.com and use the code HYMAN20 for 20% off your first order. That's bodyhealth.com and use the Code HYMAN20.
- [03:43]
A
Celine, welcome to the podcast.
- [03:45]
B
Thank you so much for having me, Mark. Truly a pleasure.
- [03:47]
A
So good to be with you. You've been coaching me on my hrv, which I appreciate because I got work to do. And for those of you listening who don't know what HRV is, it means heart rate variability. And we're going to get into what that means, why it's important, how it's a reflection of your nervous system state and why you need to pay attention to it so you can actually improve your overall wellbeing and health and longevity and all the things we care about. So Saleem, for someone who's first hearing about hrv, what is it and what is it actually measuring?
- [04:19]
B
Great question. So HRV stands for heart rate variability and it's measuring the gap or the variance between each of your heartbeats and what that Gap is indicating is how your nervous system and heart is perceiving its ever changing environment. So essentially your relationship to your stress and a direct reflection of the health of your autonomic nervous system and its ability to shift from a sympathetic to a parasympathetic state.
- [04:44]
A
So essentially it's like if we're trying to say like I'm stressed, like what's the biomarker of stress? You know, you can check your cortisol level and that, that can be helpful. And I do salivary cortisol testing, but that's a little bit cumbersome pain in the ass. And it's not really a day to day metric you can follow and track. But, but now with all these devices and wearables, we're actually able to measure this and there's, you know, things you can do exact computer. I mean I, I was involved with HeartMath a long time ago that it was very much about this. And I remember at Canyon Ranch when I was working there 30 years ago, we actually were measuring heart variability on all our, all our patients and it was like fascinating to see, you know, what happened. And over time this is a, this is an important biomarker. So it's something people can look at, track and measure for themselves and then create changes in their life to actually improve their stress resilience.
- [05:32]
B
Absolutely.
- [05:33]
A
Tell me why, why this has become more of a hot topic. Why is HRV now a thing? Is it just because you can measure it or the scientists and longevity researchers paying more attention to it? Like what? Why should they care?
- [05:43]
B
Yeah, well, it's great to hear that you were measuring it and knowing about it 30 years ago. It's been around forever. Right. But I think now because of what science has proven, which we were talking about this earlier, science has proven that the root cause of all aging, disease and eventually death is cellular inflammation.
- [05:59]
C
Right.
- [05:59]
B
If you pe on your back enough, I know you and Dr. Eric Verdin were talking about this on a recent podcast. Cellular inflammation is at the underlying cause of all mortality. Science has also proven that the number one leading cause of that cellular inflammation, chronic stress, meaning prolonged sympathetic activation, which we call chronic stress. So if you care at all about longevity, then being aware of your internal state, being aware of if you're in a prolonged stressful state is important. And guess what? HRV is a biomarker reflecting the health internal state. So that's why it's becoming a thing now, which I am so, so deeply grateful for.
- [06:36]
A
Yeah, I think I just want to double click on what you said around chronic stress, because stress is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, there are many good stresses that we call hormesis, which we'll get into, which are stresses that don't kill you, that make you stronger. And throughout most of our evolutionary history, humans have only been subjected to acute stresses. It comes and it goes. And there was a wonderful book written by a crazy wild scientist from Stanford, Robert Sapolsky, who has been on the podcast called why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. And basically the thesis is that zebras just go about eating their food, and then the lion comes, and they run like crazy as fast as they can to escape the lion until the lion catches one of them. And then the lion goes about eating their friend, and they just kind of go back to eating the grass and chill. And so they've gotten all the stress out of their system. And we don't do that. We just have this unremitting, chronic, prolonged stress from the way we live, from the lack of our circadian rhythms, from the living indoors, from not being in nature, from not having good relationships, from eating crappy food, which makes our bodies stress. I mean, there's so many reasons. So we have way more to deal with than we ever had. And I think that, you know, people don't really have a clear idea of how to shift that. But there's meditation, there's yoga, there's breath work, there's all these tools. But you talk about HIV in a little bit of a different way than most people. You talk about this idea of instead of nervous system regulation, nervous system sovereignty. I don't really know what that means. And why does it matter more than regulation? Because you seem to have, like, a little bit of a thing about regulation.
- [08:07]
B
I love the question, and I love nervous system regulation. I love that people are talking about it, people are aware of it. That's kind of what we hear in the ether so much. But what I've come to find in my own journey is, I believe as humans, we did not come here to be regulated all the time. And if we're regulated all the time, we actually can't increase the capacity and resilience of our nervous system to go handle more stress or to go have a bigger impact on the world. So what I've come to find is more important is awareness, awareness of your internal state agency over your internal state. And that's what sovereignty is, being aware. So that way, when a stress happens, you have the ability to consciously choose how you want to respond to that stress versus Automatically responding based on an old program, a prior story, a stuck belief from your limbic brain. Because that's actually how the nervous system works physiologically.
- [08:56]
C
Right.
- [08:56]
B
It is just programmed to react when the mind perceives a stress. So sovereignty or agency over your internal state allows you to be aware that we're a stressful state and if we so choose, get ourselves out of it.
- [09:10]
A
Yeah. So it's essentially a way for us to kind of recalibrate with awareness 100% instead of just being in it.
- [09:16]
B
Yes.
- [09:17]
A
A friend of mine talks about this idea of being in it, but not of it. Most times we're in it and we're of it, which means we're like in the kind of unconscious swirl of our life rather than stepping out and going, hey, is this. Is this the right response for me in this situation? How do I get back to a more authentic, maybe call it sovereign way of relating to my own experience rather than being constantly in a state of trigger or stress or reaction? And you're kind of inviting people to kind of pay attention to this metric as a way to. As a doorway into understanding their own biology and how it's affecting them as
- [09:53]
B
a compass to what their body actually is resonant with versus what the story that they're playing out is. Right. Because we're just projecting these stuck emotions, these stories from the past. Your beautiful analogy of a zebra, right. They shake it off. They move that emotion. And emotion on a quantum level is literally just frequency. It's energy. They move it out. So they're not stuck. Exactly. So they're not stuck to that story. And then they can live in the present moment, which all that is.
- [10:18]
A
I actually remember being in Africa and seeing this. I'm like, wow, the lion's right there and the zebras and stuff are all
- [10:25]
B
there, and they're just eating one, sunbathing, relaxing.
- [10:28]
A
And the zebras are just hanging out with the lion while he's eating and another zebra. It was wild and they're not freaked out or anything. And it was. I mean, I'd be pretty freaked out. Maybe it's like wants an appetizer or a dessert or something. You know, I want to kind of double click on the idea of the biology of this chronic stress and why the HRV metric is so important and why understanding how to use it and regulate it and actually reset it is important. But before we do that, I kind of wanted people to understand when you say chronic stress drives inflammation on a cellular level, like, that's big mouthful. Can you kind of Unpack that and what's actually going on and how it works.
- [11:08]
B
Absolutely. And as, as an engineer, when I understood that, that science has proven that, I needed to understand why, how, what is happening internally, physiologically. Right. And that has everything to do with again, the autonomic nervous system, which is such an intricate system that governs 90% of our voluntary and involuntary function, meaning our heart rate, our breath, our digestion, our reproduction, all of these vital organs are being governed by this incredible electrical system that we know so little about, that we' not fully aware of. And if we look at evolution, which you talked about a little bit, right, Evolution is always happening for us, for our survival. And we evolved at creating this sympathetic, activated state for our survival. Because for most of human evolution, we didn't have the luxury, like you said, of homes, of running water, of food. And so we had real life or death threats like a predator, or like the weather. And so our brilliant bodies develop the sympathetic activation to support that survival. So what's happening internally? If the mind perceives an external threat, the amygdala fires off and all of these signals go to the organs. Our eyes dilate to let in more light, our saliva production slows down, which you may not think is a big deal. I know you know it's a big deal because that's where all nutrient absorption comes in, right? Our heart rate goes up, our lungs slow down, but most importantly, all of the vital oxygenated blood that's normally flowing to our visceral organs, meanings our lungs, our digestion, our reproduction, it gets diverted to our extremities, to our hands and legs to support run, fighting or freezing, which is brilliant if we need to run from a tiger, right? But, but back for most of our evolution, that would happen for an hour, maybe two. And then we do what you just said all the zebras are doing. Relax. Right, Fast forward to today. We wake up from our deepest parasympathetic state of sleep. We look at our phone, we read an email, we get in an argument, and we go into a mind made, perceived stressful state for 8, 10, 12 hours a day, day over day, week over week. So what is happening internally? All of that vital, oxygenated blood is flowing here instead of our visceral organs. So they can't maintain the homeostasis in the body, they can't rep. And downstream of that, cellular inflammation begins. And when my mind realized that that's what was happening internally, I was like, oh shit. I really need to be aware of if my mind is perceiving a threat, even if it's just an email, and then get my body out of it, at least temporarily, so all that oxygen can go back here and my organs can maintain the homeostasis in the body.
- [13:31]
A
Yeah, it's so important. And I think the quote that I once heard that really kind of stuck with me about the definition of stress. It made so much sense to me. Stress is defined as the real or imagined. And this is a big one for most of us. Most of it's imagined, the real or imagined threat to our body or our ego. So it can be a real threat to your body like a lion chasing you, or it can be an imagined threat to your ego. Like you think your husband came home late from work because he's having an affair, but actually he was just going to buy you flowers and so you have this whole spin out and the body registers it all exactly the same 100% as like a life threatening emergency that you have to gear up for.
- [14:12]
B
Totally. And the thing I want to double click on is you said so beautifully. Stress. This is how I call it too. It's your actually best friend and ally if you learn to dance with it and not stay in it. Because we didn't say stress was the number one leading cause of inflammation, cellular inflammation, we said chronic stress. Staying in that prolonged stressful state in that story, in whatever you're perceiving.
- [14:32]
C
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- [16:13]
A
You kind of mentioned the sympathetic nervous system and this sort of chronic stress as being the problem. What's the other part of our nervous system, the parasympathetic, and how does that work? And how do they kind of work together?
- [16:25]
B
The other side of the autonomic nervous system branch is the parasympathetic side, known as the rest or digest. And this operates in three primary, primary stages. And what's so important about this is they correlate with our developmental years, right? It's where our nervous system foundation is being built. So we start out with the delta state when your brain is oscillating between 0.5 and 4 hertz, and that's synonymous with sleep, when it's a total reset on the nervous system. And it also correlates to babies when they come out the womb for about the first, they say, 12 to 18 months. Their baseline brainwave state is delta, and their nervous system foundation is being built. Right? They're so susceptible to all energies and nervous systems around them. Then we go to the theta state, known as that meditative between conscious and unconscious state, when your brain is oscillating between 4 and 8 Hertz and you are a sponge, you are hypnotic, susceptible to all energies around. And this is the important one for our youth because it correlates to the ages 2 to 7 that we call our formative years because they quite literally form us. We don't have a prefrontal, prefrontal cortex developed at that time, so we don't have the ability to discern reality ourselves. So if a caregiver or parent yells or does something unintentionally, our body doesn't know how to process that emotion, and it gets stuck in the body because we Just literally absorb it. There's an incredible book, the Body Keeps Score, that literally talks about how we're like grownups living in this adult meat suit, just projecting all of our stuck emotions and stories. Then you go to the third, the alpha state of the parasympathetic side, known as the flow state. Right. Like into an athlete in their zone. This is when the brain is oscillating between 8 and 14 hertz. The monkey mind is quiet. You're focused on one thing. You're awake and alert, but quiet, and you are still susceptible. Right. This correlates with the ages of 7 to 14, which is when we send children to school, because your prefrontal cortex is being developed and you have the ability to retain all of that information. So that's the parasympathetic side.
- [18:21]
A
What's really interesting to me, and as I sort of studied all this over years, is that the sympathetic activation happens automatically. Like, you. You don't really have to go into that on purpose. You don't go, oh, there's a tiger chasing me. I need to go get into a stress response so I can run. It just happens in an instant, like, almost. Almost milliseconds. And most of us have felt that if you're almost like in a car accident or something, you get that, like, whatever jolt, your body just goes boom. What I realize is entering into a parasympathetic state is a very deliberate, active process. It's not something that just happens to you. And often we can go through life never reaching that state. In a way, this is why HRV is so important, because it is an indirect indicator of the health of your autonomic nervous system and the way you regulate between stress and relaxation or between sympathetic and parasympathetic response.
- [19:18]
B
Your agility.
- [19:19]
A
Yeah, it's. It's like the flexibility. And we, you know, we know, for example, that if you look at. At people who are chronically ill, they have very low heart rate variability. If you look at heart failure patients, they have very low heart rate variability. The most healthy heart rate is the most complex. The simplest heart rate is the most dangerous. Other words, a flat line.
- [19:41]
C
Yep.
- [19:41]
B
Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. Right. A few ffi. Exactly.
- [19:45]
A
And so what we see is in heart failure patients, actually, when they look at their hrv, it's quite low. And then one of the interesting things I saw in science years ago that kind of got my attention was that if you do saunas in heart failure patients, they actually increase their hrv.
- [20:02]
C
Wow.
- [20:02]
A
And so there's a lot of tools to regulate hrv. We're going to get into all those, but need you to kind of help us understand what's actually happening with hrv. Because it's described as the beat to beat variability. In other words, your heart rate is in like 72, it's 71 and a quarter, it's 16 and nine and a third, it's 73 and four eighths, it's like, and it's the more that is happening, the healthier you are. But if it's like 72, 72, 72, 72, that's bad. So that's kind of the simple way of thinking about it. But you've said that HRV is the language of the body. How does that help us understand what's actually happening inside?
- [20:34]
B
If it is measuring that gap or variance between each beat, let's say your heart rate is 72. That means it's beating 72 beats per minute. And HRV is the measure of each of that variance between the 72 and a minute, meaning it is so variable and changes so much. So it's not about your real time HRV because that's fluctuating 72 times in a minute. And you want it to be variable. Right. So what is important is the higher variance between each of the beats. It indicates a more malleable and resilient nervous system that could handle the ever changing environment that we are always seeing. Right. On the flip side, a lower variance, meaning less of a gap between each beat, indicates a more rigid nervous system. And that which is rigid eventually breaks. So that's that analogy you said, like a death patient connected to heart monitor.
- [21:22]
A
You hear beep, beep, beep, beep, beep,
- [21:23]
B
Right before they go. There's no variation between that beep. That's not what you want, right? Rigidity will lead to breaking. So that's what's super important now, knowing that everyone's like, okay, well then what is a good HRV score?
- [21:36]
A
Right?
- [21:37]
C
Yeah.
- [21:38]
B
The question, and this is where science, which has researchers for so long, has yet to publish a range. The only thing that they have said scientifically is that it is so uniquely individualized to you, the person. And just like there's no two fingerprints in the world that are the same, there's actually no two heartbeats in the world that are the same. Meaning your HRV score is solely meant just for you.
- [22:01]
A
You said that yours was like 32 and you increased it to 100 by doing practices. Right. So you could change it.
- [22:06]
B
Oh, yeah, and we'll get into that.
- [22:07]
A
So I can't change my fingerprints, but I can change my HRV.
- [22:10]
B
You could. You could train your HRV, right? But me training it to 100, 170 doesn't mean that you're.
- [22:15]
A
Wait, are you 170 now?
- [22:17]
B
I got to 170. You know that. And I'm not that now. And we'll get into why that's what matters. Again, it's unlike, I have a few.
- [22:23]
A
I want a few. Yeah, just give me like, 50.
- [22:25]
B
I would happily give you all. You know that. You know that what's more important, right, is to utilize this biomarker as a language, right? And this is what I'm trying to share with the world. And when you think of languages, you don't think English is better than Spanish is better than French, right? The what's the intent of a language, a language? The intention is for an ecosystem within a community to communicate, right? The sole intent of your HRV score is only for your nervous system, for Dr. Mark Hyman's body to communicate with you. Right. The second you compare it to my hundred or to a number, you need to chase. What are you doing? If HRV is measuring how your nervous system is perceiving its reality, right. How do we perceive our reality? Through our senses, through our touch, through our taste, through our smell, through our eyes, through ears, but most of all through our thoughts, through our relationship to our environment. And if you are relating to you thinking you have a low HRV score and Saleem has a high HRV score, what are you telling your nervous system, system, you're not good enough. You need to be better. And so what's going to happen?
- [23:22]
A
It's going to do what I'm telling myself.
- [23:25]
B
It's going to stay in this quote, unquote, lower thing. So, yes, a higher HRV is a healthier nervous system, but higher for me is totally different than higher for you is totally different for higher than whoever is listening. So that's why I like to look at your HRV baseline and I define your HRV baseline as your average HRV score over the last 30 days. That is a good snapshot of the overall health of your nervous system in whatever you've been putting it through. And so if you're wearing a wearable and you wake up and you see your morning HRV score, let's say it's 40, right? And your baseline is 60. That's not a bad thing. Yes, it's a lower than your baseline, but that's not Bad. That's simply a language of your body. Saying whatever you did the day before is more of a load than your nervous system's been used to the last 30 days. The best thing you can do, listen to it. Honor it. Do something that nourishes your body, that gets you in a more parasympathetic state versus what we're also conditioned to do in this modern society. Push harder, work out harder, stay up late doing the same thing that you're doing. Listening is the key to seeing, over time, the baseline maintain and go up. However, we know it has been proven as you age, your HRV is going to decline because of all the stresses that you're putting it through. Right. So ideally, you want to see your baseline maintain and if possible, start to go up as you age, because in general, it will go down.
- [24:42]
A
Yeah. I noticed when I during COVID I went to Maui and I just stayed put and didn't travel and had a clear routine and went to bed at the same time, woke up every day at the same time, and my HRV
- [24:52]
B
actually doubled and doubling at a lower level. That's massive. Right. Going from whatever it was 16, 20 to 40 is as good as going from like 100 to 250. Right. It's not like that's how you need to think of it.
- [25:05]
A
But you say the score isn't the point. You say it's. It's sort of like a different way of thinking about a biomarker. Not like that. It should be like this perfect number.
- [25:12]
B
Totally. And that's what I find the biggest thing in clients and talking and seeing is that there's this, like, score shame or judgment because you think you HEAR Someone have 100, 170, you think you need to be there or you're not healthy. And that's not. Not how it works. It really is a unique language and listening to your own body because you notice better than anyone the body is the temple. The body knows how to heal itself if you just give it the tools and technology and nutrition to do so. Right. And HRV is just a compass guiding you to what is resonant with your body.
- [25:43]
C
Yeah.
- [25:44]
A
Amazing. So. So you work with clients and you help them, coach them on hrv. And we'll. We'll put a link into your. Your website. What's your website?
- [25:51]
B
That HRV guy dot com.
- [25:52]
A
That HRV guy dot com. Okay. And you can learn more about Selena's work there. But what do you do with your clients to help them improve their stress resilience? Because it's not about the number, like you said. It's just really about understanding how to work with stress in their nervous system. So it's not so much of a chronic problem.
- [26:11]
B
Totally.
- [26:11]
A
So what. What do you do with your clients around this?
- [26:13]
B
Yeah. So this is the question of, okay, how do you increase your hrv? What is. What is. What is the thing to do? So, and to. To answer that question, I think I want to just give a little background on, like, how I got to being so passionate about hrv.
- [26:25]
A
Right.
- [26:25]
B
So I grew up in upstate New York, and I'm the oldest of three in a first generation Lebanese family. And I lost my father from cancer at a young age of seven, which very much. That was formative years. Right. So that was shaping all of my programming and conditioning around how I go about. And it led to, you know, my caregiving, my belief I can't let people down. The sacrifice, which were all beautiful gifts that supported my journey. Right.
- [26:49]
A
You're a people pleaser too.
- [26:50]
B
Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's why we. That's. That's why we're such good friends, brother. And so I went to school for engineering and I graduated and I worked at a nuclear power plant that powered most of New York City. And it was during that time.
- [27:00]
A
Wait, was that Three Mile Island?
- [27:01]
B
Indian Point? No, Three Mile Indian Point.
- [27:04]
A
I was like, oh, are you. Are you radioactive? No.
- [27:06]
B
It was during that time that my grandmother, who was up my second mom, got diagnosed with breast cancer. And I was like, what is going on in the world in this thing called cancer? And that's when I went down the rabbit hole of health. I started listening and learning about you and all these incredible people who were sharing a different perspect on health and nutrition. And it was the first time that I realized, wow, we see what people want us to see. And there's so much more out there, right? So bring curiosity to it. And so I started with diet, with food, with exercise, right. And I came across ketosis about 18 years ago and fell in love with the energy and the clarity from cutting out sugar. And so I would just drink water and unsweetened tea for like three, four years. And a colleague at the power plant of mine loved bubbles. And we drink our yerba mate every day together. And one day we decided to. To brew, to mate, cool it, put it in a soda stream, and we made the first unsweetened sparkling tea sound. My last company, which you know all about. And so we quit the nuclear engineering job and went all in to launch a beverage Rather challenging industry, nuclear power
- [28:06]
A
to a beverage company.
- [28:07]
B
Yeah, yeah. And it was at the time that the beverage company launched that the biohacking movement emerged with the likes of Dave Asbury, Ben Greenfield, all these people. So my engineering mind went down every rabbit hole, obsessed with biohacking, wanting to optimize to the point where I was showing off. I was hacking my to five hours of sleep a night, running 10 miles every other day, listening to three audiobooks a week, raising money from 170 people in New York City, thinking I'm winning this game of life.
- [28:33]
A
Right?
- [28:33]
B
I did that for five years until my body broke down and my knee gave out. And that was the beginning of my inward journey. And that's when I read Dr. Joe Dispenza's book Becoming Supernatural. And it was the first time in literature that I saw this biomarker, HRV described relating to stress. And the second I read that, the light bulb went off. From my research around knowing what science has proven that chronic stress is the number one lead cause of cellular inflammation, which is the root cause of aging, disease and death. And so the past six years of my life have been a journey on understanding this biomarker, hrv. And that led me to creating this framework that I call the art of the heart. And art stands for awareness, regulation, transformation. And this is a three act arc that isn't a ladder you climb once and you made it to the top and you're regulated forever and your nervous system's set and you don't need to do anything, but it's one and done one and no, that's not how real life works. It's rather a daily act of devotion towards listening to your nervous system, towards utilizing HRV as a biomarker to support understanding what your body needs. So this is the framework that I bring to clients that I go talking about. And within this framework there are five pathways to HRV growth to support nervous system sovereignty that I talk talk about. So the first pathway is sleep as the foundation, which I know you know all too well, you talk about it on the podcast all the time and has everything to do with actually what you shared in the beginning of the podcast, really honoring your circadian rhythm from a nervous system perspective standpoint. Right. And if you are gypping that deepest parasympathetic state, that delta state of sleep, it's going to be very hard to see your HRV go up and to have sovereignty over your nervous system. So this kind of all relates to my story over the last six years rewind to me, showing off I was hacking my way to five hours of sleep was really not honoring my nervous system. It wasn't until I started honoring my sleep, revering my sleep, that I started seeing my HRV baseline, which when I started was 30, begin to go up step by step. And so outside of honoring your circadian rhythm, so many other things I know you talk about in terms of blue light exposure and eating, you know, how long to eat before bed. So so many different tools that you can utilize to support your sleep. And if you weave the art frame framework, that awareness, regulation, transformation to how you sleep, you could see what works for your body. So that's sleep the foundation. Second pathway is hormetic stress, the catalyst. And you talked about hormesis. And for those unfamiliar with it, hormetic stress is the philosophy of intentionally eliciting a stress on the body and then consciously getting your body out of it. Training. Right. The best analogy I give for that is weight training. When you go to the gym to lift your biceps, right. You're lifting more weight than the muscle can actually handle. Tearing the fibers in your muscle, body, bicep, what do you do the next day?
- [31:25]
C
Right? Yeah.
- [31:25]
B
So that the following day you can go and lift more weight.
- [31:28]
C
Yeah.
- [31:29]
B
Same thing with your nervous system. Put it in a conscious stressful state, contrast therapy, all these different things. Hot, cold, then consciously get it out of it. And the thing is, most people don't complete the equation until you go to sleep. Right. And so back to my story. I decided to continue running the beverage company, putting myself in arguably one of the most challenging industries, continuing to raise money. But throughout the day, multiple times, I would consciously drop my body into parasympathetic states using all of the biohacking technologies with the intention to bring a parasympathetic state to my body. Whether it was contrast therapy, whether it was pmf, whether it was binaural beats. I mean, my house had all the gadgets you could imagine. So I was literally training to be an emotional athlete for about three years. And it was that training that took me from the baseline of 30 to above 170, because I literally was putting myself in, in arguably for me, the most challenging, stressful situation. So good news for anybody listening. I don't think any human being has a problem putting themselves in a stressful state. We do it all the time. What I was the most guilty of, and most of us are, is not completing that equation and dropping into a parasympathetic side until we go to sleep. And this is Where NSDR non sleep deep rests. Right. That we talk about in the biohacking field. It's so important to do it throughout
- [32:45]
A
the day, to take a little break.
- [32:46]
B
To take a little break, to take a pause to do. And it could be as simple as just two minutes of box breathing or just. Just a long slow exhale. Right. Or they know, you know, the psychological side. Right. That resets the vagus nerve, calms the body. Breath is the freest tool to support changing your internal state. So that's pathway number two, hormetic stress. Pathway number three, reframing the shift before we go. Before the.
- [33:14]
A
We sort of jump up the hormetic stress.
- [33:15]
B
Yeah. Kind of double down on it.
- [33:17]
A
Yeah, yeah. Break down what. What are the most effective tools in that framework?
- [33:22]
B
Any. Anytime anyone asks me, like, what is the best thing, I always say for me, because it's so unique to the individual. And that's where HRV is such a powerful compass for you to test what actually resonates with your body. Cause cold plunging for me is great, but for some people, especially women, during certain ovulation cycles, it's not necessarily the best thing. So if you bring this art framework and awareness to whatever the thing is that you're doing, seeing if it regulates your body, seeing if your body's resonant for it, and then consistently showing up with that awareness and regulation will lead to the transformation to support your hrv. And so it's listening. And in a day and age where we are so blessed to be inundated with so much technology, so much information with AI helping do this diet, do this exercise, right, it's all amazing. But what works for me or for Brian Johnson or for whoever may have the opposite impact for someone else. So experiment yourself, because your body is the guru. Your body knows what is most resonant with it. And if you were like me, I could not. I was not attuned, I couldn't hear. I was too much up in here. And HRV supported started getting me to listen to my body. It was a biomarker that was objectively telling me what is resonant with my body.
- [34:31]
A
Like, what are the most things affecting. Like, is it a cold plunge? Is it a hot sauna?
- [34:35]
B
For me, the number one tool that I know I've shared with you, and I think you still do, nucom, that app, it's a. It's an app with a patented technology guaranteed to get your body in a parasympathetic state through binaural beats. So it essentially uses frequencies to Guide your brain into a desired theta state. And for me, while I was running the beverage company, it was so hard for me in the middle of the day to sit and meditate right when you're in it. It is so challenging. But they have this 20 minute power nap that Tony Robbins says the best power nap you could do. You listen to this track for 20 minutes and your mind slowly goes from that high beta state through alpha into theta and then gets you right back out of it.
- [35:11]
A
Yeah, I've used it. It's fun, it's good. So there's binaural beats, there's contrast therapy,
- [35:17]
B
there's breathwork, meditation, dancing, swimming, running, whatever is resonant. So many different things out there that I know you talk about so many, there's so many technologies and to use. Like I love all the biohacking technologies, but I was guilty the first five years of using it to do more and have more energy instead of to bring internal stillness, calmness, parasympathetic side to balance the equation.
- [35:42]
A
You talk about this idea of nervous system load and your baseline and the trends over time. And now there's all these tools to measure all its wearables and watches and rings. And what should we be kind of looking at and what should be people paying attention to and tracking?
- [35:57]
B
Great, great question. Because we didn't talk about how to track it. And most people nowadays, like myself, through wearables like Oura ring Whoop Apple watch, right? The thing to know all of these
- [36:05]
A
wearables, like if you do, if you measure multiple ones at the same time, you're gonna get different numbers on everyone.
- [36:10]
B
Totally. Because the aura and the whoop use RMSSID versus an Apple watch, which uses something else. So it'll be slightly higher versus athletes who use polar H straps that give you actually like the real time, but no wearable gives you real time hrv. What you're getting in your morning score is actually, actually your average nightly HRV reading. Right. And what that's a good indicator of is the overall health and load you put your nervous system through the day before because it's being taken when there's no external stimulation and you're lying down. Right. And so that's why listening to it and comparing it to your baseline is the best way to utilize these wearables and to not wake up and say, oh, I have a low score. That's bad, right? That is where then you stay perpetually in that low state because you are thinking it is bad. It's not bad, It's Your body saying, hey, yesterday was more of a load than I'm used to. Why don't you nourish me a little more today?
- [37:01]
A
You know, you can use use any of these devices and it's sort of an internally consistent metric, but if you jump between devices, you're going to see different measurements.
- [37:09]
B
You're going to see. So what I say, the best device to use is the one that you'll use consistently. Right. The one that's the most consistent that you could actually take day to day and understand what your baseline is.
- [37:19]
A
All right, I want to go back to your art framework and the five pathways.
- [37:22]
B
So we talked about sleep.
- [37:23]
A
It's awareness, regulation, and transformation. Those are the three, right?
- [37:27]
B
Those are the three that weave between each pathway. Right. And so pathway one, sleep. We said pathway two, hormetic stress, pathway three, reframing the shift. Right. And so if we go back to my story, I, for the next four years continued running the beverage company, taking my HRV from 30 to a 170 baseline, thinking, I'm winning this game of life, right? Good HRV score. On the outside, the beverage company was doing great. We were at a number two beverage in Whole Foods on the east coast, opening up in 3,000 retailers outside. Amazing. Internally, to keep up with that demand in the beverage space, you need a lot of capital. And I was struggling, raising an enough money to keep the beverage going, getting myself in a lot of debt and internal stress. And it was my birthday about three years ago, and in front of all of our community, I declared and asked I wanted to step into less, doing more being a common statement echoed amongst entrepreneurs approaching burnout. And I got gifted from everybody. Ali pulled together the community to give me a Super 73 electronic bike, this Burning man bike that I wanted so badly. And I take said bike for its first spin on the Venice boardwalk. The sun is setting and I'm like, oh, it's gonna work out. Take a deep breath. The money's going to come in. It always happens. And I get in the silliest accident that anteriorly dislocates my right shoulder, tears my Labrum and fractures 30% of my shoulder socket off. I had to go to the ER for them to dislocate to relocate it. I wake up the next morning still in pain. But more importantly, my mind's like, how can this happen now? How am I going to raise money? Why, why, why, why? And my HRV, which at the time baseline 170 dropped to 30, my body screaming, it was not happy, right? Thankfully, I had A call with my coach, coach that day, and I tell him the story, and he breaks out laughing. And I go, what the hell is so funny? And he goes, let's break down the body spiritually. The arms represent the doing. The torso to body represents the being. The shoulder connects the doing to the being. What did you ask for on your birthday? Less doing, more being. What did you get? Exactly what you asked for from the gift in front of everybody, Everybody that you asked for it. How can you not laugh at the cosmic joke of what I call the educational simulation? And the second he said that, I broke out laughing. I was like, oh, my God. My body is screaming for me to let go of this beverage because I had poured every ounce of my soul into it nine years. But I was running on the story of I can't let people down, I can't let my investors down, I can't let my family down. That I was not letting go of it. I had started talking about hrv, coaching hrv, but I blindfolded, not letting go of this business. And I was like, you know what? Okay, I'm gonna listen and I'm gonna let go of it. And I shit you not, 24 hours later, same dislocated shoulder, same pain, but my HRV tripled to 97, simply from changing my relationship to the injury happening for me. Yeah, that is the power of reframing and how much your relationship.
- [40:12]
A
You always said to me, it didn't happen to you, it happened for you. I'm like, yeah, shut up. I did.
- [40:16]
B
And I'm gonna keep saying that to you. Right? And so that's the importance of reframing in that pathway, which is very underestimated. And it's the center. It's the center.
- [40:25]
A
Well, that's. It goes to sort of a deeper framework of understanding your life, which is often we fight against reality. Byron. Katie talks a lot about this, arguing with reality. And the opposite of that is loving what is. And it's such a simple, obvious framework. But, you know, it's hard for us to do. It's really hard for us to go, not why is this happening to me? But why is this happening for me? And I. I'm guilty of that like everybody else.
- [40:55]
B
Me too.
- [40:55]
A
And. And I'm like, oh, God, you know, things are hard or this happens or that happens, like why? And. And then go, oh, this is actually in service of something that I can't quite see yet. It sounds kind of woo, woo, and. And crazy, but I think the more I've lived and I'M kind of old now, so I've had a few turns around the sun. It's truer every year. It's like relax around what's happening and just trust in the unfolding, even if it's a difficult moment and not fight it, but just feel it. It's a huge life hack. It doesn't mean you don't go through pain or suffering or discomfort. It just means your relationship to it
- [41:37]
B
is different and it's the relationship that matters. And that's why I intentionally call it an educational simulation for my mind to realize, especially when it's a more challenging thing, like, oh yeah, what is the medicine in this for me to learn? I allow myself to be in it, to grieve, to whatever, but then pull back and bring awareness, that art framework awareness to wait, why is this actually happening? For me, that is where the importance of this art framework, especially in the reframing to bring awareness to what is actually happening and then learning to use different tools to support regulating what is going on in the internal state. So that's refreshed next path. So we have sleep as the foundation, hormetic stress reframing before we jump out
- [42:16]
A
of the reframe the reframing.
- [42:18]
B
Yeah.
- [42:18]
A
I think this is really about perception, right? It's about how we interpret reality and how that affects our nervous system. Like I said, stress is the real or imagined touch of your body, your ego. So it could be a real threat to your body or an imagined threat to your ego that you're making up in your head has nothing to do with actually happening. And so you talk about this idea of metacognition, about kind of awareness of your thought patterns and how to re kind of look at your emotions from a different perspective. So. So I think it's important for people to understand this because it requires a bit of this witness consciousness they talked about in meditation where you're sitting. I've done 10 day meditation retreats and after a while you're sitting there and you're like, yeah, there's my crazy mind going, doing its thing. And so you have the awareness of the awareness and it's like this meta framework of seeing yourself doing your thing and it kind of takes you out of identifying with the experience and being in it. It's more the being of it, it not in it. And that of not in is a really interesting framework. And this is kind of what you're talking about, right?
- [43:14]
B
It's a thousand percent what I'm talking about. And metacondition now is proven to be the highest form of intelligence and intellect.
- [43:19]
C
Right.
- [43:19]
B
And metacognition, meaning awareness of your thoughts, awareness of your internal state.
- [43:24]
C
Right.
- [43:25]
B
And by doing so, it totally changes the dynamic of your nervous system. Just looking at it from a nervous system perspective, because all a nervous system ever wants safety, right? You talked about how we don't need to turn on the sympathetic state. It automatically happens because it's programmed in us for thousands of years to automatically. If we see a tiger. Oh, fired at, Right? We know that. Right. So it's a pattern that's there. And it's an on off switch.
- [43:47]
C
Right.
- [43:48]
B
I liken the nervous system. I have an analogy to hospitals in Florida. They have this fail safe button where if a tornado or hurricane is coming. Right. Metal shades and come down to protect everybody from getting hurt. Brilliant program put in place to save people. What happens if a shooter's in the building and someone hits that button? Not so brilliant of a program, but it was birthed from a brilliant place. That's how our nervous systems want when that amygdala fires off. No on off switch, no access to the prefrontal cortex, to all of our knowledge, our intuition, everything we know, we go back here. So the more we can bring metacognition and awareness and be like, oh, actually, I am spinning over this email. I'm okay. Physically, I'm totally fine. Let me take a breath, let me go respond to the email, but let me respond to it from this place versus the limbic automatic place that we're so used to firing.
- [44:36]
C
Whether I'm having a demanding week, pushing myself through a tough workout, or simply trying to keep up with everything on my plate, I know my body is constantly being asked to respond and to recover. And that's why I think resilience is one of the most important markers of long term health. And one of the best tools I found for that, both personally and clinically, is infrared sauna use. I think of it the same way I think about exercise. It's a beneficial stressor. You're signaling your body to adapt, recover to come back stronger. And that's one reason I make time for regular sunlight and sauna sessions. What sets sunlight and apart is their pulse IQ technology. It delivers red light along with near mid and far infrared wavelengths independently. So you're getting a more personalized infrared experience, not simply blended wavelengths. And whether you're just getting started or looking for a more advanced setup, sunlight offers options for different homes, lifestyles and budgets. And if you're looking for another way to build resilience sauna therapy may be worth exploring. Visit sunlighten.com and use the code HYMAN to save up to $2,100 plus free shipping.
- [45:31]
A
One of the most powerful things you
- [45:32]
C
can do for your health is cook more of your meals at home. When you prepare your own food, you have control over the quality of ingredients, the oils you use, the amount of sugar and processed foods you're eating, even the materials you cook with. And that last part matters more than most people realize. A lot of cookware contains chemical coatings that can break down over time, especially with high heat cooking. And that's one reason I've been using Made in Stainless clad cookware. It's completely free of coatings, built with high quality stainless steel and designed for even heating and better heat control. Whether you're sauteing veggies, cooking fish or searing protein. Their cookware is used in over 4,000 top rated restaurants, but it's also incredibly practical for everyday cooking at home. If you're looking to upgrade to clean cookware that will actually last, go to maidenware.com and use the code hyman-hive for 10% off your first first order.
- [46:22]
A
So it's a helpful, it's helpful and it's, it's, it takes a practice like, I think to be aware of your mind and not identified with your mind is a tough thing. You know, Viktor Frankl, man, search for meaning, talked about this simple idea where he, he didn't let his Nazi captors in Auschwitz control his thinking in his mind. And he's like, you know, he says in between stimulus and response, there's a pause. And in that pause lies a choice. And that choice lies your freedom. And what he means is like you, you have a pause, pause. And that pause doesn't happen for most of us. It can be a millisecond between stimulus and response. But what you're talking about is trying to figure out how to sort of exercise the muscle, allows you to create more than a millisecond, allows you to create a pause between your stimulus and your response. And the stimulus is the stimulus. That's just going to be what it is. But how you respond to it, as opposed to reacting to it is a
- [47:20]
B
very different framework that's likened to the space between each heartbeat, which is your hrv. Right. And for me, the biggest practice that has supported my journey, that I work with clients I know I've worked with you on, is a morning practice to get you to remember that right, to tether to that. Because I had a mentor once say so beautifully as humans, we all came here to remember and forget, remember and forget, remember and forget. The mastery comes from shortening the gap between remembering and forgetting, right? So the more consistent you do that, the more consistent you remind yourself that, oh, yeah, it's happening for me. Let me ground into that. Let me go out in the world. I'm going to forget. That's what we're here for, to forget. But let me shorten that gap between forgetting and remembering.
- [48:03]
A
That's the third thing.
- [48:05]
B
The fourth pathway is intentionality, the alignment.
- [48:10]
A
Right.
- [48:10]
B
And so back to my story. I said, okay, I'm going to let go of this beverage. But I wanted to see if there's a way I could still salvage for myself and the investors. And it took about six months, but we ended up finding a holding company that acquires distressed beverages. We put an APA and asset purchase agreement together. So they purchased our brand and asset. They took our cap table and our 170 investors who own some of the new company. They took the debt to continue from the suppliers to continue producing, but the rest of the debt fell on the company's shoulder, which we dissolved and literally fell on my shoulder. So I had to go through personal bankruptcy, right? Which was the last attachment of my beautiful mind and ego to its identity. And so I did. Most people do.
- [48:50]
A
But you're going to be a multi billionaire founder of a beverage, right?
- [48:53]
B
Oh, that. That's what I have my mindset on. And then, and then all of that goes away. And so I. I go to Bali to eat, pray, love, and find myself, right? And every morning in Bali, I contemplate my beautiful wish, less doing, more being. And every morning, my beautiful incessant mind would come on, say, but we love doing. We're so good at doing. What are we going to do if we're not doing until one morning, I have an epiphany. That statement, less doing and more being is mind made and dualistic in nature. And it implies that doing and being are mutually exclusive when the reality is we're always being, even though we're unaware of it 99% of the time. And we're always doing, even if we're sitting or sleeping or breathing. So it's actually not about doing less and being more. It's about the intentionality in your doing, the why behind your doing and the how you're doing it, and the how you're doing it. And the reason it came to me was I was reading the Bhagavad Gita and one of my favorite Quotes from the Bhagavad Gita and is you have a right to your actions but never your actions. Fruit act solely for the action's sake and don't be attached to inaction. Meaning we all came here with a right to act, to create, to do. We don't have a right to the outcome of our doing and we must solely act for our intention, for our why. And what I've come to find with HRV is it is a compass telling you how aligned you are with your body and your highest self and your ultimate purpose. And a compass needs three points to try and triangulate. So for hrv, point one is what you're perceiving. Point two is how you're reacting, how you're responding to what you're perceiving. And point three is something to compare it to your why and most people. I was so guilty of running on an old why. I can't let people down. I need to sacrifice. I need to support. And I wasn't auditing what was actually resonant with my body in that time. And so to intentionally take the time, which I do in my morning practice, to audit your why, to ground into your purpose and then go about doing actions that align with that. Your HRV will go up because your nervous system is resonant with the actions that you're taking in life. So that's the importance of intentionality in your path toward the HRV we're really
- [51:03]
A
talking about is integrity. Like integrity with yourself, with yourself, with your word, with your body and alignment is. Is sort of how you get into integrity.
- [51:11]
B
One thousand and most of us are
- [51:13]
A
somehow living in a world where we're doing things for others.
- [51:17]
B
Well, we're listening to our. We're up here. We're in our story. We're in our ego, which again was birthed from a brilliant place and needed. Right. I needed my ego to think. I needed to support, I needed to sacrifice so I could build everything I built and be on this journey. Right. Your biggest wound is your greatest gift. Always. Always. It's just not a lot. It's about not allowing it to be in the driver's side seat 99% of the time. Bringing awareness and sovereignty. Being like, actually this is good here, but I'm going to laugh at you the other 99% because it's not needed anymore.
- [51:46]
A
Okay.
- [51:47]
B
The fifth, the fifth one. You're going to love this one community, the Amplifier. And I know this comes as no surprise especially to you. Every blue zone in the world a pillar Is community the longest study in human history to 80 year Harvard study. Right. That followed 72 youth from Boston, age 18, in every aspect of their lives, from medical records to interviews with spouses, colleagues, children, to find out what led to a longer, healthier, happier life. Right. And after 80 years, three generations of scientists, all this research, they came back with one thing, and that was relationships.
- [52:20]
C
Yeah.
- [52:20]
A
Community.
- [52:20]
B
And not quantity, but quality. And from a nervous system perspective, that has everything, again, to do with all the nervous system wants is safety. And one of the best ways that we feel most safe is being authentically seen by a mirror by another human. Right? Not needing to wear a mask. Mask. Just being our most authentic self and resonating with other people who are on that similar frequency. So community is the amplifier.
- [52:46]
A
It's huge. But here's a question, Salim. You know, it's easy to say that, and I obviously say it a lot, and community is medicine. It's as powerful as food is medicine. But creating it and having it is not as easy as saying it.
- [53:00]
B
Yeah.
- [53:00]
A
I mean, it's easier to change your diet than to instantly create a community that you belong to. And to create a sense of belonging, longing and connection.
- [53:09]
B
And this is such a good question. And this every time I get asked this question, I go back, my sister shout out to her. She's a big fan of you. A functional medicine Dr. Christine. And she reached out to me when I moved to la because I had somehow just got this beautiful community all around. She's like, salim, I miss you. You're not here. I'm so desperately seeking community. Like, what do I need to do? How come? And I responded saying, this didn't just happen, happen overnight. And the reality is, again, I believe this is an educational simulation. And I believe in quantum science and physics has proven what we are perceiving, we are creating, right? Via the double slit experiment and the observer effect, right? Like we are actually turning the electrons from a wave into a particle with our perception, right? And so essentially, everything is a mirror. And if you want community, you need to first and foremost cultivate whatever you're seeking in internally, right? That is the most important thing. So whatever. If you're saying I'm seeking community first. And I had a mentor tell me this. When I went to him, asking Erwin, he was like, well, what is it that you seek in a community? What do you want? Have you ever thought about that? And so I journaled about it. And then I would spend time intentionally getting myself into that frequency, into that state. And then I end up Materializing beautiful humans like you in my life.
- [54:24]
A
Wow, that sounds. That's a little vague, Salim. I love it. Essentially, materialize me. Okay.
- [54:31]
B
Be the thing that you want in a community and then you end up putting out this vibration of other people who are matching that resonance.
- [54:40]
C
Right.
- [54:40]
A
Rather than coming from a needy place, nourish yourself, cultivate your own inner well being. And that will naturally attract people in
- [54:48]
B
the time, if you are authentically doing that. So the first step that I give to someone who asks this question is actually write down what do you want in a community? Because most of you are like, oh, I see Mark with this brittle computer. Like I want that. What is it that you actually, actually want? Right. Journal about that. That would be my step one.
- [55:03]
A
And you have to be deliberate about it. We invest so much time in all sorts of things, work and emails and whatever. But it takes a conscious, deliberate, consistent set of responses to your life to actually cultivate and develop friends and community. And to me, as I get older is the most important thing in my life. Everything else just sort of like whatever. And I think this is such a key framework. So we've got sleep. Right. The foundation, hormetic stress. Like saunas, cold plunges, stress training, reframing the shift. So looking at your, your thoughts and
- [55:38]
B
being, your relationship to your stories. Yeah.
- [55:41]
A
Being in integrity with your purpose and alignment with who you are and not living somebody else's life. And then building community, which helps sort of cultivate all the response. So this is a good roadmap. I love these five pathways. They're great on a day to day basis, when you're coaching someone, like what are you doing with them? Like how do you kind of help them go through and because the point isn't to get your HRV number better, it's to help your nervous system become, as you say, sovereign. How do you coach people to do that?
- [56:08]
B
So it's essentially weaving that art framework, awareness, regulation and transformation into each of these pathways in their unique way. So it's first getting a baseline of kind of where they're at and what the stresses in their life are and really changing their relationship to understand. You know, we talked about, I mentioned the educational simulation. Right. And so I wanna just break down what is happening in your. When you perceive a stress or a threat. Right?
- [56:34]
A
Yeah.
- [56:34]
B
And the reality is when we see a stress or a trigger beneath what we are perceiving, what we are seeing, there's always an emotion or multiple emotions associated with this challenge, right?
- [56:45]
A
Yeah.
- [56:45]
B
And directly connected to that emotion is a Physical sensation that's stuck in the body. And if you peel the onion one layer deeper, an emotion, as we talked about on a quantum level, it's just a scalar wave of energy. It's free frequency. There is no such thing as a good or bad emotion. And as humans, we're actually meant to feel every emotion on the spectrum. Grief, anger, love, joy. Feel it for, they say, about 90 seconds. Until the wave moves through us.
- [57:10]
C
Yeah.
- [57:10]
A
Instead of staying stuck in it.
- [57:11]
B
Instead of staying stuck in it. However, most of us, and especially in that formative years when the baseline brainwave state is theta and we don't know how to process the emotion and we don't have a prefrontal cortex to discern it ourselves, that scalar wave of frequency that's supposed to move, move through us freezes. And I like to think of it forming a glacier in the fascia in our body, right? And so all the emotion wants is to be felt, but now we have a whole story around it. You know, you, you mentioned zebras and there's this analogy I Give. There's a YouTube video of a deer eating grass on the side of a road and getting clipped, right? And the, the video stays on the deer and for about a minute it looks like it's dead. Then all of a sudden it gets up and it does this kind of like tremor thing and you think it would run for, for its life. Instead it goes right back to eating grass like nothing ever happened. Why? Because that tremor, was it moving that stuck frozen emotion out. And then there's no more story and they just get to be in the present moment and they're eating grass like nothing happened. But we as humans, we love story. So this frozen glacier that's in our fascia, we create a whole world around it that we project on our friends, on our relationships, on our business. And all it wants is to be felt. Right? And, and so, you know the number one fear in humans, documented stage fright, public speaking.
- [58:23]
C
Right.
- [58:23]
B
It was a big, big fear of mine. And I used to get on stage or do podcasts and I get this knot in my stomach and I used to think the knot came because I'm on a stage. The reality is that I co created this stage in this experience and this podcast to feel what I am calling an uncomfortable knot that really is just a stuck frozen emotion about my self worth or whatever the story is. So if you can feel, and you said that earlier, if you can feel into your, your body, that is what gets the emotion to move. But it is very Challenging to feel when you are triggered in a stressful state, right, that on, off, switch. So what I work on is learning to train to be an emotional athlete and feel these stuck, frozen emotions before it actually happens in real life. And that looks like essentially in whatever practice you do, sitting and intentionally with your mind eliciting the stress or the trigger or whatever it is story you're stuck in. And as soon as you feel that emotion, that stuck frozen glacier elicited, you drop out of the story, you drop out of the visual, you drop out of your mind and you drop into a somatic awareness practice where you are just physically describing the sensations in your body. And by putting your attention on the sensation without the story, you're giving this emotion all it wants. All it wants is to be felt and not judged and put in this box. And if you do that over time, the glacier melts. And then when the thing happens in real life, the on, off, switch isn't as strong and you have access to your preference frontal cortex. And this is, that's the grown up in the room. That's the grownup in the room, not the little child in the room. And this is why athletes, you know, I got approached by a sports agency because they're like our hall of fame best athletes. They all have much higher HRVs than regular athletes. Like, why would that be the thing? And I was like, oh, that makes so much sense physiologically. Michael Jordan, when he used to approach a game seven free throw, right, he wasn't there thinking what everybody outside is looking at, like, oh my God, this is such a high stakes stressful. He was like, this is just another free throw. I'm cool and calm. Which means he was using his prefrontal cortex. His amygdala wasn't firing off, so he had access to all of his muscle memory. Because your muscle memory is in the prefrontal cortex. Of the thousands of free throws he took versus another athlete who isn't as cool and calm as Michael Jordan approaches that same thing. His amygdala fires, he's back here. Guess what? He could have taken more free throws than Michael Jordan, but he doesn't have access to that muscle memory. So you're adjusting agility to shift states. Your sovereignty over your internal state is so important to how you go about responding to the external world.
- [60:50]
A
A lot of us just kind of push through it, right? We don't really stop to reset our system. We just kind of. And I guilty of this, you know, just kind of go, go, go, go.
- [60:59]
B
Guilty of it.
- [61:00]
A
And override my body sensations, override my body signals. Don't listen to the feeling. And how do you help people sort of unlearn that habit? Asking for a friend?
- [61:09]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, and Mark, the reason why I talk about this and I work on this, it's funny, I think the thing, and I've told you this, the thing that we do and we're most passionate about is the thing we need the most. So I need nervous system sovereignty more than anybody else, hence why I'm so passionate about it. And it is really just discipline and showing up with compassion for yourself when that happens. Because again, people like, I can't believe I said that again. I can't believe I did that again. When they react automatically in situations, situations, you need to have compassion because that's just the little kid in you running their old program. So if you can train outside of the stressful situation to learn to feel that suck emotion, you will have more sovereignty as the next time that it happens. Right?
- [61:55]
A
Yeah. So it's really about, it's about developing like a training. Like if you want to lift weights, I mean, you can't start with like 50 pushups, you have to do five. Right. And so it's really about the training that you're about talking, talking about and the daily training. And I, and I've been doing this every morning. I do breath work, I do meditation, I do some qigong practices. And it really helps me to kind of ground my nervous system every day and easily come back to that throughout the day. You were going to teach me some Tibetan breath thing. I want to learn that too. But like, I think there's all sorts of tools and techniques and practices out there. But it's important that people take this seriously because if you don't learn how to actively relax, it sounds amazing, almost like a kind of oxymoron, like to actively do nothing. But it's really hard to activate your parasympathetic system unless you're really deliberate about it. So I think different people can be attracted to different practices, but it is something you have to be deliberate about, whether it's breath work, whether it's yoga, whether it's meditation, whether it's qigong, whether
- [62:53]
B
it's simple box breathing, washing dishes, whatever. And that's where the art framework, bringing awareness to what works and resonates with you to get your body in that parasympathetic activation. Right? And so there's not one right thing. And I'm not here saying do, I'm saying Just listen to your body and what's resonant with it. And HRV for me has been an objective biomarker that is telling you what is resonant and supporting, guiding you to flex that muscle.
- [63:19]
A
And you'll say, you know, maybe you do the same thing, but how you feel inside is different. Right? So they say. You know, in the Zen Buddhists say, before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
- [63:29]
B
It's just your relationship to it is totally different. It's totally different. Totally different.
- [63:34]
A
Amazing. So, Celine, thank you for diving into this whole field and getting it out there. I think it's important people understand this because people hear stress. They don't really have a framework for understanding what to do or how to navigate it and how to track it. I think people can go to that. Hrbguy.com learn more about you, your work, your coaching platform, get help if they need it, find you on Instagram. And what is your same thing?
- [63:57]
B
That HRV guy. Thanks to Allie T H A T HRV guy. Yeah. And you can find all social everything through that. And the one thing, I guess I'd
- [64:05]
A
leave the audience like the cable guy.
- [64:07]
B
HRV guy. Yeah, the one thing I think my favorite, you know, philosophy that a mentor teacher taught me, that really supported, you know, that reframing pathway and just cultivating a different relationship with life. So intentional with your words and your thoughts. Right. Because that's what creates your reality. And instead of saying, I have a good HRV score, a bad HRV score, this person's good or bad or right or wrong or blue versus red bad, I use dissonant or resonant. Right. Because everything's just frequency. And if something is dissonant for me, it could be resonant for you. And if something's dissonant for me today, tomorrow I could wake up and it's actually resonant. But by not labeling it bad today, tomorrow, my nervous system won't lock up because I didn't label it bad. I labeled it dissonant. And it is open and more malleable to being, seeing how I feel in that moment. Right. So anytime I catch myself or someone saying, oh, that was good. That was. I was like dissonant or resonant.
- [65:01]
A
Beautiful, Beautiful. Well, thank you, Celine. Thanks for your. Your creativity around helping people frame this differently and think about it. And thanks for your work and ready to check out your stuff. And thanks for being on the podcast, man.
- [65:12]
B
Thank you for having me and thank you for all you've done in this world. Such an inspiration. I love you Mark.
- [65:17]
D
If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at rmark Hyman. Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and and questions. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to the Dr. Hyman show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Dr. Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on the Dr. Hyman Show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness center, my work at Cleveland Clinic, and Function Health where I am Chief Medical Officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, please seek out a qualified medical practitioner. And if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, visit my clinic, the Ultra Wellness center at ultrawellnesscenter.com and request to be Become a patient. It's important to have someone in your corner who is a trained, licensed healthcare practitioner and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health. This podcast is free as part of my mission to bring practical ways of improving health to the public, so I'd like to express gratitude to sponsors that made today's podcast possible. Thanks so much again for listening.