A Masterclass in Improving Your HRV - Dr Jay Wiles

Chris Williamson 0:00 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?

Dr. Jay Wiles 0:15 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.

Chris Williamson 1:12 It's a cool new metric that nobody has a clue what it does.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:14 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?

Chris Williamson 6:35 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?

Dr. Jay Wiles 6:46 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-

Chris Williamson 10:20 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?

Dr. Jay Wiles 10:30 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.

Chris Williamson 10:46 Jesus Christ!

Dr. Jay Wiles 10:46 I know. It gets comp... It gets complicated.

Chris Williamson 10:48 We don't need to make it overcomplicated.

Dr. Jay Wiles 10:50 No.

Chris Williamson 10:50 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.

Dr. Jay Wiles 11:01 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?

Chris Williamson 12:04 Is a high HRV always good, and is a low one always bad then?

Dr. Jay Wiles 12:08 ... 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?

Chris Williamson 14:49 Hmm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 14:49 Uh, the answer is yes and no, but mostly no.

Chris Williamson 14:53 Right.

Chris Williamson 14:54 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.

Dr. Jay Wiles 15:17 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.

Chris Williamson 15:38 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 15:39 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.

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Chris Williamson 19:56 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-

Dr. Jay Wiles 20:25 Mm-hmm

Chris Williamson 20:26 ... 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?

Dr. Jay Wiles 20:55 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.

Chris Williamson 22:05 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 22:06 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-

Chris Williamson 22:23 Mm

Dr. Jay Wiles 22:23 ... stress, even depression.

Chris Williamson 22:25 Mm-hmm. Interesting. What about the modifiable ones?

Dr. Jay Wiles 22:29 Well, let me, let me mention one more non-modifiable because this is another one that I get to pick on females about [chuckles]

Chris Williamson 22:36 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 22:36 So-

Chris Williamson 22:36 Good.

Dr. Jay Wiles 22:37 So there are s- there's-

Chris Williamson 22:37 We don't do enough of that on this podcast.

Dr. Jay Wiles 22:39 [chuckles] Right, exactly. Another, another tall white guy-

Chris Williamson 22:41 Yeah

Dr. Jay Wiles 22:41 ... coming to pick on females.

Chris Williamson 22:42 Yeah.

Dr. Jay Wiles 22:43 Uh, men, uh, so sex, sex differences is the non-modifiable. Again, another one that we can get in trouble on. [chuckles]

Chris Williamson 22:49 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 22:50 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.

Chris Williamson 23:09 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 23:09 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.

Chris Williamson 23:49 Okay, modifiable.

Dr. Jay Wiles 23:50 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-

Chris Williamson 24:25 Hmm

Dr. Jay Wiles 24:25 ... as opposed to the full puzzle itself.

Chris Williamson 24:27 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 24:27 ... 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."

Chris Williamson 24:53 Hmm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 24:54 I think we're thinking about it in the wrong way. It's a bit, bit ass backwards there.

Chris Williamson 24:57 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 24:57 I think it's, "Hey, let's increase cardiorespiratory fitness, because we know it's great for health, wellness, and longevity, and also great for mood and mental health," and then the byproduct of that is that we'll see typically HRV in- increase.

Chris Williamson 25:09 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 25:09 Uh, the other one is chronic health conditions. So we know that people who have chronic health conditions like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, chronic pain, those all significantly lower heart rate variability. So the one thing that I would say is that if you were battling with any of those kind of conditions, and it probably doesn't even need to be said, is that working on kind of managing those is gonna be a significant way to move heart rate variability in the, in the right direction. And then the last one, which is probably what I'd argue, and I'm a little bit biased on this, and is the most important, is just overall stress load. Like, if you are someone who is, like, the typical person in today's day and age, especially Americans, is that we are freaking stressed all the time, and this chronic buildup of stress over time then results or equates to a nervous system that becomes way more rigid, way less adaptive. Uh, we're not able to actually have these things that we encounter on a day-to-day basis bounce off of us as easily, and so therefore, we kind of retreat to just kind of this chronic state of stress, where we're on high alert, scanning the environments for threats nonstop. And that has a negative, a net negative, compounding effect on us. And so I think that if there's anything that people could do, is just creating better adaptability to internal and external stress.

Chris Williamson 26:27 Okay. What doesn't it measure? What does HRV not measure?

Dr. Jay Wiles 26:32 Yeah. HRV is not a measure of direct stress. I think a lot of people will think of, "Oh, I see HRV, and that's how stressed I am."

Chris Williamson 26:40 Right.

Dr. Jay Wiles 26:40 And so therefore, then, I should-

Chris Williamson 26:42 But you did just say something that sounds a lot like HRV would be a direct measure of stress.

Dr. Jay Wiles 26:46 Okay. But let me... I can back- I can backpedal a little bit and, and say what I say there. So, and, and I think you're talking about me saying, how do we improve it, is by helping to manage-

Chris Williamson 26:55 Yeah. If you are more stressed, therefore, over time, your HRV is going to decrease.

Dr. Jay Wiles 26:59 Yes.

Chris Williamson 26:59 Therefore, my HRV has gone down, I must be stressed.

Dr. Jay Wiles 27:03 Right. What I should, what I should say is that when I think about stress, I'm thinking about the psychological construct of stress.

Chris Williamson 27:09 Hmm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 27:09 And so there's physiological stress and psychological stress, and both of them actually manifest in the body the, the, the same way. I don't look at HRV and say... Like, so for instance, if I put a strap on you, and I said, "Okay, let's measure Chris's HRV right now," and it's a singular reading. Now, I know a good bit about your HRV, but let's just say I didn't know anything about your HRV.

Chris Williamson 27:29 Hmm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 27:29 And I looked at that data point. What could I tell you about your stress response? The answer is, I could tell you basically nothing. One singular reading outside of any context in regards to HRV isn't a signaling window to me telling you, "I can see how, you know, on a, on a spectrum, how stressed Chris is."

Chris Williamson 27:46 Hmm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 27:47 I can't gain that. Now, over time, I can say HRV is showing me how well you adapt to stress, how flexible you are to stress. Not how stressed you are-

Chris Williamson 27:57 Hmm

Dr. Jay Wiles 27:58 ... but how adaptable to stress you are. There's nuance there, so there's a difference between those two. So I can't just take that absolute value and number and say, "Okay, I'm at a fifty milliseconds this morning when I took my HRV reading, and so therefore, like, I know that I am stressed."

Chris Williamson 28:15 Hmm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 28:15 And so when people try to tap into that as a, "Hey, I'm gonna use that as the guide," it sets them up for disaster, because then we have this nasty, unwinding, like, self-fulfilling prophecy of people looking at these data points, and especially without context, just looking at singular data points, and then using that to drive decisions, because one reading of HRV should never be used to drive decision-making.

Chris Williamson 28:39 Hmm. Okay.

Chris Williamson 28:44 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.

Dr. Jay Wiles 29:05 Hmm.

Chris Williamson 29:05 It's, it's not superbly simple.

Dr. Jay Wiles 29:07 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 29:07 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?"

Dr. Jay Wiles 29:22 Hmm.

Chris Williamson 29:23 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"-

Dr. Jay Wiles 29:30 Mm-hmm

Chris Williamson 29:31 ... 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.

Dr. Jay Wiles 29:49 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-

Chris Williamson 30:11 Got some form of a wearable

Dr. Jay Wiles 30:12 ... have some form of wearable.

Chris Williamson 30:13 Yeah.

Dr. Jay Wiles 30:13 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-

Chris Williamson 30:46 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 30:46 -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.

Chris Williamson 31:29 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-

Dr. Jay Wiles 31:40 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 31:40 -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-

Dr. Jay Wiles 31:58 Mm

Chris Williamson 31:58 ... 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.

Dr. Jay Wiles 32:09 Mm.

Chris Williamson 32:09 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-

Dr. Jay Wiles 32:27 Yeah

Chris Williamson 32:27 ... in this context.

Dr. Jay Wiles 32:28 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?

Chris Williamson 32:50 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 32:50 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.

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Chris Williamson 38:14 [whooshing] How l- fast does our nervous system actually respond to these interventions?

Dr. Jay Wiles 38:21 Mm.

Chris Williamson 38:21 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?

Dr. Jay Wiles 38:32 Uh-

Chris Williamson 38:33 Not adapt. How quickly does it respond?

Dr. Jay Wiles 38:35 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-

Chris Williamson 39:04 Mm

Dr. Jay Wiles 39:04 ... 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-

Chris Williamson 39:17 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.

Dr. Jay Wiles 39:23 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 39:23 You're saying that the opposite is true, that the parasympathetic's even quicker.

Dr. Jay Wiles 39:26 It's even quicker, and it's so, so-- it's not to say that the sympathetic nervous system isn't fast.

Chris Williamson 39:30 Right.

Dr. Jay Wiles 39:30 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-

Chris Williamson 40:07 Well, because you can't go to sleep right now. You said one of the other ways is to work on sleep.

Dr. Jay Wiles 40:12 Got it.

Chris Williamson 40:12 I, I can't sleep right now-

Dr. Jay Wiles 40:14 Yeah

Chris Williamson 40:14 ... but I can breathe right now.

Dr. Jay Wiles 40:16 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-

Chris Williamson 40:47 Mm

Dr. Jay Wiles 40:47 ... and then therefore-

Chris Williamson 40:48 Why does it increase mental acuity?

Dr. Jay Wiles 40:50 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-

Chris Williamson 40:59 Keep it simple.

Dr. Jay Wiles 41:00 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.

Chris Williamson 43:37 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.

Dr. Jay Wiles 43:54 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.

Chris Williamson 44:09 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 44:09 It's a perceived threat, but it's having the impact on your physiology and your mental acuity, like a viable threat would.

Chris Williamson 44:16 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?

Dr. Jay Wiles 44:29 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.

Chris Williamson 46:29 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 46:29 So kind of like split the difference, about eight to ten-

Chris Williamson 46:31 Mm-hmm

Dr. Jay Wiles 46:31 ... is when we really see people start to make those changes.

Chris Williamson 46:34 What was the mean change? Do you know?

Dr. Jay Wiles 46:36 And when you say mean change, say more.

Chris Williamson 46:37 Average-- What was the average change increase? Five percent, one percent, ten percent?

Dr. Jay Wiles 46:41 Yeah. And then are we talking about heart rate variability?

Chris Williamson 46:43 Yeah.

Dr. Jay Wiles 46:43 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.

Chris Williamson 46:53 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 46:53 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.

Chris Williamson 47:02 That's during the session?

Dr. Jay Wiles 47:03 That's during the session.

Chris Williamson 47:04 Yep.

Dr. Jay Wiles 47:05 Yes. However, baseline changes, which we're actually looking at more of like f- fine blood pressure changes that are occurring.

Chris Williamson 47:12 Mm, mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 47:12 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.

Chris Williamson 47:28 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 47:28 The nervous system's having a hard time keeping up. It's that cruise control example.

Chris Williamson 47:31 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 47:31 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.

Chris Williamson 47:55 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 47:55 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.

Chris Williamson 48:11 I, I don't think I'm fully up to speed on what low frequency power and high frequency power are.

Dr. Jay Wiles 48:17 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.

Chris Williamson 48:25 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 48:25 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-

Chris Williamson 49:18 Mm-hmm

Dr. Jay Wiles 49:18 ... alpha, beta, theta, gamma, delta, and so forth. We can do the same thing and look at characteristics of your cardiovascular system. Uh, we just call it something different in, in, in the HRV world. It's just three bands that are typically looked at. It's the very low frequency band, low frequency, and high frequency. So when you're breathing at a slow paced rate, so you're doing HRV biofeedback, for instance, or resonance breathing, you start to create these really long sinusoidal low frequency oscillations of your heart rate. So the peak to trough differences between your heart rate start to change significantly.

Chris Williamson 49:53 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 49:53 So maybe at rest, your heart rate's just going from, let's say, sixty up to sixty-three, sixty-four, sixty-five, and then back down.

Chris Williamson 49:59 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 49:59 Now we're going from your heart rate's at sixty, it's going up to seventy-five, s- eighty, ninety, even if you have a really strong baroreflex gain, and then it's dropping-

Chris Williamson 50:07 Mm

Dr. Jay Wiles 50:07 ... and it's going well below sixty to fifty-five, fifty, forty, forty-five. So that's low frequency power, these real sinusoidal, large scale changes in the, in, in the heart rate.

Chris Williamson 50:20 Hmm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 50:20 So when we see someone that has a lot of power in the low frequency band, we typically know that they're breathing at a really slow rate, and that's an oscillation that's occurring that's in line, again, with that baroreflex response. And then high frequency power is what we call the respiratory sinus arrhythmia band. So at rest, when you're not breathing at a slow pace, most of the power should be in the high frequency band because that's where kind of just the normal breathing oscillation should occur. So when we look at high frequency power, we know that as someone becomes more attuned to resonance breathing, that number increases because your vagus nerve is what is driving the power there at rest.

Chris Williamson 50:57 Even though you're not directly training the high frequency stuff, low frequency work impacts the high frequency?

Dr. Jay Wiles 51:02 Hundred percent. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 51:03 That's in-- I mean, it's good that it is that way, or else you'd have to do high frequency training, too. You'd have to do two different types of training, which would be annoying.

Dr. Jay Wiles 51:09 Yeah, and you can kind of bookend it. Like a lot of companies, like who are doing biofeedback, will bookend it where they're not doing training, but they're doing like pre/post analysis.

Chris Williamson 51:17 Hmm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 51:17 So they're looking at, okay, when you start the session, what is your time domain indices and low frequency, you know, high frequency band look like? And then you do the session, we look at all that data in terms of frequency domains, and at the end of the session, we look at that data and we say, "Okay, from pre to post, what was the significant-- was there a significant increase in high frequency power at rest?" And then across time, we actually start to look and plot, okay, baseline high frequency power has gone from, you know, whatever, it's ten thousand milliseconds squared be really high. We'll go two thousand milliseconds squared-

Chris Williamson 51:47 Mm-hmm

Dr. Jay Wiles 51:47 ... and now that's when they started the biofeedback practice. They've done it consistently for ten weeks, and now at rest, it's at like six thousand milliseconds squared worth of power. That tells us that that delta of four thousand milliseconds squared of power-

Chris Williamson 52:00 Hmm

Dr. Jay Wiles 52:00 ... indicates that there was indeed actual entrainment of the nervous system across that period of time.

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Chris Williamson 53:08 Okay, talk to me about biofeedback, resonance breathing. These are terms people probably haven't heard before. What is it?

Dr. Jay Wiles 53:17 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.

Chris Williamson 53:57 Well, everybody does-- uh, but most people are familiar with breathwork.

Dr. Jay Wiles 54:00 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 54:00 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.

Dr. Jay Wiles 54:10 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 54:10 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?

Dr. Jay Wiles 54:31 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.

Chris Williamson 55:07 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 55:07 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.

Chris Williamson 55:24 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.

Dr. Jay Wiles 55:41 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 55:41 And, uh, they're using it to get themselves more energized and alert or calmer in the moment.

Dr. Jay Wiles 55:47 Mm.

Chris Williamson 55:47 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-

Dr. Jay Wiles 56:08 Mm-hmm

Chris Williamson 56:09 ... 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."

Dr. Jay Wiles 56:38 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-

Chris Williamson 56:57 I just wanna be relaxed for an hour.

Dr. Jay Wiles 56:58 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.

Chris Williamson 57:14 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 57:14 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-

Chris Williamson 57:22 Mm

Dr. Jay Wiles 57:22 ... 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.

Chris Williamson 57:32 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.

Dr. Jay Wiles 57:45 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 57:45 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.

Dr. Jay Wiles 57:53 Right.

Chris Williamson 57:53 Like, it really-

Dr. Jay Wiles 57:54 Right

Chris Williamson 57:54 ... is the time and attention sufficient to do that? Okay, your disclaimer about the potential problems with the fucking world of breathwork are out.

Dr. Jay Wiles 58:02 [chuckles]

Chris Williamson 58:03 Talk to me about resonance breathing and biofeedback. What is it? Why does it work? How do you do it?

Dr. Jay Wiles 58:07 Yeah. So biofeedback was discovered back in the '60s, '70s, and it was initially discovered by a lot of Russian, uh, physiologists who were actually studying space exploration and trying to get the Russians up to space, and so therefore, they were looking at, Well, how do we ensure that we get these, uh, astronauts in the best physiological shape that we possibly can? And so they just started measuring everything and said, "We're gonna measure every single metric that we possibly can." And then they came across and said, "Well, actually, now that we've measured it, and we have seen," 'cause this is when they came across heart rate variability, "that there are, uh, these-- there's these interesting characteristics of people's nervous systems that I think we're looking at when we look at HRV, but we don't really know for sure. The only way to test that really is to start introducing different interventions or start introducing different things that we see, you know, in real time are actually moving the needle in terms of people's nervous system response." And so then back in the '60s, '70s, uh, uh, the researchers here in the US started to team up with these Russian researchers, and they said, "Okay, we see that there are dynamic aspects of the nervous system that we can measure here. We also notice that when people breathe, something kinda weird happens with their HRV. Something weird happens with all these dy- dynamics, but we can't fully explain it, so we should start to put it to the test." So they started to say, "Well, what if we manipulate that thing? What if we manipulate things like breathing? Can that then change how the nervous system responds in real time?" And then later on, of course, the research says, "Can it respond-- uh, can it start to respond that way in baseline, to where people don't have to consciously move the needle?" And that's where HRV biofeedback was kind of, like, discovered. And the word resonance breathing, kinda like we were mentioning earlier, was something that was coined because we saw that, again, we're aligning these physiological mechanisms of breathing and heart rate and also our blood pressure regulation. When we can align all of those things at the same exact time, we start to create this beautiful symphony, this beautiful pattern, this great relationship. We start to see that instead of just the throttle of the gas pedal, so that sympathetic nervous system being kind of, like, modulated on and off, and the brake pedal being modulated on and off, just kind of at, at random, if you will, and by random, I mean because of physiology, we actually start to see that you can use breathing to do the brake in and out, so kind of like flutter the brake in and out at will.... and so resonance frequency came along when Dr. Paul Lehrer said, "Okay, I see that there's these fixed characteristics of this baroreflex response, of this breathing response on heart rate and respiratory sinus arrhythmia. Let's see what happens, like, when we introduce this as a training protocol." And when they started to introduce this as a training protocol, and they published many studies on this, they found that, well, not only are we changing someone's physiology, but people are now saying, "Well, I feel a lot less stressed. I feel like I'm adapting better. I don't feel like, uh, stress is kind of like running over me as much as I can. I feel mood lifting," so less of that, like, negative emotional valence there. And so biofeedback has been around for quite some time, and many companies have tried to introduce biofeedback in a way that's consumer-friendly. But the problem is, is that there's always been so much friction to doing it, and again, like we've been talking about it for a while, it's not an easy topic for most people to understand. So what does it then require? Well, you gotta pay a clinician. It's really expensive. They gotta use all of this, like, hardcore software and gear. It becomes quite difficult. So how can we just make this accessible to everybody? Well, these technology companies came out and said, "Well, we'll just use kind of like everyday sensors. We'll use, like, wearables or a chest strap, like a-- like an ECG chest strap, and then we'll just have you, like, breathe at this-- with this pacer in and out. You'll be able to watch your heart rate variability in real time, and then over time, that will then indeed result in improved autonomic flexibility, better emotional and stress resiliency, and, and so forth." So HRV biofeedback is a tool that we use. It is an intervention tool, so as opposed to, to just looking at HRV as a data point, where it's actually using HRV in real time to guide the changes that are occurring in your nervous system, so biofeedback being biological feedback-

Chris Williamson 1:02:31 Mm-hmm

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:02:31 ... in real time.

Chris Williamson 1:02:32 Detecting something coming from the body, and then telling you to do something with your breathing in order to maximize that big wave of high heart rate on the in breath and low heart rate on the out breath.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:02:43 Yeah, that's, that's correct. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:02:48 W- why, why can I not just do some sort of assessment in a lab, uh, find out what my resonance frequency is, how many breaths per minute? I've done-- I've, I've done this with, with, with other, other, um, wearables, and then it says... I think mine is, uh, four point five breaths a minute, and I think that that's split as four point nine seconds in, seven point five seconds out, with nought point five on either end-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:03:14 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:03:14 ... or something.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:03:14 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:03:15 Um, I can just do that, and then once I've got my frequency assessment done once, go in, like, g- go in for a blood pressure check or getting my teeth done. Go in every six months, find out if my frequency's changed.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:03:27 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:03:27 I don't know whether it does. Why can't I just... Why can't I just do that?

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:03:31 Yeah, so you're saying go do that, and then utilize it as an intervention on a daily basis.

Chris Williamson 1:03:34 And just g- count, count to five and then count down, or, or, um, make a track on ChatGPT that gets me to breathe in and breathe out at that sort of a pace. W- is it- i- does it not lock in in that kind of way? If I found my frequency, is that not always my frequency?

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:03:50 Yeah, it's a great question. The, the answer to this is that you could one hundred percent do that. Like, you could actually go into a clinician and have them run the full, you know, twelve to fifteen-minute Paul Lehrer protocol, get your resonance frequency rate, tell you kind of like, "Here's your inhalation, exhalation ratio, the timing," and you could do it by yourself. Like, you could one hundred percent do that.

Chris Williamson 1:04:11 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:04:12 Because the intervention is in the breathing itself. It's not in the data.

Chris Williamson 1:04:16 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:04:16 However, what I think is huge here that goes missing is that it's only as good as if you actually do it, [chuckles] so you actually have to be practicing it.

Chris Williamson 1:04:25 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:04:26 And so many people have a hard time with getting into the habit and discipline of doing something like slow pace or resonance breathing without having a high degree of accountability. Um, it's, it's-- so you could, you could do it. I haven't met a lot of people that have been that successful, and me saying, "Here's your resonance protocol-

Chris Williamson 1:04:46 Yeah

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:04:46 ... like, you know whatever, go time it in your head and, and go do it," I just haven't seen it.

Chris Williamson 1:04:49 Well, this is why guided meditation practices have become so good at keeping people's compliance.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:04:57 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:04:57 You know, you do waking up... I'm using this new one, uh, uh, somebody Shuckman, uh, A- Alan Shuckman, maybe. Farris put me onto it. It's called-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:05:05 Oh, The Way. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:05:05 The Way.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:05:06 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:05:06 Really cool.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:05:07 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:05:07 Lovely. Single path, an actual path that's sort of drawn out, and I thought it was really, really fun. So I'm do- I'm doing that, and I've d- I've meditated thousands of times. I'm like, "I, I, I'm done with unguided for a bit. I want someone to hold my hand as I go through this." So I think that you're right, and, dude, I mean, I, I'm asking you questions that I, I'm interested in, but I already believe in the answer to-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:05:27 Mm

Chris Williamson 1:05:27 ... which is, you got me onto resonance breathing almost a year ago now, and w- I was using some arm strap thing with a induction charger, and then you sent me out an Ohm Lamp-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:05:39 Mm

Chris Williamson 1:05:39 ... which for the people that are listening, there's a lamp in between us on the table. Uh, and I told Huberman about this in November-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:05:45 Mm-hmm

Chris Williamson 1:05:45 ... of last year, and I- I'm completely sold. I think that resonance breathing is probably the next big wave of intervention that we're going to see. We've seen breathwork, although it hasn't really, apart from Wim Hof, it hasn't fully broken through. If you were to say, "What's the go-to meditation app?" You'd say, like, Headspace or Calm or Waking Up. "What's a go-to breathwork app?" You go, "Uh, maybe Wim Hof or something." So some breathwork has, but as you've kind of identified, it's good for some things, but the data behind it isn't necessarily there, and-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:06:18 Well, it's also getting-- it's also getting kind of, like, lumped in there with a lot of woo-woo practices right now, unfortunately.

Chris Williamson 1:06:25 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:06:25 Like, a lot of people are seeing breathwork... It's because so many people's are-- they're hanging up their shingle, and they're saying, "Look at me, I've got this new proprietary, best in the cla- in class nervous system coaching breathwork practice for you, and this is kind of the path for you."

Chris Williamson 1:06:39 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:06:40 And then when I see it, like I was at a conference a couple of weeks ago, and-... I- they had a breathwork practitioner who was up on stage, and she was speaking about how-- and the audience was kind of like jiving along with it, so maybe I just don't, I'm not spiritual enough to understand it. But she kept saying things like, "With our breathing, we create these new realities and holograms of ourself that we can then manifest," and then fill in the blank. And everybody's kind of like shaking their head, and I'm back there like, "What are we talking about?" Maybe I just [laughing] -

Chris Williamson 1:07:09 [laughing] No, dude, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. You're just the most clinician, clinician, to ever did clinician.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:07:14 [laughing] Right.

Chris Williamson 1:07:14 It's, it's, uh, everybody has been to one of these seminars, at least in Austin, Texas, everybody's been to them. A lot of people listening in the UK, they're like, "What the fuck are you talking about?" Um, I get it, man. Y- y- you... Breathwork kind of bridges the gap between the psychedelic, esoterica, I'm off to do ayahuasca in the Amazon people, and a business guy that's a bit stressed-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:07:42 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:07:42 ... or a pregnant mum that heard that breathwork is good to sort of chill her out and is as blue collar as they come.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:07:48 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:07:48 And these two groups of people meet at Third Eye Meditation Lounge here in downtown Austin or at Sukha Yoga on 12th Street or whatever, and you- it really is a bit of an oil and water situation 'cause you're seeing typically the practitioners that have dedicated their lives to teaching it are the ones who have gone down the esoterica rabbit hole a little bit more deeply.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:08:12 Mm.

Chris Williamson 1:08:12 We've got a, a great friend, Aaron Alexander, from the Align Podcast.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:08:15 I love Aaron.

Chris Williamson 1:08:16 Aaron's, Aaron's great.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:08:17 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:08:18 Aaron is doing a lot of breathwork coaching, as far as I can see, in Miami at the moment?

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:08:22 Yeah, he's in Miami now.

Chris Williamson 1:08:23 I think.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:08:23 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:08:23 And, uh, I haven't seen-- I haven't done any of his stuff live, and he's kept it... He's pretty sort of evidence-based, but I've seen some of the fucking hats that people wear-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:08:35 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:08:35 ... who attend those classes. I'm like, "I've-- I know who you are from that fucking hat." [laughing]

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:08:38 [laughing]

Chris Williamson 1:08:38 "I can tell."

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:08:39 You can tell there's-

Chris Williamson 1:08:40 "I can tell there's too much, there's too many fucking corks hanging from it."

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:08:42 [laughing]

Chris Williamson 1:08:42 "You've got too many beads on." Um, and that's fine. That's kind of their thing in their world-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:08:48 Yeah, let them

Chris Williamson 1:08:48 ... but I understand-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:08:49 Let them be them.

Chris Williamson 1:08:50 It's, it's good when you talk about functionality or, I, I guess, um, how do you say? Like, felt sense of, interestingly, resonance. Like, I resonate with what that person's saying-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:08:59 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:08:59 ... and that speaks to me, and it's persona and narrative and mythology and arc, right? It brings these characters to life.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:09:06 Mm.

Chris Williamson 1:09:07 We, we manifest our reality out there, strength and resilience and your better self and vibrations and higher and all that stuff. Doesn't necessarily show up in the data.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:09:16 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:09:16 And that is what your world is.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:09:19 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:09:19 And I think in the same way as we had, even though there's been a lot of pushback, uh, a revolution in lifting where evidence-based came through, well, what does the science tell us about the rep range and the pacing and the loading and the frequency-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:09:36 Mm

Chris Williamson 1:09:36 ... and the rest and so on and so forth? The same thing is now happening when it comes to breathing.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:09:41 Yes.

Chris Williamson 1:09:42 And I, I don't know of any data, apart from the stuff that comes out of resonance breathing, that says, "This is how you breathe in order to enact a trait change over time."

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:09:55 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:09:56 Everybody that's tried to do-- when you were a kid, and you would breathe in and out really fast, you go, "Ah, I feel a little bit light-headed." Great, you've just done a state change.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:10:03 Mm.

Chris Williamson 1:10:03 Like, congratulations.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:10:04 Sure.

Chris Williamson 1:10:05 But in order to be able to get to the trait change, and this is where making claims about holographically manifesting your new high-vibration reality, uh, come into conflict with a little bit of the data.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:10:19 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:10:19 So-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:10:20 Mm-hmm

Chris Williamson 1:10:20 ... uh, yeah, I think I, I, I'm-

Chris Williamson 1:10:24 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"-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:10:45 Mm-hmm

Chris Williamson 1:10:45 ... 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.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:10:55 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.

Chris Williamson 1:11:10 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:11:10 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.

Chris Williamson 1:11:21 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:11:22 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-

Chris Williamson 1:11:32 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-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:11:45 Mm-hmm

Chris Williamson 1:11:45 ... right now, which I thought was even cooler 'cause it made me feel like I was getting access to the new Batman utility belt-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:11:51 [laughing]

Chris Williamson 1:11:51 ... before it was actually, uh, fully out. But I've been playing with mine, and it replaced what I was using previously.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:11:56 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:11:57 Um, but yeah, I guess explain kind of what it is that you've done 'cause I think it's really cool.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:12:02 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.

Chris Williamson 1:12:43 Right. [chuckles]

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:12:43 ... [chuckles] so that was the problem.

Chris Williamson 1:12:44 Yeah.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:12:44 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-

Chris Williamson 1:12:51 Disregulation-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:12:51 -attrition.

Chris Williamson 1:12:52 And frustration.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:12:52 Yeah, dysregulation, and then attrition, 'cause so you're like, throw it in.

Chris Williamson 1:12:55 Yep.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:12:55 So it's gonna meet the graveyard of all the other wearables that you have in your shelf.

Chris Williamson 1:12:58 Yeah.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:12:58 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?

Chris Williamson 1:13:05 Watching your phone.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:13:06 Watching your phone.

Chris Williamson 1:13:07 Yeah.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:13:07 And how much do we need to really disconnect from our phone nowadays? Like, we're so inundated. When I think about my phone, I don't associate that with something that is intended to help me down-regulate and relax.

Chris Williamson 1:13:17 That's why I can't read. I was on a plane, and I had, uh, the book that I wanted to read, Dan Jones just put me onto it. It's called A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:13:26 Mm.

Chris Williamson 1:13:27 Fucking sick. So it teaches you how to read Russian literature.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:13:31 Mm.

Chris Williamson 1:13:31 So there's a single page of a short story from Chekhov or some other sort of legendary Russian writer, and then it explains how to do it, and I had downloaded it on my Kindle, and my Kindle couldn't connect to the Wi-Fi in the United flight, and I was like: "I'll read it on my phone. I watch my housemate read on his phone all the time." Bro, I'm not reading sh-- I'd had no connection, there was no internet, and I still couldn't read on my phone.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:13:51 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:13:52 It's just not the environment for me. I- I... And I guess we even talk about sort of digital environments now, that, "Oh, sorry, you had the wrong device in front of you instead of the other device in front of you," which is the Kindle instead of the laptop, instead of the phone. But we are just habituated, uh, I am habituated into my behavior-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:14:12 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:14:12 ... on these devices, and when I'm on there, I'm thinking about swiping up and moving stuff. Like, I'm not, I'm not in the mood. So I, I agree, and I did enjoy doing the resonance stuff, but even that, the previous versions of it, were just locking you into a frequency that had previously been tested.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:14:29 Correct.

Chris Williamson 1:14:29 Yeah.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:14:29 Correct. And this actually kind of to, to a call back to a previous question that you had that I actually don't think we answered, is that you had asked: Does resonance frequency change over time? Like, do you need to go get retested with resonance frequency? And the answer is, is that initially it was thought that it was a pretty fixed characteristic, but now that we're actually, like, looking at more of the nuances-

Chris Williamson 1:14:51 Mm

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:14:51 ... of resonance frequency, we actually see that it can dynamically change across time and across context. So if you're breathing at, said, four and a half breaths per minute, which, which you mentioned was your resonance rate-

Chris Williamson 1:15:02 Mm

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:15:02 ... like, it may have been at the time of the testing that you did it, but what if, you know, you left and the next day it's four point eight nine seven?

Chris Williamson 1:15:12 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:15:12 Well, it doesn't sound like a big change, but what we know in the world of biofeedback, and this is the type of breathing that I really want to hone in on, is that precision always beats effort and intention when it comes to breathing.

Chris Williamson 1:15:24 Right. So if you were continuing to breathe at four point five, but it's actually four point eight, even though you're not that far off, because you're not doing it precisely, a lot of the gains aren't accruing, no matter how hard you try, how frequently you do it.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:15:36 Yeah, and it, it's not to say that you wouldn't have gains. It's just wouldn't-- you're not optimizing the gain. You're not gonna gain as much of a robust or significant gain there.

Chris Williamson 1:15:44 How fragile is i- i- if you get it on the nose of the right frequency? Are we talking about a significant difference to being a little bit off?

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:15:54 So-

Chris Williamson 1:15:54 Is it a bit of a knife edge in terms of that?

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:15:56 It depends on the person. Like, I have seen some people that if I were to have them, let's say, breathe at five breaths per minute versus five point two breaths per minute, we could have a fifty percent difference, a hundred percent difference-

Chris Williamson 1:16:07 Wow

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:16:07 ... in heart rate variability. So precision matters. I mean, even so, even with them breathing at five point two when their resonance rate was five point oh, they're still gonna have net positive-

Chris Williamson 1:16:17 Mm

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:16:17 ... benefits. Slow-paced breathing, regardless of whether or not me- you're measuring it-

Chris Williamson 1:16:21 Mm

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:16:21 ... has net positive benefits. But do we want to optimize those gains for that longer-term trait change?

Chris Williamson 1:16:27 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:16:27 That is where precision is gonna win, and that's where Ohm comes in because we're not running you through-- Like, it's, it's a bit annoying to have someone say, "Okay, well, I want to know what my resonance frequency is. Now I've got to sit down and do this twelve-to-fifteen-minute test where I do these two-minute trials of breathing at different rates, and then we'll see kind of what heart rate-

Chris Williamson 1:16:46 Mm

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:16:46 ... variability looks like." Like, it's a bit of a, a, it's a bit of a pain to do.

Chris Williamson 1:16:49 And then hope that it doesn't change over time.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:16:51 Exactly. And then also, too, it's just like, when someone wants to use a product that's intended to help as an intervention to calm their nervous system down, they just want to use it right away.

Chris Williamson 1:17:00 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:17:00 So they, like, they just want to walk in. So a lot of people just say, "Well, I'm just gonna breathe at six breaths per minute," 'cause that's easy. Five seconds in, five seconds out, or four in, six out. Whereas what Ohm is doing is it is built with a immensely sophisticated algorithm, if I do say so myself. [chuckles]

Chris Williamson 1:17:14 You wrote the fucking algorithm, dude.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:17:15 [laughing]

Chris Williamson 1:17:15 Don't, don't-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:17:16 So- [laughing]

Chris Williamson 1:17:17 ... fellate yourself on this fucking podcast.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:17:19 Uh, I know, I know, I know. Okay, so scratch that. It's just really cool device. Uh, so the, the way this works is obviously, and for people who are watching, there's a stone that lives on top, and once you pick up that stone, that is, it's a, it's a really good hand feel. So I mean, it's nice and heavy, and it's also warm. Have you noticed that? Like, it'll, it'll actually feel warm, and it's got a sensor in it, a PPG or a photoplethysmography sensor in it, that when you hold it against your palm, immediately, it's starting to look at all the dynamic characteristics of your nervous system changing in real time. So looking at heart rate, looking at heart rate variability, and it's starting to map it, and it's starting to look at kind of those unique characteristics. At the same time, the lamp will start to oscillate just in an up-and-down direction. So as the lamp goes up, that's as, that's you inhaling, so you're supposed to inhale with the timing of the lamp going up, and as the light goes down, you're exhaling. And during that time, within the first few breaths, because we're looking at the unique characteristics of how your nervous system is shifting dynamically at that time to that breathing pace, we start to filter that data through our algorithm and start to pace you at your resonance rate. So you don't have to sit there and do a whole twelve, fifteen-minute program. We're looking at it, and it's not just saying, "Oh, this is person's, uh, respiration rate, or their resonance frequency rate is six breaths per minute, so five, five, just throw it on five, five." It's saying, "No, we see it's six breaths per minute, but we want, uh, because of the characteristics of how their nervous system is changing, their inhalation is gonna be four point two seven six seconds long, and their exhalation is going to be, you know, five point eight three four." I didn't do the math right there, but it's probably pretty close, actually. A- and we're gonna take that all into consideration. What are we doing there? We're trying to maximize the output of those beautiful, slow sinusoidal rhythms of your heart rate that we know are dynamically changing how your nervous system is responding, making it more efficient at any given time.

Chris Williamson 1:19:07 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:19:08 And we're watching it across the session.... and if there are these kind of small, minute changes that your nervous system is telling us, we will adjust the ratio-

Chris Williamson 1:19:15 Within the session?

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:19:15 Within the session.

Chris Williamson 1:19:16 Yeah.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:19:16 We'll adjust the ratio of the breathing.

Chris Williamson 1:19:18 I've no- I've noticed that it does that if I sort of grab it, especially if I do a long, a long session of sort of 20 or 30 minutes-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:19:23 Mm-hmm

Chris Williamson 1:19:23 ... it will start speeding up and slowing down.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:19:28 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:19:28 Like, the, the frequency of frequency will continue to change.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:19:30 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:19:30 It's

Chris Williamson 1:19:31 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-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:19:45 Mm-hmm

Chris Williamson 1:19:46 ... uh, in breathwork? Because I usually feel chilled, and actually sometimes a little bit spacey, when I do resonance breathing.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:19:53 Mm.

Chris Williamson 1:19:54 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-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:20:00 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:20:00 ... in the moment.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:20:01 Sure.

Chris Williamson 1:20:01 So is calm proof of regulation when we're talking about other breathwork practices or this?

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:20:06 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-

Chris Williamson 1:20:16 Yeah, we've just done 90 minutes of fucking becoming more calm

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:20:18 ... 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."

Chris Williamson 1:20:48 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:20:48 "I am training. That is my gym right there."

Chris Williamson 1:20:50 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:20:50 "That is my nervous system gym today. I'm hitting it. I'm getting in the reps-

Chris Williamson 1:20:53 Mm

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:20:53 ... 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."

Chris Williamson 1:21:03 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:21:03 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.

Chris Williamson 1:21:11 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:21:11 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-

Chris Williamson 1:21:18 Mm

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:21:18 ... because it can produce that huge level of vagal arousal, or what we would just say is, like, vagal stimulation.

Chris Williamson 1:21:24 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:21:24 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-

Chris Williamson 1:21:51 Mm

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:21:51 ... I want my nervous system to kick into high gear when shit hits the fan.

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Dr. Jay Wiles 1:23:05 [chuckles]

Chris Williamson 1:23:05 What would happen if all like-- if I managed to do so many sessions that I would just walk about all day doing 4.5 in, 7.9 out?

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:23:13 I find myself doing it just, like, instinctively. Like, actually, when I encounter-- let's say I'm, like, in traffic or whatever, I actually will notice because of my immense amount of training doing this, because I do practice what I preach, I use this every day-

Chris Williamson 1:23:25 Mm

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:23:26 ... for a very long time, and I have the app to prove it. [chuckles]

Chris Williamson 1:23:28 You say that Bryan Johnson's the current power user of this thing.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:23:31 Bryan is killing it. I wish I could say it, Chris Williamson was g- You're... Chris Williamson is-

Chris Williamson 1:23:36 I'm doing fucking okay!

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:23:36 You're killing it. You're killing it.

Chris Williamson 1:23:37 I'm doing okay.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:23:38 Bryan's, Bryan's killing it.

Chris Williamson 1:23:39 Can you say, can you say how many hours a day he's doing?

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:23:42 I don't know. I don't wanna get in trouble.

Chris Williamson 1:23:44 Okay, you think that's fucking potentially-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:23:45 He's doing a lot.

Chris Williamson 1:23:46 Look-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:23:46 He's doing a, he's doing, he's doing a lot.

Chris Williamson 1:23:47 A lot of time on the-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:23:48 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:23:48 ... on the lamp.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:23:49 Yeah. We can-

Chris Williamson 1:23:49 Which doesn't surprise me.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:23:50 Yeah, you...

Chris Williamson 1:23:51 But when you think about, uh, the areas that he's covering at the moment, one of the things I haven't heard him talk about much is moving it across into the more nervous system-come-psychological side of things.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:24:04 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:24:04 Uh, and it doesn't make... I, it, it doesn't surprise me that he's managed to find an evidence-based, highly metric, uh, sort of driven solution for something that could be a bit, like, fucking, like, esoteric or-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:24:18 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:24:18 ... witchy wash... I mean, he did do psilocybin on, uh, live stream, so which was-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:24:22 He did, which was pretty fun to watch, actually.

Chris Williamson 1:24:24 I didn't watch it. I didn't-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:24:25 You should watch at least some highlight clips.

Chris Williamson 1:24:26 I didn't sh-- Okay, cool.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:24:27 'Cause it's like, I feel like it's a, uh, aspect of Bryan Johnson's personality, where you're like, "I didn't know that was in there."

Chris Williamson 1:24:32 Oh, I'd-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:24:33 It's-

Chris Williamson 1:24:33 ... I've seen enough aspects of his personality to know what's in the right place. [chuckles] He's I-- Bryan's a sweetie.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:24:37 [chuckles]

Chris Williamson 1:24:37 I think he's fantastic, and he's a good friend.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:24:39 That's great.

Chris Williamson 1:24:39 Um,

Chris Williamson 1:24:41 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?

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:24:59 Mm.

Chris Williamson 1:25:00 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-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:25:22 Mm.

Chris Williamson 1:25:22 -from top to bottom.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:25:23 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:25:24 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.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:25:34 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:25:35 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?

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:25:46 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-

Chris Williamson 1:26:02 Mm-hmm

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:26:02 ... 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."

Chris Williamson 1:26:28 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:26:29 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.

Chris Williamson 1:26:37 Turn that into a modern example story for me.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:26:41 Oh, sure. Yeah, sure. So I, I can give you a clinical example or a performance example.

Chris Williamson 1:26:45 Both.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:26:45 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-

Chris Williamson 1:26:54 You're doing the long answers.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:26:55 [laughing]

Chris Williamson 1:26:55 I'm gonna do this as well.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:26:57 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]

Chris Williamson 1:28:14 Motherfucker, did you kick me out?

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:28:15 [laughing]

Chris Williamson 1:28:15 Oh, my God, damn.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:28:16 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.

Chris Williamson 1:28:26 This is great. It's like story time with nervous system training.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:28:29 I like it.

Chris Williamson 1:28:29 You're telling me about this guy-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:28:31 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.

Chris Williamson 1:32:37 Well, I th- I, I think the, the facet... That was wonderful, by the way. I got a, a four-minute-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:32:41 You did, you did great.

Chris Williamson 1:32:42 -uh, resonance, res- thank you. That's what I need my fucking breath coach to say.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:32:46 [laughing]

Chris Williamson 1:32:47 Um, it makes a lot of sense to me, even though it sounds kind of counterintuitive. You have a sense in the body that gets shot up to your brain, "I am not safe. This is not good." For instance, let's say that you were in a relationship, and something about the way that your partner showed up made you feel unsafe regularly. You don't really know what. So what is it that they've done?

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:33:08 Mm.

Chris Williamson 1:33:08 Maybe they took a bit longer to text back. Maybe they didn't put a kiss at the end of the message. Maybe they, maybe they seemed a little bit more distracted. Maybe they d- something, something about them, the way that they show up, your conception of them, makes you just feel a bit activated or agitated.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:33:22 Mm.

Chris Williamson 1:33:24 And then you start to tell yourself stories about what, why I don't feel good. It's like, why don't you feel good? So I'm not really too sure. So you have some sense that has hit you that's kind of like the relational equivalent of a snake-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:33:35 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:33:35 ... that's perhaps something patterned from your pa- mum also seemed to be a little bit distant, and, and you had, uh, fears of threats of abandoning, or you feel like you need to perform in order to win your partner's love, and that was just the same way that your grandma or your father or your school teachers or some story that you've told yourself, not even from childhood, you don't even need to go back to childhood. Like, some part of your worldview has a fissure in it, and this rela- relationship with your boss or your new coworker or the fucking bus driver, whoever it is, is getting to you in a manner that seems to sort of really pierce your programming.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:34:13 Mm.

Chris Williamson 1:34:15 And that is making you feel a way. Well, you're gonna-- the only place you can experience that is in your brain.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:34:20 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:34:20 And you go, "Well, I'm now gonna start to tell myself a story about why I feel this way."

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:34:24 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:34:25 And that-- the first time that I heard that, it makes complete sense about how emotions do move in both directions. Like, I can absolutely manifest myself by thinking about stuff.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:34:37 Mm.

Chris Williamson 1:34:38 Completely j- uh, uh, a imaginary situation, right? Allow me to, to just come up with this, this potential catastrophe or good, good thing, and it, it go top-down. But I can also feel something in the body, and it shoot up and tell myself... Great example of this: I was working New Year's Eve eight years ago, and I know this because my business partner texted me about it over, uh, Christmas, in Manchester, and I was partway through the night, and I was being so fucking catty with all of the staff. I was like s- you know, there's twenty, twenty-five, eighteen to twenty-three-year-olds that are working for me in Manchester, and I've driven down there, and it's New Year's Eve, and fuck, I'm working, but I'm a club promoter. I've done it for fifteen... I didn't have a New Year's Eve in fifteen years. Like, fine.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:35:23 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:35:23 I, this is my job. This is what I signed up for. I'm in a different city, and we've sold out, and we've made some good money, and it's whatever, whatever. I was being so fucking short with everyone. And I get a text from my business partner, and he said, um, "I'm locked in the disabled toilet at Riverside," which was the venue that we used to run in Newcastle. I'm like: I'm a hundred and fifty miles away. Have you lost the key? Uh, w- has someone else locked you in there? Is there a f- a, a fucking shooting going on? Like, what is this? Uh, turned out that he'd got norovirus. He'd got a twenty-four-hour stomach bug, brutal, and, uh, i- we'd been to his son's first birthday party in between Christmas and New Year. Turned out that that was a super spreader event for fucking norovirus. I'd been super short with all of the staff that had been on site with me, and it turned out that I also had norovirus. I was about to, an hour and a half later, feel nausea and feel like I wanted to spend the rest of the day in the bathroom.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:36:24 Mm.

Chris Williamson 1:36:26 But my behavior had been, "I'm being short. Why am I so irritable? I'm feeling this sort of a way."

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:36:32 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:36:32 Like, if that doesn't say that you can have a sensation that I literally didn't have an explanation for until I started to do the fucking Sherlock Holmes corkboard thing of piecing together. We went to the kid's birthday, and he's in the toilet, and, oh, my God, this means I'm going to be in... And I'm a hundred and fifty miles away from home, and I have cream leather seats in my fucking BMW. This is gonna be a n-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:36:52 Right.

Chris Williamson 1:36:52 Uh, sure enough, I had told myself a story about what it meant.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:36:57 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:36:57 Well, maybe it's because this thing wasn't organized with the DJ booth, or he didn't bring his microphone, or I found out that the fucking DJ that night wasn't going to do the countdown because nobody had prepped him that he needed to use the mic.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:37:09 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:37:09 And he was being a purist, and I was like: I, I guess I'm gonna have to fucking count down from ten at my own event while I'm trying to hotwire the pyrotechnics using two nine-volt battery.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:37:17 [chuckles]

Chris Williamson 1:37:17 It was a fucking nightmare, but I told myself all of these stories about this m- little adventure that I'd been on-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:37:23 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:37:23 ... that had nothing to do with how I was feeling.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:37:25 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:37:26 And it was exclusively because I-... I was gonna shit my pants in-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:37:29 Right

Chris Williamson 1:37:29 ... two hours time.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:37:30 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:37:31 And, uh-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:37:31 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:37:32 ... yeah, that sense, uh, it, it, it completely tracks.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:37:36 It's, it's a method of self-preservation. I'm trying to put together a piece of your story, how kind of like you creating that, uh, is, is a bit of self-preservation, but may- [chuckles] maybe there's something that I can link there.

Chris Williamson 1:37:46 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:37:46 But we all- w- we're, we're doing it all as a method to make sure that we continue our survival and pass on our gene pool.

Chris Williamson 1:37:53 Ooh, uh, do you know lassitude? You know what lassitude is?

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:37:56 Mm-mm. No.

Chris Williamson 1:37:56 The, the sort of emotion of being unwell-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:37:59 Mm

Chris Williamson 1:37:59 ... being sick, like physically sick.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:38:01 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:38:02 And, uh, I did this episode with Diana Fleischman, and she was telling me about lassitude, and some of the interesting elements of lassitude are, um, you want to be around friends and family more. You don't want to try, uh, new foods. You prefer bland foods.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:38:16 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:38:16 If you've got the flu or something, bread and toast, like, uh, b- butter on toast and, and cups of tea and-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:38:23 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:38:23 ... my Britishness is showing here.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:38:25 It's so showing.

Chris Williamson 1:38:25 Um, uh, wanting to be looked after by mum or partner or whatever. Um, well, why? Because if I try some new food, that might have pathogens in.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:38:35 Mm.

Chris Williamson 1:38:36 If I try and make friends with someone, they might not be able to look after me. So you have these, these behaviors that are impacted by your physiological state, by your medical state, right?

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:38:45 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:38:46 Your sort of current health system is leaking out of you-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:38:50 Mm

Chris Williamson 1:38:50 ... into your behavior.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:38:52 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:38:53 And, uh, it, it-- that's a longer version, a more protracted version of what I had.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:38:57 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:38:58 And the, a, a less protracted version of what your special operator had-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:39:02 Sure

Chris Williamson 1:39:03 ... which is, I have pattern matched this thing with another felt sense-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:39:08 Mm

Chris Williamson 1:39:08 ... and now I've begun to tell myself a story. Uh, Paul Conti told me this thing about how, uh, people that have travel anxiety, especially for being in a serious travel, uh, a road accident, you can retrospectively go back and tell yourself, "Oh, I never liked driving. I actually never-- I never enjoyed..." You could have loved driving-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:39:26 Mm

Chris Williamson 1:39:26 ... but the narrative gets smoothed out.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:39:27 Like a form of cogniti- cognitive dissonance.

Chris Williamson 1:39:29 Hundred percent.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:39:30 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:39:30 Hundred percent.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:39:31 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:39:31 So yeah, this sort of, I don't even know what you'd call it, this bidirectional, um, nature of emotions, the moving both bottom up and top down, and it makes complete sense to me as well to think, well, if you can get your nervous system into a state where it feels really good and calm and regulated-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:39:48 Yeah

Chris Williamson 1:39:49 ... uh, although maybe not super calm, but at least resonant-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:39:52 Yes

Chris Williamson 1:39:52 ... um, you would be a little bit more open to maybe talking about things that are difficult.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:39:58 Yeah. Can you imagine a world, and again, obviously, I'm very biased in my statement that I'm about to make because I have something to make from, from Ohm in this, in this process. But I can imagine a world where every single psychotherapeutic session starts and ends with some resonance breathing or biofeedback. And again, let's, let's take Ohm out of, out of even the discussion. It doesn't have to be Ohm, but just starting with resonance breathing-

Chris Williamson 1:40:20 Mm

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:40:20 ... as a way to open up to what we, what, what we're about to encounter in terms of our discussion, 'cause for many psychotherapeutic discussions, they're very difficult-

Chris Williamson 1:40:29 Mm

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:40:30 ... processing to get through.

Chris Williamson 1:40:31 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:40:31 And then maybe the back end is saying, "Okay, well, now we're re-releasing you back out into the world. We've gotten our fifty-minute session done."

Chris Williamson 1:40:36 Safe again.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:40:37 Safe again. Use time to assimilate all that information and carry on.

Chris Williamson 1:40:41 It makes me think about kind of like microdosing ketamine or MDMA.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:40:46 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:40:46 Ketamine-assisted psychotherapy or MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. This is resonance-assisted psychotherapy.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:40:50 Yeah, that's right.

Chris Williamson 1:40:51 Um, and what you're trying to do is just give a little bit of a safety cue, uh, and I suppose that's, in large part, what MDMA is trying to do, right?

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:40:59 Mm.

Chris Williamson 1:40:59 It's opening the heart up. It's you can talk about this thing without reliving it in the same sort of scary, dangerous way. You're being comforted

Chris Williamson 1:41:06 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?

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:41:18 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:41:19 What's the protocol?

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:41:20 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.

Chris Williamson 1:41:46 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:41:46 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-

Chris Williamson 1:42:03 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:42:03 ... breathed at our resonance rate?

Chris Williamson 1:42:05 Yep.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:42:05 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-

Chris Williamson 1:42:12 Yep

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:42:12 ... 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-

Chris Williamson 1:42:30 Mm, mm

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:42:30 ... 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-

Chris Williamson 1:42:48 Mm-hmm

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:42:49 ... you're not gonna receive as nearly as much of the longitudinal benefits as you will with a singular ten-minute session.

Chris Williamson 1:42:56 Why?

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:42:56 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-

Chris Williamson 1:43:07 Mm

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:43:07 ... 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."

Chris Williamson 1:43:28 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:43:28 Not at all. I do it all the time. Like, in between meetings, I'll do three to five minutes.

Chris Williamson 1:43:32 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:43:33 Is that having necessarily the compounding effect? Not as much as the ten-minute sessions or the fifteen or the twenty-minute sessions.

Chris Williamson 1:43:39 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:43:39 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.

Chris Williamson 1:43:49 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:43:49 And if you do that in as little as four weeks, but probably more around eight to ten weeks-

Chris Williamson 1:43:54 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:43:54 -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.

Chris Williamson 1:44:02 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:44:03 I'm not using that as, like, my marker or my goalpost-

Chris Williamson 1:44:05 Mm

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:44:05 ... um, kinda like my source of truth, but we see that quite often in the research, in the literature. We do see that baseline heart rate variability for people that practice in that type of protocol can actually see pretty vast improvements. What I'm actually looking at are a couple things. First, I'm looking to say, subjectively, "Do I feel more resilient?" I think that goes, that goes missed, man. Like, in the day of, again, biometric hypervigilance, where we're all, like, so data-driven and using it as our decision-making, we're becoming increasingly poor at checking in subjectively.

Chris Williamson 1:44:37 Yeah.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:44:37 Like, how do I feel? I wake up in the morning, yeah, my wearable says that I'm in the red, and I feel... A- and, and it says I'm a twenty-nine out of one hundred, but how do I actually feel? Like, bypassing that is a huge mistake.

Chris Williamson 1:44:49 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:44:49 So we know in the literature that people that do this type of protocol, one of the main things that they see is they see better emotional regulation. Okay, so maybe my fuse isn't as short as it once was.

Chris Williamson 1:44:59 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:44:59 Maybe I have a little bit more lenience, like in this-- on this-- in this business call. We're working with, you know, Deborah down the hall. She doesn't piss me off as easily, or maybe she does piss me off, but I don't fly off the cuff-

Chris Williamson 1:45:08 Mm

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:45:08 ... with her. Uh, they see better sleep. We actually see improvements in sleep metrics and markers. Uh, we see, uh, um, more resilience to kind of other things, like recovery. We actually see that we improve things like physiological recovery. So, for instance, like, I know a lot of people that a-- a lot of the pro athletes that I work with, every single time that they are working out or they'll do, like, a training session, they're down-regulating their nervous system with Ohm for about ten minutes or so, like, post that session.

Chris Williamson 1:45:34 That's the protocol. So let's say just someone who is a, a high performer, uh, creator of some kind. Maybe they give presentations at work, maybe they're a salesperson, maybe they're trying to learn something, they're a student. How would you stack resonance breathing with skill acquisition, practice, game time?

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:45:53 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:45:54 Are you doing it before? It feels like I, I'm, I'm not convinced that it's great for everything. If I'm an NF- NFL player, I probably just want to be listening to Creed-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:46:01 [chuckles]

Chris Williamson 1:46:01 ... before I go out. I don't necessarily want-- I, I wanna be, like-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:46:04 Sure

Chris Williamson 1:46:04 ... hyped. I don't know if I wanna be doing this.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:46:06 Mm-hmm. It depends on their level of autonomic dysregulation. So, for instance, like I had an NHL player that I worked with, and he had... A, an amazing player, great player.

Chris Williamson 1:46:18 You told me about this guy, but just could not control his game nerves.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:46:22 S- significantly.

Chris Williamson 1:46:23 Yeah.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:46:23 Like, he would get into-

Chris Williamson 1:46:24 In practice, he was like the, uh, generational talent-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:46:27 Amazing

Chris Williamson 1:46:27 ... but couldn't do it on the ice.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:46:28 Amazing.

Chris Williamson 1:46:28 Yeah.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:46:29 But when he'd get out on the ice, one bad touch, one bad whatever, and the brain goes, the nervous system goes, heart rate fluctuates, can't sleep the next night, like perseverating on things.

Chris Williamson 1:46:40 Wow.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:46:41 And so for that individual, I'm gonna structure a protocol that looks quite different for him than I am gonna be, let's say, someone who's like, "Man, I, I, I need to get amped up." 'Cause I have worked with multiple MLB players, like pitchers especially, who, the day that they're pitching, some of them are like, "I, I'm just not feeling it. There's, like, this lag of energy. Like, I need to, like, amp myself up." I'm not gonna have them probably do as much resonance breathing-

Chris Williamson 1:47:03 Yeah

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:47:04 ... before they go out there.

Chris Williamson 1:47:05 But they might do it afterward in order to bring-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:47:07 Hundred percent

Chris Williamson 1:47:07 ... themselves back down.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:47:07 Exactly. Well, because they're on a bunch of, you know, whatever, n- nicotine and w- [chuckles] whatever else-

Chris Williamson 1:47:13 Energy drinks

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:47:13 ... energy drinks.

Chris Williamson 1:47:13 Or whatever else.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:47:14 Yeah, exactly.

Chris Williamson 1:47:15 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.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:47:30 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:47:30 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?

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:47:45 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:47:46 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?

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:48:01 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]

Chris Williamson 1:48:07 Yeah, you should actually have a beer before you go to bed on a nighttime.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:48:10 Right, right.

Chris Williamson 1:48:10 I've heard the Huermans been talking about it a lot.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:48:11 Exactly, yeah. There, there's huge proponents of at least, like, two to three beers-

Chris Williamson 1:48:15 Yeah, yeah, yeah

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:48:15 ... right before you go to sleep.

Chris Williamson 1:48:17 Yep.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:48:17 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?

Chris Williamson 1:48:26 Yep.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:48:26 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-

Chris Williamson 1:48:36 Yeah

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:48:36 ... 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.

Chris Williamson 1:48:47 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:48:48 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-

Chris Williamson 1:49:04 Mm

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:49:04 ... 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.

Chris Williamson 1:49:19 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:49:19 If we're just thinking about improving HRV, is that then equate to improving things like parasympathetic braking-

Chris Williamson 1:49:26 Mm

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:49:26 ... 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.

Chris Williamson 1:49:36 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:49:37 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-

Chris Williamson 1:50:12 Yeah

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:50:12 ... 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.

Chris Williamson 1:50:24 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:50:25 So for most people, I would say then that's where I would turn to, and again, bias coming out, something like Ohm, where it's like we're actually spending dedicated time in a controlled environment to train our nervous system four times a week at 10 minutes, you know, per, per day even.

Chris Williamson 1:50:39 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:50:40 As little as 10 minutes. If you wanna do more than that, do more than that. Like, for instance, I aim for 10- fi- for 15 minutes of resonance a day--

Chris Williamson 1:50:47 Mm-hmm

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:50:47 ... not 15 minutes of practice.

Chris Williamson 1:50:48 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:50:49 15 minutes of my time in blue. So when you turned it blue during our discussion a minute ago-

Chris Williamson 1:50:53 Yep

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:50:53 ... I want 15 minutes where I'm holding myself in that. Now, that doesn't have to be 15 sustained minutes.

Chris Williamson 1:50:57 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:50:57 I'm not sure if I've ever done 15 minutes of sustained resonance, but 15 minutes cumulative, and I normally do 10-minute sessions or other small sessions. So again, if we had to kind of come back, that's me, like, maximizing output-

Chris Williamson 1:51:10 Mm

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:51:10 ... of the vagus nerve. If we're just saying, "Well, what's the minimal dose that somebody can do to get started?" I think four times a week, 10 minutes a day, so that's 40 minutes that you have to devote to the nervous system gym every week-

Chris Williamson 1:51:20 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:51:21 ... will get you a lot of the benefit and certainly provide a good foundation.

Chris Williamson 1:51:27 When you've looked at the evidence around resonance breathing, what does it suggest about what people should be doing with their minds?

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:51:33 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-

Chris Williamson 1:51:39 Mm

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:51:39 ... what happens?

Chris Williamson 1:51:40 Yep.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:51:40 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-

Chris Williamson 1:51:46 It is a kind of mindfulness.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:51:48 100%.

Chris Williamson 1:51:48 Yeah.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:51:49 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-

Chris Williamson 1:52:00 Yeah

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:52:00 ... so we can process all that thinking," and so then therefore-

Chris Williamson 1:52:03 It's pulled you out of-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:52:04 It's pulled you out.

Chris Williamson 1:52:04 Right.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:52:05 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.

Chris Williamson 1:52:20 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.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:52:50 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:52:50 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-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:52:59 So many people-

Chris Williamson 1:52:59 ... 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.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:53:07 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:53:07 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?"

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:53:21 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:53:21 Like, that is fantastic, but how many of the gains are you losing-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:53:24 Mm-hmm

Chris Williamson 1:53:25 ... by not focusing where you're supposed to be?

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:53:27 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:53:28 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-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:53:41 Mm.

Chris Williamson 1:53:42 ... which is-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:53:43 Mm-hmm

Chris Williamson 1:53:43 ... that your nervous system is doing one thing while your mind is doing another."

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:53:47 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:53:47 So can we chew walk and, [chuckles] uh, chew walk and gum at the same time? Can we chew gum and walk at the same time?

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:53:52 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:53:52 Um, are we able to allow our front brain to be focused on that while our nervous system is trying to regulate-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:53:58 He-

Chris Williamson 1:53:58 ... from this thing at the side?

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:53:59 It's a great question. I mean, that's a great-

Chris Williamson 1:54:00 It's really interesting

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:54:01 ... great research study that could be done there. Well, what I will say, though, and I go back to the statement that I made before, is that I will take precision over effort and intention any day. It doesn't mean that intention and effort with precision-

Chris Williamson 1:54:16 Mm

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:54:16 ... don't yield the greatest benefits.

Chris Williamson 1:54:17 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:54:18 But precision is key here-

Chris Williamson 1:54:19 Yeah

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:54:20 ... because we know that the nervous system, like, your baroreflex response and your respiratory sinus arrhythmia, so the characteristics that are contributing mostly to HRV, they actually don't care. They don't give a shit about your intention. They don't care. As long as you're breathing within rhythm, they're doing its work. They're aligning. Now, if you wanna maximize that benefit, that's-

Chris Williamson 1:54:41 Put them all together

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:54:41 ... when we put them all together-

Chris Williamson 1:54:43 Yeah

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:54:43 ... and that's where we can start to layer mindfulness. So again, just to, to make sure I don't get misquoted here, mindfulness and meditation matter. Like, they're really important-

Chris Williamson 1:54:52 Mm

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:54:52 ... for what we do. I think it's great to layer on them, but is it necessary, or are we required to utilize that in order to have some appreciable nervous system benefit with, through HRV biofeedback? The answer is no.

Chris Williamson 1:55:05 Okay, so to recap, you would say some zone 2 work, 150 minutes a week, maybe 100 to 150 minutes.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:55:14 Yeah, I think ATS set typically says around 120 to 150 minutes.

Chris Williamson 1:55:17 Yeah.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:55:17 Yeah, so about two hours.

Chris Williamson 1:55:17 Per week, and if you can get some Norwegian four-by-four, maybe one session a week-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:55:22 Mm

Chris Williamson 1:55:22 ... something like that, of top-end work to get the, the zone 5 stuff in, and then between four and six sessions of between 10 and 20 minutes of resonance breathing-

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:55:33 Yep

Chris Williamson 1:55:33 ... that is done in a focused manner. Um, that together should be from a modifiable factor. I mean, this is, stop drinking so much fucking salt. Like, element's fantastic, but you can't have 10 a day.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:55:46 [chuckles]

Chris Williamson 1:55:46 You should be having, like, two or three a day at most.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:55:48 Yes. Blood volume is a huge, um, contributor or influencer to heart rate variability, so you don't want to be dehydrated-

Chris Williamson 1:55:56 Mm

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:55:56 ... but you also don't want to overhydrate.

Chris Williamson 1:55:59 ... that will build you about as good in terms of HRV

Chris Williamson 1:56:03 gain. The thing that we haven't talked about is how this impacts sleep.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:56:05 [chuckles] When you were mentioning all that, the one thing that was coming to my mind is that I was thinking, "Yes!"

Chris Williamson 1:56:12 And sleep.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:56:12 As long as [chuckles] sleep.

Chris Williamson 1:56:14 So talk to me about, 'cause you work with Andy Galpin's company, Absolute Rest, which is fucking awesome.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:56:19 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:56:19 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?

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:56:40 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-

Chris Williamson 1:57:20 Mm

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:57:20 ... 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.

Chris Williamson 1:57:27 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:57:27 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-

Chris Williamson 1:57:39 Mm

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:57:39 ... 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.

Chris Williamson 1:57:46 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:57:46 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.

Chris Williamson 1:58:06 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:58:06 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.

Chris Williamson 1:58:21 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:58:21 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?

Chris Williamson 1:58:32 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:58:32 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.

Chris Williamson 1:59:04 So is sleep where trait-level autonomic regulation sort of shows up the most?

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:59:12 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.

Chris Williamson 1:59:43 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:59:43 We're taking all of that out.

Chris Williamson 1:59:44 Pretty blank canvas.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:59:45 Yep, blank canvas, and we're saying, "Okay, here's true baseline. Here's the process where, like, we are working to repair everything-"

Chris Williamson 1:59:54 Well, I guess you, you, you can't fake regulation during sleep.

Dr. Jay Wiles 1:59:57 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]

Chris Williamson 2:00:22 Wow!

Dr. Jay Wiles 2:00:23 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 2:00:23 Okay.

Dr. Jay Wiles 2:00:24 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 2:00:24 So it's... Your- what would people who work on their fitness and their resonance breathing see in sleep, all other things being equal, over the course of 12 months?

Dr. Jay Wiles 2:00:40 If they're working on it... So what I love-- So this is, again, to shamelessly plug Absolute Rest and Andy Galpin's team. They're using a lot more advanced ways of looking at what's happening in the nervous system-

Chris Williamson 2:00:51 Mm

Dr. Jay Wiles 2:00:51 ... throughout the night, as opposed to, like, a lot of consumer-based wearables.

Chris Williamson 2:00:55 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 2:00:55 But that's when you're going from, like, FDA-cleared medical device, we're getting, like, tons of granularity, to, like, okay, sampling rate's a lot lower. We've got to conserve battery. We're just giving you kind of information that we think could be useful to-

Chris Williamson 2:01:07 Mm

Dr. Jay Wiles 2:01:07 ... hopefully drive behavior. So what we saw, I ki- I wanna, kind of wanna explain a gold standard 'cause I think that this is the best way to view it. So, like, at Absolute Rest, when you're wearing the overnight ring, it's a ring called the Sleep Imaging, which again, FDA-cleared medical device, it's actually looking at the fine, finite, quite granular, high-fidelity changes that are occurring in your nervous system through an algorithm called CPC algorithm, just looking at cardiopulmonary coupling. So how coupled or in congruence is your breathing within your resp- resp- uh, w- your breathing and your heart rate when you're at rest?

Chris Williamson 2:01:41 Mm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 2:01:41 So at baseline. They should be highly coupled. You should be creating a lot of what I referred to earlier as high-frequency power, so that's what we should see on our charts. We'd have, like, these really tight, big, blue mountains that we'd wanna see that are occurring across the night. When someone is having really poor problems with sleep, and this can be due to sleep-disordered breathing, so let's just say they've got sleep apnea-... or they just have an immensely dysregulated nervous system, really cannot bounce back from stress. They've got other problems related just to autonomic flexibility. We see that that high-frequency coupling is really low. Like, so it looks like they're not getting hardly any restorative sleep.

Chris Williamson 2:02:16 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 2:02:17 And when they're not getting any restorative sleep, they start to experience kind of like this sympathetic burst at night, what we call fragmentation. And you can't pick up fragmentation on, like, a consumer-based wearable. This is why you gotta go to the high-fidelity stuff that they have at Absolute Rest.

Chris Williamson 2:02:29 Which is also why these rings have one night of battery. [chuckles]

Dr. Jay Wiles 2:02:32 Yeah, yeah, they're, they're pretty good.

Chris Williamson 2:02:33 Because they're sampling, what, 100 hertz or something?

Dr. Jay Wiles 2:02:35 Yeah. Oh, it's, uh, I think the sampling rate's 1,000 hertz. Um, so it's, it's really high. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 2:02:40 As opposed to even the best consumer wearables are taking little chunks throughout the day.

Dr. Jay Wiles 2:02:43 Small, small bits, so small, what we call epochs-

Chris Williamson 2:02:46 Yeah

Dr. Jay Wiles 2:02:46 ... or just smaller-

Chris Williamson 2:02:46 Windows

Dr. Jay Wiles 2:02:46 ... periods of time. So yeah. And so going back to this, if we see that someone's having a lot of fragmentation at night, so the sympathetic nervous system's starting to kick into high gear, you know, heart rate is bouncing up. We're starting to see kind of like this pattern that we don't want to see when we're at rest, well, what does that cause us to do? Fragmentation causes us not to get into the deepest stages of, like, N3 sleep or the real restorative stages. It keeps us in very light sleep, and then what does it do? It kicks us out of sleep as well, causes a lot of wakefulness. So we see people's sleep efficiency, which we want to be above 85%, start to drop below 85%. We see the night is completely fragmented. So what do we do? Like, well, at Absolute Rest, what we would do is we'd say, "Okay, we want to put you on a biofeedback protocol, where about 30 minutes before bed, we're gonna do 10 to 15 minutes of resonance breathing."

Chris Williamson 2:03:33 Hmm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 2:03:33 "And within that kind of timeframe, the whole idea is that we're down-regulating the nervous system acutely to try to ease ourself into sleep, to get that good, deep, restorative sleep," and that's what we want to see. So we do that. We see that, oh, yeah, first night they did it, they did increase a little bit more high-frequency power. It's might be only at the beginning of the night-

Chris Williamson 2:03:52 Hmm

Dr. Jay Wiles 2:03:52 ... uh, and the fragmentation kind of kicked into high gear, but we see it start to improve, and then they do it week after week after week. And, and what's so interesting is that almost every client for Absolute Rest says that their favorite intervention, or the one that they feel like is truly moving the needle, aside from like top-tier level coaching, is heart rate variability biofeedback.

Chris Williamson 2:04:11 Hmm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 2:04:11 Because it is something that they can see. Like, you can see, it's we're not g- we're not... It's not a guessing game anymore, right? It's like, I see that my nervous system has actually made changes. Not just am I getting a little bit more of that parasympathetic sleep at the beginning of the night-

Chris Williamson 2:04:24 Hmm

Dr. Jay Wiles 2:04:24 ... but it's starting to traverse the entire night.

Chris Williamson 2:04:27 Hmm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 2:04:27 We're starting to see it fluctuate, and not fluctuate, but really go across the night, and a lot less wake-ups.

Chris Williamson 2:04:32 What are the limits of HRV's usefulness?

Dr. Jay Wiles 2:04:35 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.

Chris Williamson 2:04:53 Hmm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 2:04:53 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.

Chris Williamson 2:06:23 Hmm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 2:06:23 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.

Chris Williamson 2:06:34 Hmm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 2:06:35 But I'm not proposing that everybody should, like, get someone like me to do that-

Chris Williamson 2:06:39 Yeah

Dr. Jay Wiles 2:06:39 ... 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.

Chris Williamson 2:06:54 Yeah.

Dr. Jay Wiles 2:06:54 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-

Chris Williamson 2:07:02 Hmm

Dr. Jay Wiles 2:07:02 ... 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.

Chris Williamson 2:07:27 Hmm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 2:07:28 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.

Chris Williamson 2:07:49 Yep.

Dr. Jay Wiles 2:07:49 It's just not the f- it's not the case.

Chris Williamson 2:07:50 Right.

Dr. Jay Wiles 2:07:51 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.

Chris Williamson 2:08:03 Hmm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 2:08:03 But HRV is best used this way. It's best used in real time to... as a guide, as a signaling window for training.

Chris Williamson 2:08:11 It's

Chris Williamson 2:08:12 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?

Dr. Jay Wiles 2:08:34 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.

Chris Williamson 2:08:49 Hmm.

Dr. Jay Wiles 2:08:49 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]

Chris Williamson 2:09:06 Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dr. Jay Wiles 2:09:06 ... 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.

Chris Williamson 2:09:13 Okay. Appreciate you, man.

Dr. Jay Wiles 2:09:14 Absolutely, bro. [upbeat music]

Chris Williamson 2:09:16 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.