A Masterclass in Improving Your HRV - Dr Jay Wiles

Go see Chris live - https://chriswilliamson.live Dr Jay Wiles is https://ohm.health's Chief Health & Performance Officer and HRV researcher. HRV is the new health flex, but is it lying to you? Everyone’s comparing HRV scores, but what does HRV really mean for your health? How do you raise it, and should you actually care if yours is lower than your friends'? Expect to learn what HRV actually measures and what it doesn’t, why everyone suddenly cares about HRV, how fast the vagal system responds to changes in HRV and how it adapts, why resonance breathing is different than slow breathing, what to improve first when optimising HRV, the big picture takeaway you should look out for, for HRV and much more... - 0:00 Why Should We Be Looking at HRV? 14:54 Why Everyone’s HRV is Different 19:56 Do Men and Women Have Different HRV? 28:44 State vs Trait: Understanding Nervous System Change 38:14 How Fast Your Nervous System Really Reacts 44:16 Can You Train Your Nervous System to Adapt Over Time? 53:08 Does Resonance Breathing Actually Work? 01:10:24 How Ohm is Rethinking Breathwork 01:19:31 Does Feeling Calm Mean You’re Regulated? 01:24:41 How to Reduce Physiological Stress 01:41:06 The Top Signs Your Resonance Breathing is Working 01:47:15 The Best Ways to Improve Your HRV 01:51:27 How Breath Connects the Mind and Nervous System 01:56:03 Why Sleep is the Most Important Factor 02:04:32 Is There a Limit to Improving HRV? 02:08:12 Where to Find Jay - Get 15% off your first order of my favourite Non-Alcoholic Brew at https://athleticbrewing.com/modernwisdom Get a free sample or 30% off a one-month supply of Timeline at https://timeline.com/modernwisdom30 Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://shopify.com/modernwisdom Get up to $350 off the Pod 5 at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Good news, I'm going back on tour with a brand new live show in Australia, New Zealand and Bali. If you are interested in learning how to overcome imposter syndrome, reach your goals while not missing your entire life, my perspective on where true confidence comes from, everything I've ever discovered about discipline, plus brand new insights that I've never spoken about on the podcast, then join me on stage as I explore all of these topics with you. And you can get involved during an extensive Q and A where we work through the biggest questions that you have right now. Perth and Brisbane are completely sold out, but there are still tickets available for Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Christchurch, Auckland and Bali. And you can get yours right now by going to the link in the description below or heading to chriswilliamson.live.

• 0:42Chris Williamson?

  HRV is kind of like the new hot girl in school. Everyone's real interested in her, finding out where she's come from and what she can do and who she likes. Assume that I know nothing about HRV. What is it? What's it measure?

• 0:57Speaker 01

  The funniest thing about this, Chris, is that, let's say circa 10, 15 years ago, like, we would have never been having this discussion. And so for someone like me who is early to the game in the field of heart rate variability, because I was exposed to it, let's say 15 years ago, when I first started doing mostly clinical work, now everybody has access to this. Like, it's in, because of the advent of wearable technology, we all have accessibility to something that you used to have to go into, like, let's say, a specialized academic clinic in order to receive. So I worked at the Department of Veteran Affairs as a resident. And so within that context, like, I was exposed to it because we utilize three-lead, six-lead, 12-lead EKGs. And so it's, these are 30,000,

• 1:42Speaker 01

  50,000, 60,000 pieces of dollars worth of equipment. And so within that context, it's great to see now that we can all obtain this data. But the problem is that nobody actually understands what the hell this thing is.

• 1:54Chris Williamson?

  It's a cool new metric that nobody has a clue what it does.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, indeed. So the way I like to explain heart rate variability is first by giving a broad definition of what HRV actually is. And then I like to backpedal a little bit because I think that the definition that I'm going to give is probably a little bit too broad. And heart rate variability in and of itself is actually quite nuanced. So when we think about HRV or heart rate variability, and I'm going to say HRV probably for the rest of the podcast, because heart rate variability is a mouthful, HRV is the single greatest non-invasive proxy that we have for measuring the adaptations of the nervous system. HRV is a signal. It's a window into how the nervous system is responding at any given time or the time we're actually measuring it. And so when we think about HRV, I want people to think about adaptation, to think about

• 2:41Speaker 01

  resilience and to think about flexibility. Those are probably three words that I'll use quite often within this context. So if it's looking at the adaptations of the nervous system, I like to backpedal a little bit and I explain what we mean by nervous system. Cause I think a lot of people, they hear this word nervous system. It's kind of like one of those cool catchphrases in terms of people using the health and wellness sphere right now, that I don't think people actually fully grasp and understand what it is. So maybe it makes sense for me to explain the nervous system a little bit. Okay. So when we talk about nervous system, we're talking about a massive signaling highway. And when we think about a massive signaling highway, we think about nerve endings that are running throughout the entire body. So all the way from the brain and spinal cord out to the periphery of the body itself. And it's all about communication.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  It's all about sending signals and messages to and from the brain and the spinal cord out to the body and then back up. So effrent and affrent signaling. The nervous system is not just in one location or in one area. So a lot of people, when they think about nervous system, they think about what's going on within the brain. That's the central nervous system. So the central nervous system is the brain and the spinal cord, but there are also other signaling highways, one being the peripheral nervous system, which is a larger umbrella term that people use. But within the peripheral nervous system, we have the somatic nervous system and the autonomic nervous system. Somatic nervous system is all voluntary. So it's movement, coordination, muscular contraction, whereas the autonomic nervous

• 4:09Speaker 01

  system is all about involuntary, or at least we thought it used to be all involuntary. And so that's, this things like managing things like your respiration, your blood pressure, heart rate, digestion, it's all kind of under autonomic or automatic control. So what does the autonomic nervous system even do? Like what do we, what do we need it? It's a threat detection signaling mechanism that we have built in from an evolutionary perspective, the great way to think about it is that it's constantly scanning our environments, receiving internal cues, external cues, and making adjustments to our physiology so that we can maintain balance, maintain homeostasis throughout the body. Because we don't want

• 4:51Speaker 01

  things dysregulated in one way or another, because that can cause pretty significant dysfunction from a mind-body perspective. So it's all intended to say, hey, let me zone in on which way I need to adjust. Do I need to move blood pressure up? Do I need to move it down? Do I need to increase heart rate up and down? And it's kind of like this back and forth communication highway that we have. When people think about the nervous system, they think about it being either like the stress response or the relaxation response. And it's actually a bit more nuanced than that even. Because when we think about the autonomic nervous system, it consists of two different branches, the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system is

• 5:32Speaker 01

  what most people see as the fight or flight or freeze response. And I actually think that that's a bit of a bastardization or overgeneralization as to what the sympathetic response is. I actually think that to conceptualize the parasympathetic response, it's much more of a way that we mobilize energy. So if we think about mobilizing energy, why would we need to do that? We would need to mobilize energy in an effort to evade perceived threat or even potential viable threat. And then on the other side, we have the parasympathetic nervous system. So when we think about parasympathetic nervous system, the way I was taught about this in graduate school is para is like a parachute. It helps to bring us down. The whole intention behind the parasympathetic nervous system is our

• 6:17Speaker 01

  rest, digest, or relaxation response. But again, I like to think of it more as a way of conserving energy. So mobilizing energy, sympathetic nervous system, conserving energy, parasympathetic nervous system. And we have both of those kind of working together, not just antagonistically. They're not just like this seesaw where we turn one on or we turn one off. And that's where a lot of people get this wrong, is that there's a misconception that I turn on my stress response and I can turn it off, or I turn on my relaxation response, or I can turn it off. It doesn't work that way. It's not a seesaw. They actually work together. And so

• 6:54Speaker 01

  Kind of taking a step forward now to HRV and kind of how this relates to everything is that we can actually gain insight or window through a biometric, which is heart rate variability, which actually looks at that autonomic nervous system and whether or not it's actually making true adaptations and is resilient, or is it lacking in flexibility and potentially causing us some significant harm?

• 7:17Chris Williamson?

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

• 7:28Speaker 01

  The nervous system is having to respond to millions of processes at any given moment. So it's having to make adaptations at any given moment, again, to keep us in that state of homeostasis. Otherwise, we become dysregulated and we experience what's called allostatic load. In other words, our nervous system can't keep up with all of the input. It's basically too much, it's too taxing. And so therefore, when we look at heart rate variability and the distance between successive heartbeats, and I think that actually probably I should offer that definition now and explain why those distances relate actually to dysregulation or regulation of the nervous system. It gives us insight into, is it making those fine tune adjustments and adaptations?

• 8:13Speaker 01

  So let me back up now and explain heart rate variability from a definition perspective. And the way I like to explain this through the heuristic of heart rate that most people understand. So for instance, Chris, if I were to look at your wearable that you have on, let's say with your whoop, and I open up your phone, and in your phone I see that your heart is beating at a rate of 60 beats per minute. So we take some really easy math here and we say, okay, so if your heart is beating at a rate of 60 beats per minute, that's one beat that's occurring every single second. And so therefore, we're approximating that across a 60 second window, your heart is beating once every single second, 60 beats per minute, easy math. Is that actually what's going on? And the answer is no. The heart actually doesn't operate like a metronome.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  When the heart starts to operate like a metronome, that's actually when we run into some struggle, we run into trouble. Because the thermos- Is starting to adjust to say, there's a lot of chaos that's going on right now. I need to kind of like hone in, back in and regulate the system to kind of a consistent, constant beat. Because I've got other things that I've got to attend to. There's threat that's kind of within my environment. So what we'd actually say is that, no, the heart during that 60 minute or 60 second window that we were looking at wasn't just kind of holding a nice even beat. Actually, it was going up and down and up and down. And if you look at a heart rate of someone just kind of at rest at baseline right now. It kind of looks a little bit chaotic, like it doesn't actually have a nice little sinusoidal pattern or rhythm. It actually looks quite chaotic.

• 9:41Speaker 01

  And that's because there are many processes that are occurring in that time that it's causing your heart rate to speed up. And to slow down and to speed up and to slow down. And so with that, across that, let's say, cycle of speeding up and slowing down. The time between successive heartbeats, which is what we're looking at with heart rate variability. Is shrinking kind of as we inhale. So that time is going down, down, down. Because heart rate is increasing. And then as we exhale, it's going longer, longer, longer. So the space between successive heartbeats is actually elongating. Now, the difference between those heartbeats, so when we look at what is the amount of time and we look at that in milliseconds.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  So for instance, we wouldn't say like there's one second or 1.2 seconds when the world of heart rate variability research, we'd say. There's 1,000 milliseconds or 980 milliseconds. That variance tells us something about the fine tunements that your nervous system is making to adjust to its environment. And when it's having a really hard time adjusting, then we see that variance start to decrease. So it may go from, hey, I'm in a really perfectly relaxed mode and my heart rate variability is 100 milliseconds. To it may actually start to shrink pretty, pretty substantially when we're experiencing stress. Because our body's having a hard time adapting.

• 11:02Chris Williamson?

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

• 11:12Speaker 01

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

• 11:28Chris Williamson?

  Price.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  I know it gets complicated.

• 11:30Chris Williamson?

  We don't need to make it over complicated.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  No.

• 11:32Chris Williamson?

  It explains whether you are making the distance between heartbeats longer or shorter, and how much of that occurs across a given time period.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So and that variance that occurs between heartbeats. The reason that's so incredibly valuable and so important for people to understand is because as we examined whether or not your nervous system is truly adapting to its environment, we can take that number and plot it across time and see whether or not it is changing or is it staying the same or is it decreasing? And this is again, another misconception that people have is they believe that heart rate variability is this metric that I should always see going in an upward direction. It should always be progressing in an upward direction. When in fact, and this actually comes from my really close friend. His name's Dr. Marco Latini, Italian researcher, brilliant in this space.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  He actually says that a good HRV is actually a normal HRV. It is a HRV that doesn't change across time very much. So it's actually one that remains stable. And we can get into that if you if you want. But HRV is a metric that shouldn't just be taken out of context and looking at just what is it right now, but what is it across time?

• 12:46Chris Williamson?

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

• 12:50Speaker 01

  If I had a dollar for every email I got asking that question of whether or not, you know, my HRV is good because it is said number or bad because of said number, I'd be a very rich man right now. So I would say that this is a little nuanced. High HRV is good, but it's only good when it's relative to you. It's not good when we're saying, hey, I want to compare my HRV to someone else. That's actually where we can get into trouble. High HRV as it is relative to you could be good. That could be a sign of adaptation for you. So let's say, Chris, for instance, easy math, your HRV typically is 50 milliseconds.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  So if we see that across time, that number is going from 50 to 60 to 65 to 70. Well, relative to you, that's pretty good. But I may look at someone else whose HRV is, their baseline is 100 milliseconds. And over the course of time, it's actually gone from 100 to 90 to 85. Well, the absolute value is still much higher than yours. But I would say that you're showing way better adaptations from a nervous system perspective than they are. So high isn't what we're aiming for here because this is not a, it's not a metric of virtue. And I think that this is where people get into a lot of trouble. They see whoever, health influencer posts their aura or whoop score on their Instagram page.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  And they've got a heart rate variability score of 150 milliseconds. And like, shit, like I've got, mine is like 25. And that's when I get the email like, am I going to die? Like, am I going to have like some cardiovascular issues or panic attacks that are going to cause me to die? And I always say, hey, let's pump the brakes, let's pump the vagal brake here and just relax for a second. Like what's most important here is not looking at whether or not it's high or low. It's looking at stability across time. And one metric that's not used very often, but I use this a lot with my, within my clinic. So I work with a lot of pro athletes, you know, ranging from individuals in the MLB, NFL, Formula One, et cetera. And one of the metrics I use for them with recovery is actually not looking at just the daily absolute value score

• 14:58Speaker 01

  that you might get from whoop or a et cetera. I actually look at a number called HRV CV, which is the coefficient of variation of heart rate variability, which is a long-winded way of saying from day to day, how much does your HRV vary? So when we look at it across a seven day window, is it varying significantly? Indicating that it's having a hard time adjusting because it's going up and down and up and down, maybe due to stress, overtraining, overreaching? Or is it nice and stable, indicating that the nervous system is always rebounding? It's always doing what it should do. So I know that's a long-winded way of saying, is high good, low bad? The answer is yes and no, but mostly no.

• 15:35Chris Williamson?

  Right. Why, why do certain people have different HRVs to others? Cause I've got a whoop team and on my whoop team is a bunch of pro athletes. And I have a weightlifter friend whose HRV I've seen in the 200s to 10. I've got a professional cricketer friend, he's regularly in the 150s. And then there's me and the rest of my degenerate friends that are kind of scrabbling around in midlife.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  There are a lot of different factors that come into play here. So you have to think about a couple of things. I think the biggest thing are what are the non-modifiable factors that influence heart rate variability? And then what are the modifiable factors? Because I think that we place a lot of pressure in a day and age where there's like so much, I guess, biometric hypervigilance. We place a lot of pressure on ourselves to have certain metrics meet whatever our standards are. Typically, they're pretty arbitrary standards because people are just like, again, I saw somebody who had a 200 millisecond HRV. I probably should have that because they're a pro athlete. We're comparing apples and oranges here. We're using the same metric, but we're comparing two different physiological presentations.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  So let's talk then about first, non-modifiable influencers. Because I think that that's the one that people need to hear more than anything. The first one's age. Like, age is one of the primary, uh, non-modifiable factors that we see within the literature. Like, if you go and you look at the literature that compares normative values across longitudinal time in these, in these studies, we see that there is a distinct negative slope. And one of the things that's happening is that generally around ages 40 to 50 or so, or even like in the mid 30s, we start to see a pretty steep decline in baseline heart rate variability. This is due to a lot of reasons. I mean, we have things like, uh, autonomic efficiency is reduced.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  So the ability to kind of like actually handle stress is reduced, likely due to compounding stress. And we're just disillusioned by like all the stuff that we've experienced in life. The second is like vascular stiffening. So as we get older, we actually know that we have vascular stiffening, whether it be due to things like atherosclerotic plaque buildup or like the hardening of arteries, like that can occur. So we see this steep decrease. The great news, though, is that even though we see declination in HRV across kind of the longitudinal studies in regards to age, we actually know that the ceiling for HRV isn't reduced. And so what I mean by that is that just because it declines doesn't mean that we can't increase it

• 18:06Speaker 01

  and doesn't mean that there is some ceiling that's like, okay, when I, once I hit 60 years old, I'll never get over 30 milliseconds. So that's the good news. So age is one non-modifiable factor. The second one would be genetics. And I guess, given kind of advances in technology like CRISPR and stuff, people might argue that you can now influence this aspect, but I would say that currently with what we have, we cannot influence it. It's just genetics. Like, some people are actually just born with a genetic predisposition towards lower heart rate variability. So when we look at twin studies on heredibility of these genes related to cardiovascular structure and nervous system structure, like, we find that there is a pretty moderate to high influence of genetics on HRV.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  And kind of as a, as a story, like, I see this all the time with my, my pro athletes, actually. Like, I'll have a pro athlete come into my clinic, and I'll have one come in who's an Olympic sprinter, who is in the best cardiovascular condition that you could ever imagine. VO2 max, like, out the roof. But his, but his actual HRV is, like, in the 30s, 40s. And then I'll have another guy, like, an NFL, let's say, lineman, who maybe isn't in the highest degree of cardiovascular shape, but it's still in good shape to be able to take on all that they do. And genetically, they just have a high predisposition towards HR, high HRV, and it's in the 150s, 160s. And so it's like, okay, is one healthier than the other? Because one has a higher HRV versus low HRV?

• 19:31Speaker 01

  And the answer is, is that we have no evidence in the literature to suggest that that HRV should be seen, that number, absolute value, should be seen as a longevity metric.

• 19:40Chris Williamson?

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• 20:25Chris Williamson?

  Right now, you can get 15% off your first online order by going to the link in the description below, or heading to athleticbrewing.com/modernwisdom. That's athleticbrewing.com/.

• 20:37Chris Williamson?

  Modern wisdom. Should, if I was to be able to put myself into the mind, the experience of each of those two different people, different personalities, different life experiences, different everything. But if I was able to experience their HRV or experience their nervous system, do you have anything that indicates that the guy at 150 and the guy at 30 would experience their nervous systems differently? Because what you're saying here is what matters is you relative to you over time, not you relative to somebody else. And the reason that they have that set point is because of a lot of things that are non-modifiable and modifiable. But even those things taken into account, would their experience of their nervous systems

• 21:22Chris Williamson?

  be different? Would the guy at 150 be more likely to be able to come back down after some sort of high arousal state? Is he going to be more likely to fall asleep more quickly? Or is it literally just all contained within the system and they're completely uncomparable?

• 21:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, the answer broadly is no. Their experience, if you were to jump in to say someone who has a 200 millisecond, 250, 300 millisecond RMSSD value in their HRV baseline reading overnight, you wouldn't necessarily inherently experiencing anything different purely just based on that baseline reading. Now, that person may have really strong, let's call it baroreflex gain, or a really strong adaptive nervous system to stress, because maybe they've been training it or some other things are influencing their ability to be resilient in terms of a nervous system perspective. You may notice it then, depending on kind of your baseline level of stress and anxiety, but just purely based

• 22:20Speaker 01

  on feel, no. It's kind of like, I, I think this is kind of analogous to blood pressure, right? So if, if you were to have, let's say, a standard blood pressure of 120 over 75, and then you were to hop into the body of somebody who has, like, let's say, a 145 over 95, you wouldn't necessarily experience it just kind of at baseline, a difference in feel between those. And so that, that's kind of synonymous, or I guess I would say analogous to. HRV. But if you've got somebody who's got a very well dynamically trained nervous system to adapt to stress. And so their inherent physiology knows what to do when it encounters stress and almost does it subconsciously.

• 23:01Speaker 01

  You might experience that, especially if you had a high propensity towards things like anxiety, stress, even depression.

• 23:09Chris Williamson?

  Interesting. What about the modifiable ones?

• 23:11Speaker 01

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

• 23:20Chris Williamson?

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

• 23:21Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. Another, another tall, white guy coming to pick on females. Men, so sex, sex differences is the non-modifiable. Again, another one that we can get in trouble.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  Sex differences. The, we know from literature, men typically have a higher average heart rate variability than women do. And actually, six foot five guy here, taller guys typically have higher heart rate variabilities. And actually, lower resonant frequency rates of breathing. Well, I'm sure we're going to talk about resonant frequency rates as well. And this is just a, a sex difference that we see. And one of the main reasons is that women, as we know, go through a 28 day cycle. And so because of this menstruation cycle that, or menstrual cycle that they go through, we actually know that different phases of their cycle can influence different hormonal expressions. So mostly stark drops in things like progesterone.

• 24:12Speaker 01

  And in estrogen, especially during like the late luteal phase, can increase sympathetic drive and reduce heart rate variability pretty significantly. So when you average that out across time, we see that women's, especially premenopausal women, their HRV tends to be quite lower than, than men's.

• 24:31Chris Williamson?

  Okay, modifiable.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, modifiable. The biggest one is cardio respiratory fitness. So we actually know that when someone increases things like stroke volume, when they increase or lower blood pressure, and especially when they lower their heart rate, resting heart rate, that this can indeed increase baseline heart rate variability. I never say that HRV, because we should say what HRV like is useful for and what it's not useful for, because this is not like a catch all metric that can be used for everything. I actually think it's best used in conjunction with other metrics. So it's kind of like a piece of the puzzle as opposed to the full puzzle itself. Cardiorespiratory fitness. So as VO2 max increases, we know that resting heart rate decreases,

• 25:14Speaker 01

  stroke volume of the heart increases. And so therefore, we actually see heart rate variability improvements. And this can be, and this can range. It can range from pretty significant changes in baseline HRV to not much at all. I don't like to set it as the goalpost. So it's like, hey, I want to raise my HRV, then so therefore I should go get better cardiorespiratory fitness. I think we're thinking about it in the wrong way. It's a bit ass backwards there. I think it's, hey, let's increase cardiorespiratory fitness because we know it's great for health, wellness and longevity, and also great for mood and mental health. And then the byproduct of that is that we'll see typically HRV increase. The other one is chronic health conditions. So we know that people who have chronic health conditions like cardiovascular

• 25:57Speaker 01

  disease, diabetes, chronic pain, those all significantly lower heart rate variability. So the one thing that I would say is that if you were battling with any of those kinds of conditions, and it probably doesn't even need to be said, is that working on kind of managing those is going to be a significant way to move heart rate variability in the in the right direction. And then the last one, which is probably what I'd argue, and I'm a little bit biased on this, is the most important, is just overall stress load. Like, if you are someone who is like the typical person in today's day and age, especially Americans, is that we are freaking stressed all the time. And this chronic buildup of stress over time then results or equates to a nervous system that becomes way more

• 26:41Speaker 01

  rigid, way less adaptive. We're not able to actually have these things that we encounter in a day to day basis bounce off of us as easily. And so therefore, we kind of retreat to just kind of this chronic state of stress where we're on high alert, scanning the environments for threats, nonstop. And that has a negative, a net negative compounding effect on us. And so I think that if there's anything that people could do, is just creating better adaptability to internal and external stress.

• 27:09Chris Williamson?

  Okay. What doesn't it measure? What does HRV not measure?

• 27:14Speaker 01

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

• 27:22Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  And so therefore then I should.

• 27:24Chris Williamson?

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

• 27:28Speaker 01

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

• 27:37Chris Williamson?

  If you are more stressed, therefore, over time, your HRV is going to decrease.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 27:41Chris Williamson?

  Therefore, my HRV has gone down, I must be stressed.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  Right. What I should, what I should say is that when I think about stress, I'm thinking about the psychological construct of stress. And so there's physiological stress and psychological stress, and both of them actually manifest in the body the same way. I don't look at HRV and say, like, so for instance, if I put a strap on you and I said, okay, let's measure Chris's HRV right now. And it's a singular reading. Now, I know a good bit about your HRV, but let's just say I didn't know anything about your HRV. And I looked at that data point, what could I tell you about your stress response? The answer is I could tell you basically nothing. One singular reading outside of any context in regards to HRV isn't a signaling window to me telling you, I can see how, you know, on a spectrum, how stressed Chris is. I can't gain that.

• 28:31Speaker 01

  Now, over time, I can say, HRV is showing me how well you adapt to stress, how flexible you are to stress. Not how stressed you are, but how adaptable to stress you are. There's nuance there. So there's a difference between those two. So I can't just take that absolute value and number and say, okay, I'm at a 50 milliseconds this morning when I took my HRV reading. And so therefore, like, I know that I am stressed. And so when people try to tap into that as a, hey, I'm going to use that as the guide, it sets them up for disaster. Because then we have this nasty unwinding, like self fulfilling prophecy of people looking at these data points. And especially without context, just looking at singular data points and then using that to drive decisions.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  Because one reading of HRV should never be used to drive decision making.

• 29:22Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 29:26Chris Williamson?

  It seems to me at the moment that our ability to measure HRV is significantly better than our understanding of how to influence it. We've been given a ton of really great tools and you can wear your Oura or your Whoop or your Apple Watch and it will give you this reading. And yet, almost no one really understands what it is. It's kind of a complex metric. It's not superbly simple. It's taking you half an hour to kind of deconstruct what it means. And I think if you were to ask most people, even Whoop wearers, your HRV, if I told you that you need to increase it by 5% next month, what would you do? Sleep more, maybe. They'd say something like that. I know that it's to do with stress,

• 30:11Chris Williamson?

  so I'll try and be less stressed, whatever that means.

• 30:16Chris Williamson?

  Maybe I'll try and become fitter or something. But directly influencing HRV and sort of what the constituent parts are. So yeah, at the moment, it does seem a lot like people have got the ability to detect it, but aren't yet able to influence it.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. The, I want to give credit where credit's due. It's like these wearable companies, so fill in the blank, Whoop or a Pisces, Apple, all these great wearable companies that are out there that people are leveraging. I think I heard like the last stat was like 40% of Americans, I think, or maybe like even close to like 50%.

• 30:53Chris Williamson?

  Some form of wearable.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  Have some form of wearable. So we're all getting this biometric data. The problem is, and so much frustration starts to arise when people wake up and they say, well, I have this data point here that's supposed to drive some level of self-awareness, but it's not necessarily driving any type of action. And I think that's where people can get frustrated. So you tell me that my nervous system is dysregulated, you tell me that my sleep is poor, but now what do I do about it? So in that sense, I think that diagnostics have really kind of outpaced the interventive side of what we can, what we can actually do. And so part of me is like, well, now I think it's time to bring to the light like things that people

• 31:36Speaker 01

  can actually do that have been proven within the scientific literature. To help you make these adaptations to the nervous system so that we can, again, take all the great data that we get from wearables. We can leverage that data, but then use it kind of in a way that's applied. And actually, if, one of the things that I like to say is that HRV is best used in an applied real-time setting. And I think that's actually where most people don't have an understanding and then therefore probably not an appreciation for HRV as much as they should because they've never used it in an applied real-time setting.

• 32:11Chris Williamson?

  You wake up the next morning and your whoop gives you a score of what you had last night. And you, maybe you can work out that you did something yesterday. I mean, if you had a beer before you went to bed, okay, there we go. That's associated in my journal or whatever. But yeah, you're right that everybody has this number that kind of appears and feels almost at the mercy of it. It's down again. I guess, I guess I'm not doing something right, but the ability to intervene isn't as educated. Okay, so

• 32:45Chris Williamson?

  one of the things that we've kind of hinted at is that there are ways that you can state change and ways that you can trait change. So there are sort of immediate acute ways that you can intervene. And then over time, there is a adaptability side to the nervous system. What is it doing longitudinally across the months, across the years, across your entire life? Talk to me about the difference between a state change and a trait change in this context.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  So much confusion arises because people think, or they ask the question to me all the time. It's like, well, is this breathing strategy or meditative strategy just going to affect me in the here and now? So more of an acute transient change? Or is there actual evidence to suggest that if I consistently practice this, then I'll have more trait or longitudinal changes? So state changes are things that are occurring transiently, so happening right now. And then trait changes are things that are actually occurring across time, that are building a more robust system. We can think about it as more of like, if we fine tune the engine of a car over time. So maybe we know that there's a little bit of, you know, some, I'm not a mechanic here, but you know, maybe we know that there's some

• 33:52Speaker 01

  creaks and some things that are going wrong. We hear the belt, you know, kind of like not working in its proper way. Can we fine tune it over time so that we can create a more robust engine that maybe one day we create this car that we're working on over time to create more of like a race car or something that can actually perform at a really high level? So we know that things like breathing is probably the single greatest lever that we can pull, maybe aside from focusing on sleep, that breathing is one of the greatest levers that we can pull towards state change, but it's also a lever that we can pull more towards trait change. And we have really great studies and evidence based that I use to kind of base my claim here. State change, what is happening when we are, let's say, engaging in something like slow-paced breathing

• 34:37Speaker 01

  or resonance breathing, which we know is an effective strategy for shifting and regulating the nervous system? We start to create this internal environment. We start to distinctively change our physiology so that it experiences a position of safety, a position of security. I always like to kind of share the story. It's like, it would make no sense that if we were in face of a viable threat, let's say, the mountain lions chasing us, for us to stop and take a moment to do some deep breathing, because we need to execute and mobilize all that energy. The sympathetic nervous system needs to be firing on all cylinders. We need to have that parasympathetic withdrawal. We need everything that we can to get out of that or fight in that environment.

• 35:22Speaker 01

  So when we take the time to slow our breathing down, we're sending direct physiological signals up to the brain and to the central nervous system that says, well, the only opportunity that we would want to utilize this strategy is when we're in a safe and protected environment. And so therefore, from a physiological perspective, all of these things start to dynamically change. And we can get into the dynamics of what's occurring in the physiology, if you like, but all of these are happening so that we can calm and rest the nervous system in that moment. And that then results in that experience of relaxation. However, and that's great acutely, like we want that. Big meeting coming up that you have to speak with investors. We need to be able to down-regulate the nervous system and change that state really quickly, reduce anxiety, improve mental acuity, etc.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  That is only going to last for so long. So how do we build a robust system that then starts to translate into basically all areas of life and where we're not having to consciously think about regulating our nervous system? And that is where trait change starts to take place. And that can only come from consistent practice of resonance breathing, of any other type of meditation, whatever it may be for nervous system regulation. And the interesting thing or the analogy I like to make about this is like, it's like going to the gym, right? It's like, I can go into the gym right now and get a really great bicep workout, get a really great pump, and it feels excellent, blood's flowing in the muscles, great, great day.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  But then if I don't ever go back to the gym again, it's like, well, I had that nice, great workout, that was a great state change for that period of time, but I didn't make these adaptations. My muscles didn't get stronger because of that, they didn't get larger because of that. The nervous system works in the exact same way. So it's like, when I do a lot of these practices that I'm sure we'll get into, I think about me every single time, it's like me going to the nervous system gym. And every breath that I take, that's like a rep. It's like every time I do 10 minutes of this breathing practice, that's like a workout. And I know that as I compound workouts across time, the research has demonstrated that we actually experience more longitudinal or trait changes, or our nervous system's thermostat starts to actually dial in the direction that we're training it.

• 37:35Speaker 01

  And that's when we can, and that's when we've made a nervous system that's flexible and can handle a lot of the things that stress, that life throws at us like stress.

• 37:43Chris Williamson?

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• 38:28Chris Williamson?

  over fifty patents and nearly a dozen human clinical trials. It was recommended to me by my doctor, and that is why I've used it for so long, since way before I knew who even made the product. And best of all, there's a thirty day money back guarantee, plus free shipping in the US, and they ship internationally. Until the end of January, you can get thirty percent off a one month supply by going to the link in the description below or heading to timeline.com/ModernWisdom30. That's timeline.com/ModernWisdom30. How fast does our nervous system actually respond to these interventions? You do the thing, let's say that someone's about to go into a meeting, and they're feeling nervous, and they do some resonance breathing.

• 39:12Chris Williamson?

  How quickly does their nervous system actually adapt? Not adapt, how quickly does it respond?

• 39:17Speaker 01

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

• 39:59Chris Williamson?

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

• 40:08Speaker 01

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

• 40:49Chris Williamson?

  Well, because you can't go to sleep right now. You said one of the other ways is to work on sleep.

• 40:54Speaker 01

  Got it.

• 40:54Chris Williamson?

  I can't sleep right now.

• 40:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:56Chris Williamson?

  But I can breathe right now.

• 40:58Speaker 01

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

• 41:30Chris Williamson?

  Why does it increase mental acuity?

• 41:32Speaker 01

  Hmm. So that probably takes a little bit of time just to explain the science behind this and you can kind of like slap slap me for going like a little bit too much.

• 41:41Chris Williamson?

  Keep it simple.

• 41:42Speaker 01

  Okay, we'll keep it simple. So our body has a natural blood pressure regulation system and it called the barrow reflex response. The barrow reflex response is essentially like cruise control for your blood pressure. It's always trying to kind of dial up and dial down whenever it needs to, based on what it's seeing in terms of physiological change. That barrow reflex mechanism is what bridges the gap between our autonomic nervous system and our cardiovascular system. So it's kind of that bridge or pathway for communication. When our barrow reflex is not working like it should, so let's say we're experiencing some nervous system dysregulation. What happens within the barrow reflex mechanism is that

• 42:27Speaker 01

  it essentially will identify changes in blood pressure and then immediately it will try to overshoot to course correct because it basically is like, I'm on high alert, I'm going to send the signal to the Nervous system that we need to really course correct. It's like a great example of this is like the older cars with like cruise control. When they first came out with cruise control, they were like really crappy at like actually doing what they're supposed to do. So the speed would modulate like five, 10 miles an hour. And then the engine would just like abruptly like shift and would overshoot. Now we're going five or 10 miles over. Whereas like the newer cars, they have better barrel reflex gain because a mile an hour over and it adjusts nicely and smoothly. So you can imagine that when your nervous system is dysregulated and you're having all

• 43:12Speaker 01

  of these overshootings of blood pressure that are occurring. It causes a lot of different dynamics in terms of how we feel. Increased heart rate, blood rushing kind of to places really quickly. Like when blood pressure goes up, you may not be able to necessarily feel it if you don't have a high level of interoception or feeling of the body. But if you do, then you can kind of notice how it impacts mental acuity for the most part. So why does it impact mental acuity? Is that that barrel reflex response, when it becomes quite dysregulated, it changes basically like blood flow dynamics and vagal firing dynamics, which can cause that stress response to become quite heightened and almost like unruly and uncontrolled, which basically

• 43:56Speaker 01

  will start to flood our nervous system to think that there's a threat that's that's within within kind of like distance of us. And so therefore our mind is now trying to pursue all the different ways to kind of fight or flee and get out of there as opposed to kind of like locking in, getting into this night's deep flow state where blood pressure is really nicely managed in the way that it should be.

• 44:20Chris Williamson?

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

• 44:36Speaker 01

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

• 44:58Chris Williamson?

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

• 45:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. This is all going to come from the literature on resonance frequency biofeedback. So resonance frequency is kind of a long-winded way or a very kind of complex way of saying is that we can modulate our breathing, like the speed of breathing, which is frequency and how fast we breathe, to create physiological resonance in the body. The resonance from a physiological perspective is when two or more systems are oscillating at the same speed. So they're working in synergy with one another. They're oscillating at the same rate. So when we do something like resonance breathing, which was coined by a guy named Paul Laird out of Rutgers Medical School, who found that breathing at certain paces, and for adult

• 45:56Speaker 01

  humans, this is generally from four and a half breaths per minute as to highest six and a half breaths per minute, when we breathe kind of within that range and we can pinpoint specifically where our resonance frequency is through some different testing. When we breathe at that rate, we start to align what's called our respiratory sinus arrhythmia, which is as we inhale again, heart rate's going up and as we exhale, heart rate goes down. So it creates this beautiful kind of like sinusoidal pattern. We align breathing and respiration with heart rate. And then we also align that with our baroreflex mechanism that I was referring to just a second ago. When you do one single session of resonance breathing, you can start to make those initial adaptations at about minute six to 12.

• 46:41Speaker 01

  So sweet spot is probably around minute 10 or so from the literature. When you do that consistently, so in the research studies, when they've looked at different cohorts where they've compared that type of breathing, resonance breathing, they've generally found that breathing at, for 10 minutes at the resonance rate around four to six days a week, actually led to trait changes of the autonomic nervous system in as little as four weeks, as much as 12 weeks. So kind of like split the difference about eight to 10 is when we really see people start to make those changes.

• 47:16Chris Williamson?

  What was the mean change, do you know?

• 47:18Speaker 01

  And when you say mean change.

• 47:19Chris Williamson?

  Average, what was the average change increase? 5%, 1%, 10%?

• 47:24Speaker 01

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

• 47:44Chris Williamson?

  That's during the session.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  That's during the session.

• 47:46Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  Yes. However, baseline changes, which we're actually looking at more of like fine blood pressure changes that are occurring. So that's actually more the sign of is someone actually making a trait change, which is as we breathe, is blood pressure following very specifically, like a fine tuned fork with your breathing? If it's not, then we have what's called low barrow reflex gain. The nervous system's having a hard time keeping up. It's that cruise control example, really hard time adapting. But when we have high barrow reflex gain, which comes from all of this consistent training of HRV biofeedback or resonance breathing, then that fine tune then results in our ability to adapt quickly.

• 48:29Speaker 01

  And that quick adaptation then results in blood pressure moving at an instant when you tell it and very smoothly when you tell it. So low frequency power in HRV can increase significantly as well, but high frequency power is another one. So at resting baseline, we're actually looking at changes in what's called high frequency power. And we see that that can change in order of magnitude anywhere from 20, 40, 50%.

• 48:53Chris Williamson?

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

• 49:00Speaker 01

  We, when you are looking at your whoop score every single morning, and you see that number that is HRV, it's in milliseconds. We call that a time domain index. A time domain index is exactly as it says. It's just looking at the time difference between successive heartbeats. We can take the data, which is all those raw intervals between heartbeats. So all those time intervals. And we can apply some mathematical equations and algorithms to it. Something called an FFT or a Fast Fourier Transformation, which is essentially when we take those data, run it through a prism, and then get the component rhythm values of that. Best way to explain this, because that's probably very confusing, is to think about this as being analogous to an EEG.

• 49:45Speaker 01

  So I put electrodes all over your head. I look at your brainwave states and the amount of signaling and power of that brainwave. And I get this raw EEG. I can take that raw EEG and I can filter it and start to get the component rhythms of your, of your brainwave state and how strong they're responding. Alpha, beta, theta, gamma, delta, and so forth. We can do the same thing and look at characteristics of your cardiovascular system. We just call it something different. In, in, in the HRV world, it's just three bands that are typically looked at. It's the very low frequency band, low frequency, and high frequency. So when you're breathing at a slow paced rate, so you're doing HRV biofeedback, for instance, or resonance breathing, you start to create these really long sinusoidal,

• 50:29Speaker 01

  low frequency oscillations of your heart rate. So the peak to trough differences between your heart rates start to change significantly. So maybe at rest, your heart rate's just going from, let's say, 60 up to 63, 64, 65, and then back down. Now we're going from, your heart rate's at 60, it's going up to 75, 80, 90 even, if you have a really strong barot reflex gain. And then it's dropping and it's going well below 60 to 55, 50, 40, 45. So that's low frequency power, these real. Sinusoidal, large scale changes in the, in the heart rate. So when we see someone that has a lot of power in the low frequency band, we typically know that they're breathing at a really slow rate. And that's an oscillation that's occurring, that's in line, again, with that Barrow reflex response.

• 51:13Speaker 01

  And then high frequency power is what we call the respiratory sinus arrhythmia band. So at rest, when you're not breathing at a slow pace, most of the power should be in the high frequency band. Because that's where kind of just the normal breathing oscillation should occur. So when we look at high frequency power, we know that as someone becomes more attuned to resonance breathing, that number increases because your vagus nerve is what is driving the power there.

• 51:39Chris Williamson?

  Even though you're not directly training the high frequency stuff, low frequency work impacts the high frequency.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  Hundred percent, yeah.

• 51:46Chris Williamson?

  That's, I mean, it's good that it is that way, or else you'd have to do high frequency training too. You'd have to do two different types of training, which would be annoying.

• 51:52Speaker 01

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

• 52:34Speaker 01

  And now at rest, it's at like 6,000 milliseconds squared worth of power. That tells us that that delta of 4,000 milliseconds squared of power indicates that there was indeed actual entrainment of the nervous system across the period of time.

• 52:48Chris Williamson?

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• 53:33Chris Williamson?

  focus on the job that you came here to do, which is designing and selling an awesome product. And right now, you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period by going to the link in the description below or heading to Shopify.com/ModernWisdom, all lowercase. That's Shopify.com/ModernWisdom to start selling today. Okay, talk to me about biofeedback, resonance, breathing. These are terms people probably haven't heard before. What is it?

• 53:59Speaker 01

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

• 54:39Chris Williamson?

  Well, everybody does, but most people are familiar with breathwork. Almost everybody has done some form of it, even if it's just they use waking up with Sam Harris and he tells you to take a breath in and a breath out at the very beginning, something like that. All the way up to they've gone to do a breathwork class, they've tried Wim Hof, they've done holotropic stuff, maybe they've done slow paced breathing, maybe they've done box breathing, 5555, maybe they've done some, some other version of this, whatever it is, the 7383 circle or whatever. But this is kind of taking it to a bit of a different level.

• 55:13Speaker 01

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

• 55:58Speaker 01

  not just in changing people's state change, but are actually like going to change people's inner workings of their nervous system adaptation.

• 56:06Chris Williamson?

  Well, I think a lot of people, when they're doing breath work in that manner, they're not even necessarily thinking about the trait change to their physiology over time. A lot of people are using breath work as a state shift. In fact, I think state shift is one of the biggest breath work apps. And they're using it to get themselves more energized and alert, or karma in the moment. Or they're using it to bypass a few blocks in their psychology to allow them to access emotions that maybe they've been struggling to deal with, to do some kind of a release, to work with a practitioner, to help them

• 56:46Chris Williamson?

  through kind of the level zero of the psychedelic pyramid, includes you using breath work to kind of just alter your experience of the world a little. And I, I feel a bit different about talking about that problem now, or that, fuck, that relationship stress that's been weighing on me for a little while, it's come out and I've not been able to stop it, and that felt cathartic or whatever. I don't think most people are thinking about, this is a real physiological hypertrophy training for my vagus nerve input.

• 57:20Speaker 01

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

• 57:39Chris Williamson?

  I just want to be relaxed for an hour.

• 57:40Speaker 01

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

• 58:14Chris Williamson?

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

• 58:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:30Chris Williamson?

  Who, how many times are you doing that to think, oh yeah, if I do this twice a day? It's two breaths, dude.

• 58:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 58:35Chris Williamson?

  Like, it really is the time and attention sufficient to do that? Okay, your disclaimer about the potential problems with the fucking world of breathwork are out. Talk to me about resonance breathing and biofeedback. What is it? Why does it work? How do you do it?

• 58:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, so biofeedback was discovered back in the 60s, 70s, and it was initially discovered by a lot of Russian physiologists who were actually studying space exploration and trying to get the Russians up to space. And so therefore they were looking at, well, how do we ensure that we get these astronauts in the best physiological shape that we possibly can? And so they just started measuring everything. They said, we're going to measure every single metric that we possibly can. And then they came across and said, well, actually, now that we've measured it and we have seen, because this is when they came across heart rate variability, that there are these, there's these interesting characteristics of people's nervous systems that I think we're looking at when we look at HRV, but we

• 59:29Speaker 01

  Don't really know for sure. The only way to test that really is to start introducing different interventions or start introducing different things that we see, you know, in real time are actually moving the needle in terms of people's nervous system response. And so then back in the 60s, 70s, researchers here in the US started to team up with these Russian researchers. They said, okay, we see that there are dynamic aspects of the nervous system that we can measure here. We also noticed that when people breathe, something kind of weird happens with their HRV. Something weird happens with all these dynamics, but we can't fully explain it. So we should start to put it to the test. So they started to say, well, what if we

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  manipulate that thing? What if we manipulate things like breathing? Can that then change how the nervous system responds in real time? And then later on, of course, the research says, can it respond, can it start to respond that way in baseline to where people don't have to consciously move the needle? And that's where HRV biofeedback was kind of like discovered. And the word resonance breathing, kind of like we were mentioning earlier, was something that was coined because we saw that, again, we're aligning these physiological mechanisms of breathing and heart rate, and also our blood pressure regulation. When we can align all of those things at the same exact time, we start to create this beautiful symphony, this beautiful

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  pattern, this great relationship. We start to see that instead of just the throttle of the gas pedal, so that sympathetic nervous system, being kind of like modulated on and off, and the brake pedal being modulated on and off, just kind of at random, if you will, and by random, I mean because of physiology, we actually start to see that you can use breathing to do the brake in and out, so kind of like flutter the brake in and out at will. And so resonance frequency came along when Dr. Paul Laird said, okay, I see that there's these fixed characteristics of this barrow reflex response, of this breathing response on heart rate and respiratory sinus arrhythmia. Let's see what happens like when we

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  Introduce this as a training protocol. And when they started to introduce this as a training protocol and they published many studies on this, they found that, well, not only are we changing someone's physiology, but people are now saying, well, I feel a lot less stressed. I feel like I'm adapting better. I don't feel like stress is kind of like running over me as much as I can. I feel mood lifting, so less of that like negative emotional valence there. And so biofeedback has been around for quite some time. And many companies have tried to introduce biofeedback in a way that's consumer friendly. But the problem is, is that there's always been so much friction to doing it. And again, like we've been talking about it for a while, it's not an easy topic for most people to understand. So what does it then require? Well, you gotta pay a clinician. It's really expensive.

• 1:02:19Speaker 01

  They gotta use all of this like hardcore software and gear. It becomes quite difficult. So how can we just make this accessible to everybody? Well, these technology companies came out and said, well, we'll just use kind of like everyday sensors. We'll use like wearables or a chest strap, like a, like an EKG chest strap. And then we'll just have you like breathe at this, with this pacer in and out. You'll be able to watch your heart rate variability in real time. And then over time, that will then indeed result in improved autonomic flexibility, better emotional and stress resiliency and so forth. So HRV biofeedback is a tool that we use. It is an intervention tool.

• 1:02:59Speaker 01

  So as opposed to just looking at HRV as a data point, where it's actually using HRV in real time to guide the changes that are occurring in your nervous system. So biofeedback being biological feedback in real.

• 1:03:14Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:03:25Speaker 01

  Yep, that's, that's correct. Yeah.

• 1:03:30Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:04:13Speaker 01

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

• 1:04:17Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:04:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a great question. The, the answer to this is that you could 100% do that. Like you could actually go into a clinician and have them run the full, you know, 12 to 15 minute pole layer protocol. Get your resonance frequency rate, tell you kind of like, here's your inhalation, exhalation ratio, the timing. And you could do it by yourself, like you could 100% do that. Because the intervention is in the breathing itself. It's not in the data. However, what I think is huge here that goes missing is that it's only as good as if you actually do it. So you actually have to be practicing it. And so many people have a hard time with getting into the habit and discipline of doing something like slow paced or resonance breathing

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  without having a high degree of accountability. It's, it's, so you could, you could do it. I haven't met a lot of people that have been that successful. And me saying, here's your resonance protocol, like, you know, whatever, go time it in your head and, and go do it. I just haven't seen.

• 1:05:32Chris Williamson?

  Well, this is why. Guided meditation practices have become so good at keeping people's compliance. You do waking up, I'm using this new one, somebody Schuckman, Alan Schuckman, maybe Ferris put me on to it. It's called

• 1:05:47Speaker 01

  Oh, The Way.

• 1:05:47Chris Williamson?

  The Way, really cool, lovely, single path, an actual path that's sort of drawn out. And I thought it was really, really fun. So I'm doing that and I've meditated thousands of times. I'm like, I'm done with unguided for a bit. I want someone to hold my hand as I go through this. So I think that you're right. And dude, I mean, I'm asking you questions that I'm interested in, but I already believe in the answer to, which is you got me onto resonance breathing almost a year ago now. And I was using some arm strap thing with a induction charger. And then you sent me out an Ohm lamp, which for the people that are listening, there's a lamp in between us on the table. And I told Huberman about this in November of last year, and I'm completely sold.

• 1:06:30Chris Williamson?

  I think that resonance breathing is probably the next big wave of intervention that we're going to see. We've seen breathwork, although it hasn't really, apart from Wim Hof, it hasn't fully broken through. If you would say, what's the go to meditation app, you'd say like Headspace or Calm or Waking Up. What's the go to breathwork app? You go, maybe Wim Hof or something. So some breathwork has, but as you've kind of identified, it's good for some things, but the data behind it isn't necessarily there. And

• 1:07:00Speaker 01

  Well, it's also getting, it's also getting kind of like lumped in there with a lot of woo woo practices right now, unfortunately. Like a lot of people are seeing breathwork. It's because so many people are, they're hanging up their shingle. And they're saying, look at me, I've got this new proprietary best in the class, nervous system coaching breathwork practice for you. And this is kind of the path for you. And then when I see it, like I was at a conference a couple of weeks ago and I, they had a breathwork practitioner who's up on stage. And she was speaking about how, and the audience was kind of like jiving along with it. So maybe I just don't, I'm not spiritual enough to understand it, but she kept saying things like, with our breathing, we create these new realities and holograms of ourself that we can then manifest and then fill in the blank.

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  And everybody's kind of like shaking their head and I'm back there like, what are we talking about? Maybe I just

• 1:07:51Chris Williamson?

  No, dude, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. You're just the most clinician clinician that ever did clinician. It's, it's, everybody has been to one of these. Seminars, at least in Austin, Texas, everybody's been to them. A lot of people listening in the UK, they're like, what the fuck are you talking about? I get it, man. You breathwork kind of bridges the gap between the psychedelic, esoteric, I'm off to do ayahuasca in the Amazon people and a business guy that's a bit stressed. Or a pregnant mum that heard that breathwork is good to sort of chill her out and is as blue collar as they come. Yeah.

• 1:08:30Chris Williamson?

  And these two groups of people meet at Third Eye Meditation Lounge here in downtown Austin, or at Sukka Yoga on Althoff Street, or whatever. And you, it really is a bit of an oil and water situation because you're seeing typically the practitioners that have dedicated their lives to teaching it are the ones who have gone down the esoteric rabbit hole a little bit more deeply. We've got a great friend, Aaron Alexander, from the Align podcast. I love Aaron. Aaron's, Aaron's great. Yeah. Aaron is doing a lot of breathwork coaching, as far as I can see, in Miami at the moment. He's in Miami now. I think. And I haven't seen, I haven't done any of his stuff live. And he's kept

• 1:09:10Chris Williamson?

  it, he's pretty sort of evidence-based. But I've seen some of the fucking hats that people wear who attend those classes. I'm like, I know who you are from that fucking hat. I can tell. I can tell. There's too much, there's too many fucking corks hanging from it. You've got too many beads on. And that's fine. That's kind of their thing in their world. But I understand. Let them be them. It's, it's good when you talk about functionality, or I guess, how do you say? Like felt sense of, interestingly, resonance. Like, I resonate with what that person's saying. And that speaks to me in its persona and narrative and mythology and arc, right? It brings these characters to life. We manifest our reality out there, strength and resilience and your better self and vibrations and higher and all that stuff.

• 1:09:56Chris Williamson?

  Doesn't necessarily show up in the data.

• 1:09:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:09:58Chris Williamson?

  And that is what your world is.

• 1:10:01Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:10:01Chris Williamson?

  And I think in the same way as we had, even though there's been a lot of pushback, a revolution in lifting where evidence-based came through. Well, what does the science tell us about the rep range and the pacing and the loading and the frequency and the rest and so on and so forth? The same thing is now happening when it comes to breathing.

• 1:10:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:10:24Chris Williamson?

  And I don't know of any data, apart from the stuff that comes out of resonance breathing, that says this is how you breathe in order to enact a trait change over time. Everybody that's tried to, when you were a kid and you would breathe in and out really fast, you go, ah, I feel a little bit lightheaded. Great, you've just done a state change. Like, congratulations.

• 1:10:46Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:10:47Chris Williamson?

  But in order to be able to get to the trait change, and this is where making claims about holographically manifesting your new vibration reality come into conflict with a little bit of the data. So, uh, yeah, I think, I, I'm, I've been doing some form of resonance breathing, low tech and slightly higher tech now, um, for a while. But you are right, that the consistency thing is so tough. And I think that's why what you guys have done with OM. And like I said, I, I mentioned it to Huberman and he, he completely agreed that he's like, this sounds fucking fantastic.

• 1:11:27Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:11:28Chris Williamson?

  To be able to give people a way to access pretty advanced tech that what you've had to go into a lab to do probably only a decade ago.

• 1:11:37Speaker 01

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

• 1:12:14Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:12:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we are, I guess, in still in a bit of a dark mode because we won't be shipping out anything until the latter half of this year, probably early Q3, so in August or so. But for now, we are taking pre-orders at omhealth, but the lamp in and of itself. So I like to think about this as we were trying to reduce as many barriers as we possibly can that caused friction for people not to not do it. So for instance, like with all the other stuff that you used before, you had to have the device that you put on, whether it was a chest strap or an armband, wrist wearable. Open up the phone, make sure, like, for the love of God, please Bluetooth connect.

• 1:13:25Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 1:13:25Speaker 01

  Because that was the problem. You had to make sure all the, and there was all these friction points. And when something went awry, then it's going to lead to what? It's going to lead to

• 1:13:33Chris Williamson?

  Disregulation.

• 1:13:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, disregulation and then attrition. So you're like, throw it in. So it's going to meet the graveyard of all the other wearables that you have in your shelf. So, and then the other component too is that what are you looking at the whole time you're doing biofeedback on a phone?

• 1:13:47Chris Williamson?

  Watching your phone.

• 1:13:48Speaker 01

  Watching your phone. And how much do we need to really disconnect from our phone nowadays? Like, we're so inundated. When I think about my phone, I don't associate that with something that is intended to help me down, regulate and relax.

• 1:13:59Chris Williamson?

  That's why I can't read, dude. I was on a plane and I had the book that I wanted to read. Dan Jones just put me onto it. It's called A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. Fucking sick. So it teaches you how to read Russian literature. So there's a single page of a short story from Chekhov or some other sort of legendary Russian writer, and then it explains how to do it. And I hadn't downloaded it on my Kindle and my Kindle couldn't connect to the wifi in the United flight. And I was like, I'll read it on my phone. I watch my housemate read on his phone all the time. Bro, I'm not reading shit. I had no connection. There was no internet and I still couldn't read on my phone. It's just not the environment for me. And I guess we even talk about sort of digital environments now that, oh, sorry,

• 1:14:41Chris Williamson?

  you had the wrong device in front of you instead of the other device in front of you, which is the Kindle instead of the laptop, instead of the phone. But we are just habituated, I am habituated into my behavior on these devices. And when I'm on that, I'm thinking about swiping up and moving stuff. Like, I'm not, I'm not in the mode, so I, I agree. And I did enjoy doing the resonance stuff, but even that, the previous versions of it were just locking you into a frequency that had previously been tested.

• 1:15:11Speaker 01

  Correct. Correct. And this actually kind of to, to call back to a previous question that you had that I actually don't think we answered, is that you had asked, does resonance frequency change over time? Like, do you need to go get retested with resonance frequency? And the answer is, is that initially it was thought that it was a pretty fixed characteristic. But now that we're actually like looking at more of the nuances of resonance frequency, we actually see that it can dynamically change across time and across context. So if you're breathing at said four and a half breaths per minute, which, which you mentioned was your resonance rate, like, it may have been at the time of the testing that you did it. But what if, you know, you left and the next day it's 4.897?

• 1:15:54Speaker 01

  Well, it doesn't sound like a big change, but what we know in the world of biofeedback, and this is the type of breathing that I really want to hone in on, is that precision always beats effort and intention when it comes to breathing.

• 1:16:06Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:16:18Speaker 01

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

• 1:16:27Chris Williamson?

  How fragile is, i- i- if you get it on the nose of the right frequency, are we talking about a significant difference to being a little bit off? So is it a bit of a knife edge in terms of that?

• 1:16:38Speaker 01

  It depends on the person. Like, I have seen some people that if I were to have them, let's say, breathe at five breaths per minute versus 5.2 breaths per minute, we could have a 50% difference, 100% difference in heart rate variability. So, precision matters. I mean, even with them breathing at 5.2, when their resonance rate was 5.0, they're still gonna have net positive benefits. Slow-paced breathing, regardless of whether or not you're measuring it, has net positive benefits. But do we want to optimize those gains for that longer-term trait change? That is where precision is gonna win. And that's where OM comes in, because we're not running you through. Like, it's a bit annoying to have someone say, "Okay, well, I want to know what my resonance frequency is.

• 1:17:20Speaker 01

  Now, I've got to sit down and do this 12 to 15-minute test, where I do these two-minute trials of breathing at different rates, and then we'll see kind of what heart rate variability looks like." Like, it's a bit of a, it's a bit of a pain to do.

• 1:17:32Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:17:33Speaker 01

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

• 1:17:56Chris Williamson?

  You wrote the fucking algorithm, dude. Don't, don't filate yourself on this fucking podcast.

• 1:18:01Speaker 01

  I know, I know, I know. Okay. So, scratch that. It's just really cool advice. So, the way this works is, obviously, and for people who are watching, there's a stone that lives on top. And once you pick up that stone, that is, it's a really good hand feel. So, I mean, it's nice and heavy, and it's also warm. Have you noticed that? Like, it'll actually feel warm. And it's got a sensor in it, a PPG or photoplasmography sensor in it, that when you hold it against your palm, immediately, it's starting to look at all of the dynamic characteristics of your nervous system changing in real time. So, looking at heart rate, looking at heart rate variability, and it's starting to map it, and it's starting to look at kind of those unique characteristics. At the same time, the lamp will start to oscillate, just in an up and down direction. So, as the lamp goes up, that's you inhaling. So, you're supposed to inhale with the timing of the lamp going up.

• 1:18:47Speaker 01

  And as the light goes down, You're exhaling. And during that time, within the first few breaths, because we're looking at the unique characteristics of how your nervous system is shifting dynamically at that time to that breathing pace, we start to filter that data through our algorithm and start to pace you at your resonance rate. So you don't have to sit there and do a whole 12, 15 minute program. We're looking at it. And it's not just saying, oh, this is person's respiration rate or their resonance frequency rate is six breaths per minute. So five, five, just throw it on five, five. It's saying, no, we see it six breaths per minute, but we want, because of the characteristics of how their nervous system is changing, their inhalation is going to be 4.276 seconds long, and their exhalation is going to be, you know, 5.834. I didn't do the math right there, but

• 1:19:32Speaker 01

  it's probably pretty close, actually. And we're going to take that all into consideration. What are we doing there? We're trying to maximize the output of those beautiful, slow sinusoidal rhythms of your heart rate that we know are dynamically changing how your nervous system is responding, making it more efficient at any given time. And we're watching it across the session. And if there are these kind of small minute changes that your nervous system is telling us, we will adjust the rate.

• 1:19:57Chris Williamson?

  Within the session.

• 1:19:58Speaker 01

  Within the session. We'll adjust the ratio of the breathing.

• 1:20:00Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:20:43Chris Williamson?

  So is calm proof of regulation when we're talking about other breathwork practices or this?

• 1:20:48Speaker 01

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

• 1:20:58Chris Williamson?

  We've just done 90 minutes on fucking becoming more calm.

• 1:21:00Speaker 01

  Relax, yes. The, this is going, kind of going back to HRV as being a byproduct number, right? Resonance breathing, producing a sense of relaxation for most people, most sessions, is the byproduct of aligning your nervous system. And so the intention isn't that I come in with resonance and with biofeedback, I never come in with the intention that, hey, this is my opportunity to relax. I come in with it with this, this is my opportunity to train. I am training, that is my gym right there. That is my nervous system gym today, I'm hitting it, I'm getting in the reps. Because we know that this has a wide systemic effect on how I respond now and how I'll respond later and how it's transitive to how I experience the world after this.

• 1:21:45Speaker 01

  And so for me, when I do it, slowing my breathing down inherently typically is going to make me produce a sense of calm. You may even feel sleepy. This is something that we use like with Absolute Rest, like Andy Alpin's company. Like we use this with everybody, everybody does HRV biofeedback before bed because it can produce that huge level of vagal arousal, or what we would just say is like vagal stimulation. That brake is being put onto the nervous system, which can help you wind down and actually can improve so many metrics as it relates to sleep. This is a well, well-found and well-studied thing that we can, we can do. But the intention again isn't like, I'm going to experience relaxation, maybe, maybe you will. Right now, I'm working on timing, I'm working on precision, I'm working on training that nervous system to align.

• 1:22:27Speaker 01

  So that when I leave this controlled environment that I've trained on and I go out into the real world where I don't have this little thing, I want my nervous system to kick into high gear when shit hits the fan.

• 1:22:37Chris Williamson?

  If you struggle to stay asleep because your body gets too hot or too cold, this is going to help. Eight Sleep just released their brand new Pod 5, which includes the world's first temperature regulating duvet. Compare it with their smart mattress cover, which cools or warms each side of the bed by up to 20 degrees, and you've got a climate controlled cocoon built for deep uninterrupted rest. The new base even comes with a built in speaker, so you can fall asleep to white noise, nature sounds, or a little ambient Taylor Swift, if that's your thing. And it's got upgraded biometric sensors that quietly run health checks every night, spotting patterns like abnormal heartbeats, disrupted breathing, or sudden changes in HRV, which is why it has been clinically proven to increase total sleep by up to one hour every night. Best of all, they've got a 30 day sleep trial, so you can buy it and sleep on it for 29 nights.

• 1:23:22Chris Williamson?

  And if you don't like it, they will give you your money back, plus they ship internationally. Right now, you can get up to $350 off the Pod 5 by going to the link in the description below, heading to eightsleep.com/moderndwism, using the code MODERNDWISDOM at checkout. That's E-I-G-H-T sleep.com/moderndwism. A modern wisdom at checkout. Would it not be good for us to just always breathe at our resonance frequency? What would happen if I managed to do so many sessions that I would just walk about all day doing 4.5 in, 7.9 out?

• 1:23:55Speaker 01

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

• 1:24:10Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:24:13Speaker 01

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

• 1:24:17Chris Williamson?

  I'm doing fucking okay.

• 1:24:19Speaker 01

  You're killing it. You're killing it.

• 1:24:20Chris Williamson?

  I'm doing okay.

• 1:24:20Speaker 01

  Brian's killing it.

• 1:24:22Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:24:24Speaker 01

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

• 1:24:26Chris Williamson?

  Okay, you think that's fucking...

• 1:24:27Speaker 01

  He's doing a lot. He's doing, he's doing, he's doing a lot.

• 1:24:30Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:24:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:33Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:25:04Speaker 01

  He did, which was pretty fun to watch, actually.

• 1:25:06Chris Williamson?

  I didn't watch it.

• 1:25:07Speaker 01

  You should watch at least some highlighting clips.

• 1:25:09Chris Williamson?

  I didn't, okay, cool.

• 1:25:09Speaker 01

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

• 1:25:14Chris Williamson?

  Oh, I've seen enough aspects of his personality to know what's in there. He's, Brian's a sweetie. I think he's fantastic and he's a good friend.

• 1:25:21Speaker 01

  That's great.

• 1:25:23Chris Williamson?

  Okay, I have a question. Let's say that someone is under chronic stress and that's caused them to have a dysregulated nervous system. Does that not suggest that because it was top-down that caused the issue, that they need to go top-down to fix it? They should go CBT, ACT therapy, psychotherapy, cognitive reframing. You have been in a situation with work, or your kid, or your finances, or whatever, for three years, and it's just sent you haywire and now you're trying to intervene. The issue was caused this way, from top to bottom.

• 1:26:06Chris Williamson?

  But the intervention that's being suggested now is to go bottom to top. Can you talk about, because you said before, psychological stress is one of the biggest contributors to this.

• 1:26:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:17Chris Williamson?

  How do you come to think about the relationship between intervening with nervous system work directly with stuff like resonance breathing and what's happening psychologically? Does that make sense?

• 1:26:28Speaker 01

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

• 1:27:13Speaker 01

  So it's bottom up. And then now we're starting to make a cognitive appraisal with that thing that we just experienced.

• 1:27:19Chris Williamson?

  Turn that into a modern example story for.

• 1:27:23Speaker 01

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

• 1:27:27Chris Williamson?

  Both.

• 1:27:28Speaker 01

  Which one? Okay, let's go both. So clinical example. Now, um, so this would be someone, uh, for instance, who is experiencing, oh yeah, please do a session. Get it, get into some.

• 1:27:36Chris Williamson?

  You're doing a long answer.

• 1:27:39Speaker 01

  All right. So clinical example. So let's say someone who experienced like some a- actual trauma. Um, so my background is I've worked historically with operators, like special operators in the DOD and also with veterans. Uh, for these individuals, um, you know, they're encountering so many different types of external events that put them readily on high alert as they should be. They should readily be on high alert. So they experience kind of all these things that they, uh, know should be associated with danger. And so therefore like engage kind of this protective mechanism to kind of fight off kind of what they have tune in, lock in. So I had a, had a veteran kind of back in the day when I was working within the VA. And he has had all these experiences kind of like within kind of war.

• 1:28:24Speaker 01

  So he was over in the Battle of Fallujah, kind of like the early times of us being over, um, you know, in the Middle East, um, during the, during, um, Iraq and Afghanistan war. And he came back and he was like, I know that my nervous system is, you just got into a state of resonance. So I do want to comment before going on with my story that the lamp is now blue, indicative that Chris Williamson, during our communicating just now, or me communicating a little bit one sided, got into a state of resonance. And now that I'm bringing it to his attention and calling it out, he's exiting resonance.

• 1:28:56Chris Williamson?

  Motherfucker, did you kick me out?

• 1:28:58Speaker 01

  I kicked you out because I brought attention to it. You know, anytime you go into blue there, you're in a state of physiological resonance. Your nervous system is responding and firing on all cylinders in the best way possible.

• 1:29:09Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:29:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. And we haven't gotten to the good meat of it. So exposure to all these things. So he comes into clinic and he says, you know, I've noticed that like every single time like I go out to drive, like I lock up, the entire body locks up. I can't think straight. I get tunnel vision, like all of these things are occurring kind of within my nervous system. And he didn't coin it that way because he didn't know to use some language nervous system. But he said, everything just feels really disruptive. And it's gotten to the point now where like, I actually have a phobia of getting in the car and driving anywhere. Like I just, I can't do it. So that's caused me to be socially isolative. I'm a hermit. I just kind of live by myself, do my own thing.

• 1:29:55Speaker 01

  The only time I come here is when I get a taxi because Uber wasn't a thing back then. Am I aging myself here? And he would go to the VA to receive help. Okay. So then when we started to unpack and explore, like what was going on here? Basically, what he would say is that he would walk out and he would have, he would just, he wouldn't even actually like be looking at a car, but he would know that he was kind of like moving towards a car. And all of a sudden, his physiology would just ramp up. Heart rate would increase. Everything would just kind of like become immensely excitable. And so, yeah, okay, well, we have, well, there's this association that he's making, but we don't know like what the association is, is why it's there. And so as we kind of backpedaled and unpacked a little bit of things, because as you do in

• 1:30:40Speaker 01

  therapy, which I am a psychologist, so of course, like that's kind of part of what I do, is that we realized that he was making just these really broad associations with hitting IEDs, kind of out when he would be in Humvees during his time over, and associating that with the car. But that wasn't something that was cognitively manifesting. It was really his physiology that would ramp up and send that signal directly to kind of to his brain. And then he would get into this tunnel vision, highly sympathetic mode, and not really kind of know what to do in that moment. So it would be like, well, I'll just avoid. I'll go inside. I won't do like anything because that keeps me safe. Then that becomes obviously a really vicious cycle.

• 1:31:24Speaker 01

  So he's experiencing kind of like all this flood of changes within the physiology that's sending this signal to the brain that this is a dangerous environment. This dangerous environment is now connected with previous experiences. So I experienced kind of all these nasty things that happened over in the Middle East. And so now for I've created this vicious physiological cycle. And so this is where like, yes, we want to leverage something like top down cognitive processing or therapy with him. And that's important, but actually starting from the body up and helping him just learn how to regulate that physiological response was the best place to start. Because trying to change the mind with the mind, I've heard Huberman talk a lot about this, and I really agree with Huberman on this.

• 1:32:08Speaker 01

  It says, trying to change the mind with the mind is a bit like tug of war. It's very difficult. You can kind of get into these nasty impasses and you're always butting heads. But changing the mind with the body tends to be a lot more efficient. And it is the thing that can bridge the gap and segue us into doing the top down processing. Because all the things that you mentioned before, cognitive behavioral therapy, ACT, all of these evidence based psychotherapies are immensely valuable tools. Like they are 100% needed and they are efficacious. But if we can use something like this to augment what we're doing there and also allow us to open up from a nervous system perspective. So this is why I might get a tiny bit esoteric, actually, which is not typically my thing.

• 1:32:51Speaker 01

  But if we can leverage a tool like this, let's say before a therapy session, to open up the nervous system to receiving and saying, okay, I'm in an environment with my psychologist or my therapist, this is a very safe environment because I'm communicating this with my body, with my nervous system. This might be a really unique and amazing way to start really transitioning from just purely talk therapy and psychotherapeutics to now going more into using psychophysiology.

• 1:33:19Chris Williamson?

  Well, I think the fascinating, that was wonderful, by the way, I got a four minute

• 1:33:24Speaker 01

  You did, you did great.

• 1:33:25Chris Williamson?

  Thank you. That's why I need my fucking breath coach to say.

• 1:33:31Chris Williamson?

  It makes a lot of sense to me, even though it sounds kind of counterintuitive. You have a sense in the body. That gets shot up to your brain, I am not safe, this is not good. For instance, let's say that you were in a relationship and something about the way that your partner showed up made you feel unsafe regularly. You don't really know what, what is it that they've done? Maybe they took a bit longer to text back, maybe they didn't put a kiss at the end of the message, maybe they, maybe they seemed a little bit more distracted, maybe they. Something, something about them, the way that they show up, your conception of them makes you just feel a bit activated or agitated.

• 1:34:06Chris Williamson?

  And then you start to tell yourself stories about why I don't feel good. It's like, why don't you feel good? So I'm not really too sure. So you have some sense that has hit you, that's kind of like the relational equivalent of a snake. Right, that's perhaps something patterned from your past. Mum also seemed to be a little bit distant and, and you had fears, threats of abandoning. Or you feel like you need to perform in order to win your partner's love. And that was just the same way that your grandma or your father or your school teachers or some story that you've told yourself, not even from childhood. You don't even need to go back to childhood. Like some part of your worldview has a fissure in it. And this relationship with your boss or your new coworker or the fucking bus driver, whoever it is.

• 1:34:49Chris Williamson?

  Is getting to you in a manner that seems to sort of really pierce your programming.

• 1:34:57Chris Williamson?

  And that is making you feel away. Well, you're gonna, the only place you can experience that is in your brain. And you go, well, I'm now going to start to tell myself a story about why I feel this way. And that, the first time that I heard that, it makes complete sense about how emotions do move in both directions. Like I can absolutely manifest myself by thinking about stuff. Completely imaginary situation, right? Allow me to, to just come up with this, this potential catastrophe or good, good thing. And it go top down. But I can also feel something in the body and it shoot up and tell myself. Great example of this, I was working New Year's Eve.

• 1:35:39Chris Williamson?

  Eight years ago, and I know this because my business partner texted me about it over Christmas in Manchester, and I was partway through the night and I was being so fucking catty with all of the staff. I was like, you know, there's 20, 25, 18 to 23 year olds that are working for me in Manchester. And I've driven down there and it's New Year's Eve and fuck, I'm working, but I'm a club promoter. I've done it for 15, I didn't have a New Year's Eve for 15 years. Like, fine, this is my job. This is what I signed up for. I'm in a different city and we've sold out and we've made some good money and it's whatever, whatever. I was being so fucking short with everyone. And I got a text from my business partner and he said, I'm locked in the disabled toilet at Riverside, which was the venue that we used to run in Newcastle.

• 1:36:21Chris Williamson?

  I'm like, I'm 150 miles away. Have you lost the key? Has someone else locked you in there? Is there a fucking shooting going? Like, what is this? Turned out that he'd got norovirus. He'd got a 24 hour stomach bug. Brutal. And we'd been to his son's first birthday party in between Christmas and New Year. Turned out that that was a super spreader event for fucking norovirus. I'd been super short with all of the staff that had been on site with me. And it turned out that I also had norovirus. I was about to, an hour and a half later, feel nausea and feel like I wanted to spend the rest of the day in the bathroom.

• 1:37:08Chris Williamson?

  But my behavior had been, I'm being short. Why am I so irritable? I'm feeling this sort of a way. Like, if that doesn't say that you can have a sensation, that I literally didn't have an explanation for, until I started to do the fucking Sherlock Holmes corkboard thing of piecing together. We went to the kid's birthday and he's in the toilet and oh my God, this means I'm going to be in. And I'm 150 miles away from home and I have cream leather seats in my fucking BMW. This is going to be in.

• 1:37:36Chris Williamson?

  Sure enough, I had told myself a story about what it meant.

• 1:37:39Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:37:39Chris Williamson?

  Well, maybe it's because this thing wasn't organized with the DJ booth, or he didn't bring his microphone. Or I found out that the fucking DJ that night wasn't going to do the countdown because nobody had prepped him that he needed to use the mic.

• 1:37:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:51Chris Williamson?

  And he was being a purist. And I was like, I guess I'm gonna have to fucking countdown from 10 at my own event. While I'm trying to hotwire the pyrotechnics using two nine volt battery. It was a fucking nightmare. But I told myself all of these stories about this little adventure that I'd been on.

• 1:38:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:05Chris Williamson?

  That had nothing to do with how I was feeling.

• 1:38:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:08Chris Williamson?

  And it was exclusively because I was gonna shit my pants in two hours' time.

• 1:38:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:13Chris Williamson?

  And, uh, yeah, that sense, uh, it completely tracks.

• 1:38:18Speaker 01

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

• 1:38:35Chris Williamson?

  Ooh, uh, do you know lassitude? Know what lassitude is?

• 1:38:38Speaker 01

  Uh uh, no.

• 1:38:38Chris Williamson?

  The, the sort of emotion of being unwell, being sick, like physically sick. And, uh, I did this episode with Diana Fleishman, and she was telling me about lassitude. And some of the interesting elements of lassitude are, um, you want to be around friends and family more. You don't want to try, uh, new foods. You prefer bland foods. If you've got the flu or something, bread and toast, like butter on toast and, and cups of tea.

• 1:39:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:06Chris Williamson?

  My Britishness is showing here.

• 1:39:07Speaker 01

  So showing.

• 1:39:07Chris Williamson?

  Um, uh, wanting to be looked after by mum or partner or whatever. Well, why? Because if I try some new food, that might have pathogens in.

• 1:39:17Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:39:18Chris Williamson?

  If I try and make friends with someone, they might not be able to look after me. So you have these, these behaviors that are impacted by your physiological state, by your medical state, right? Your sort of current health system is. Leaking out of you.

• 1:39:32Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:39:33Chris Williamson?

  Into your behavior.

• 1:39:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:35Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:39:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:40Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:39:44Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:39:45Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:40:09Speaker 01

  A form of cognitive dissonance.

• 1:40:11Chris Williamson?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:40:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:12Chris Williamson?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:40:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:13Chris Williamson?

  So yeah, this sort of, I don't even know what you'd call it, this bidirectional nature of emotions, the moving both bottom up and top down. And it makes complete sense to me as well to think, well, if you can get your nervous system into a state where it feels really good and calm and regulated.

• 1:40:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:31Chris Williamson?

  Although maybe not super calm, but at least resonant.

• 1:40:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:40:35Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:40:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. Can you imagine a world, and again, obviously I'm very biased in my statement that I'm about to make because I have something to make from, from OM in this, in this process, but I can imagine a world where every single psychotherapeutic session starts and ends with some resonance breathing or biofeedback. And again, let's take OM out of, out of even the discussion, it doesn't have to be OM. But just starting with resonance breathing as a way to open up to what we, what we're about to encounter in terms of our discussion. Cause for many psychotherapeutic discussions, they're very difficult process to get through. And then maybe the backend is saying, okay, well now we're releasing you back out into the world. We've gotten our 15 minute session done.

• 1:41:18Chris Williamson?

  Safe again.

• 1:41:19Speaker 01

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

• 1:41:24Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:41:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:41:34Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:41:57Chris Williamson?

  Good progress, like how much, how often, how long? What's the protocol?

• 1:42:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, if you want state change, if you're like, hey, I need something right now. Just a couple of minutes. I mean, even a minute to three minutes will get you a really good, solid effect. What we, one of the things that we know is that resonance breathing in and of itself, its efficacy is so immensely high that we can safely say that every time you do it, you have a net positive benefit from, in terms of a nervous system perspective. It's a nice little gentle hug. We know that when we get to around that 10 minute mark and as much as 10 to 20 minutes, that's actually kind of like the sweet spot for starting to really entrain the nervous system. You had mentioned ago, a little, you mentioned a little bit ago, what if we just walked around and constantly breathed at our resonance rate?

• 1:42:47Speaker 01

  And it's like, in theory, I love that idea. However, what I will say, and that hasn't been tested for obvious reasons. But what I will say is that the research does demonstrate that going above about 20 minutes of resonance breathing, like the return on investment, like it starts to, it starts to drop. It's not, there's no deleterious or detrimental effect, but you're not gaining any more significant appreciable gain, like from doing longer than 20 minutes. So I always tell people the sweet spot is per day, 10 to 20 minutes. And that is not 10 to 20 minutes compounded over the day. It's doing sessions, like the, the compounding, like if I did 10 minute, uh, two, sorry, five two-minute sessions

• 1:43:30Speaker 01

  equals 10 minutes, you're not going to receive as nearly as much of the longitudinal benefits as you will with a singular 10-minute session. We do have research, the, because the nervous system doesn't start to really entrain in a single session and make those larger scale, scale barrel reflex changes until about minute eight to 12. The minute eight to 12 is when we start to see that making those more robust changes. It'll change, the nervous system will make. Significant changes before then, but the adaptations don't occur until that point in time. So that isn't to say, hey, if I get an OM or I get do some other breathing practice that I should never do anything less than 10 minutes. Not at all. I do it all the

• 1:44:12Speaker 01

  time. Like in between meetings, I'll do three or five minutes. Is that having necessarily the compounding effect? Not as much as the 10 minute sessions or the 15 or the 20 minute sessions. So I tell people like, if you really want to get the effects, and this is coming more from the literature and biofeedback, 10 minutes done four to six times a week. And if you do that in as little as four weeks, but probably more around eight to 10 weeks, you're going to actually see significant train changes. Now that can result in, I look at my whoop and my baseline heart rate variability is increased. I'm not using that as like my marker or my goalposts, kind of like my source of truth. But we see that quite often in the research and the literature, we do see that baseline heart rate variability

• 1:44:54Speaker 01

  for people that practice in that type of protocol can actually see pretty vast improvements. What I'm actually looking at are a couple of things. First, I'm looking to say, subjectively, do I feel more resilient? I think that goes, that goes missed, man. Like in the day of, again, biometric hypervigilance, where we're all like so data driven and using it as our decision making, we're becoming increasingly poor at checking in subjectively. How do I feel? I wake up in the morning, yeah, my wearable says that I'm in the red and I feel, and it says I'm a 29 out of 100, but how do I actually feel? Like bypassing that is a huge mistake. So we know in the literature that people that do this type of protocol, one of the main things that they see is they see better emotional regulation. Okay,

• 1:45:38Speaker 01

  so maybe my fuse isn't as short as it once was. Maybe I have a little bit more lenience, like in this, on this, in this business call or working with, you know, Deborah down the hall, she doesn't piss me off as easily, or maybe she does piss me off, but I don't fly off the cuff with her. They see better sleep. We actually see improvements in sleep metrics and markers. We see more resilience to kind of other things like recovery. We actually see that we improve things like physiological recovery. So for instance, like I know a lot of people that, a lot of the pro athletes that I work with, every single time that they are working out or they'll do like a training session, they're down regulating their nervous system with OM for about 10 minutes or so, like post that session.

• 1:46:17Chris Williamson?

  That's the protocol. So let's say there's someone who is a high performer.

• 1:46:23Chris Williamson?

  Creator of some kind, maybe they give presentations at work, maybe they're a salesperson, maybe they're trying to learn something, they're a student. How would you stack resonance breathing with skill acquisition, practice, game time? You doing it before? It feels like I'm not convinced that it's great for everything. If I'm an NFL player, I probably just want to be listening to Creed before I go out. I don't necessarily want, I want to be like hyped. I don't know if I want to be doing this.

• 1:46:49Speaker 01

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

• 1:47:00Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:47:04Speaker 01

  Significantly, like he would get.

• 1:47:06Chris Williamson?

  In practice, he was like the generational talent, couldn't do it on the ice.

• 1:47:10Speaker 01

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

• 1:47:47Chris Williamson?

  But they might do it afterward in order to bring themselves back down.

• 1:47:50Speaker 01

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

• 1:47:55Chris Williamson?

  Pop conceits and whatever else.

• 1:47:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:47:57Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Let's add in now, let's say that somebody wanted to, by the end of 2026, I want to make as many great improvements to my nervous system and also my HRV. I'm, I'm just gaming the HRV game, right? I want to piss all over everyone else in my whoop group. What would you structure as a pretty easily compliant, broad spectrum protocol that includes the cardio respiratory work? What would that look like? Something that's relatively easy to stick to, but will have, it'll capture most of the gains,

• 1:48:34Chris Williamson?

  including the resonance breathing and then also looking at any other contributing factors? What would you do?

• 1:48:44Speaker 01

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

• 1:48:49Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:48:53Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah, there's a huge proponents of at least like two to three beers.

• 1:48:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:48:58Speaker 01

  Right before you go to sleep. So the, the first thing that I would say, and again, I'm trying to think about what are the best levers that you can pull to kill the most birds with one stone? And literally, it would probably be just two things that, that come to mind now because I don't want to add, I could, I could create a protocol for you where I add, I have created protocols for you where I can add layers of complexity where there's a tons of things. But I think for the everyday individual, if you focused on two things, which are both modifiable factors, like we talked about, it's nervous system regulation earlier. I think that you're going to get the most bang for your buck. I think the first one is exercise. I think that enhancing cardio respiratory fitness and getting more on a path to increase things like VO2 max.

• 1:49:40Speaker 01

  And again, like you just go listen to any of T S stuff where he talks about, you know, improving, you know, the base, base of the pyramid, you know, through zone two training and high intensity training as well on the top. I just listen to all his, of his stuff. I mean, you're improving cardio respiratory fitness, which is improving cardiovascular output and therefore lowering resting heart rate. And you're going to improve HRV that way. If we're just thinking about improving HRV, is that then equate to improving things like parasympathetic braking or vagal braking or vagal tone?

• 1:50:11Speaker 01

  Potentially, we do have some research to suggest that exercise in and of itself is a great way to actually exercise the vagal break. So that way, again, we're kind of killing two birds with one stone. We should be exercising and improving cardiorespiratory fitness no matter what. And the second component, again, this is my bias 100% coming out, is that we need to have dedicated time and practice where we are in a controlled environment and we're down regulating our nervous system. So for many people, meditation is really helpful for them. And I don't want to, you know, poo poo on meditation. I think it's a great practice. I actually think that HRV biofeedback that we've been talking about is an amazing thing to combine with mindfulness and meditation. I actually think they work very well in tandem

• 1:50:54Speaker 01

  with one another. But the thing about meditation is, is that creating a practice that's 15, 30 minutes a day, that's maybe not as much structured, it's just really hard to create good behavioral habits and routines around that. So for most people, I would say, then that's where I would turn to, and again, bias coming out, something like OM, where it's like, we're actually spending dedicated time in a controlled environment to train our nervous system four times a week at 10 minutes, you know, per, per day even, as little as 10 minutes. If you want to do more than that, do more than that. Like, for instance, I aim for 10, for 15 minutes of resonance a day, not 15 minutes of practice, 15 minutes of my time in blue. So when you turned it blue during our discussion a minute ago, I want 15 minutes

• 1:51:36Speaker 01

  where I'm holding myself in that. Now, that doesn't have to be 15 sustained minutes. I'm not sure if I've ever done 15 minutes of sustained resonance, but 15 minutes cumulative, and I normally do 10-minute sessions or other small sessions. So again, if we had to kind of come back, that's me like maximizing output of the vagus nerve. If we're just saying, well, what's the minimal dose that somebody can do to get started? I think four times a week, 10 minutes a day, so that's 40 minutes that you have to devote to the nervous system gym every week, will get you a lot of the benefit and certainly provide a good foundation.

• 1:52:09Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:52:15Speaker 01

  Good question. Have you ever noticed, like, when you're using it, have you ever noticed that when your mind starts to go and wander? What happens?

• 1:52:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:22Speaker 01

  I've been in the blue so much and then all of a sudden, like, I will catch my mind go. Here's the great thing.

• 1:52:28Chris Williamson?

  It is kind of mindfulness.

• 1:52:30Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. And you have to be mentally attuned to what's going on. Otherwise, it's like the nervous system knows. It's like you're feeding it information. If the mind's going, then it says, well, we need to, again, sympathetic nervous system, we need to mobilize energy. So we can process all that thinking. And so then therefore.

• 1:52:45Chris Williamson?

  It's pulled you out of.

• 1:52:46Speaker 01

  It's pulled you out.

• 1:52:47Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:52:47Speaker 01

  It's pulled you out. So, so there's a direct connection there. That's why I say that meditation and mindfulness is immensely important to include as a layer of what you're doing with biofeedback. Otherwise, I think you're going to miss out on some of the other potential mental attunement benefits.

• 1:53:02Chris Williamson?

  Well, I think one of the

• 1:53:06Chris Williamson?

  risks that you guys are going to have as this becomes bigger, and there will be, based on how good I think this product is, I think there's going to be like a million copycats within the space of a couple of years.

• 1:53:18Chris Williamson?

  One of the things I've noticed, because you don't need to look at your phone, again, for the people that are just listening, it's like a stone, you hold the stone in your hand and you breathe in time with the stone and the stone can just vibrate. But what it means is you don't need to look at anything because you've linked the lamp in with the wifi. So you never actually have to open your phone again. So I have it next to my bed and it means that when I'm watching a movie, I'll be, I watch Die Hard, because it's the greatest Christmas movie of all time. Grab the stone and I'm there for thirty minutes, forty minutes, but I'm, you know, knee deep in Die Hard. And I care about Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman. So I'm not mentally with my breath work. And I do think that that's going to be something that people are probably going to get into doing because it sounds great.

• 1:54:00Chris Williamson?

  Oh, my God, I can train my vagus nerve while I'm watching a movie. Like, that is fantastic. But how many of the gains are you losing by not focusing where you're supposed to be? But then also, maybe if you were to look at the literature for this, I would love someone to do a study to say, well, this is a more.

• 1:54:21Chris Williamson?

  Real world applicable situation, which is that your nervous system is doing one thing while your mind is doing another. So can we chew walking, chew walking gum at the same time? Can we chew gum and walk at the same time? Are we able to allow our front brain to be focused on that while our nervous system is trying to regulate? From this thing at the side?

• 1:54:41Speaker 01

  It's a great question.

• 1:54:42Chris Williamson?

  I mean, it's a really interesting.

• 1:54:43Speaker 01

  Great research study that could be done there. What I will say, though, and I go back to the statement that I made before, is that I will take precision over effort and intention any day. It doesn't mean that intention and effort with precision don't yield the greatest benefits. But precision is key here because we know that the nervous system, like your baroreflex response and your respiratory sinus arrhythmia, so the characteristics that are contributing mostly to HRV, they actually don't care, they don't give a shit about your intention. They don't care. As long as you're breathing within rhythm, they're doing its work, they're aligning. Now, if you want to maximize that benefit, that's when we put them all together. And that's where we can start to layer mindfulness.

• 1:55:27Speaker 01

  So again, just to make sure I don't get misquoted here, mindfulness and meditation matter. Like, they're really important for what we do. I think it's great to layer on them. But is it necessary? Or are we required to utilize that in order to have some appreciable nervous system benefit? With through HRV biofeedback? The answer is no.

• 1:55:47Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:55:56Speaker 01

  I think a T S typically says around 120 to 150 minutes.

• 1:55:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:59Speaker 01

  Yes, about.

• 1:55:59Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:56:31Speaker 01

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

• 1:56:41Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:56:48Speaker 01

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

• 1:56:56Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:57:03Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:57:22Speaker 01

  Sleep is, is the canary in the coal mine. When we start to have significant disruptions in sleep, sleep efficiency, the overall quality of our sleep, when all of those things are happening, it's a signal. It's a signal that the nervous system is experiencing a significant amount of dysregulation. And so if I had to think about like a, a pyramid of health and wellness interventions, or not even interventions, but a pyramid of health and wellness factors or variables that people should focus on if they want to have the greatest longevity and overall sense of health and wellness.

• 1:58:04Speaker 01

  The bottom or the base of that pyramid, without a doubt, I don't think there's a close second is sleep. Because we know that sleep, its intention is reparation. It is repairing the nervous system. We can, we receive insults all throughout the day, right? So whether it's psychological insults or physiological insults, there's insults that we are incurring at all times and our nervous system is doing the best it can. It's like 24 by seven security. Like it's trying to attend to everything, but it gets beat up. And especially as we experience more chronic stressors, day in, day out, week in, week out, month after month, year after year, decade after decade. Now we've got all this compounding stress that's kind of living kind of within the nervous system. Its thermostat is really stiff and stuck in a direction that we don't want to have.

• 1:58:48Speaker 01

  And so therefore it starts to impact things like our sleep and our ability to actually sustain longer, deeper sleep.

• 1:58:57Speaker 01

  And so we can leverage, this is why heart rate variability is typically given to us on wearables while we're asleep. And that's because when we get really good data of a process that is intended to repair our nervous system, HRV is telling us, well, is sleep actually helping us to repair the nervous system? Or is there some gap there? So without focusing on sleep, it's like you can do all the breathing you want and it's great and it's gonna help and it can actually help improve sleep. Tons of literature on resonance breathing and biofeedback and how it can improve sleep. But if you aren't addressing sleep issues at its core, which can be a wide variety of factors, nervous system dysregulation probably being the foundation of that, then

• 1:59:38Speaker 01

  like all the other things that you're doing maybe aren't gonna have nearly as much of a net positive impact. So we have to start with sleep.

• 1:59:46Chris Williamson?

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

• 1:59:54Speaker 01

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

• 2:00:26Chris Williamson?

  Pretty blank canvas.

• 2:00:27Speaker 01

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

• 2:00:35Chris Williamson?

  I guess you can't fake regulation during sleep.

• 2:00:39Speaker 01

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

• 2:01:04Chris Williamson?

  Wow, okay. So it's your, what would people who work on their fitness and their resonance breathing see in sleep, all of the things being equal, over the course of 12 months?

• 2:01:22Speaker 01

  If they're working on it, what I love, so this is again to shamelessly plug, absolute rest and Andy Galpin's team, they're using a lot more advanced ways of looking at what's happening in the nervous system throughout the night as opposed to like a lot of consumer based wearables. But that's when you're going from like FDA cleared medical device, we're getting like tons of granularity to like, okay, sampling rates a lot lower. We've got to conserve battery. We're just giving you kind of information that we think could be useful to hopefully drive behavior. So what we saw, I kind of want to explain a gold standard because I think that this is the best way to view it. So like at absolute rest, when you're wearing the overnight ring, it's a ring called the sleep imagery, which again FDA cleared medical device. It's

• 2:02:05Speaker 01

  actually looking at the fine, finite, quite granular, high fidelity changes that are occurring in your nervous system through an algorithm called CPC algorithm, just looking at cardio pulmonary coupling. So how coupled or incongruence is your breathing within your rest, your breathing and your heart rate when you're at rest. So at baseline, they should be highly coupled. You should be creating a lot of what I referred to earlier as high frequency power. So that's what we should see on our charts. We'd have like these really tight, big blue mountains that we'd want to see that are occurring across the night. When someone is having really poor problems with sleep, and this can be due to sleep disordered breathing. So let's just say they've got sleep apnea, or they just have an immensely dysregulated nervous system, really cannot bounce back from stress.

• 2:02:49Speaker 01

  They've got other problems related just to autonomic flexibility. We see that that high frequency coupling is really low. Like, so it looks like they're not getting hardly any restorative sleep. And when they're not getting restorative sleep, they start to experience kind of like this sympathetic burst at night, what we call fragmentation. And you can't pick up fragmentation on like a consumer based wearable. This is why you got to go to the high fidelity stuff that they have at absolute rest.

• 2:03:11Chris Williamson?

  Which is also why these rings have one night of battery.

• 2:03:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:03:15Chris Williamson?

  Because they're sampling, what, 100 hertz or something?

• 2:03:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, it's a, I think the sampling rate's 1000 hertz. So it's, it's really high.

• 2:03:22Chris Williamson?

  As opposed to even the best consumer wearables are taking little chunks throughout.

• 2:03:26Speaker 01

  Small, small bits, so small of what we call epics, or just small periods of times. Yeah. And so going back to this, if we see that someone's having a lot of fragmentation at night, so the sympathetic nervous system's starting to kick into high gear, you know, heart rate is bouncing up, we're starting to see kind of like this pattern that we don't want to see when we're at rest. Well, what does that cause us to do? Fragmentation causes us not to get into the deepest stages of like in three sleep or the real restorative stages. It keeps us in very light sleep and there was a dude kicks us out of sleep as well, causes a lot of wakefulness. So we see people's sleep efficiency, which we want to be above 85%, start to drop below 85%. We see the night is completely fragmented. So what do we do? Like at absolute rest, what we would do is we would say, okay, we want to put you on a biofeedback protocol where about 30 minutes

• 2:04:11Speaker 01

  before bed, we're going to do 10 to 15 minutes of resonance breathing. And within that kind of timeframe, the whole idea is that we're down regulating the nervous system acutely to try to ease ourself into sleep, to get that good, deep restorative sleep. And that's what we want to see. So we do that. We see that, oh yeah, first night they did it, they did increase a little bit more high frequency power. It's might be only at the beginning of the night and the fragmentation kind of kicked into high gear, but we see it start to improve. And then they do it week after week after week. And what's so interesting is that almost every client for absolute rest says that their favorite intervention or the one that they feel like is truly moving the needle, aside from like top tier level coaching, is heart rate variability biofeedback, because it is something that they can see.

• 2:04:55Speaker 01

  Like you can see it's not guessing game anymore, right? It's like, I see that my nervous system has actually made changes. Not just am I getting a little bit more of that parasympathetic sleep at the beginning of the night, but it's starting to traverse the entire night. Starting to see it fluctuate and not fluctuate, but really go across the night and a lot less wakeups.

• 2:05:14Chris Williamson?

  What are the limits of HRV's usefulness?

• 2:05:17Speaker 01

  Hmm. I, when people want to use HRV as like a catchall metric for health, wellness and longevity, I think that that is immensely poor way to use it because it can't be used that way. I think I mentioned at the beginning of our podcast that it's not a vanity metric. It's not something you compare to other people and we've kind of gotten past that that point. But I think the limit of it is when you start to use it and you say, I'm gonna say every single day, I'm gonna wake up and I'm gonna look at that number and I'm gonna use that number to now drive decision making in regards to what I do that day in my in my behavior. And the problem that will ultimately arise from that is that, again, you're not

• 2:05:58Speaker 01

  taking context in into consideration whatsoever. And so now you're making decisions just kind of based off of that and you're not actually breaking, bringing in your own subjective experience and subjective feel. So that's, that's one. The other limitation, I think, of HRV is that the way it is being used now is that people are just using a singular metric and they're not actually looking at it in terms of the compilation of metrics that HRV actually is. And so they misuse it because they say, well, I'm looking at this one number and I'm either comparing it to something I shouldn't be comparing it as opposed to relative to me. But I'm not looking at all kind of like the, the minute,

• 2:06:40Speaker 01

  high fidelity, really nuanced picture of what this can provide, which is why, for instance, if I'm working with a pro athlete of mine, yeah, we're gonna take their whoop data or their aura data, I'm gonna examine that and give them some feedback on that. But I'm also gonna have them do like a morning reading. So they wake up and the first thing they do in the morning is actually do a two to five minute baseline reading, not, not a resonance reading, baseline reading. Why am I doing that? Because I'm deriving 12 to 15 metrics that are giving me a much more microscopic view of their nervous system as opposed to that singular one. But I'm not proposing that everybody should like get someone like me to do that or even have the need to do that. It's just understand

• 2:07:24Speaker 01

  that there are limitations. Uh, HRV.

• 2:07:29Speaker 01

  Is not nearly as robust of a metric for telling you something about your physiology as something like VO2 max.

• 2:07:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:37Speaker 01

  Like VO2 max, I put up there as like a metric of like, okay, this is kind of like a true metric of like overall like wellness and overall like fitness. HRV is not like that. It just doesn't operate like that. And it's not a normative based metric either. It's like, we technically do have norms because we've done so many studies to where we know where people typically fall. But we also know that because of the other influencers, genetics, age, sex, that if you don't fall within that normative range, it actually doesn't tell us anything about your overall level of health and wellness. It's like, if you know that, hey, for males aged 35 to 40, the mean arm SSD value is

• 2:08:18Speaker 01

  56 milliseconds and you know, the standard deviation is 10 and my HRV is 25. So therefore I know I fall multiple standard deviations outside of the mean. And so therefore I must be unhealthy.

• 2:08:31Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 2:08:31Speaker 01

  It's just not, it's not the case.

• 2:08:33Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 2:08:33Speaker 01

  We don't have enough evidence to suggest that. So it does require a little bit of nuance. And I think that it's best used when you have someone and we can bias like me who can inform you as to what it means. But HRV is best used this way. It's best used in real time to, as a guide, as a signaling window for training.

• 2:08:54Chris Williamson?

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

• 2:09:16Speaker 01

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

• 2:09:55Chris Williamson?

  Okay, appreciate you, man.

• 2:09:56Speaker 01

  Absolutely, Rob.

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