A Masterclass in Improving Your HRV - Dr Jay Wiles

1. 0:00 – 14:54

   Why Should We Be Looking at HRV?

   1. CWChris Williamson0:00

      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 does it measure?

   2. JWDr. Jay Wiles0:15

      The funniest thing about this, Chris, is that let's say circa ten, fifteen 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, fifteen years ago when I first started doing mostly clinical work, uh, 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, as a resident, and so within that context, like I was exposed to it because we utilized three lead, six lead, twelve lead EKGs. And so it's-- these are thirty thousand, fifty thousand, sixty thousand pieces of, or 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, is that nobody actually understands [chuckles] what the hell this thing is.

   3. CWChris Williamson1:12

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

   4. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:14

      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 gonna 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 gonna say HRV probably for the rest of the podcast 'cause 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 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, w-- 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 that people use in 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. It's ab-- all about sending signals and messages to and from the brain and the spinal cord, out to the body and then back up, so efferent and afferent 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 n- nervous system is all voluntary, so it's movement, coordination, muscular contraction, whereas the autonomic nervous system is all about involuntary, or at least we thought it used to be all involuntary. And so that's-- this is 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 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 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. Uh, I actually think that t- to conceptualize the paras... or sorry, the sympathetic 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 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, uh, 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 w- 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?

   5. CWChris Williamson6:35

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

   6. JWDr. Jay Wiles6:46

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

   7. CWChris Williamson10:20

      When you say it's a, a heart rate variability of a hundred milliseconds, that's the swing, that's the distance between shortest and longest?

   8. JWDr. Jay Wiles10:30

      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 twelve to fifteen HRV metrics that people use.

   9. CWChris Williamson10:46

      Jesus Christ!

   10. JWDr. Jay Wiles10:46

       I know. It gets comp... It gets complicated.

   11. CWChris Williamson10:48

       We don't need to make it overcomplicated.

   12. JWDr. Jay Wiles10:50

       No.

   13. CWChris Williamson10:50

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

   14. JWDr. Jay Wiles11:01

       Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, and, and that variance that occurs between heartbeats, uh, 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 is Dr. Marco Latini, Italian researcher, brilliant in this space. He actually says that a good HRV is actually a normal HRV. It is a HRV that doesn't change across time very much, so it's actually one that remains stable. And we can get into that and 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?

   15. CWChris Williamson12:04

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

   16. JWDr. Jay Wiles12:08

       ... if I had a dollar for every email I got [chuckles] 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 i- 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 fifty milliseconds. So if we see that across time, that number is going from fifty to sixty, to sixty-five, to seventy, well, relative to you, that's pretty good. But I may look at someone, you know, else whose HRV is, their baseline is one hundred milliseconds, and over the course of time, it's actually gone from one hundred to ninety to eighty-five. 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, post their Oura or Whoop score on their Instagram page, and they've got a heart rate variability score of one hundred and fifty milliseconds, and they're like: "Shit! Like, I've got... mine is, like, twenty-five." And that's when I get the email like: "Am I gonna die? Like, am I gonna have, like, some cardiovascular issues or panic attacks that are gonna 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 cl- wi- within my clinic, so I work with a lot of pro athletes, you know, ranging from individuals in the MLB, NFL, Formula One, et cetera. And one of the metrics I use for them with recovery is actually not looking at just the daily absolute value score that you might get from Whoop, Oura, 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 'cause 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?

   17. CWChris Williamson14:49

       Hmm.

   18. JWDr. Jay Wiles14:49

       Uh, the answer is yes and no, but mostly no.

   19. CWChris Williamson14:53

       Right.

2. 14:54 – 19:56

   Why Everyone’s HRV is So Different

   1. CWChris Williamson14:54

      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 two hundreds, two ten. I've got a professional cricketer friend, uh, his is regularly in the one fifties. And then there's me and the rest of my degenerate friends that are kind of scrabbling around in midlife.

   2. JWDr. Jay Wiles15:17

      There are a lot of different factors that come into play here. So you have to think about a couple of things. W- I think the biggest thing are, what are the n- 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.

   3. CWChris Williamson15:38

      Mm-hmm.

   4. JWDr. Jay Wiles15:39

      We place a lot of pressure on ourselves to have certain metrics meet whatever our standards are. Typically, they're pretty arbitrary standards 'cause people are just like, "Again, I saw somebody who had a two-hundred-millisecond HRV. I probably should have that 'cause 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 symp- uh, presentations. So let's talk then about, first, non-modifiable influencers, 'cause 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 forty to fifty or so, or even like in the mid-thirties, 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, so the ability to kind of like actually handle stress is reduced, likely due to compounding stress, and we're just, you know, disillusioned by, [chuckles] 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 a- across kind of the longitudinal studies in regards to age, we actually know that the ceiling for HRV isn't reduced. And so what I mean by that is that just because it declines doesn't mean that we can't increase it, and doesn't mean that there is some ceiling that it's like: "Okay, when I-- once I hit sixty years old, I'll never get over thirty 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 [chuckles] 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 heritability of these genes related to cardiovascular structure and nervous system structure, like, we find that there is a pretty moderate to high influence of genetics on HRV. And kind of as a, as a story, like, I see this all the time with, like, 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 thirties, forties. 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 is 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 one fifties, one sixties. And so it's like, okay, well, is one healthier than the other because one has a h- higher HRV versus lower HRV? 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.

   5. CWChris Williamson18:58

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3. 19:56 – 28:44

   Do Men and Women Have Different HRV?

   1. CWChris Williamson19:56

      Should, uh... 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 one fifty and the guy at thirty would experience their nervous systems differently? Because what you're saying here is, what matters is you relative to you over time-

   2. JWDr. Jay Wiles20:25

      Mm-hmm

   3. CWChris Williamson20:26

      ... 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 be different? Would the guy at one fifty be more likely to be able to come back down after some sort of high arousal state? Uh, 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?

   4. JWDr. Jay Wiles20:55

      Yeah. The, the answer broadly is no. Their experience, if you were to jump into, say, someone who has a two hundred millisecond, two hundred and fifty, three hundred millisecond RMSSD value in their HRV based on 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 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 on feel, no. It's kind of like... I, I think this is kind of analogous to, uh, blood pressure, right? So if, if, if you were to have, let's say, a standard blood pressure of one twenty over seventy-five, and then you were to hop into the body of somebody who has like, let's say, a one forty-five over ninety-five, you wouldn't necessarily experience it, just kind of at baseline, a difference in feel between those. And so that- that's kind of synonymous or I guess I would say analogous to, to HRV.

   5. CWChris Williamson22:05

      Mm-hmm.

   6. JWDr. Jay Wiles22:06

      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, you might experience that, especially if you had a high propensity towards things like anxiety-

   7. CWChris Williamson22:23

      Mm

   8. JWDr. Jay Wiles22:23

      ... stress, even depression.

   9. CWChris Williamson22:25

      Mm-hmm. Interesting. What about the modifiable ones?

   10. JWDr. Jay Wiles22:29

       Well, let me, let me mention one more non-modifiable because this is another one that I get to pick on females about [chuckles]

   11. CWChris Williamson22:36

       Mm-hmm.

   12. JWDr. Jay Wiles22:36

       So-

   13. CWChris Williamson22:36

       Good.

   14. JWDr. Jay Wiles22:37

       So there are s- there's-

   15. CWChris Williamson22:37

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

   16. JWDr. Jay Wiles22:39

       [chuckles] Right, exactly. Another, another tall white guy-

   17. CWChris Williamson22:41

       Yeah

   18. JWDr. Jay Wiles22:41

       ... coming to pick on females.

   19. CWChris Williamson22:42

       Yeah.

   20. JWDr. Jay Wiles22:43

       Uh, men, uh, so sex, sex differences is the non-modifiable. Again, another one that we can get in trouble on. [chuckles]

   21. CWChris Williamson22:49

       Mm.

   22. JWDr. Jay Wiles22:50

       Sex differences. The... We know from the literature, men typically have a higher average heart rate variability than women do. Um, and actually, six foot five guy here, taller guys typically have higher heart rate variabilities and actually, uh, uh, lower resonant frequency rates of breathing. Well, I'm sure we're gonna talk about resonant frequency rates as well.

   23. CWChris Williamson23:09

       Mm.

   24. JWDr. Jay Wiles23:09

       And this is just a, a, a sex difference that we see, and one of the main reasons is that women, as we know, go through a twenty-eight-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, uh, can influence different hormonal expressions. So mostly s- stark drops in things like progesterone and in, uh, 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, uh, especially pre-menopausal women, their HRV tends to be quite lower than, than men's.

   25. CWChris Williamson23:49

       Okay, modifiable.

   26. JWDr. Jay Wiles23:50

       Yeah, modifiable. The biggest one is cardiorespiratory fitness. So we actually know that when someone increases things like stroke volume, when they increase or r- 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... W- 'cause 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-

   27. CWChris Williamson24:25

       Hmm

   28. JWDr. Jay Wiles24:25

       ... as opposed to the full puzzle itself.

   29. CWChris Williamson24:27

       Mm.

   30. JWDr. Jay Wiles24:27

       ... cardiorespiratory fitness. So as VO2 max increases, we know that resting heart rate decreases, stroke volume of the heart increases, and so therefore, we actually see heart rate variability improvements. And this can be-- and this can range. It can range from pretty significant changes in baseline HRV to not much at, at all. I, I don't like to set it as the goalpost. So it's like, "Hey, I wanna raise my HRV, and so therefore, I should go get better cardiorespiratory fitness."
4. 28:44 – 38:14

   Deconstructing State Changes and Trait Changes

   1. CWChris Williamson28:44

      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.

   2. JWDr. Jay Wiles29:05

      Hmm.

   3. CWChris Williamson29:05

      It's, it's not superbly simple.

   4. JWDr. Jay Wiles29:07

      Yeah.

   5. CWChris Williamson29:07

      It's taking you half an hour to kind of deconstruct what it means. Uh, and I think if you were to ask most people, even Whoop wearers, "Your HRV, if I told you that you needed to increase it by five percent next month, what would you do?"

   6. JWDr. Jay Wiles29:22

      Hmm.

   7. CWChris Williamson29:23

      Uh, "Sleep more," maybe. They'd say something like that. Um, "I know that it's to do with stress, so I'll try and be less stressed"-

   8. JWDr. Jay Wiles29:30

      Mm-hmm

   9. CWChris Williamson29:31

      ... whatever that means. Um, "Maybe I'll try and become fitter or something." But y- 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.

   10. JWDr. Jay Wiles29:49

       Hmm. Yeah. The... I wanna give credit where credit's due. It's like these wearable companies, so fill in the blank, Whoop, Oura, Pisa, Apple, all these great wearable companies that are out there that people are leveraging. I think I heard, like, the last stat was, like, forty percent of Americans, I think, or maybe, like, even close to, like, fifty percent-

   11. CWChris Williamson30:11

       Got some form of a wearable

   12. JWDr. Jay Wiles30:12

       ... have some form of wearable.

   13. CWChris Williamson30:13

       Yeah.

   14. JWDr. Jay Wiles30:13

       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, uh, kind of outpaced the interventive side-

   15. CWChris Williamson30:46

       Mm.

   16. JWDr. Jay Wiles30:46

       -of what we can, what, what we can actually do. And so part of me is like, well, now I think it's time to bring to the light, like, things that people can actually do that have been proven within the sci- 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 kinda 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, uh, an understanding and, and then therefore probably not an appreciation for HRV as much as they should because they've never used it in a applied real-time setting.

   17. CWChris Williamson31:29

       You wake up the next morning, and your Whoop gives you a score of what you had last night, and you-- m-maybe you can work out that you did something yesterday. I mean, if you had a, a beer before you went to bed, you go, "Okay, there we go-

   18. JWDr. Jay Wiles31:40

       Yeah.

   19. CWChris Williamson31:40

       -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. I, I, I, it's down again, I guess I, I g- I, I guess I'm not doing something right, but the ability to intervene-

   20. JWDr. Jay Wiles31:58

       Mm

   21. CWChris Williamson31:58

       ... um, isn't as educated. Okay, so one of the things that we've kind of hinted at is that there are ways that you can state change and ways that you can trait change.

   22. JWDr. Jay Wiles32:09

       Mm.

   23. CWChris Williamson32:09

       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-

   24. JWDr. Jay Wiles32:27

       Yeah

   25. CWChris Williamson32:27

       ... in this context.

   26. JWDr. Jay Wiles32:28

       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?

   27. CWChris Williamson32:50

       Mm.

   28. JWDr. Jay Wiles32:50

       So state changes are things that are occurring transiently, so happening right now, and then trait changes are things that are actually occurring across time, that are building a more robust system. You can think about it as more of like if we fine-tune the engine of a car over time, so maybe we know that there's a little bit of some, you know, some... I'm not a mechanic here, but, you know, maybe we know that there's some creaks and some things that are going wrong. We hear the belt, you know, kind of like not working in its proper way. Can we fine-tune it over time so that we can create a more robust engine that maybe one day we create this car that we're working on over time to create m- 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, uh, 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, uh, the, that, that, 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 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, uh, let's say the mountain lion's chasing us, for us to stop and take a moment to do some deep breathing because we need to execute and mobilize all that energy. The sympathetic nervous system needs to be firing on all cylinders. We need to have that parasympathetic withdrawal. We need everything that we can to get out of that or fight in that environment. So when we take the time to slow our breathing down, we're sending direct physiological signals up to the brain and, and the, to the central nervous system that says, well, the only opportunity that we would want to utilize this strategy is when we're in a safe and protected environment. And so therefore, from a physiological perspective, all of these dynamic-- all these things start to dynamically change, and we can get into the dynamics of what's occurring in the physiology, if you like, but all 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, the b-- 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 s- and change that state really quickly, reduce anxiety, improve mental acuity, et cetera. But that is only gonna last for so long. So how do we build a robust system that then starts to translate into basically all areas of life and where we're not having to consciously think about regulating our nervous system? And that is where trait change starts to take place, and that can only come from consistent practice of resonance breathing, of any other type of meditation, whatever it may be, for nervous system regulation. And the interesting thing or the, the analogy I like m- to make about this is like, it's like going to the gym, right? It's like I can go into the gym right now and get a really great bicep workout, get a really great pump, and it feels excellent. Blood's flowing in the muscles, great, great day. But then if I don't ever go back to the gym again, it's like, well, I had that nice, great workout. That was a great state change for that period of time, but I didn't make these adaptations. My muscles didn't get stronger because of that. I-- They didn't get larger because of that. The nervous system works in the exact same way. So it's like when I do a lot of these practices that I'm sure we'll get into, I think about me every single time, it's like me going to the nervous system gym.... and every breath that I take, that's like a rep. It's like every time I do ten 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 v- our, our nervous sy- system's thermostat starts to actually dial in the direction that we're training it. And that's when we can-- and that's when we've made a nervous system that's flexible and can handle a lot of the things that stress, or that, that life throws at us, like stress.

   29. CWChris Williamson37:01

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5. 38:14 – 44:16

   How Fast Your Nervous System Really Reacts

   1. CWChris Williamson38:14

      [whooshing] How l- fast does our nervous system actually respond to these interventions?

   2. JWDr. Jay Wiles38:21

      Mm.

   3. CWChris Williamson38:21

      Like, 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. How quickly does their nervous system actually adapt?

   4. JWDr. Jay Wiles38:32

      Uh-

   5. CWChris Williamson38:33

      Not adapt. How quickly does it respond?

   6. JWDr. Jay Wiles38:35

      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-

   7. CWChris Williamson39:04

      Mm

   8. JWDr. Jay Wiles39:04

      ... 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. So we-

   9. CWChris Williamson39:17

      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.

   10. JWDr. Jay Wiles39:23

       Yeah.

   11. CWChris Williamson39:23

       You're saying that the opposite is true, that the parasympathetic's even quicker.

   12. JWDr. Jay Wiles39:26

       It's even quicker, and it's so, so-- it's not to say that the sympathetic nervous system isn't fast.

   13. CWChris Williamson39:30

       Right.

   14. JWDr. Jay Wiles39:30

       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 y- 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. So-

   15. CWChris Williamson40:07

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

   16. JWDr. Jay Wiles40:12

       Got it.

   17. CWChris Williamson40:12

       I, I can't sleep right now-

   18. JWDr. Jay Wiles40:14

       Yeah

   19. CWChris Williamson40:14

       ... but I can breathe right now.

   20. JWDr. Jay Wiles40:16

       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, you know, since we've been talking, is just slow the pace of my breathing down. 'Cause 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-

   21. CWChris Williamson40:47

       Mm

   22. JWDr. Jay Wiles40:47

       ... and then therefore-

   23. CWChris Williamson40:48

       Why does it increase mental acuity?

   24. JWDr. Jay Wiles40:50

       Mm. 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 if we're going, like, a little bit too much in-

   25. CWChris Williamson40:59

       Keep it simple.

   26. JWDr. Jay Wiles41:00

       Okay, we'll keep it simple. So our body has a natural blood pressure regulation system in it called the baroreflex response. The baroreflex response is essentially like cruise control for your blood pressure. It's always trying to kind of dial up and dial down whenever it needs to, based on what it's seeing in terms of physiological change. That baroreflex mechanism is what bridges the gap between our autonomic nervous system and our cardiovascular system, so it's kind of that bridge or pathway for communication. When our baroreflex is not working like it should, so let's say we're experiencing some nervous system dysregulation, what happens within the baroreflex mechanism is that it essentially will identify changes in blood pressure, and then immediately it will try to overshoot to course-correct because it basically is like, "I'm on high alert. I'm gonna send the signal to the, 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 were supposed to do. So the speed would modulate, like, five to ten miles an hour, and then the engine would just, like, abruptly, like, shift and would overshoot. Now we're going five or ten miles over. Whereas, like, the newer cars-... they have better baroreflex gain, because a mile an hour over, and it adjusts nicely and smoothly. So you can imagine that when your nervous system is dysregulated and you're having all of these overshootings of blood pressure that are occurring, it causes a lot of different dynamics in terms of how we feel: increased heart rate, blood rushing kind of to places really quickly. Like, when blood pressure goes up, you may not be nes- 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 kinda notice how it impacts mental acuity for the most part. So why does it impact mental acuity? Is that that baroreflex 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 will start to flood, uh, uh, our nervous system to think that there's a threat that's, uh, 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.

   27. CWChris Williamson43:37

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

   28. JWDr. Jay Wiles43:54

       Yeah, and the problem, though, is, is that the tiger may be all, 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.

   29. CWChris Williamson44:09

       Mm.

   30. JWDr. Jay Wiles44:09

       It's a perceived threat, but it's having the impact on your physiology and your mental acuity, like a viable threat would.

6. 44:16 – 53:08

   Can You Train Your Nervous System to Adapt Over Time?

   1. CWChris Williamson44:16

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

   2. JWDr. Jay Wiles44:29

      Yeah. This is all gonna come from the literature on resonance frequency biofeedback. So resonance frequency is kind of a long-winded way or a, 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, a guy named Paul Lehrer out of, you know, Rutgers Medical School, who found that breathing at certain paces, and for adult humans, this is generally from four and a half breaths per minute as to high as six and a half per m- uh, breaths per minute. When we breathe kind of within that range, and we can pinpoint specifically where our resonance frequency is through, through some different testing, when we breathe at that rate, we start to align what's called our respiratory sinus arrhythmia, which is, as we inhale again, heart rate's going up, and as we exhale, heart rate goes down. So it creates this beautiful, kind of like sinusoidal pattern. We align breathing and respiration or 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 twelve. So sweet spot is probably around minute ten or so from the, from the literature. When you do that consistently-- So in the research studies, when they've looked at different cohorts, where they've compared that type of breathing, resonance breathing, they've generally found that breathing at for ten 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 and as much as twelve weeks.

   3. CWChris Williamson46:29

      Mm-hmm.

   4. JWDr. Jay Wiles46:29

      So kind of like split the difference, about eight to ten-

   5. CWChris Williamson46:31

      Mm-hmm

   6. JWDr. Jay Wiles46:31

      ... is when we really see people start to make those changes.

   7. CWChris Williamson46:34

      What was the mean change? Do you know?

   8. JWDr. Jay Wiles46:36

      And when you say mean change, say more.

   9. CWChris Williamson46:37

      Average-- What was the average change increase? Five percent, one percent, ten percent?

   10. JWDr. Jay Wiles46:41

       Yeah. And then are we talking about heart rate variability?

   11. CWChris Williamson46:43

       Yeah.

   12. JWDr. Jay Wiles46:43

       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.

   13. CWChris Williamson46:53

       Mm.

   14. JWDr. Jay Wiles46:53

       So we saw that change by a magnitude anywhere from-- I mean, we'd see it go f- anywhere from fifty percent to as much as three hundred, four hundred percent.

   15. CWChris Williamson47:02

       That's during the session?

   16. JWDr. Jay Wiles47:03

       That's during the session.

   17. CWChris Williamson47:04

       Yep.

   18. JWDr. Jay Wiles47:05

       Yes. However, baseline changes, which we're actually looking at more of like f- fine blood pressure changes that are occurring.

   19. CWChris Williamson47:12

       Mm, mm.

   20. JWDr. Jay Wiles47:12

       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 baroreflex gain.

   21. CWChris Williamson47:28

       Mm.

   22. JWDr. Jay Wiles47:28

       The nervous system's having a hard time keeping up. It's that cruise control example.

   23. CWChris Williamson47:31

       Mm.

   24. JWDr. Jay Wiles47:31

       Really hard time adapting. But when we have high re- baroreflex gain, which comes from all this consistent training of HRV biofeedback or resonance breathing, then that fine-tunement then results in our ability to adapt quickly, and that quick adaptation then results in blood pressure moving at an instant when you tell it, and very smoothly when you tell it.

   25. CWChris Williamson47:55

       Mm.

   26. JWDr. Jay Wiles47:55

       So low frequency power and HRV can increase significantly as well, but high frequency power is another one. So at resting baseline, we're actually looking at changes in what's called high frequency power, and we see that that can change in order of magnitude anywhere from twenty, forty, fifty percent.

   27. CWChris Williamson48:11

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

   28. JWDr. Jay Wiles48:17

       So we-- when you are looking at your WHOOP score every single morning-... and you see that number, that is HRV. It's in milliseconds.

   29. CWChris Williamson48:25

       Mm-hmm.

   30. JWDr. Jay Wiles48:25

       We call that a time domain indices. A time domain indices 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. 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 rhy- rhythms of your, of your brainwave state and how strong they're responding-
7. 53:08 – 1:10:24

   Does Resonance Breathing Actually Work?

   1. CWChris Williamson53:08

      Okay, talk to me about biofeedback, resonance breathing. These are terms people probably haven't heard before. What is it?

   2. JWDr. Jay Wiles53:17

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

   3. CWChris Williamson53:57

      Well, everybody does-- uh, but most people are familiar with breathwork.

   4. JWDr. Jay Wiles54:00

      Yeah.

   5. CWChris Williamson54:00

      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.

   6. JWDr. Jay Wiles54:10

      Yeah.

   7. CWChris Williamson54:10

      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, five, five, five, five. Maybe they've done some, some other version of this, whatever it is, the seven, three, eight, three circle or whatever. Um, but this is kind of-... taking it to a bit of a different level?

   8. JWDr. Jay Wiles54:31

      Yeah. What we don't have in the literature is that those other breathing strategies that you used, and this is again, um, I don't wanna push back too hard on this whole field of breathwork. I do have some gripe with the general field of breathwork that I can talk about, but I don't wanna be like-- I don't wanna overindex 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 breathwork practices that you mentioned don't have are robust studies demonstrating trait change. They just-- They're j- they're just not there, at least to my knowledge.

   9. CWChris Williamson55:07

      Mm.

   10. JWDr. Jay Wiles55:07

       Now, I'm more than willing to wave the white flag if that comes out and be a, you know, proponent of those types of strategies, if we see later down the road that they indeed are effective, not just in changing people's state change, but are actually, like, going to change people's inner workings of their nervous system adaptation.

   11. CWChris Williamson55:24

       Well, I think a lot of people, when they're doing breathwork in that manner, they're not even necessarily thinking about the trait change to their physiology over time. A lot of people are using breathwork as a state shift. In fact, I think State Shift is one of the biggest breathwork apps.

   12. JWDr. Jay Wiles55:41

       Yeah.

   13. CWChris Williamson55:41

       And, uh, they're using it to get themselves more energized and alert or calmer in the moment.

   14. JWDr. Jay Wiles55:47

       Mm.

   15. CWChris Williamson55:47

       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, uh, to work with a practitioner, to help them through kind of the level zero of the psychedelic pyramid-

   16. JWDr. Jay Wiles56:08

       Mm-hmm

   17. CWChris Williamson56:09

       ... uh, includes you using breathwork to kind of just alter your experience of the world a little, and, "Ah, I, I, I feel a bit different about talking about that problem now," or, "Fuck, that relationship stress that's been weighing on me for a little while, it's, it's come out, and I've not been able to stop it, and that felt cathartic," or whatever. I don't think m- most people are thinking about, "This is a, a real physiological hypertrophy training for my vagus nerve, uh, input."

   18. JWDr. Jay Wiles56:38

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

   19. CWChris Williamson56:57

       I just wanna be relaxed for an hour.

   20. JWDr. Jay Wiles56:58

       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.

   21. CWChris Williamson57:14

       Mm.

   22. JWDr. Jay Wiles57:14

       I mean, even something that, like, is being, uh, talked about a lot today in the health and wellness sphere in terms of breathing, which is the physiological sigh or cyclic sighing-

   23. CWChris Williamson57:22

       Mm

   24. JWDr. Jay Wiles57:22

       ... doesn't necessarily have the robust research, like, de- definitely doesn't have the robust research that resonance breathing does on longer-term longitudinal or systemic change in the nervous system.

   25. CWChris Williamson57:32

       It would not surprise me that for the people who want Huberman pilled, the [inhaling] [exhaling] that sort of big breath in, top it off, and then blow out through typically pursed lips.

   26. JWDr. Jay Wiles57:45

       Yeah.

   27. CWChris Williamson57:45

       Um, uh, who-- H- how many times are you doing that to think, "Oh yeah, if I do this twice a day..." It's two breaths, dude.

   28. JWDr. Jay Wiles57:53

       Right.

   29. CWChris Williamson57:53

       Like, it really-

   30. JWDr. Jay Wiles57:54

       Right
8. 1:10:24 – 1:19:31

   How Ohm is Rethinking Breathwork

   1. CWChris Williamson1:10:24

      I've been doing some form of resonance breathing, low-tech and slightly higher tech now, um, for a while, but you are right. The, the consistency thing is so tough, and I think that's why what you guys have done with Ohm, and like I said, I, I mentioned it to Huberman, and he, he completely agreed that-- He's like, "This sounds fucking fantastic"-

   2. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:10:45

      Mm-hmm

   3. CWChris Williamson1:10:45

      ... um, to be able to give people a way to access pretty advanced tech that, what? You'd have had to go into a lab to do probably only a decade ago.

   4. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:10:55

      Oh, yeah, and, 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.

   5. CWChris Williamson1:11:10

      Mm.

   6. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:11:10

      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.

   7. CWChris Williamson1:11:21

      Mm.

   8. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:11:22

      And now we have accessibility to do it, like, readily. Like, we made obviously Ohm so that people could have it live anywhere in their environments and do it at any time, but also it serves another purpose. It's-

   9. CWChris Williamson1:11:32

      Do you, do you wanna 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, and people can keep-- people can pre-order the, the lamps or whatever, but it, it's still pretty stealth-

   10. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:11:45

       Mm-hmm

   11. CWChris Williamson1:11:45

       ... right now, which I thought was even cooler 'cause it made me feel like I was getting access to the new Batman utility belt-

   12. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:11:51

       [laughing]

   13. CWChris Williamson1:11:51

       ... before it was actually, uh, fully out. But I've been playing with mine, and it replaced what I was using previously.

   14. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:11:56

       Yeah.

   15. CWChris Williamson1:11:57

       Um, but yeah, I guess explain kind of what it is that you've done 'cause I think it's really cool.

   16. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:12:02

       Yeah, so we are, I guess, in a, still in a bit of a dark mode because we won't be shipping out anything until the, the latter half of this year, probably early Q3, so in August or so. Uh, but for now, we are taking pre-orders at ohm.health. But the lamp in and of itself-- So I, 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 a, or, or an arm ba- band, wrist wearable. Open up the phone. Make sure, like, for the love of God, please Bluetooth connect.

   17. CWChris Williamson1:12:43

       Right. [chuckles]

   18. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:12:43

       ... [chuckles] so that was the problem.

   19. CWChris Williamson1:12:44

       Yeah.

   20. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:12:44

       You had to make sure all the-- and there was all these friction points, and when something went awry, then it's gonna lead to what? It's gonna lead to-

   21. CWChris Williamson1:12:51

       Disregulation-

   22. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:12:51

       -attrition.

   23. CWChris Williamson1:12:52

       And frustration.

   24. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:12:52

       Yeah, dysregulation, and then attrition, 'cause so you're like, throw it in.

   25. CWChris Williamson1:12:55

       Yep.

   26. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:12:55

       So it's gonna meet the graveyard of all the other wearables that you have in your shelf.

   27. CWChris Williamson1:12:58

       Yeah.

   28. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:12:58

       So-- and then the other c- component, too, is that what are you looking at the whole time you're doing biofeedback on a phone?

   29. CWChris Williamson1:13:05

       Watching your phone.

   30. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:13:06

       Watching your phone.
9. 1:19:31 – 1:24:41

   Does Feeling Calm Mean You’re Regulated?

   1. CWChris Williamson1:19:31

      pretty cool. So I guess one thing that a lot of people will be thinking is, "I already do breathwork in one form or another, and it makes me feel calm." Does that not suggest... Is, is feeling calm not a proof of regulation-

   2. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:19:45

      Mm-hmm

   3. CWChris Williamson1:19:46

      ... uh, in breathwork? Because I usually feel chilled, and actually sometimes a little bit spacey, when I do resonance breathing.

   4. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:19:53

      Mm.

   5. CWChris Williamson1:19:54

      Uh, but I don't always necessarily feel super calm. I don't maximize calm. I've done breathwork sessions that have made me feel more calm-

   6. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:20:00

      Yeah

   7. CWChris Williamson1:20:00

      ... in the moment.

   8. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:20:01

      Sure.

   9. CWChris Williamson1:20:01

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

   10. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:20:06

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

   11. CWChris Williamson1:20:16

       Yeah, we've just done 90 minutes of fucking becoming more calm

   12. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:20:18

       ... the nervous system relax." Yes. The-- this is going, kind of going back to HRV as being a by-product number, right? Resonance breathing producing a sense of relaxation for most people, m- most sessions, is the by-product of aligning your nervous system. And so the intention isn't that I come in with resonance... And, and, 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."

   13. CWChris Williamson1:20:48

       Mm.

   14. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:20:48

       "I am training. That is my gym right there."

   15. CWChris Williamson1:20:50

       Mm.

   16. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:20:50

       "That is my nervous system gym today. I'm hitting it. I'm getting in the reps-

   17. CWChris Williamson1:20:53

       Mm

   18. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:20:53

       ... 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 translative to how I experience the world after this."

   19. CWChris Williamson1:21:03

       Mm.

   20. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:21:03

       And so for me, when I do it, slowing my breathing down inherently typically is gonna make me produce a sense of calm. You may even feel sleepy.

   21. CWChris Williamson1:21:11

       Mm.

   22. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:21:11

       This is something that we use, like, with Absolute Rest, looking at Andy Galpin's company. Like, we use this with everybody. Everybody does HRV biofeedback before bed-

   23. CWChris Williamson1:21:18

       Mm

   24. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:21:18

       ... because it can produce that huge level of vagal arousal, or what we would just say is, like, vagal stimulation.

   25. CWChris Williamson1:21:24

       Mm.

   26. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:21:24

       A 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, uh, the intention, again, isn't like, "I'm gonna experience relaxation." Maybe, maybe you will. Right now, I'm working on timing, I'm working on precision, I'm working on training that nervous system to align, so that when I leave this controlled environment that I've trained on and I go out into the real world, where I don't have this little thing-

   27. CWChris Williamson1:21:51

       Mm

   28. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:21:51

       ... I want my nervous system to kick into high gear when shit hits the fan.

   29. CWChris Williamson1:21:55

       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. Pair 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, 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 or heading to eightsleep.com/modernwisdom, using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's E-I-G-H-T sleep.com/modernwisdom and MODERNWISDOM at checkout. [whooshing sound] Would it not be good for us to just always breathe at our resonance frequency?

   30. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:23:05

       [chuckles]
10. 1:24:41 – 1:41:06

    How Can We Combat Physiological Stress?

    1. CWChris Williamson1:24:41

       okay, I have a question: It-- 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?

    2. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:24:59

       Mm.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:25:00

       They should go CBT, ACT therapy, psychotherapy, uh, cognitive reframing. You have been in a situation with work or your kid or your finances or whatever for-... three years, and it has just sent you haywire, and now you're trying to intervene. The issue was caused this way-

    4. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:25:22

       Mm.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:25:22

       -from top to bottom.

    6. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:25:23

       Mm-hmm.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:25:24

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

    8. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:25:34

       Yeah.

    9. CWChris Williamson1:25:35

       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?

    10. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:25:46

        Yeah, it, it makes sense. The, the one thing to kind of also question here, most of it is coming top-down, but there are some actual theories of emotion that are actually looking more at bottom-up. So there's James-Lange theory of emotion that actually says that we encounter an incident, um, so let's say we encounter an event, an external event-

    11. CWChris Williamson1:26:02

        Mm-hmm

    12. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:26:02

        ... 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."

    13. CWChris Williamson1:26:28

        Mm.

    14. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:26:29

        And so then we receive that signal from our body up, so it's bottom up, and then now we're starting to make a cognitive appraisal with that thing that we just experienced.

    15. CWChris Williamson1:26:37

        Turn that into a modern example story for me.

    16. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:26:41

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

    17. CWChris Williamson1:26:45

        Both.

    18. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:26:45

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

    19. CWChris Williamson1:26:54

        You're doing the long answers.

    20. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:26:55

        [laughing]

    21. CWChris Williamson1:26:55

        I'm gonna do this as well.

    22. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:26:57

        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, I had a veteran kind of back in the day when I was working within the VA, and he had had all these experiences, kind of like within kind of war. 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. [laughing]

    23. CWChris Williamson1:28:14

        Motherfucker, did you kick me out?

    24. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:28:15

        [laughing]

    25. CWChris Williamson1:28:15

        Oh, my God, damn.

    26. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:28:16

        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.

    27. CWChris Williamson1:28:26

        This is great. It's like story time with nervous system training.

    28. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:28:29

        I like it.

    29. CWChris Williamson1:28:29

        You're telling me about this guy-

    30. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:28:31

        Yeah. Yeah, and we haven't gotten to the good meat of it. So exposure to all these things. So he comes into clinic, and he says, uh, you know, "I've noticed that, like, every single time, like, I go out to drive, like I, I lock up. The entire body locks up. I can't think straight. I get tunnel vision. Like, all of these things are occurring kind of within my, my nervous system." He didn't coin it that way 'cause he didn't know to use the language nervous system, but he said that, "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. The only time I come here is when I get a taxi," 'cause Uber wasn't a thing back then. Am I aging myself here? And he would go to the, to the VA to, to receive help. Okay, so then when we started to unpack and explore, like, what was going on here, basically, what he would say is that he would walk out, and he would have-- he would just-- he wouldn't even actually, like, be looking at a car, but he would know that he was kind of like moving towards a car, and all of a sudden, his physiology would just ramp up. Heart rate would increase. Everything would just kind of, like, become immensely excitable. And so yeah, okay, well, we have... Well, there's this association that he's making, but we don't know, like, what the association is, is w-why it's there. And so as we kind of backpedaled and unpacked a little bit of things, 'cause as you do in therapy, which I am a psychologist, so of course, like that's kind of part of what, 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, uh, 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. So he's experiencing kind of like all this flood of, uh, 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 therefore I've created this v-vicious physiological cycle. And so this is where, like, yes, we want to leverage something like top-down cognitive processing or therapy with him, and that's important, but actually starting from the body up and helping him just learn how to regulate that physiological response was the best place to start. Because trying to change-... the mind with the mind. I've heard Huberman talk a lot about this, and I really agree with Huberman on this. It says, "Trying to change the mind with the mind is a bit like tug of war." It's very difficult. You can kind of get into these nasty impasses, and you're just always butting heads. But changing the mind with the body tends to be a lot more efficient, and it is the thing that can bridge the gap and segue us into doing the top-down processing. Because all the things that you mentioned before, cognitive behavioral therapy, ACT, all of these evidence-based psychotherapies are immensely valuable tools. Like, they are one hundred percent 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 where I might get a tiny bit esoteric actually, which is not typically my thing. But if we can leverage a tool like this, let's say, before a therapy session, to open up the nervous system to receiving and saying, "Okay, I'm in an environment with my psychologist or my therapist. This is a very safe environment because I'm communicating this with my body, with my nervous system," this might be a really unique and amazing way to start really transitioning from just purely talk therapy and psyco- psychotherapeutics to now going more into using psychophysiology.
11. 1:41:06 – 1:47:15

    How Do You Know Resonance Breathing is Working?

    1. CWChris Williamson1:41:06

       by someone. Okay, so for resonance breathing, what is a good starting point that's realistic to get good progress? Like, how much, how often, how long?

    2. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:41:18

       Mm-hmm.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:41:19

       What's the protocol?

    4. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:41:20

       Yeah, if you want state change, if you're like, "Hey, I need something right now," uh, just a couple minutes, I mean, even a minute to three minutes will get you a really good, solid effect. What we-- one of the things that we know is that resonance breathing in and of itself, 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.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:41:46

       Mm-hmm.

    6. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:41:46

       We know that when we get to around that ten-minute mark, and as much as ten to twenty minutes, that's actually kind of like the sweet spot for starting to really entrain the nervous system. You had mentioned ago, a, a little... I mean, you mentioned a little bit ago, what if we just walked around and constantly-

    7. CWChris Williamson1:42:03

       Mm-hmm, mm-hmm

    8. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:42:03

       ... breathed at our resonance rate?

    9. CWChris Williamson1:42:05

       Yep.

    10. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:42:05

        And it's like, in theory, I love that idea. However, what I will say, and that hasn't been tested for [chuckles] obvious reasons-

    11. CWChris Williamson1:42:12

        Yep

    12. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:42:12

        ... but what I will say is that the research does demonstrate that going above about twenty 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-

    13. CWChris Williamson1:42:30

        Mm, mm

    14. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:42:30

        ... like, from doing longer than twenty minutes. So I always tell people the sweet spot is per day, ten to twenty minutes, and that is not ten to twenty minutes compounded over the day. It's doing sessions, like the com- the compounding, like, if I did ten-minute, uh, two, or sorry, five two-minute sessions equals ten minutes-

    15. CWChris Williamson1:42:48

        Mm-hmm

    16. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:42:49

        ... you're not gonna receive as nearly as much of the longitudinal benefits as you will with a singular ten-minute session.

    17. CWChris Williamson1:42:56

        Why?

    18. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:42:56

        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 baroreflex changes-

    19. CWChris Williamson1:43:07

        Mm

    20. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:43:07

        ... until about minute eight to twelve. The minute eight to twelve is when we start to see it 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 say, to say, "Oh, well, hey, if I get an Ohm or I get-- do some other breathing practice, that I should never do anything less than ten minutes."

    21. CWChris Williamson1:43:28

        Mm-hmm.

    22. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:43:28

        Not at all. I do it all the time. Like, in between meetings, I'll do three to five minutes.

    23. CWChris Williamson1:43:32

        Mm.

    24. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:43:33

        Is that having necessarily the compounding effect? Not as much as the ten-minute sessions or the fifteen or the twenty-minute sessions.

    25. CWChris Williamson1:43:39

        Mm.

    26. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:43:39

        So I tell people, like, if you really want to get the effects, and this is coming more from the literature and biofeedback, ten minutes done-... four to six times a week.

    27. CWChris Williamson1:43:49

        Mm-hmm.

    28. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:43:49

        And if you do that in as little as four weeks, but probably more around eight to ten weeks-

    29. CWChris Williamson1:43:54

        Mm.

    30. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:43:54

        -you're gonna actually see significant trait changes. Now, that can result in, I look at my Whoop, and my baseline heart rate variability is increased.
12. 1:47:15 – 1:51:27

    The Most Effective Ways to Improve Your HRV

    1. CWChris Williamson1:47:15

       Um, 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.

    2. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:47:30

       Yeah.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:47:30

       Right? I wanna piss all over everyone else in my Whoop group. What would you structure as a pretty easily compliant, broad-spectrum protocol that includes the cardiorespiratory work?

    4. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:47:45

       Mm-hmm.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:47:46

       What would that look like? Something that's relatively easy to stick to, but will have-- it'll capture most of the gains, including the, uh, resonance breathing, and then also looking at any other, um, uh, contributing factors. What would you do?

    6. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:48:01

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

    7. CWChris Williamson1:48:07

       Yeah, you should actually have a beer before you go to bed on a nighttime.

    8. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:48:10

       Right, right.

    9. CWChris Williamson1:48:10

       I've heard the Huermans been talking about it a lot.

    10. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:48:11

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

    11. CWChris Williamson1:48:15

        Yeah, yeah, yeah

    12. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:48:15

        ... right before you go to sleep.

    13. CWChris Williamson1:48:17

        Yep.

    14. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:48:17

        Uh, 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?

    15. CWChris Williamson1:48:26

        Yep.

    16. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:48:26

        And literally, it would probably be just two things that, that come to mind now. Because I don't wanna 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-

    17. CWChris Williamson1:48:36

        Yeah

    18. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:48:36

        ... 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 nervous system regulation earlier, I think that you're gonna get the most bang for your buck.

    19. CWChris Williamson1:48:47

        Mm.

    20. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:48:48

        I think the first one is exercise. I think that enhancing cardiorespiratory fitness and getting more on a path to increase things like VO2 max, and again, like, you just go listen to any Tia stuff where he talks about, you know, improving, you know, the base, base of the pyramid-

    21. CWChris Williamson1:49:04

        Mm

    22. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:49:04

        ... through zone two training and high-intensity training as well on the top. Like, just listen to all of his, of his stuff. I mean, you're improving cardiorespiratory fitness, which is improving cardiovascular output and therefore lowering resting heart rate, and you're gonna improve HRV that way.

    23. CWChris Williamson1:49:19

        Mm-hmm.

    24. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:49:19

        If we're just thinking about improving HRV, is that then equate to improving things like parasympathetic braking-

    25. CWChris Williamson1:49:26

        Mm

    26. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:49:26

        ... or vagal braking or vagal tone? Potentially. We do have some research to suggest that exercise in and of itself is a great way to actually exercise the vagal brake.

    27. CWChris Williamson1:49:36

        Mm.

    28. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:49:37

        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-

    29. CWChris Williamson1:50:12

        Yeah

    30. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:50:12

        ... 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.
13. 1:51:27 – 1:56:03

    How Breath Connects the Nervous System and the Mind

    1. CWChris Williamson1:51:27

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

    2. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:51:33

       Ooh, 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-

    3. CWChris Williamson1:51:39

       Mm

    4. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:51:39

       ... what happens?

    5. CWChris Williamson1:51:40

       Yep.

    6. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:51:40

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

    7. CWChris Williamson1:51:46

       It is a kind of mindfulness.

    8. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:51:48

       100%.

    9. CWChris Williamson1:51:48

       Yeah.

    10. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:51:49

        And you have to be mentally attuned to what's going on. Uh, 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-

    11. CWChris Williamson1:52:00

        Yeah

    12. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:52:00

        ... so we can process all that thinking," and so then therefore-

    13. CWChris Williamson1:52:03

        It's pulled you out of-

    14. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:52:04

        It's pulled you out.

    15. CWChris Williamson1:52:04

        Right.

    16. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:52:05

        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 gonna miss out on some of the other potential mental attunement benefits.

    17. CWChris Williamson1:52:20

        Well, I think one of the, uh, risks that you guys are gonna have as this becomes bigger, and there will be... Based on how good I think this product is, I think there's gonna be, like, a million copycats within the space of a couple of years. Um, 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, a stone. You hold the stone in your hand, and you breathe in time with the stone, and the stone can just vibrate. But what it means is you don't need to look at anything 'cause you've linked the lamp in with the Wi-Fi, so you never actually have to open your phone again.

    18. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:52:50

        Yeah.

    19. CWChris Williamson1:52:50

        So I have it next to my bed, and it means that when I'm watching a movie, I'll be wa- I watch Die Hard because it's the greatest Christmas movie of all time. Grab the stone-

    20. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:52:59

        So many people-

    21. CWChris Williamson1:52:59

        ... and I'm there for 30 minutes, 40 minutes, but I'm, you know, knee-deep in Die Hard, and I, I care about Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman.

    22. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:53:07

        Yeah.

    23. CWChris Williamson1:53:07

        So I'm not mentally with my breathwork, and I do think that that's going to be something that people are probably going to get into doing because it sounds great. "Oh, my God, I can train my vagus nerve while I mo- watch a movie?"

    24. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:53:21

        Yeah.

    25. CWChris Williamson1:53:21

        Like, that is fantastic, but how many of the gains are you losing-

    26. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:53:24

        Mm-hmm

    27. CWChris Williamson1:53:25

        ... by not focusing where you're supposed to be?

    28. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:53:27

        Mm-hmm.

    29. CWChris Williamson1:53:28

        Um, but then also, maybe if you were to look at the literature for this, I would love someone to do a study to say, "Well, this is a more real-world applicable situation-

    30. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:53:41

        Mm.
14. 1:56:03 – 2:04:32

    Why Sleep is the Most Important Factor

    1. CWChris Williamson1:56:03

       gain. The thing that we haven't talked about is how this impacts sleep.

    2. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:56:05

       [chuckles] When you were mentioning all that, the one thing that was coming to my mind is that I was thinking, "Yes!"

    3. CWChris Williamson1:56:12

       And sleep.

    4. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:56:12

       As long as [chuckles] sleep.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:56:14

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

    6. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:56:19

       Yeah.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:56:19

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

    8. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:56:40

       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, or not even interventions, but a pyramid of health and wellness factors or variables that people should focus on if they wanna have the greatest longevity-

    9. CWChris Williamson1:57:20

       Mm

    10. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:57:20

        ... and overall sense of health and wellness, the bottom or the base of that pyramid, without a doubt, I don't think there's a close second, is sleep.

    11. CWChris Williamson1:57:27

        Mm.

    12. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:57:27

        Because we know that sleep, its intention is reparation. It is repairing the nervous system. We get- we receive insults all throughout the day, right? So whether it's psychological insults or physiological insults-

    13. CWChris Williamson1:57:39

        Mm

    14. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:57:39

        ... there's insults that we are incurring at all times, and our nervous system is doing the best it can. It's like 24 by 7 security.

    15. CWChris Williamson1:57:46

        Mm.

    16. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:57:46

        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 wanna have.

    17. CWChris Williamson1:58:06

        Mm.

    18. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:58:06

        And so therefore, it starts to impact things like our sleep and our ability to actually sustain longer, deeper sleep. And so we can leverage... This is why heart rate variability is typically given to us, uh, on wearables while we're asleep.

    19. CWChris Williamson1:58:21

        Mm.

    20. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:58:21

        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?

    21. CWChris Williamson1:58:32

        Mm.

    22. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:58:32

        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, uh, which can be a wide variety of factors, nervous system dys- dysregulation probably being the foundation of that, then like, all the other things that you're doing maybe aren't gonna have nearly as much of a net positive impact, so we have to start with sleep.

    23. CWChris Williamson1:59:04

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

    24. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:59:12

        Yes, it does. It can show up in your baseline day-to-day behavior, so in the, the ability... Let's say, for instance, with someone who's got a, an immensely flexible autonomic nervous system, got- they have high baroreflex gain. We can actually see that their blood pressure regulation mechanism is really fine-tuned and can, 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.

    25. CWChris Williamson1:59:43

        Mm.

    26. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:59:43

        We're taking all of that out.

    27. CWChris Williamson1:59:44

        Pretty blank canvas.

    28. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:59:45

        Yep, blank canvas, and we're saying, "Okay, here's true baseline. Here's the process where, like, we are working to repair everything-"

    29. CWChris Williamson1:59:54

        Well, I guess you, you, you can't fake regulation during sleep.

    30. JWDr. Jay Wiles1:59:57

        You cannot, because you can't manipulate your breathing during sleep. Even though I did watch a video, breathwork guy [chuckles] 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 Oura says that your respiration rate was five breaths per minute, please go immediately to the ER. Something's wrong. [chuckles]
15. 2:04:32 – 2:08:12

    Are There Limits to How Much You Can Improve HRV?

    1. CWChris Williamson2:04:32

       What are the limits of HRV's usefulness?

    2. JWDr. Jay Wiles2:04:35

       Hmm. I-- When people want to use HRV as like a catch-all metric for health, wellness, and longevity, I think that that is immensely poor way to use it because it can't be used that way. I think I mentioned at the beginning of our, our, our podcast that it's not a vanity metric.

    3. CWChris Williamson2:04:53

       Hmm.

    4. JWDr. Jay Wiles2:04:53

       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 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 f- the, the minute, high-fidelity, really nuanced picture of what this can provide," which is why, for instance, if I'm working with a pro athlete of mine, yeah, we're gonna take their WHOOP data or their Oura 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.

    5. CWChris Williamson2:06:23

       Hmm.

    6. JWDr. Jay Wiles2:06:23

       Not a, 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.

    7. CWChris Williamson2:06:34

       Hmm.

    8. JWDr. Jay Wiles2:06:35

       But I'm not proposing that everybody should, like, get someone like me to do that-

    9. CWChris Williamson2:06:39

       Yeah

    10. JWDr. Jay Wiles2:06:39

        ... or even have the need to do that. It's just understand that there are limitations. Uh, HRV is not nearly as robust of a metric for telling you something about your physiology as something like VO2 max.

    11. CWChris Williamson2:06:54

        Yeah.

    12. JWDr. Jay Wiles2:06:54

        Like, VO2 max I'd put up there as, like, a metric of, like, okay, this is kind of like a true metric of, like, overall, like, wellness-

    13. CWChris Williamson2:07:02

        Hmm

    14. JWDr. Jay Wiles2:07:02

        ... and overall, like, fitness. HRV's 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 heal- level of health and wellness.

    15. CWChris Williamson2:07:27

        Hmm.

    16. JWDr. Jay Wiles2:07:28

        It's like if you know that, hey, for males aged 35 to 40, the mean RMSSD value is 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.

    17. CWChris Williamson2:07:49

        Yep.

    18. JWDr. Jay Wiles2:07:49

        It's just not the f- it's not the case.

    19. CWChris Williamson2:07:50

        Right.

    20. JWDr. Jay Wiles2:07:51

        We don't have enough evidence to s- 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.

    21. CWChris Williamson2:08:03

        Hmm.

    22. JWDr. Jay Wiles2:08:03

        But HRV is best used this way. It's best used in real time to... as a guide, as a signaling window for training.

    23. CWChris Williamson2:08:11

        It's

16. 2:08:12 – 2:09:28

    Where to Find Jay

    1. CWChris Williamson2:08:12

       fucking cool, dude. I feel like this is the front, uh, vanguard of some revolution, some new sort of health revolution thing, and, uh, 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. Uh, so where should people go if they're gonna wanna check out more information about everything?

    2. JWDr. Jay Wiles2:08:34

       Yeah, sure thing. So as you've mentioned before, Ohm is in dark mode. Uh, however, we are open for pre-order, and so, I mean, again, thanks for the, the shout-out that you gave with Huberman because people actually got introduced to the world, not just... It's, and it's also, it's not just about Ohm, it was about resonance breathing.

    3. CWChris Williamson2:08:49

       Hmm.

    4. JWDr. Jay Wiles2:08:49

       And I think that that being brought into kind of the limelight is huge, and so I appreciate that, but ohm.health. Go on over there, pre-order. 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. Um, you just happen to be a, a friend of the family here, so [chuckles]

    5. CWChris Williamson2:09:06

       Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

    6. JWDr. Jay Wiles2:09:06

       ... So, so you got one. Uh, check us out there. Love to get some feedback from people and get resonance breathing out there to the world.

    7. CWChris Williamson2:09:13

       Okay. Appreciate you, man.

    8. JWDr. Jay Wiles2:09:14

       Absolutely, bro. [upbeat music]

    9. CWChris Williamson2:09:16

       Congratulations, you made it to the end of an episode. Your brain has not been completely destroyed by the internet just yet. Here's another one that you should watch. Come on.

Episode duration: 2:09:28