Master Stress in 10 Seconds with THIS Heartbeat Technique : 1354

Summary

Podcast Summary

Podcast: The Human Upgrade: Biohacking for Longevity & Performance
Host: Dave Asprey
Episode: Master Stress in 10 Seconds with THIS Heartbeat Technique (Ep. 1354)
Guest: Dr. Rollin McCraty, Director of Research at HeartMath Institute
Date: October 30, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the science and practice of heart rate variability (HRV) and heart coherence, revealing how just minutes per day of targeted heart-focused training can dramatically improve stress resilience, mental performance, sleep, emotional well-being, and even social connection. Dave Asprey and Dr. Rollin McCraty discuss the latest research from HeartMath, the physiological mechanisms at play, and real strategies for using coherence techniques to upgrade your biology—plus, the fascinating heart-brain-earth connection and how regulating your “inner rhythm” contributes to longevity and performance.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What Is Heart Rate Variability (HRV) and Why Does It Matter?

• HRV Definition: The variation in time between each heartbeat, not the average heart rate (02:20).
  • “The heart does not beat like a metronome... a sign of good health, of resilience, and our ability to self-regulate has to do with how much of this variation goes on in the time intervals between each pair of heartbeats.” — Dr. McCraty (02:37)
• Good HRV: More variation signals a better ability to adapt and regulate stress.
• HRV vs Heart Rate: HRV is like the “music” your heartbeat plays, revealing inner rhythms and coherence (03:32–04:11).

2. The Physiology of HRV: The Four “Drummers” (Rhythms)

• Fastest Rhythm: Breathing (linked to “vagal tone”; measured by rmssd) (06:51–07:21).
• Resonant Frequency: A 10-second rhythm (0.1 Hz), representing heart-brain coherence. This is the focus of HeartMath training (09:23–10:17).
• Very Low Frequency (VLF): A 5-minute rhythm, the “granddaddy” for health/resilience prediction (21:05–21:43).
• Circadian & Planetary Rhythms: 24-hour and multi-day cycles, influencing our biological state and syncing with Earth’s magnetic fields (21:54–22:16).

3. Coherence Training: How & Why It Works

• Real-Time Biofeedback: HeartMath’s earlobe sensor gives second-by-second feedback to train yourself into a coherent state, unlike wearables that only analyze trends (10:36–12:20).
• Creating a New Baseline: Regular practice (even five minutes a day) “reprograms” your physiology, making calm, coherent response your new natural state.
  • “We are literally... creating a new baseline in our physiology, in our brain, in our nervous system.” — Dr. McCraty (13:11)
• Practical Outcomes: Noticeable reduction in fight-or-flight triggers, improved self-awareness, and better transfer of meditation benefits to daily life (13:20–14:26).

4. Measuring Coherence & Its Impact

• Heart-Driven Synchrony: The heart, not the brain, is the “conductor” for bodily coherence. Information from the heart organizes the whole brain’s electrical activity (14:31–14:53).
• Training Transfer: After consistent practice, you can self-regulate without the sensor—you’ve created a physiological habit (15:30–15:54).
• Benefits: Enhanced composure, reduced overreaction to stressors, and more emotional energy for meaningful tasks (16:10–16:19).

5. Group & Social Coherence: The Science of Energetic Connection

• Heart-to-Heart Synchronization: Groups of well-connected people show synchronized HRV patterns—even at a distance (18:48–20:26).
• Social Applications: Practicing coherence together (even virtually) can bond a group at the physiological level and enhance collective well-being (33:59–34:19).

6. The Earth's Fields and Human Health

• Field Resonance: Our bodies naturally sync with resonant rhythms in Earth’s magnetic fields—especially at 0.1 Hz (27:17–28:13).
• Geomagnetic Storms: Solar flares and field disturbances can bring more hospitalizations and mood instability; coherence practice can “solar-flare proof” you (32:44–33:29).

7. Breathwork, HRV, and State Shifting

• Heart-Focused Breathing: Five seconds in, five seconds out through the chest, at your natural resonant frequency.
  • Avoid box-breathing (equal in/out/hold) for coherence; use sine-wave-like, smooth breathing (35:22–35:31).
• Tuning State: Longer out-breaths slow the heart, longer in-breaths amp you up—useful tools depending on performance needs (36:24–38:19).
• “The Something Else”: Achieving coherence requires both the rhythm and an intentional shift in feeling/emotion for optimal results (35:54–36:12).

8. Research Highlights & Performance Effects

• Cognitive & Physical Health:
  • Regular training improves vascular health in the brain, reduces biomarkers for Alzheimer's, increases connectivity for emotional regulation, and slows aging (49:11–49:51).
  • “Brains were becoming younger. Significantly reduced levels of amyloid beta and tau. Greater white matter in the frontal cortex. Increased functional connectivity between the frontal cortex and the amygdala.” — Dr. McCraty (49:11–49:50)
• Elite Performance: Top athletes (e.g., world champion tennis players, ocean rowing teams) and high-stakes professionals (hedge fund managers) use coherence training for sustained composure, better decisions, and resilience (53:35–55:09).

9. Practical “How-To” and Getting Started

• Beginner Protocol:
  • Week 1: 5 minutes morning + 5 minutes evening.
  • Week 2: 10 minutes twice daily.
  • Week 3: 15–20 minutes (51:00–51:19).
• Training “In Real Life”:
  • After you can easily reach coherence while sitting still, practice during phone calls, meetings, or traffic to master stress in daily challenges (51:56–52:26).
• Five Minutes a Day is Enough: Start small to create a baseline — it’s cumulative and sticky (38:58, 50:09).

10. Emotional Self-Regulation, Social Intelligence, and Spiritual Implications

• Regulation = Freedom: When you can regulate your emotional state, you’re less likely to be triggered by others—more autonomy, less energy leakage (16:19–17:16).
• Love as a Frequency: The most direct path to higher consciousness and awareness is to intentionally radiate love—a literal, measurable frequency (65:08–67:23).
  • “The straightest line path to rapidly increasing my level of awareness and consciousness is to radiate love.” — Dr. McCraty (65:08)
• Measurability: Patterned, coherent states are measurable in the heart’s electromagnetic fields and influence those around you, even unconsciously (66:33–67:55).
• Congruence & Social Connection: Your inner emotional state transmits, affecting trust, attraction, and group bonding (69:36–71:36).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “I made more personal gain and progress in three to four months than I did in years of meditation.”
  — Dr. Rollin McCraty (00:07, 58:42)

• “If you can go in and regulate your sympathetic fight or flight response by learning this technique… It’s not just ‘take a deep breath’…”
  — Dave Asprey (17:16)

• “When we really form relationships that are meaningful, we are forming a group level field.”
  — Dr. McCraty (20:36)

• “We are literally now… creating a new baseline in our physiology, in our brain, in our nervous system.”
  — Dr. McCraty (13:11)

• “Just five minutes a day for a few weeks… not metaphor, it’s real: new baseline.”
  — Dr. McCraty (38:58)

• “When you learn how to do it [coherence], you can hug someone and it’ll change them.”
  — Dave Asprey (71:33)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• HRV Explanation: 02:20–04:11
• The Four Rhythms: 06:51–10:17, 21:05–21:43
• Coherence Training Mechanics: 10:36–14:26, 15:30–16:19
• Group Synchrony: 18:48–20:26
• Earth Fields & Solar Flares: 27:17–33:29
• Breathwork Details: 35:04–38:19
• Training Progression (How-To): 50:10–52:26
• Performance/Health Science: 48:43–49:51
• Social and Energetic Connection: 66:33–71:36
• Core Wisdom — “Radiate Love” Advice: 65:08–67:55

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Takeaway Protocols & Action Steps

• Start with 5–10 minutes daily of heart-focused, slow and smooth breathing through the chest, using a biofeedback sensor if you can.
• After baseline, practice maintaining coherence in real-world situations.
• Coherence isn’t just breathing; include an intentional feeling of calm/compassion/gratitude.
• For relationships or teams: Practice synchronous coherence together to deepen connection and resilience.
• Remember: “Pause throughout your day, check: What are you feeding the field?” (68:10–68:43).

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Final Note

The science and practice of heart coherence, as advanced by Dr. McCraty and HeartMath, is fast, measurable, accessible, and radically effective for elevating human resilience and performance. As Dave Asprey sums up:
“This is five or 10 minutes a day… and then you’re less of a dick for the rest of your life. Just, that happened to me.” (61:45)

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Resources:

• HeartMath for sensors and studies
• InsideTrack for Dave’s science newsletter

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For anyone who hasn’t listened, this episode offers actionable science, vivid metaphors, and a clear, compassionate path to emotional self-mastery—backed by 30 years of rigorous research and personal transformation.

Transcript

[Dave Asprey]

Hundreds of times a day, my body, without any awareness from me, was going into fight or flight mode over and over.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

That's when we tend to have foggy thinking, poor performance, rapid aging. Once I learned, honestly say, Dave, I made more personal gain and progress in three to four months than I did in years of meditation.

[Dave Asprey]

Dr. Rollin McCready is director of research at the HeartMath Institute and a pioneer of heart brain coherence science. His team built a worldwide system that tracks how changes in the Earth's energy affect our bodies. And his research proves you can train your heart in minutes a day to stay calm, think sharper, and handle stress better. The God helmet.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Five minutes a day that brains were becoming younger. Resting metabolic rate goes down.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

When we have higher resonant frequency, it's really about stilling the mind enough that they could finally hear the voice of the heart.

[Dave Asprey]

When you learn how to do it, you can hug someone and it'll change them, bro. And this is. It's incredible work. God, you've taken this field so far. You're listening to the human upgrade with Dave Asprey. Living longer than you're supposed to isn't about luck anymore. It's about who gets the right data first. That's why I built InsideTrack. It's my new private weekly newsletter that gives you the science before everyone else. Most of the advice you find online creates confusion, not clarity, because it's just echoing stuff that's been around for a long time. You deserve better. I want everything you do to work for you. Because we're not all the same. In InsideTrack, I cut through the noise and send you exactly what actually nutrition tech supplements and tools that pass the quote, unquote. Does this actually work?

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Test.

[Dave Asprey]

When you join today, I'll send you the beginner's guide to biohacking. Your first steps to taking control of your biology and your state. Right now, the truth is simple. The people who thrive and have resilience don't wait around for mainstream medicine to finally admit what their research has shown a decade ago. We take action while everyone else waits for permission. So if you care about your energy, your brain, your lifespan, don't sit this out. Stay informed and stay ahead. And maybe outlive your doctor. Go to daveasprey.com to join InsideTrack today. What is heart rate variability?

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

At its simplest level, heart rate variability is the beat to beat time change between each pair of heartbeats. Okay, so it's the heart does not beat like a metronome. Okay? Like actually used to be thought that was a sign of good health not that many years ago. It's completely wrong.

[Dave Asprey]

Wow.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

A sign of good health, of resilience. And our ability to self regulate has to do with how much of this variation that goes on in the time intervals between each pair of heartbeats. So at one level it's really simple. The beat to beat, change in heart rate. So we all know what heart rate is. Right. How many times did the heart beat in a minute? But that's very different. Right. That's just average. When you look closely, you see that the time between each pair of heartbeats is always different. And that measuring that time interval is what heart rate variable is what HRV is. Keep it short. Now, in reality, you can spend an entire career. I've been studying HRV for 30 years.

[Dave Asprey]

Wow.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

So it's very simple on one level, but it's so deep and so much that it tells us about what's going on in the body once you understand what's under the hood of that, what creates heart rate variability. Now go ahead. It looks like you had another question. Yeah.

[Dave Asprey]

Sometime in the early aughts, I became a certified heartmath trainer and then I became an advisor to the company for a while. And I've worked for years in biohacking to explain what you just said and where I ended up. And I want you to shoot holes in this was you can think about 60 beats a minute. It's like da dum, da dum, da dum. But if you had all 60 beats in the first second, that would be weird, but it would still be 60 beats per minute. So. Oh, 60 beats per minute doesn't really mean anything. It's just a big average. And what you're really studying is kind of like the music that's played by the heartbeat.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Perfect analogy. Because HRV is ultimately what gives rise to the heart rhythm. And this is where a lot of people really don't understand the deeper aspects of hrv. It's really about the study of rhythm. Rhythm is everything. Rhythm has everything to do with what we call how coherent is the correlated and correlated behavior within our body systems. Now you used a music example. It was perfect, Dave, because if you think of the heart and the heart's rhythm as the conductor, everything going on in our physiology, if the conductor gets frantic and frustrated, the music becomes discordant and chaotic.

[Dave Asprey]

Absolutely. If the drummer's off everything.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

So it's the same thing. Now within hrv there are multiple rhythms.

[Dave Asprey]

So you have two drummers or at least one drummer with two drums have.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

More like four drummers. Wow.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah. And with different sources in the body. And most of the apps that are out there are measuring one little baby part and not even measuring the rhythm. They're just measuring. Think of it this way. Think of waves. So you've got the amplitude of a wave, and that's what it's called. Time domain statistics. Trying to get out how much variation up and down tells you nothing about. Is it choppy seas or a coherent wave that has aligned energy? You follow what I mean?

[Dave Asprey]

So you could have the same energy, say, at the beach, but if it's a bunch of choppy waves that are small but rapid and not even rhythmic, the amount of water moving could be the same as those big, beautiful waves that frequently.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Exactly. Yeah. And choppy seeds is not good. Right. That's when we tend to have foggy thinking, poor performance, rapid aging, messed up relationships, and really the inability to maintain our composure. I would say when the blanks sit in the fan. I guess I can say that here.

[Dave Asprey]

But anything you want. Okay. If there's four drummers that are controlling the rhythm of your biology, you can see why this might be relevant for biohacking.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Totally.

[Dave Asprey]

Right. Because we're talking about things like vagal tone. We've had multiple episodes talking about sympathetic and parasympathetic. And this is tied to that. All the episodes about cognitive function, even some of the 40 years of Zen stuff, directly tied into these drummers. So when I look at my OURA ring, for instance, that's a measure. That morning readiness score is a measure of heart rate variability. But it's not all four drummers. It's just like the big bass drum. That's.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

No, it's actually the smallest of the drummers.

[Dave Asprey]

It's a snare. Okay.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah. So maybe it might help just to see what the rhythms are.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah. What are they?

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

So the fastest rhythm is breathing.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

And that's what is vagal tone. That's actually. And actually that's even the wrong term.

[Dave Asprey]

But we only breathe 13 times a minute. That's not the fastest.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Well, that's a fast rhythm.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

From an HRV perspective. And that's measured in what's called typically, the statistical. God, I can't talk today. The statistical measure is called rmssd, and it's a complex statistical term that tries to find the changes in the beat to beat variability that are bigger than other ones. Okay. Because that's vaguely mediated.

[Dave Asprey]

So you find the big changes like the big positives.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah. The ones that are the fast fibers in the vagus. Now that's the fastest rhythm and that's what Oura Ring and others measure as well, especially during sleep, because you can only measure it while you're at rest. And it's a good measure, but it's not the big game. Okay, let me back up a little bit. So if we look at heart rate to begin with, Dave. So you know we've got a daytime heart rate and a nighttime heart rate.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Now if you. We've done thousands of these recordings over the years. So if you look at daytime heart rate, it's up here and around the exercise time up. But when you go to sleep, if you're doing like you do, heart rate should drop immediately down to your nighttime heart rate.

[Dave Asprey]

Right.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

And stay down kind of wiggly and then pop right up right before you wake up.

[Dave Asprey]

Correct. Unless you have a big meal before bed that you won't do.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Okay. So that's as it turns out. Well, I'm going to get ahead of myself. I'm not careful here. One of the best indicators of expending too much energy that day or the day before that could be physical energy. You over expended too much workout or you had a lot of emotional crap going on.

[Dave Asprey]

Yep.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Frustration, anxiety triggering over the little stuff. Yeah. The way that actually shows up actually isn't really in RMSSD as much as people think.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

What it actually what you see when you look at the heart rate. Daytime bop, bop, bop. Now instead of dropping down it goes. Takes about four hours to get down to nighttime level.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Your best indicator.

[Dave Asprey]

So then you're overtrained.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

You're overtrained or you expend too much emotional energy.

[Dave Asprey]

Got it.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

So too much the choppy sees energy.

[Dave Asprey]

Got it. Okay. Too much stress or too much exercise, which is a form of stress. And at least in my oura ring and some similar other apps and things I have, they call that late heart rate drop.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Okay.

[Dave Asprey]

Right. That's kind of similar.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

I call it the downward slope and heart rate.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah. Interesting. Yeah.

[Dave Asprey]

And what are the other two rhythms in the heart?

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Okay, well. Okay, so that's the breathing related, your vagal activity rhythm, how it's measured. Then you've got a slower rhythm, which is where the coherence frequency shows up, which is our. We all have a literal resonant frequency.

[Dave Asprey]

Is it the same for all of us or is it different?

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

No, but in fact I just published a paper a couple of months ago.

[Dave Asprey]

Hey, tell me.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

1.8 million biofeedback sessions of people being coherent globally.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay, that's a lot.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

It's a lot. It's the. The dominant or the center of the bell curve is 0.1 hertz.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

In frequency language, or a 10 second rhythm.

[Dave Asprey]

And so what's happening every 10 seconds of my heartbeat?

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Well, your heart rate's going up.

[Dave Asprey]

Ah.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

And down. And this beautiful sine wave.

[Dave Asprey]

Wow. Okay, that's gonna be invisible on an aura or something.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Oh, yeah. Well, you don't see it.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah. Okay.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Right.

[Dave Asprey]

Now that's what you pay attention to, though. And that's the heart bath app.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Now that is a rhythm that's actually generated between the heart and brain. Now, breathing, you can breathe at that pace and help coax the system into what we call a coherent state. So now the conductor is getting everything working together harmoniously, and that's what maximizes our optimal function. Really?

[Dave Asprey]

That is actually the clearest explanation I've ever heard on the difference between the sleep monitoring heart rate variability and what HeartMath does. And I'm going to skip a couple steps here and describe what happens with heart rate variability training.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Perfect.

[Dave Asprey]

And I can do this because, well, I learned how to do it from you, but I'll translate it just because listeners know the way I communicate. So when you're doing the latest HeartMath app with the Coherence plus sensor, it's a little thing you clip on your ear. It's not like wearing an OURA ring. Your ring is tracking long things over time.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

During sleep, mainly.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah, during sleep and a little bit during the day, but not heart rate variability. And you can think of it like this. At the end of the week, some AI system analyzes your calendar and says, you know, every Friday you buy beer and diapers and you're like, wow, I never knew that about myself. Maybe next Friday I won't do that. It's of some value because it lets you think about what you did and maybe change something with real time feedback. What's happening is every second you're saying, am I doing this or am I not doing this? So you're looking at your phone and you're trying to make the light turn green and you're breathing in and out according to rhythm. But what the heck do you do to make the light turn green? There really aren't words for it, which is why it's really hard to teach meditation. And you sit in a monastery somewhere in some odd pose with your hands here, and you're doing this and doing that, and you're just trying to learn how to reach these inner states. But when you sit there frustrated for a little while until you figure out what to do with your inner control system to make the light turn green, when you do that, you have created the coherence you're talking about.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Right.

[Dave Asprey]

Right. And that's the difference between real time training. We're teaching you a new state, and we're teaching you what it feels like to be in the state and out.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Of the state and how to shift into that state at will.

[Dave Asprey]

That changed my life.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah. When you need to. Because that's the problem. It's when we get triggered or we hit the stressors, the challenges that we don't have the experience maybe to meet or we don't have the confidence. That's when we tend to the conductor, goes wacky and we get into discord, and then we do stupid things. Right. Follow what I'm saying. And what you. With coherence training, Dave, it's what, you know, five minutes a day.

[Dave Asprey]

It doesn't take much time.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Take much time, but you do that over time. We are literally now we can prove this scientifically, creating a new what we call baseline in our physiology, in our brain, in our nervous system.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

So that that state is more our natural. Our new natural state. So when we hit the bigger things, it's much easier to go there.

[Dave Asprey]

What I learned from you, you came and you spoke at the Longevity nonprofit group at the time. Now it's called Silicon Valley Health Institute. But you came and you spoke, and I was blown away. I'm like, this guy's an engineer. He knows stuff. So I went and I bought a heart math thing. It was much more expensive back then. And I started doing this training, and I learned within about a month that hundreds of times a day, my body, without any awareness for me, was going into fight or flight mode over and over. And once I got really good at heart math, I would notice it, and then I would say, why? And then I would kind of play whack a mole with my nervous system to put it back into shape. And that was foundational to a lot of the meditation training I've done. And a lot of the other spiritual work is that I be. I gained awareness of my inner state. And I look at heart rate variability as kind of the entry level to neurofeedback. It's. They're both biofeedback. One is based on the heart, one is based on the brain. But the heart stuff is very accessible and it's easy to do and you are the leading voice in that whole industry.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah. You can focus on the brain and brain waves. Been there, done that.

[Dave Asprey]

Yep.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

But in reality, the heart sends more information to the brain than the brain sends to the heart. It's the master rhythm. It's the rhythm maker. And when you get in the heart, into the coherent rhythm, those neural signals go directly to the thalamus brain core of our brain, which is responsible for globally synchronizing the electrical activity in the entire brain.

[Dave Asprey]

You can definitely synchronize the brain with HeartMath 100%.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

And that is the quickest, fastest way. Well, you can say it, get in sync. Because that's really what it is. And that's what underlies all the different brain systems ability to perform optimally.

[Dave Asprey]

How many hours have you had heart math tech connected to your brain?

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

I have no idea. Well, to my earlobe.

[Dave Asprey]

To your earlobe, yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Or my chest? I have no idea.

[Dave Asprey]

Just guess.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

I would be in probably thousands.

[Dave Asprey]

More than thousands. I would imagine it's probably a 10,000 at this point.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

I have no idea.

[Dave Asprey]

You. You might one of the more measured people out there. What I found though, is that if I did 20 minutes of training with HeartMath Tech every day for six weeks to two months, that I felt like I had a pretty good sense of where I was and that I didn't have to use the tech in order to reregulate myself.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

That's the whole point. Yeah, you're retraining, you're training your system, training your nervous system into that new baseline state of coherence. Because this is really about navigating day to day life with more composure. Right?

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Being able to flow through, not trigger over the small stuff or even the big stuff eventually with practice. Because all that does is waste energy.

[Dave Asprey]

Man, we're so in alignment on that and heavily meditated. Point is, if someone can trigger you, it means you're carrying a loaded gun and their finger is on your trigger, and nobody wants that. So if you can go in and regulate your sympathetic fight or flight response by learning this technique. And it's not just take a deep breath. In fact, I remember I gave my kids a sensor when they were little and I called it the magic fairy breathing game. Because they're pretty little and it's just our math. And I watched my son go, he said, take a deep breath to most little kids and they go, they don't even know what a deep breath is. But because he had done the training and of course he made the light Turn green, take a deep breath. He'd go. And I was so impressed. But that's the power of this. Because even for kids, they want to regulate. They just don't know how. And then we're adults, we think we know how. We just learn how to think about it and behave, but we never learned how to regulate.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah. And we forget to do it in the times that count the most.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah. Why do we forget?

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Well, called cortical inhibition. There's the technical term for it. When we're in that choppy sea state, our system. Our systems are out of sync. The frontal cortex, which really begins the self regulation process, is literally taken offline until we retrain to that state.

[Dave Asprey]

All right, I want to get a little bit mystical with you.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

All right.

[Dave Asprey]

And I would consider you to be one of the leaders in the science of consciousness at this point in your career. I mean, you've studied this for a very long time and done some. Some cool stuff, some of which you probably talk about, some of which you don't. But I learned before I go on a big stage to go into a state of coherence, and I learned that state of coherence from using my heartmath stuff years ago. So before I went on to Tony Robbins main stage one time, I'm like, the first time. So this was my biggest audience. It was like 15,000 people at the time. So I'm backstage and it takes a couple seconds when you know how to do it and you go in and you change your state. And I'm supposed to walk out after my Sizzle Reel plays. Introducing Dave Asprey. The team forgets to play my Sizzle reel and go, okay, Dave, come on out. And as I walked out, zero change in my heart rate. I was already regulated. It didn't bother me in the slightest, and I got a standing ovation. I. It was a very popular talk. But I learned if I'm regulated when I go on stage or even before I do an interview, it feels like the audience regulates better, too.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Absolutely.

[Dave Asprey]

Can you measure that?

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yes, I think we can.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay. Have you.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

In certain ways, that's actually an area of active research where we're measuring. Really? It's heart to heart synchronization in groups.

[Dave Asprey]

Oh, yeah.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

In fact, this is getting real wide. Probably where I should be going in this podcast. But we just published this too. Well, the first study, I was talking about 1.8 million people. Right. We also. Those 1.8 million, we had emotion reports. Oh, wow.

[Dave Asprey]

What a data set.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Oh, it was awesome. Because what this study proved is that when we're feeling anxious, fearful, frustrated, impatient, that basically messes with the rhythms. Right. So smooth internal rhythms become choppy seas and we don't feel good and we don't think well and we don't sleep well and it's aging is faster. Right. Whereas when people were feeling things like calm, patience, inner stillness, these type of feelings that created more stability in the inner rhythms. Right. Okay. So in a couple of weeks. Amazing. We had two publications in a nature journal, Scientific reports. Yeah. This one we were looking at long term HRV over 15 days continuous, in five groups of people, 20 people in each group, 100 people around the world, five different countries. And what we found, I'm going to make a long story short, was in two of the groups out of the five, their heart rhythms were synchronized across the 15 days. Wow. And they're going about their normal days.

[Dave Asprey]

20 people all in a group. And they're just doing their lives. But they're synchronized.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah, in the same areas. The two groups that were synchronized were the two groups that knew each other well and liked each other.

[Dave Asprey]

Wow.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

They had created that social heart connection with each other.

[Dave Asprey]

So you want to be friends with well regulated people, not with chaotic people.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

But what this shows us is that when we really form relationships that are meaningful to us, that we are forming a group level field. Wow. Remember I was saying there's multiple rhythms in hrv because HRV is really the study of rhythm, multiple rhythms. So we've got the fast stuff, breathing and the heart, brain resonant frequency. Then we have another rhythm called the VLF rhythm.

[Dave Asprey]

Now that's the granddaddy very low frequency.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

That is the most important one for predicting future health and resilience. It's not the vagal stuff. That actually has very little to do with predicting future health. The VLF is correlated. If that's low, all cause mortality, dying from any reason.

[Dave Asprey]

So 0.1, that's much faster.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

VLF is a five minute rhythm.

[Dave Asprey]

Got it. Just to differentiate between them. So there's a 10 second rhythm which.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Is 0.5, which is a very fundamental rhythm for heart, brain synchrony.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay. That's the synchrony connection between heart, brain and the one you're talking about, the five minute rhythm. What's the hertz in that?

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

That's like point zero zero something, I forget.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah, it's five minute rhythm. Yeah, five minute rhythm. Okay.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Then there's a. Get a lower rhythm that we would know. It's circadian rhythm. It's a 24 hour rhythm of your heart rate.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

That's also in hrv. Remember I said you can spend a lifetime. There's even a lower frequency rhythm.

[Dave Asprey]

There's always going to be octaves. What's the lower frequency?

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Well, it can vary. One of our studies showed in one group it was about two and a half days.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Some studies show can be even a weekly rhythm. And this is the rhythm where we tune in and synchronize to the activity going on in the Earth's fields.

[Dave Asprey]

Wow. Two and a half to five days. And we're not sure yet. Or maybe very dependent.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Depends on what's going on in the environment and us. Now we're just completing analysis of almost 10 million sessions over seven years globally, where we also have a system measuring the planetary frequencies. And what this study is showing, clear, so clear, Dave, is that when people practice coherence, they're not as affected by the external environment.

[Dave Asprey]

You want to be in charge of yourself. You might want to learn how to be coherent.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Whether it's the solar flare stuff. Solar, you know, whether. Or it's just you're in a noisy city and it's driving you crazy. You can still go in and maintain that inner composure. Following up.

[Dave Asprey]

I think you just dysregulated some skeptics when you talked about solar flare. So I want to talk about that for a second. Oh, that's all right. Disregulating skeptics is great fun. I mean, we can all do that. And by the way, if you're a skeptic and you're like, well, dude, we just told you that if we can trigger you, you're a loaded gun and we're in charge of you. And now you're even more trigger, and that's okay, but you should probably work on that. Everybody wants less wrinkles, better hair, stronger immune system, and to recover from anything life brings your way, well, we all want it. And the answer lies in your gut. Your gut's health affects everything, including your immune system, your metabolic function, your mood, even how your skin looks invisible. Toxins from your environment or even from your body can silently ruin your health. Armora Colostrum is here to help. It contains over 400 bioactive nutrients that work at the cellular level to help rebuild your gut health, strengthen your immune function, and just turn your metabolism back on. Armor and colostrum supports your entire gut wall system and your microbiome that can help your gut be more resistant to irritants, that can trigger symptoms like bloating, constipation, and Inflammation. Armor also has growth factors, vitamins and regenerative peptides that help your hair grow strong and your skin glow from the inside out. And you can see it. In fact, 60% of people taking armor and colostrum notice less wrinkles and 79% notice thicker hair after 12 weeks. And if you're an athlete, check this out. Studies show that colostrum can improve fitness endurance by only 20%. That's big. Decrease recovery time by over 50% after intense exercise and it improves stamina and builds lean muscle mass. So it doesn't make a difference whether you're training for a race or just working to have better health. You just want to feel really good. Armor helps you operate at your highest level and armor's work. To have a special offer for listeners of the human upgrade, receive 30% off your first subscription order. Go to armor.comdave or enter Dave to get 30% off your first subscription order. That's a R M R A.com Dave. You might still be losing muscle even if you're eating tons of protein. Here's why. Your body can't store amino acids which are the building blocks of your protein proteins. And get this. If you're missing just one essential amino acid, your body can't use the others. So protein synthesis stops and the rest goes to waste. So that 40 gram protein shake might not be helping you as much as you think. Perfect amino fixes that it gives your body pure essential amino acids in the exact ratios it needs to build and repair tissues. Your muscle, your bone, your skin, everything. No waste, no fat storage and just about no calories. I use perfect amino when I'm fasting, when I'm training or recovering from a workout. In fact, I take it before I go to bed too. So in order to keep muscle recover faster and stop wasting protein, use perfect AMINO. Go to bodyhealth.com and use code DAVE20 for 20% off your first order of perfect amino.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Skeptic of what though?

[Dave Asprey]

Well, there's just people who are saying I have a model of reality that I believe and I just heard something that is outside my model, therefore I don't feel safe. They don't? Yes. They don't.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

They don't know that my version of that is don't bother. Don't confuse me with the data. Oh yeah, mind is made up.

[Dave Asprey]

Oh, that's the who. Wait, did I say that out loud? So space weather. In heavily meditated I wrote about space weather because it has a direct effect on human consciousness and one of the pieces of Tech that I shared is called the. The God helmet.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Persinger's helmet.

[Dave Asprey]

Persinger's God helmet. Right, of course. You know about this?

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah, Persinger. So.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay, cool. And I know Todd. Who? Persinger's work. And Todd Murphy. So I was talking with him on the phone and he said, Dave, if you really want to use the helmet that changes your brain state with subtle magnets at the right. And get the best results, you have to check the space weather and do it when it's not too calm and not too stormy. So you go to spaceweather.com and sure enough, it's a thing. And it's actual real data. And the fact that you may not know that it affects your consciousness has nothing to do with whether or not it changes your consciousness? It does. And it's prov.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah. 10 million sessions over seven years.

[Dave Asprey]

So what did you find when you studied space weather?

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Well, the. Well, we actually have a lot of publications in this field. Some people think of it as a paradox because the background geomagnetic fields we live in. So let me make this as short as I can. So you got the geomagnetic field. Right? The field north, South Pole. These field lines, magnetic field around the Earth. Well, here's the wild thing. Magnetic field lines act like guitar strings. You can pluck them.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah. They change.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

No. Well, you pluck them and they vibrate and.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah, the government plucks them with the harp project up in Alaska.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Nah, that's nonsense.

[Dave Asprey]

Is it really? We'll talk about that later. Yeah.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Solar winds plucking the strings. Earth is turning. Solar winds rushing by at a million miles an hour, plucking the strings. The primary resonant frequency. They're called field line resonances. Guess what? 0.1 hertz.

[Dave Asprey]

Oh, so we're attuned to 0.1 hertz. And then solar winds changes that, and then we change. Unless we're well regulated.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Okay, so this is on normal, quiet days, right? Normal days. Then you got the Schumann resonances, which a lot of people make get way wrong, which overlap brain waves. They're very stable. They're the same frequency they were when they first measured in 1950.

[Dave Asprey]

So when everyone says it's changing, they're lying. They're not lying. They're mistaken.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

They're mistaken. They don't know the science. They. We have a global magnetometer, a super sensitive system, globally measuring these things for years.

[Dave Asprey]

So if you ever saw Lost, they had these weird monitoring stations buried. Roland, you actually built these. You have a network of Monitoring stations buried in Earth all over the planet that gets data you can't get from satellites. So when you're saying this, people need to know that's the extent you went through to get this hard data.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah.

[Dave Asprey]

There you go.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

We have the only global.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Time synchronized, GPS synchronized calibrated global magnetic monitoring system in the world.

[Dave Asprey]

I don't believe your data.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah, I mean we share it with, you know, MIT groups there. A lot of people like our data. The point I'm trying to make here is though, that in the Earth's fields, the vibrations we probably have the rhythms we do because we evolved in the frequency of the Earth.

[Dave Asprey]

Of course.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Again, rhythms. Right. So those fields act as synchronizing signals. Wow. That we tune to unless we get stressed.

[Dave Asprey]

So that five day signal.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah. There's all these rhythms in HRV and they're all planetary. Well, no, there's. You have the, the one, the planetary one's the lowest frequency.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

And you've got the circadian, the day night.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

That's a fundamental rhythm. Then you've got these faster rhythms. That's all reflected in hrv.

[Dave Asprey]

Incredible. So you really are kind of a picture of the environment you're in.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

So we actually did a study, this was published last year, the same five groups I was talking about, the primary study where we're continuously measuring HRV. In the middle of that 15 day period, we had all the hundred and some people do what we call a heart lock in. It's a heart focused meditation for 15 minutes using the technology they've been practicing to get coherent. They did that for 15 minutes together. Guess what happened? Of course, their coherence went off the roof. While they were doing that, the members within all the groups were significantly more in sync with each other during that exercise. The total shocker came though that every single group, all five, were significantly more in sync with the Earth's rhythms for the next 24 hours. So just getting ourselves coherent for 15 minutes synchronizes our own system. Right. We're doing a lot of benefits for us. Right. Mentally, emotionally, physically.

[Dave Asprey]

Do you want to be synchronized with Earth's rhythms? Earth seems like it's kind of screwed up right now.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

No, no, the magnetic rhythms you do, synchronizing, that's what keeps us in sync. Unless we're too stressed out.

[Dave Asprey]

What if there's something else messing with local magnetic stuff like the power grid or 5G or any of like. I mean there are focus magnetic interventions. I have some downstairs that will just.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Completely different frequencies than what we're talking about.

[Dave Asprey]

All right?

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

So you have to worry about the metal life.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Protecting rhythms.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay. You couldn't make a bad one of those and play it for people.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

I suppose you could, but if you could, someone would.

[Dave Asprey]

I'm a little worried.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

The point I'm trying to get to the paradox. Right.

[Dave Asprey]

All right.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Because this is. There's hundreds of papers on this in the scientific literature. We know that being in sync is a good thing. And like. Like rest, resting, metabolic rate goes down.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

When we're. When we have higher resonant frequencies, I'll accept that. Right. In other words, the body is literally, measurably using less energy for life processes.

[Dave Asprey]

Lovely. Okay.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Made a couple studies on this. Now my name's on too.

[Dave Asprey]

Love it.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

But anyway, it's when we get stressed out, you know, the frustrations, the anxieties, you know, worrying over the small stuff, the looping thoughts, that takes us out of sync, not only within our own body and system, but with the rhythms of the Earth and with other people.

[Dave Asprey]

Wow. All right, so you're disconnected from your community.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

So just getting in sync for a few minutes, synchronized across all those scales. Wow. Well, when I'm going there. Right. Yes. So, okay, so it's. Now, the paradox is there's a whole bunch of other studies that show that the magnetic field is like this harmful thing. But now here's the. It's not a paradox when you understand it. No, these are all studies that show that when there's this thing called KP index, which is a measure of field disturbance. Right. So every now and then, it's actually not that often Earth get hits with this big wave of plasma from the sun that's called a solar flare.

[Dave Asprey]

Right.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Hits the field of the Earth, which protects us, and it goes all wobbly.

[Dave Asprey]

Right. And then we all act weird.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

And then we all act weird. And we have more hospital admissions, we have more mental health issues, more revolutions. Exactly. Yeah. People get pissed off, triggered faster, you know, during those periods. So in other words, we don't like being out of sync with our natural environment.

[Dave Asprey]

Wow. So some studies show that. That being aligned or in resonance with the Earth is good for you, which is true. And when it's. When it's not good for you, it's because the field itself is disturbed externally.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

And the study we're getting ready to publish right now with 10 million sessions.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Shows that when we practice coherence, we don't get dysregulated in disturbed times.

[Dave Asprey]

So you can literally be solar flare proof with HeartMath.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah.

[Dave Asprey]

That's so cool.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

10 million sessions over seven years if.

[Dave Asprey]

There ever was one.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

I mean this. Everybody should be doing this.

[Dave Asprey]

Fly a. I actually agree with that. If they put this as a standard part of high school curriculum, it would completely change the world. Yeah, it, it's a. It's a big thing. What are the implications for friend groups? So let's say that I want to be more incoherent with my core group of good people. Friends.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah.

[Dave Asprey]

What would I do?

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Well, one of the easiest things is practice being coherent together at the same time.

[Dave Asprey]

So we all get a heart math and we all sit down in a room and do that and just do.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

That regularly until you. You like. The other study I was, that I thought might have been too wide really isn't now. Because that's where you're building that group field that is non locally energetically connecting those group members.

[Dave Asprey]

Wow.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

So we're literally sharing energy and information across the group.

[Dave Asprey]

But what if we all just did breath work together? Because not everyone has a heart sensor.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah, you can do that work. You can do breath work.

[Dave Asprey]

Probably not the same.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Well, okay. We all have to breathe. Right. So I say this a lot. You have to breathe anyway. Right. You really don't have to take time out of your day. But if you put more attention to the breath. So if we. We call it hard focus breathing. Because there is a big energetic component to this work. It's not just about the mechanics of breathing. So hard focused breathing, pretend you're breathing right through the center of your chest. Breathe slower and deeper. Breathe at your own natural resonant frequency, which for the majority is going to be a ten second rhythm. Five in, five out.

[Dave Asprey]

Yep.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Now, we did find in that other big study I was talking, that as people get better at this, they start breathing a little slower and coherence gets increases.

[Dave Asprey]

Do you want to pause at the top or bottom at all?

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

No. Yeah. Okay. So I'm not a fan of box breathing. I know the source of that, but that's another story.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Because that takes you out of coherence. Most people will take out of coherence.

[Dave Asprey]

Interesting.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Because the heart, the coherent heart rhythm is a sine wave. It's not a square wave.

[Dave Asprey]

Is definitely not a square wave. I recommend box breathing because it does take people out of anxiety, but it doesn't take them into coherence.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

So will hard focus breathing take you out of anxiety?

[Dave Asprey]

If they know it, yeah. The problem is if I have an audience who doesn't know heart focus Breathing and they're anxious. Well, I can teach them box breathing and.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Well, you can also teach them hard.

[Dave Asprey]

Focus breathing, Dave, and not as quickly.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah, sure you can. Really? So people breathe five seconds in, breathe five seconds out.

[Dave Asprey]

So when I do that and I'm hooked up to my heart mass sensor, the light does not turn green unless you do something else. It's the something else that's hard to teach.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Well, actually you, you, for most people, you can breathe yourself into co. Into, I'll say, the lower levels of.

[Dave Asprey]

Coherence when they're anxious.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah.

[Dave Asprey]

Interesting. Okay.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah, I've done.

[Dave Asprey]

I'm believing you. You're a very credible guy.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

We have 30, 000 healthcare professionals that are certified teaching this to patients every day.

[Dave Asprey]

You're very credible.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay, what about breathing out twice as long as the in breath?

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Okay. So that can be useful if you're trying to slow heart rate. Yeah. If you've done a workout and heart rate's high and you're people are stressed. Yeah, yeah. So that. Because you know the mechanism there. For people that want to understand how breathing modulates heart rhythm, you don't have to measure breath, by the way, to know the. We can measure. We know exactly how someone's breathing. The frequency and depth just from looking at their hrv.

[Dave Asprey]

Correct. Yeah.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

So when there are neurons in the lungs, or mechanoreceptive neurons, Sorry, they're stress sensitive. We breathe in. So when we breathe in, those neurons get stretched, they increase their firing rate, they go up certain vagus nerve fibers. 3 thousands of neurofibers in the vagus, right?

[Dave Asprey]

200,000.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah. So they connect in at the cardiovascular respiratory integration center and they modulate. Think of like a rheostat. They turn down vagal flow going to the heart. Wow. So heart rate goes up when you breathe in, breathe out. Rheostat gets turned the other way. You restore that vagal outflow, heart rate goes down. That's why breathing at 0.1 Hz helps coax our system into coherence. Wow. Now, so for new people that can feel uncomfortable because they don't have an inner reference for it yet, that's a whole other story. But stay with it and it'll become comfortable. That's that new baseline now you asked about. So if you're, if you understand that you're trying to slow heart rate because it's heart high, breathe in and breathe out slower. Right. So that can help you slow heart rate. You can do the opposite. If you need to increase heart rate, you're Getting ready to go on stage, you're getting ready to play a sport.

[Dave Asprey]

You want a higher heart rate, so then you would. Longer in breath and shorter out breath.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Exactly. So it's knowing the mechanics. Maybe not quite that exaggerated, but.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah. That's going to raise your heart rate pretty fast.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah, but you get the drift. But if we're really trying to get in sync, get coherent, get our hormonal system, our immune system, our nervous system, emotional system working together in harmony, that's where we want to get the master conductor. Creating a stable synchronization signal for all those systems. That's what heart coherence is.

[Dave Asprey]

At this point in your life, are you always practicing heart breathing?

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

No.

[Dave Asprey]

Oh. What percentage of your breaths are.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Well, I've, I've done this for long enough. It's a baseline.

[Dave Asprey]

It's just.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah.

[Dave Asprey]

So you are.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

You don't.

[Dave Asprey]

You don't have to try.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah. That's a beautiful thing.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Five minutes a day for just a few weeks. You've shown this, you've create. I mean, this is not metaphor. Yeah, yeah. It's real. New baseline. In fact, I was just talking, I have to remember his name of biohackers doing a self experiment now.

[Dave Asprey]

Oh, God, there's so many of us.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

I know. I had a conversation with him and I explained about the technology. It's not just about breathing. This is about self regulation. And he goes, okay, I'm going to try it. I just had a. Last week he called me, sent me an email and we talked. And he's sharing with me how transformed his life is.

[Dave Asprey]

Oh, good for you, Ron. That's why you were at the first biohacking conference.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

It's foundational, it's amazing, all this stuff that you know and it. So let me. When I explained to him that I think got him motivated was the. When we think of emotions, and especially us men tend to not want to think about emotions a lot.

[Dave Asprey]

You're supposed to feel about them, not think about it.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah, right. Well, it's the emotional system and it is a system runs the show.

[Dave Asprey]

Absolutely.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

It is what controls our longevity, our healthy aging, your memories, everything. Everything thing. It's. Sorry, guys. It's what runs the show. And it's a really complex system. Yeah. So yes, there's the biochemical level and you can get lost in the. This hormone, begot that hormone. That one's easy, you know, I mean, you know, just being angry for five minutes, you set in motion thousands of.

[Dave Asprey]

Biochemical changes and take some heroin and they'll Take that right away. Right.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

You have my drift.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah, it's easy to have.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

It's the biochemical level.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah. But it's easy to hack.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah. But then, you know. So if you talk like Candace Parrot was a friend of mine, you probably remember her.

[Dave Asprey]

Oh, yeah. Candice of Emotion.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah. Great book. And yeah, it's all true. However, she's right. But then you talk to a neuroscientist. No, it's all about the brain and nervous system.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Which set in motion the biochemistry. Unless you're, you know, taking a drug.

[Dave Asprey]

Or a chemical, they're simultaneously. Right. Depending on which lens you're using.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Right. But I'm going to add just another even more important system.

[Dave Asprey]

Magnetic, energetic. Okay. Is that quantum or is that information?

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Well, it's informational, ultimately, but it's. I mean, it would include the biofield and the magnetic. And that's what we're in harm half teaching people to come more aware of. Because emotion happens first energetically.

[Dave Asprey]

Yes.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Then we can measure changes in brain waves and neural activity. And that's then reflected in hrv, which is your master signature, you know, outplay of that. And then you have all the biochemistry that follows suit.

[Dave Asprey]

I love it.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Right now, this is you talking about biohacking. This is what people need to understand is this is a complex system that runs the show. Coherence is the doorway in to bringing alignment across those systems.

[Dave Asprey]

The picture that always comes to mind when I'm thinking about this, if you're getting on a really big airplane and the cockpit's open and you look in there and you're like, there are an enormous number of knobs and switches and dials and levers. And how would I ever figure out what each one of these things does? It's even more complex than that. And we don't have any instrumentation and we don't have to open the door to the cockpit. And when you look in there, there's a lot to learn here. And you just put it so beautifully, like, if you're incoherent, you have awareness of all those things. You can start looking at each dial and knob and figuring out how to control yourself.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah. And then, you know, this reminds me, I was at a conference, well, a couple years in a row, one of my favorite conferences ever in Switzerland. This invitation only. This is probably 30 years ago at the very beginning of my career. I mean, the people I looked up to then, you know, I mean, very famous people, you know, in the psychophysiology world. And. And a lot of them became Mentors.

[Dave Asprey]

I've had a lot of Timothy Leary types or more like hardcore neuromuscripts.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

More like Paul Rausch, the founder of the American PSU de stress. And just luminaries in the field. Luminaries in the field. And these guys were getting up and they were saying back then, 30 some years ago, yeah, we're starting to know more about the biochemistry and the hormones and then this and that, this was the warning even back then says don't get lost in the minutia of all of what begot, what we're forgetting, what drives all of it to begin with.

[Dave Asprey]

Which is consciousness and our emotions 100%.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Right. So I find myself now an older guy. Right. Saying the same thing because it's so easy to get lost in reading labels. Not that that's not important.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah. Cyanide will tell you what's important.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah, but you don't want to try to say. I mean, yes, of course nutrition is important, good sleep is important. Right. Having clean water, all that's important. But maintaining our emotional system into coherence, I'm going to say is even more important.

[Dave Asprey]

I would agree. It's more important. And the reason that I rolled biohacking out to society this way is because I found that when people have enough mitochondrial energy, their ability to self regulate and learn the these techniques goes up so much.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Of course it does.

[Dave Asprey]

Like it, it's hard for me to be regulated or I don't think I could have been regulated when I was 25 if I didn't have a meal every five hours or. Sorry, every. Every five minutes. Yeah.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

They're all interacting cystes. Yeah. So of course we have to have.

[Dave Asprey]

The physical regulation matters most. To your point.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah. But we, a lot of times we don't have the energy to self regulate because we haven't managed our energy systems very well when we get depleted. And this is, this is.

[Dave Asprey]

Everybody feels that or knows that feeling.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

I had a great example of this when we developed the resilience training for the US Navy. You know, I personally trained about 5,000 men and women. Wow. On the highest risk mission at that time of anything in the military. And what they, you know, I know you talk a lot about sleep. They had found that the most correlated thing to stress injury, as they called it. Right. Ptsd, anxiety disorders, was sleep disruption.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

And then I gave him the missing answer to why that's true. Because if we don't get enough sleep, that's our main way of recharging our inner battery. Think of it. When we get depleted, our energy systems get depleted. Depleted right down to the mitochondria. As you would say. We don't have the energy to self regulate.

[Dave Asprey]

Correct.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

So we go in a downward spiral. But in their case, what was depleting the battery to begin with was the lack of self regulation. Follow where I'm going. So it's.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah, so you have lack of self regulation, maybe some PTSD in there. You're not going to be able to sleep, which makes you get worse, which makes you less regulated.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

So it's a downward spiral.

[Dave Asprey]

So do you fix the sleep or do you fix the hard coherence?

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Well, we fix the hard coherence. They all got a device. This is, I probably say this because it was presented at a conference publicly at one of the Navy conferences. I won't go into detail here, but the group we were working with on the mission that they had, they had historical data that it was a year long deployment. Three months into the deployment, 80% of these men and women were on a prescription sleep medication.

[Dave Asprey]

Dang.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

80%, three months. Now this was over a five year period. We were working with them and was it. We worked a lot on sustainability. How you, I mean you can teach this stuff but you got to stay with it long enough. Right. So they were in a very high stress environment. Bottom line. The last two deployment cycles that we were tracking, I had to Access this through PubMed, less than 5% were on a prescription sleep med for the entire year.

[Dave Asprey]

Wow. You completely destroyed the sleep med industry. In the rough environment.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

They all had to train hrv, coherence training devices. They all got one issue.

[Dave Asprey]

And how much training do they have to do to make it happen?

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Well, it wasn't a lot. We had a half day training with them before they deployed. But the key that turned everything around was when we developed a secondary training that was taught downrange when they got deployed. And we call them resilience mentors in that case. But these were your basically coaches that were reminding you to get coherent before you go on shift, get now shift and reset, get back to coherent. When an incident happened that major triggers.

[Dave Asprey]

Wow.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Get you reset quick, that was the.

[Dave Asprey]

Simple stuff because you're not going to really remember if you're that triggered. But if someone sits down and says, all right, do the thing and then you do the thing and then it doesn't stick.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Right. Yeah. Wow.

[Dave Asprey]

Imagine how important that is.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah. So basically it was really simple how we sustained it every day before they would go on shift. Okay. As a, you know, These were like squad leader level mentors. Right. All right. We're going to take two minutes and get coherent together before we.

[Dave Asprey]

Wow.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Go into the stressful situation.

[Dave Asprey]

That is remarkable. Yeah, you're reminding me. Back when I started my old company, Bulletproof. And I got nothing to do with bulletproof anymore. I'm all about danger these days. But I used to have. I bought a heart math for all my execs and I had them all do it. And then I would work to start the meetings and some were more resistant than others, but the diehard people are most successful would do it. Yeah, you should do that again.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

You should. There's some awesome new research on coherence training. And coherence training, remember, it's hrv, but it's looking at not just the amplitude, but the stability of the rhythm.

[Dave Asprey]

This is really important. So when we say amplitude, non engineers, it's the volume, it's the height of the wave. Exactly.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

But the wave can be totally choppy and have high amplitude.

[Dave Asprey]

You can have big crappy waves that are unsurfable or regular beautiful waves when you're triggered. Yeah.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Right. So these are studies done at usc, really well funded, mostly FMRI studies. And what they've shown. The recent study, the most recent one, I'm just almost finished reading the paper showed that the vascular system to the brain after coherence training, that brains were becoming younger.

[Dave Asprey]

That would make so much sense.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah. But prior to that, the same group, and this was four weeks of regular practice with the hrv. Coherence technology. Heart math technology. Significantly reduced levels of amyloid beta and tau. Primary biomarkers for Alzheimer's and cognitive decline. Two of their other studies showed significantly greater white matter in the frontal cortex. Wow. Increased functional connectivity between the frontal cortex and the amygdala. The very circuit we need for self regulation, for stain and composure. Wow. Right. Increased resting state hrv.

[Dave Asprey]

So everything got better.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Everything. It's the tide that lifts all boats. Wow. Yeah. These are hardcore, well published controlled studies.

[Dave Asprey]

The total investment of time to get to this state. You're saying five minutes a day.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

It's a day.

[Dave Asprey]

It's a little bit more than that. Like 10 minutes.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Well, the 10 minutes is better.

[Dave Asprey]

Got it. I always coach people to do 20 minutes, but let's say that we have a listener who says, I'll pick up my heart math.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Well, okay. I always start with five minutes a day for the first week.

[Dave Asprey]

In the morning or at night?

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Ideally both.

[Dave Asprey]

Well, that like two and a half anesthesia. I mean.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Well, I mean I mean, if I gave an ideal. What I do is I start my morning first thing, I get out and go for a walk, get the system. Because just getting your system warmed up actually increases your HRV a little bit.

[Dave Asprey]

So you go for a walk, then.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

I'll get some coherence time in five minutes, I'll do all morning. I call it heart lock in. Just to set the tone for the day. So I'm starting out in that more coherent, balanced, aligned position.

[Dave Asprey]

So someone who's completely new to heart math, they're going to get their device the next morning, they're going to get up, go for a short walk, come back.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

That's what I do. I mean, okay, whatever.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay, so let's tell them what to do.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

And then before bed, okay. Get coherent again for say, five minutes.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay. So it's really 10 minutes.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

I'm saying that that's me.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay, well, I'm not worried about you right now. I'm worried about, okay, I'm 20 years old, I'm totally freaking out.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Five minutes before, when you first get up, five minutes before you go to bed again. Second week, take it to 10 minutes.

[Dave Asprey]

There you go. Okay. And we get to our 20 minutes a day.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Third week, 15.

[Dave Asprey]

Okay. And you also make it harder each week because you can change the settings from 1 to 4.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

You can, but it's more important, rather than trying just to keep going for a higher coherent score, is to really be able to sustain it now. Okay, so what I really recommend to people, once you get to where you can get in the green, right. Or have a high coherent score, number five, whatever it might be for you at the individual level. Great. Now here's the bigger game. Can you maintain that coherence when you're having a phone call?

[Dave Asprey]

That's amazing.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Can you maintain that coherence when you're in a traffic jam, literally? Because this is what this is about. It's how do we navigate more coherently day to day life without the triggers, without the stressors. And this is what slows the aging process. This is what our studies show changes the biochemistry where we have higher dhea, lower cortisol, better immunity. I mean, these are the. As you know, you're better than anybody, the biomarkers of aging. Wow. Right?

[Dave Asprey]

One of my favorite heart rate variability stories as a coach and a biohacker was a hedge fund manager. And I mentioned the tactoam, said you ought to do this. And he's one of these guys, works out all the time in great shape and runs billions of dollars buying an island sort of thing. And he buys the machine and throws in a desk drawer and finally says, I got bored. So I was on a long flight and I said fine, I'm finally going to do this. And I did it. I felt the difference. So I made a commitment to do it every day. So after six weeks I could max out at level four. And I just felt so good. So I went into the office and I put it on, put the little heart mouth sensor on. And then he said, the market bell range, he said and it turned red and it stayed red all day no matter what I did. And it took him another six weeks of intentionally training his self regulation while he was trading billions of dollars.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Exactly. Perfect.

[Dave Asprey]

And he said, Dave, after that period of time, he said my trades improved because I wasn't trading in fear. He said, For 20 years I've been trading in fear all day. And I didn't know. And when I go home at the end of the day now I'm full of energy and I can play with my kids. That's what self regulation looks like.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

That's what this is about. Yeah, Yeah. I just heard about your story. Reminds me, I think of four just in the last two weeks. Either world records or major turnarounds because of coherence training.

[Dave Asprey]

Wow.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

And I'm horrible with names. IGA fame, World Cup. I mean it's one of the glamstram tennis player trainers. I have to look her name up.

[Dave Asprey]

A player or a trainer player. Bianca.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

No, IGA I think is her name. You guys know that anyway, she's like the top woman tennis player in the world right now. So I just. Blown away. I just saw this last week. There's a Rolex commercial featuring her.

[Dave Asprey]

Wow.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

And it tells her story that she, you know, she. I think she's 19, 20 now probably. And she won this grand slam and was all, you know that kind of the underdog and then lost the mental game and totally crashed.

[Dave Asprey]

Oh no. That happens.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

And, but then. And so her coach actually shows her in this Rolex produced film using the Cohen strainer.

[Dave Asprey]

Oh my gosh. There you go.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

She turned it around, won the next one and has now become. And she actually credits it. Okay.

[Dave Asprey]

So beautiful.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

It just goes on and on like this. Just two weeks ago, heard about these two, three guys who set a new world record from rowing a boat boat from Monterey, California to Hawaii unassisted 4,500 miles. Wow. Right. And there's a picture of him with the inner balance coherence.

[Dave Asprey]

You have so much More self control.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah, well, and longevity. I mean endurance in this case, I mean.

[Dave Asprey]

Anyway, it's, there's something, I don't think we've ever talked about this part of it but for dating, if you're a man especially and you learn how to do this and you're going on a first date or 10th date, it doesn't really matter, go into coherence and watch how your date changes because people will feel safer around you when you're well regulated, they can feel it. And if you take the date home to the bedroom and you practice self regulation, you will be able to connect at a heart level that is completely different. And these are things that are difficult to talk about in research studies. But I know that when I learned how to do this that it did change my dating life and my romantic life. And it's some powerful, powerful technology and it's not expensive. What is the current.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

I think it's 249. And I'm supposed to mention I was told by our folks that there's a special that they can get a 15% discount.

[Dave Asprey]

Dave after the heartmath.com Dave and give you 15% off and you can say oh, Dave's just selling guys I paid to become a certified trainer in this and I just told you how it changed my life and how it changed my clients lives. And it's one of the cheapest feedback devices you can get. It's cheaper than an OURA ring and it'll do more for you than that. That's why I'm talking about it. And I got you 15% off so there.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah. Well can you really afford not to be?

[Dave Asprey]

That's a fair point. You know, I have some more questions about hrv.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Okay.

[Dave Asprey]

What does food do to heart rate variability?

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Not a lot. Okay, well and there's not, I shouldn't say that there's not a lot of research. There's some studies. I mean there's so many studies on HRV now. It's, it's, I mean in the. Probably hundreds of thousands.

[Dave Asprey]

Are they good though or is that all rssd? Which isn't?

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Well, no, I mean most of the, I mean the real research on HRV goes much deeper than just looking at the vaguely mediated rssd which is just a measure of the. Doesn't tell you anything about the rhythm or the pattern. There are actually we've stayed pretty surfacey so far because there's another approach we actually use in our apps, it's called frequency domain where we don't look at statistical Averages. We actually look at the spectrum analysis that look at what are the rhythms because you've got the breathing rhythm, you've got the heart brain rhythm, you've got the VLF rhythm which is generated by the heart. All these other rhythms that you separate out so you can tell what's really going on and what's the coordinated behavior amongst these different internal body systems. That's what coherence is really getting at. Because coherence isn't just breathing, it's not just breathing.

[Dave Asprey]

And that's what I work to explain to people. I can tell you to breathe in and out like every five seconds like you're talking about. And they won't fast. It's boring. And you won't go into coherence.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah, Hard focused breathing and then you start breathing. The appropriate attitude for the current times. Breathe a feeling if you're trying to. I mean, you know, I mean I was a meditator for years for a. Met the founder of HeartMath and got involved, you know, and I could have great meditations and fly around the universe and be disassociated, get in my car and be pissed off and frustrated before I even got to my office. So it didn't really. I mean I got benefit out of it. I don't want to make it, but.

[Dave Asprey]

It doesn't stick always.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah, it didn't transfer into day to day. Yeah, right. I mean I. Once I learned coherent heart coherence, I can honestly say, Dave, I made more personal gain and progress in three to four months than I did in years of meditation. No, I still meditate. I just do heart focused meditation.

[Dave Asprey]

I think you're onto something there in terms of changes in your life per minute of work. Hard math training is far superior to any meditation practice that I know of. And I know a lot of them and I'm a fan of them just like you. They're for different purposes. And a lot of self meditation, especially for the first decade or so, is not about self regulation. But it can be, it can get there, but it doesn't. That's why I do the neurofeedback side on the meditation front versus the heart variability front.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah, you know, I think that, I know I learned many years ago now and I've had a lot of people tell me this in recent weeks, months, that what they've discovered is that what meditation really has been about for them, but they didn't know until recently, but it was really about stilling the mind enough that they could finally hear the voice of the heart.

[Dave Asprey]

Well said. Yeah. When your mind shuts the hell up and the voice in your head goes away from whatever practice, you might be able to pay attention to that signal a little bit better.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah. So when you're doing the heart, focus, breathing, breathe a feeling. I've turned a few friends onto this, and they come back and said, God, I wish I'd known this years ago. While you're doing the hard focus breathing on the in breath, breathe in a feeling of inner stillness, consciously breathe inner stillness into your. That complex emotional system. Right. Because that emotional system is running the show. And for most of us, it's the mind that's running that's activating that system and causing the choppy waves in the system. So doing that breathing, breathing, a feeling of inner peace or stillness, and then just be quiet and listen for the inner voice, the inner rhythms, and that's how we start to become more aware. Remember, I was talking about the energetic level, which is where emotions, our triggers, really start at. Because once we get onto them there, Dave, we start feeling them, we can kind of turn them around at that energetic level. Once they get into the physiology, it's a lot harder because there go the hormones, they've already been released, and there's the knot in the stomach and the tension in the shoulders.

[Dave Asprey]

I'm trying to find words for this, and I want to ask you about this.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

This.

[Dave Asprey]

I found that after I got used to having the state, if I am dysregulated now, I'm aware that I'm just regulated, which is cool, but all I have to do is remember that I have that state. I just. Oh, let me just look for it. And then it's there again. It's. It doesn't require nearly as much effort as it used to.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Have a new baseline. Yeah, that's that new baseline I've been talking about.

[Dave Asprey]

It works. It's powerful. And in terms of getting the cost down, I think it was 4 or 500 bucks bucks back when I started working with this. And money was worth a lot more back then than it is now. So you've taken the cost down. You have.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

That was the first ever system that we actually invented, the hrv. First app ever. Hrv.

[Dave Asprey]

And you have impeccable data. I mean, the lengths you've gone to, 10 million sessions and global field measurements, it's very hard to argue with the body of research that you've experienced accumulated over the last couple decades. So there may be further improvements to be made, but I don't think any rational actor could take a look at this and go, there's nothing there. And all I really care about for any consciousness improvement is what's the return on investment of time and effort. And this is five or 10 minutes a day, maybe 20 when you get up there for a few weeks and then you're less of a dick for the rest of your life. Just that happened to me.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah. It's not like it. After four weeks you stop. No, I mean, you still want to. I still start today, 30 years later. Yeah, I still start the day making sure I get coherent.

[Dave Asprey]

But do you use the sensor every day to do that?

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

I use it most nights when I do it. I don't know if I do it in the morning.

[Dave Asprey]

I gave my.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

It keeps me honest because, you know, because I know in the like Oura ring and whoops on your tracking, basically rmssd across the mid 8 and it tells you, you know, what the waves were, I mean, how choppy or not they tell you how choppy or not the waves were, how amplitude and that, that can be that and that can modulate it. But people need to cut themselves a break a little bit there too, because a lot can affect that. That isn't what you necessarily think. So that's the difference between measuring and training.

[Dave Asprey]

It's. Measuring is a far lower value than training and, and actively changing and becoming aware.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah, but. But you can still get benefit. I'm not down on measuring.

[Dave Asprey]

Oh yeah, they're both, they're both.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

I know you're. Because, you know, like if you get, you know, flu or something, your numbers will drop if they, you know, 10% up and down. That's pretty normal.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah, I had my sensor. I've had multiple sensors over there. So I, I gave two sensors ago, my daughter was here and I talked to her about this and she said, oh, yeah, I used to do that. I said, well, you know, you just turned 18, so you might want to do that again. She goes, okay, like, can I have. All right. So I gave it to her, order another one. And then my girlfriend at the time was, was saying, all right, all right. So I gave her that sensor. So I don't have a sensor right now, but I know how to do it. So I'll probably get another one because it's a good practice to do it.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

If I know now. Well, I just showed you one a couple months ago.

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah, exactly. That was the one that went to my girlfriend. So what you can do is you can pick them up on the HeartMath website and save money on it, they're not expensive. Like it's as easy for you to bring one to be it.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

The awesome thing is that when you get, I mean these are the best. In fact, there was a study published a few months ago that compared our sensor to a bunch of other ones, including medical grain ones. Blew them all away in terms of accuracy. I mean it's.

[Dave Asprey]

If you've had some time to do.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

This right, it's really done right. And it's a high resolution sensor. It's made for training, not just continuous measuring. And it does that really well because.

[Dave Asprey]

It'S heartmath.com Dave and you don't have to do this. It's not going to change my life if you do or don't. It will probably change yours though.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah, exactly.

[Dave Asprey]

This is just incredible wisdom. And of all the things you've learned, you've done a lot that's outside of just this. I would say you're a spiritual and consciousness pioneer here. What is the one piece of advice that you'd offer for listeners? Like sum it all up a couple.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Ways I can answer that. Actually what I've finally gotten to in my own life, that the straightest line path to rapidly increasing my level of awareness and consciousness. That's what I think you're asking about, is to radiate love.

[Dave Asprey]

Oh man.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

And I've been talking openly and more about this even in scientific circles recently because a lot of people I think are confused about love in a certain way. Yeah. So I've been talking about the frequency spectrum of love.

[Dave Asprey]

What is it?

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Okay, so before I answer that, when I say frequency spectrum. Well, that sounds like I'm going woo woo or something.

[Dave Asprey]

You're pretty engineering focused.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

I'm pretty engineering focused. You know, you were getting at this a little while ago in the discussion when we were talking about fields. Right?

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

So when we put electrodes on the body to measure the electrocardiogram or the head measure the electroencephalogram, what's being measured is current flow.

[Dave Asprey]

Yes.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

That's all that's being measured by electrodes. Okay. Current flow. Now, of course, the heart is measured in millivolts, brain is measured in microvolts. Hundred times greater. Right. Whenever there's a flow of current, you create a magnetic field.

[Dave Asprey]

Correct.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Magnetic fields go through things.

[Dave Asprey]

They do indeed.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

This is why cell phones work indoors. Okay. So we showed back in the 90s that the magnetic field of the heart is carrying information about our emotional states.

[Dave Asprey]

Yes.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Those patterns of information. This is measurable spectrum analysis. You can watch them change as you change emotional states.

[Dave Asprey]

It's real science.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

It's real science. They trace back to your heart rate.

[Dave Asprey]

Variability, pattern, the rhythm, the song playing with your heart.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

There is exactly. There's a mathematical relationship. So now that we know that knowing what your HRV pattern is. Remember I said it can be spent a lifetime trying to understand this stuff is exactly what we're feeding the field, the energetic field, that your nervous system. My nervous system is picking up on each other's right now.

[Dave Asprey]

Do you know the pattern of love? Is there a specific sign?

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Well, that's where I wanted to before I answered that question. Say that. When I say the frequencies of love, I mean it literally. These are frequencies that we can measure in the fields we're radiating.

[Dave Asprey]

Wow. And we're measuring them with magnetic sensors.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah, yeah. Magnetometers.

[Dave Asprey]

Wow.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

So when you look at a coherent. When we're in a heart rhythm. Coherent. That frequency spectrum is radically different than when somebody's feeling anxiety or frustration or irritation or getting triggered and so on. Right. We're broadcasting that so what we feel inside doesn't stop at the skin. Dave. Yep. This is literal. This is science.

[Dave Asprey]

It's very literal.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

And it's affecting others in a measurable way.

[Dave Asprey]

That's why you don't want to hate on other people. It's not good for you or though.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. So it's a long answer to your question, but one of the things I. One of my calls to action is to pause as often as you can Remember to do it throughout the day.

[Dave Asprey]

To do coherent breathing.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah. Well, first ask yourself, what am I feeding the field? What's the vibration I'm feeding the field? And if it is maybe under the radar levels of anxiety or maybe some.

[Dave Asprey]

Fears or envy or jealousy. Any of the seven, 10, any of.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

That lower frequency stuff. Do some hard focus breathing. Breathe that feeling. Right. Now, the strip spectrum of love, it's an octave. Compassion. Am I extending compassionate latitude to someone because they cut me off in drafts? I really don't know what their day is like.

[Dave Asprey]

Correct.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Or that person who said the thing sideways in a meeting. Because I probably did it last week. Or we'll do it next week.

[Dave Asprey]

Little forgiveness mixed in.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah, forgiveness.

[Dave Asprey]

You're starting to sound like you've been to 40 years of Zen even though you haven't.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

That's another one of those frequencies of love. Appreciation, gratitude. Patience is a super big one that just eats our energy and takes us in the choppy seas. And the internal systems breathe a feeling of hard, focused breathing. But Then breathe. Patience.

[Dave Asprey]

So can you measure love versus compassion versus patience in the field?

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

You can see subtle differences in the field. Yeah. That's where I can say the frequency, the love spectrum.

[Dave Asprey]

I've got some of that mapped out with brainwaves, but I haven't mapped those out with heart stuff the way you have. But those are real, real signals.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah.

[Dave Asprey]

And they're trainable both in the heart and the brain. And when you learn how to do it, you can hug someone and it'll change them.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah.

[Dave Asprey]

Right.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Well, when you're talking about dating, imagine if you're with someone. If we. Once you understand that we have an energetic. This energetic magnetic field is a very real.

[Dave Asprey]

Oh, yeah.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

I mean, how do I know this? I can measure it. I can put this probe out here and every time measure this field. It's not, you know. Yeah. I'm not talking about auras and things. I'm talking about magnetics. So if you are around somebody that's radiating a coherent signal, even unconsciously, and is unconscious for most people, until we do some self awareness training. Right. You naturally feel whether it's attracted. If it's a date, maybe, or safer or more trusting. Right. You can't fake it.

[Dave Asprey]

Exactly. It's congruence and heavily meditated. I wrote about congruence. It's that inner state matches your outer state.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah. And if your feelings aren't matching what you're saying, oh, people know. Oh, boy. That creates a mixed signal that we quickly unconsciously pick up on and let me get the heck out of here.

[Dave Asprey]

You know, I remember the. The first party I went to when I moved to Austin a few years ago. I hugged someone. I just met a woman at a party. She was maybe 28, 29. Just, you know, hi, nice to meet you. And she stops. She goes, what did you just do? And I'm like, my hands are up. I have no idea what's going on here. And. And she says, no, that. That hug was different. I felt something. I'm like, well, you really want to know what I did? And she said, yeah. I said, all right. I said, I'm not being creepy at all here, but you need to sit. So your heart's right against mine where the field strength is strongest. And I'm going to do heart coherent breathing.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Drink.

[Dave Asprey]

I'm going to show it to you. And I taught it to her. And she just said, something shifted. And I'm not saying this to say I'm powerful. I'm saying this to say this technique is real and it works. And magnetic fields are stronger. They drop off at a cube of distance. So you put someone's heart right up against yours and you do this, they're going to feel it. And I had done that when I hugged her. I always do that when I hug someone.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah, you don't even have to hug to feel it.

[Dave Asprey]

No, it's just stronger when you're closer.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

I mean. Yeah, exactly. When we've done experiments in the lab though, people five, six feet apart, you.

[Dave Asprey]

Can do it across the world if you're not.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

But I mean even within the field mediated and interestingly, you know, I was. We did this guy back in the 90s experiments where we're measuring brain waves and heartbeats and multi, you know, different people in a room together interacting. So I had this hypothesis that I was totally wrong, by the way, that I am coherent. I am radiating coherent fields. I am all powerful people will synchronize. Nice to me, right?

[Dave Asprey]

Yeah. It doesn't look like that.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

No, it was completely wrong. Yeah.

[Dave Asprey]

So you're, you're.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

So being coherent is a stable system. When it actually did. Out of that stability came another level of sensitivity. So my. If you're in a coherent state, your brain waves are actually synchronizing to the other person's heart.

[Dave Asprey]

Wow.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

So now you've got access to the energetic information.

[Dave Asprey]

You can read their fields, but yet.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

You'Re stable because you're in that stable state. So you're not knocked out of control.

[Dave Asprey]

You don't pick up their incoherent heart rate. So wow. This is a lot of that intuitive sensing of other people. You're explaining it with real hard science.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Yeah.

[Dave Asprey]

And this is incredible work. And in the last couple decades since I first was blown away in our first conversation.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

God.

[Dave Asprey]

You've taken this field so far. It is truly impressive. And this is the actual state that we live in, the environment we live in. And it isn't obvious from our human senses, but it is detectable with science and with our senses, if they're trained and you make a $250 device without the discount that doesn't.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Lifetime access to the app.

[Dave Asprey]

Oh, it comes really.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

You get lifetime access. You've dropped it. You get to center. I mean it's.

[Dave Asprey]

You've made it a lot, a lot more affordable. Yeah. We've got to wind up. So guys. Heartmath.com Dave and this is worth it. I would encourage you to do it. And if you do it, do it with someone else. Like give one to your boyfriend or girlfriend or just do it for yourself, then have them do it while you sit with them. You will change yourself and you'll change the stuff around you when you do it. It's important. So thank you, Roland. I'm really always blown away by our conversations, whether they're on the air or not.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

Me too. Thanks Dave.

[Dave Asprey]

See you next time on the Human Upgrade Podcast.

[Dr. Rollin McCraty]

The Human Upgrade, formerly Bulletproof Radio, was created and is hosted by Dave Asprey. The information contained in this podcast is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended for the purposes of diagnosing, treating, curing, or preventing any disease. Before using any products referenced on the podcast, consult with your healthcare provider Cancer carefully, read all labels and heed all directions and cautions that accompany the products. Information found or received through the podcast should not be used in place of a consultation or advice from a healthcare provider. If you suspect you have a medical problem or should you have any healthcare questions, please promptly call or see your healthcare provider. This podcast, including Dave Asprey and the producers, disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. Opinions of guests are their own and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. This podcast may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products or services. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. This podcast is owned by Bulletproof Media.