[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the Heart Rate Variability Podcast. Each week we talk about heart rate variability and how it can be used to improve your overall health and wellness.
Please consider the information in this podcast for your informational use and not medical advice. Please see your medical provider to apply any of the strategies outlined in this episode. Heart Rate Variability Podcast is a production of Optimal LLC and Optimal HRV. Check us out at optimalhrv.com Please enjoy the show.
Welcome friends to Heart Rate Variability Podcast. I am Matt Bennett here with a very special guest today, Patrick Dr. Patrick Porter. I'm excited to talk to him with his expertise and interest in brain strength, stress, human performance. Dr. Porter, welcome to the show. I would love to just get started out before we kind of nerd out about technology.
I just sort of what got you interested in brain state, stress, human performance.
From what I learned about you online, it seems like you've dedicated your career and life to this study. So I'd love to kind of rewind and how you got interested in these subjects.
[00:01:11] Speaker B: Okay, I'm going to tell you a long story short then. It started when I was 12 years old actually. My dad became a Silva instructor, a Silver Method instructor. And they had a sound that played in the room called the Silva sound, which we now know is an isochronic tone generator. And so that synchronized the brainwaves to alpha. So I've been doing it since then, but we didn't have any really way to measure it except for, you know, biometrics like heart rate, skin temperature, hand temperature, these kind of things.
And so I've always been involved with trying to advance that part of it for actually just for meditation because it helped my dad become alcohol free and you know, helped me to achieve a lot of things we didn't know about heart rate variability actually. But I in, in that journey I started a franchise company, ran it for 27 years, sold that and then I just continue to advance what I think is the science. And we use HRV as our base because it's easy to collect data and you can get it anywhere, you know, it's not I, we do love eeg, but it's a big hassle so we don't use it as much as a lot of people wish we would. But it until they make it as easy as it is. Hrv, you know, where we get it through galvanic skin response or something like that, I'm not going to mess with it. But in actually about 11 years ago, maybe more than that now, maybe like 15 years ago, I was in Mexico and there was a gentleman beside me that had an HRV system and he was testing people and how some health applications change their heart rate. And I had heard about heart rate for sports, but I didn't hear about it for like medical reasons. And I fell in love with the technology then and I've been using some variation of that ever since.
And basically to prove to people that they can change their physiological state by doing just some simple things or you can do some complex things. We've measured everything in our lab you could think of pretty much. And if it doesn't move the nervous system, I'm really not interested in talking about it or moving because a lot of people will send me things and say test this out, tell me what it is. And then when I tell them it didn't do anything.
Supplements should move your nervous system. So right, you know, if we're not able to, to see that movement then there's not gonna be any neuroplasticity, there's not gonna be any real change. It might be an experience. I tell people it's, you know, they don't know the long term effect of doing psychedelics but you have an experience, but other than that we don't know what happens after that. So I'm not interested in things that just give you an experience but don't show you some long term benefit. So we start working with, right now we work with nine different top tier universities around the world. And in our HRV unit which we call Neurocheck, it actually got research in Asia because we proved out all the ancient traditions like breath work, yoga, all these things they're doing in India for 10,000 years that everybody thinks is just hocus pocus.
The Ames Institute, the all Indian Institute of Medical Sciences, we donated the equipment to them. They've now done 27 published papers on it in PubMed and they're all using HRV metrics coming from the device. I mean, because it's, it's for neck, especially for moving the nervous system, doing things like dancing or you know, sports related, you can really see HRV movement.
[00:04:18] Speaker A: Well, I, I love it. I, I don't think when I've asked that question before anybody has gone as low as 12 years old.
I mean you, if I had a prize to give you, you, you would win that prize. That, that is amazing. So I, I wonder sort of what was the journey? You know, you kind of mentioned that you may have been in some other like franchise stuff but, but to get to the great work you're doing today, with braintap and you know, HRV and all different things. I'm curious, what, what, what were some of those steps? Because I, as somebody who has gone on this journey myself with biometrics and biofeedback, I know it probably wasn't an easy, simple journey to be doing work you're doing today.
[00:05:04] Speaker B: So if we go back to 1986, I was with a company called Light Sound Research and we were looking at how a candle flame changes brains, brain states. And we were using gsr, so we were just hearing the beeping noises. We didn't have the eeg. There was no EEG to get at that point right in the, but in the, in the process we were looking of course at again, skin temperature, respiration, all that. And we noticed that every person brain, their brain synchronized into alpha. And we noticed their heart rate went down, their head temperature increased, any pain in the body began to diminish. All these things were happening. So then we used to build these on a Radio Shack. You probably remember that story. The.
So we, we, I started saying, well, what if we could move the lights? Because you can't move a fire, it's going to burn a 10Hz frequency. But LEDs came out and I said let's get them flickering. And we had a rheostat to it. And we, what we did was we were again monitoring these systems, but nothing compares to what HRV does today. I mean, a real time scan through time experiences and things like that. You can actually see the trigger when the sympathetic system takes over and drives the system into fight or flight. And you can work on that now. I mean, the therapeutic value of HRV is I think, much better than EEG because all they have to do is move a little bit and you've got a, a mess on your hands. And with hrv they can pretty much get away with it. But that's kind of how it started. And then it just kind of grew because in 1986 and 89, just to bring up speed, we got, we got Gadget of the Year at the Consumer Electronics Show. I should not be working right now. You know, we, that was it. But the problem was nobody knew what it was that we were doing for brainwave entrainment. So, you know, it's like we win this award because we have all these people that are stressed out coming on into our booth, but nobody knows what it is. And that's why I started the franchise company. And then still today, when I sold that company, I was not retired, but I was just doing Speaking and things like that. And my sister said the franchise was going to go out of business and I would get all my intellectual property back. And I said, wow, I get to reinvent it with today's technology, which is much nicer than the 90s and you know, early late 80s. And so that's, I mean, so I've always been. My first degree is actually in electronics. My second degree is in psychology.
So you know, I, I went to school most I was a nerd. You know, I grew up tinkering with CB radios and you know, just building things and doing what I could, you know. So it's kind of an extension of that.
[00:07:29] Speaker A: I love that. And for, for our listeners who may be more familiar with the heart rate variability side of things, tell us about alpha waves and how those relate to heart rate variability because we've thrown that around a little bit with some of the neurofeedback biofeedback crossover. But I think it's probably really useful for our audience to. When somebody says alpha waves or why is that important for nervous system regulation?
[00:08:01] Speaker B: Right. Well, one of our beliefs here, and we've seen it in action, we've probably put almost 400,000 people to the proto through the protocol. So it's, it's. And we have four, almost 4,000 clinics out there doing it. So this is based on that information.
And what we find is that theta in alpha are two brain rates most people don't have because they're in sympathetic drive. And that means high beta. So there's a point where beta becomes gamma, which most people don't make it through because it's pretty chaotic and pretty high intensity. But when you're think of, think of like a fulcrum. We got beta on one end and gamma and we got the others on this end. And it's a cycle. It's not, it's a circle, it's not a straight line, but they put it as a circle. So our brain should be divided into different segments. So when I measure you. And ECG gives us valuable data to do this.
When somebody says why does ECG give us heart a brain? It's not measuring brain frequencies. No, it's measuring the correlation because the heart talks to the brain. You guys know this. So you know, I don't want to. But in the process what happened was we could now create a brain dominance map based on the work of one of our researchers, Anne Wise, who wrote the, she wrote the book Master Brainwave. So she went around the world measuring. Once EEG became available it was nothing like we have today. When I think about. It was like an old Star Trek episode. But the, you know, you got the technology but she was able to measure. And what she found was when you're awake, there's an awakened brain and there's a sleeping brain, right? So our brain does different, it operates a different Marine, so it's not the same brain all the time. So what happens if we're at neutral with no stressors? We're just standing there. We should have about 45% of our brain in beta. Beta is our reactionary brain. So we need that. You know, it's the part that retrieves the information, tells it's kind of the interface to this reality. When we get into Alpha, there's a brain loop between those two actually that's called smr, sensory motor rhythm. That's actually more important than alpha. In our dementia study, which we took everybody off the dementia scale in six weeks, that was the brainwave we trained. And it has to do with the vestibular system. So it's really important for HRV if somebody can't recover, like if they can't get into a stress and get out of stress. Which is the most valuable thing we can gather right from HRV is do you have stress resilience? Because the stressor isn't what kills you, it's when you stop, you know. And so how fast do you recover? And so we measure that. We have a number that we can measure how fast the nervous system and you know, we found in ours, we, we, we numbered up to thousands. We had a, we had a emergency room doctor at 5000 on our scan and a hundred and above is bad.
Yeah, we saw him a year later. We saw him a year later. He was down under a hundred because he started doing things and he could measure. He wasn't doing them before because they thought they were silly. His wife's telling him to do these things. But the nice thing is about HR being it's almost in everything now. Right. Apple watches to rings to all these things in that data is only gathering of course two pieces of information, which is fine for research. We gather 27 because between that RR function is everything, everything about you. And the reason we use the platform we do with our partners in Russia is own the patent on that. So they actually created new math and they got a, they got a, a global peace prize for it, but in mathematics. And so because they. The cosmonaut program and sending people up into space, the story everybody tells about I'm actually working with the people that created that technology. That's my group.
[00:11:31] Speaker A: So cool. So I wonder, and I love that you brought up Radio Shack. Cause that brings back a lot of, a lot of memories.
And if you weren't alive during Radio Shack, you gotta Google it because it's kind of when you could see the guts of electronics that we were working with. And I was, I was too young and wish I'd spent a lot less time playing basketball and a lot more time in Radio Shack in my current life. But I'm curious, so. So you're on the cutting edge of putting, putting some stuff together, you know, and have talked to a lot, I've talked to a lot of people from that were doing biofeedback and early neurofeedback in the 80s and 90s.
And you know, I'm just kind of curious, you know, sort of what you've seen as, you know, the technology.
I don't know if we, back in the day, when I were a Radio Shack, if we could have dreamt up Bluetooth.
[00:12:29] Speaker B: No.
[00:12:30] Speaker A: You know, things like this and the amount of data we get from very small portable devices. So I'm curious to continue your journey from. From the 80s and 90s and as technology evolved.
[00:12:45] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, the nice thing about it is that it is almost like whatever we needed next showed up. You know, something would show up for somebody. So, you know, and we're looking at. Now we know that we can measure what infrared light does.650 nanometer light. All of these things directly on the body because they do change and alter. You know, if someone's not getting sunlight, they might get seasonal affective disorder. So. But it also creates vasodilation, blood flow and circulation. So that brings down and triggers the vagal nerve. So when that, when the vagus nerve gets triggered, of course we're going to turn on the parasympathetic system in our clinics. That's what we're trying to do all day long. Because people come in, most people that we measure right now. And like I said, we have about 40,000 people in our, our little group that we've, we've been categorizing and we find that almost everyone has about 60 to 70% Delta while they're awake.
Remember that pyramid, there should be 45% beta, 30% alpha, 10% theta, maybe 5% on each end of gamma. And that now if you don't have gamma, you're gonna get dementia. Cause gamma. Think of it as the bass drum for the brain. It keeps everything in rhythm. And think of delta as that's the recovery brain really when you're not even present, your body is doing, the subconscious is doing what it needs to do to start the glymphatic system, all those things. And so that brain that is presenting during awakened states, that's the brain they should have when they fall asleep. What we're finding is most people will flip that brain profile. They will. When they go to sleep, their beta brain wakes up and now they're dealing with all the stuff that's going on because they have a lot of inflammation in their body. We also measure there's an inflammation marker that we can measure and we usually find most people are in the severe inflammation category.
[00:14:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
In one of the initial times that I came across your research was an AAPB article around brainwave entertainment. And I thought it was really as someone who would love to both be entertained and work on my autonomic health at the same time, thought that was a fascinating approach. I'd love for you to talk a little bit about that. That work as well. And the concept of, you know, I think we get sometimes so clinical when we talk about residents frequency breathing and biofeedback coherence.
You know, these different brain states that I think there's been attempts that I've seen to make it entertaining, um, some better than others. But I'd love to just get your thinking on, on that novel concept.
[00:15:26] Speaker B: Well the, the nice thing is with us we have 120,000 users. So I know what works and doesn't work. And our every user uses it 27 times a month. We only have the worst month we've ever had was 5% but usually it runs around 1%. So people use it, they like it, they pay for it. And what we're talking about here is entertaining the brain. Now the brain gets entertained a lot differently than our conscious mind. And you know, once it does like bells and whistles and it will, that will of course distract the, the default mode network and the retake our activating system, all those things and derail what you're trying to do. So what we have to do is come up with a novel approach that will create neuroplasticity. So every time I do a recording, let's say for training, it's different than the one before. It has to be because our brain is so good at recognizing patterns. If it listens that same session in a 24 hour time period, it will actually learn that. It won't, it won't follow the algorithm anymore. We found that you have to change the pattern every three to five minutes.
I tell people, if you ever seen Rain man when they dropped the toothpicks? And he says, 12, 14. And he goes, how do you know that? He said, I counted them. Well, our brains are counting them too, but it doesn't remember them. Because our brain's really good at omitting information because there's too much information. You know, neuroscience says we render 90% of what we're perceiving. So when you think about that, like when I scan Danica Patrick, there's a YouTuber, I'm doing a HIV with her. She had one of the top performing brains we've ever seen.
And it makes sense because she does something in neuroscience. They say we can't do process speeds of 180 miles an hour. And she's doing it 220 miles an hour. So she, her brain is like.
She had the perfect profile that I'm talking about. When she sat down there, she had very little interference. Think of delta as interference. It's like pulling a parachute all day long. Alpha and theta are like free flowing. You just have information, you have energy, whatever. When you get into beta, that's when you lose energy.
Because the sympathetic system, like I've never heard anybody say, you know, I cry, I, I laugh so loud and spent such a good time, I gotta go lay down. You know, it's more, you know, when they said I cried all afternoon. I'm so depressed. I'm angry, I'm upset, whatever. Those negative emotions are like grounding a battery to the earth and you're losing all your energy. Where those positive states create energy, actually they, they know it. They create PZO energy at the cellular level and the mitochondria begin to use that in the brain. It gains up those brain wave frequencies and we record them and we can encode them with a machine or decode them as we're getting them. They're simply signals that happen in regions of the brain. And then the only difference between the heart one and the brain one is that the heart one's just giving us the information. So it's like looking at the baseball game. We're hearing it through a radio. Still the same information, but it might not be as rich as we'd get if we had television instead of radio, you know, so you. But some b. We. We probably do 95% HRV readings than we do EEG. We just, we just finished two studies in India that might bear. Because you're talking about neurofeedback in that we Work with a lot of neurofeedback practitioners. We're the home unit person. Okay. But what we wanted to see was what does neurofeedback do over time?
And what we found was absolutely nothing.
After about six months, the person's brain, if they don't keep the training up, it's like muscles, they atrophy. When they did. Brainwave entrainment is what we really call it. But they always call it brainwave entertainment for some reason, the. It's entrainment. So we changed to brain optimization. So when you think about brain optimization, what you really want to do is if you have to get into, let's say, you have to solve a problem, you might do a couple breathing techniques, you calm down the sympathetic system. You're now in a parasympathetic state. Now you have access to high states of theta and alpha and gaba will pop in there. And now your brain is creating the neurotransmitters that make you high. We did a. Just to put that in perspective for the listeners, we did a. A psilocybin study in Dallas, Texas, with a doctor for ptsd. And we were going to be the integration tool because they were going to do their. The mushrooms, right? So, yeah, and I'd never done them before, so I said, I don't know what to expect when you do those, you know? You know, and he says, well, let's gain some brains.
So that was useful. We did some HRBs on them, and they, they, they actually. You'd be amazed at what it does to the HRB afterwards. It's like, my God, they got shot with some kind of super serum or something. It was crazy. It didn't last, but it was there, you know, for a period of time. And then. But what we found during the study was there's a region of the brain that lit up on every person. And then they have this kind of spiritual experience.
So we created brainwave sessions in their gamma frequency. And we're having people have psilocybin releases, but at the end of the session, they're done, they're back. There's. There's no. You don't have to invest eight hours like a golfing match to go do your therapy. You know, you can, you can get it done and get on and without knowing, without knowing the numbers and when. You know, we use it a lot. Of course, with sports, that's probably the most useful way. And that's, that's why TBRX and Tom Brady's group is with us. Cause we Showed them how flying in a plane, just so the listeners know, when you're in a plane, every hour of the plane is like getting an X ray. And every cell of your body is in a state of cell danger response. So it's not uncommon for somebody to lose up to 70% of the energy, which we could measure that energy at the cellular level. And HRB keeps that rhythm, keeps the flow of electrons. When you're, you're really looking at the electron transport chain and how it's responding in the body because the chemical system follows the electrical system. It's not the other way around. People are, you know, we've noticed that because if somebody has a positive attitude, supplements work better than if they have a negative attitude. So it must be something with the elect build system.
[00:21:11] Speaker A: I love, I love that. So talk to me a little bit about, you know, your, your work with Braintab. So talk to me about. So you've got your, your, you got the electronics background, so you can do. One of the hardest things I think in this field is doing good hardware.
Software is developing rapidly in the 90s, you know, and obviously today we're in a whole different place with both hardware and software. You know, I'd love to understand how you designed the platform and, you know, how it's implemented and used.
[00:21:49] Speaker B: Well, when I did Braintap, I thought my franchises were very successful. We saw about 160 people a day. So I said, why don't we just duplicate that on the Internet? Let's go get some doctors. I'll trade them Light. It was franchise Light, so it wasn't like they weren't paying me all the money. I wasn't getting a percentage of their sales.
So we partnered with them and we showed them how to use brain fitness in their labs. And we told them that they usually did not have a hiv. Some did. So we showed them how to use that HRV because, you know, there's a lot of good HRVs out there and you don't need to go spend another $10,000 or whatever on a clinical one if you have one. So we showed them how to use it to validate what was going on and their other therapies in their office. Well, about six, six years ago, we had. Because of the app. We were using the app before, but it was kind of on a limited basis. But the app took off for us because our doctors give out the app for free. And so now we actually have this device here.
This is actually an hrv, but it gives you clinical data and it can be measured by your thumbs. It's about 90% accurate compared to the one we have. But the, what we wanted to do is our doctors, because they became so successful, they want to have something they could take home with them. But then this, this also gathers all the clinical data that the doctor needs. But this gives the end user just fun things to, to learn about their HRV and, you know, things like that. But then, but the doctor gets all the other data in their clinical model. So now you have a way that we can show efficacy at home. Whether they're doing a cold plunge or whatever they're doing, they're doing some kind of new cleanse, whatever it is, we can measure that and make sure that they're, um, you know, if they're having a, a stress response because they're doing something, then we say, hey, it's time to slow down, relax, get your HRV back in order before you go stress it out again. And you know, because we see a lot of people, especially in therapy, their nervous system is so fragile that the moment they flip the switch over into sympathetic, it could be days before they get over into healing mode. And that's why they can't sleep. They can't turn it off and they get it. I call it neurological. Lack of in RB is probably the best way to show that because we're. And we also talk about not only the sympathetic parasympathetic, we talk about the neural hormonal system. Think of your biological system is the backup generator. And what we find is most people don't realize they're using the backup generator. Yeah, they feel good, but they're using their backup generator. Pretty soon the, the, the bank's going to call us. No, you know, it's going to say, hey, pay up. And then now what they're going to have to do is they're going to be stuck in parasympathetic because that's kind of the cycle, you know, that they go through and they rely on the body or the body parts start to give out because of stress. You know, whether they have adrenal fatigue or they have, you know, different.
We did it, we actually did a, a study with fibromyalgia using as a. Because the, the device actually we developed it for pain clinics.
So we think about. They go. So we have a very successful pain program. But that's not why most people use it, you know. Right. You know, it's one of those things.
So what we find is that when you have that brain weight profile and you have A nervous system profile. Because we tell them that your brain profile, your EEG is just as important as your hrv, but you don't need to measure it all the time. Maybe you measure that once a year or every quarter or something like that, just to make sure that you're. And what we're really looking at, which most people. I wish our ring would do this, I mean our, our neuro check, but it doesn't. If we could measure brain voltage, because what we know with eeg, one thing it gives us that HRP doesn't, is we can measure the voltage of our brain. And Matt, when you were born, I'm sorry to tell you, but you were the smartest you're ever going to be. You, you are 18.1 volt. You had 100 billion neural bit processor, you were fully wired in firing. And what happened? As you age, you did neural pruning. Well, we can measure that neural pruning by the voltage in your brain. And when, when your brain, usually it will modulate around 10.1 volts when we're adults. But if it drops below 7 volts, what we found in our study was every person in our study had a brain voltage below 7 volts. And as soon as we got their brain voltage over 7 volts, which is a lot of ways we can do it, from movement to, you know, exercise, breathing, brain tap, all these different things. We of course did it with our brain tap, so we wanted to show what would happen. But there's. When you use a, like a synergy approach where you do it all, you get even better results. And what we found was if it dropped below 4 volts, you had Alzheimer's.
But as long as you still had 1 volt in your brain, you can improve it, you know, and that's not what medical science is saying right now. They're saying, oh, you've got dementia. Go home, pack your bags and get somebody to take care of your steroid. And that doesn't have to. Now, of course, if they stay sedentary, which anybody has an HRV, should just measure somebody sitting for an hour, they'll be shocked at how it ruins your hrv. Almost as bad as working out, right? But when you work out four hours later, it's going to be back to normal and maybe better, you know, but sitting doesn't. It's like a downward spiral and the body starts to think that's the way Patrick's supposed to be. Like, I stand most of the day because I was sitting way too much. That was. I Thought, you know, I'm an executive now, you know, or when I was seeing my clients, because I'm a psychologist, you know, I would be sitting down the whole time.
[00:27:03] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:27:03] Speaker B: Sitting on my butt. And that's not good for the brain. So.
[00:27:06] Speaker A: Yeah, so, so I'm curious with the voltage, I've, I've not heard that research before. So is that like how I, I'm assuming, you know, there's in neuroscience literature that the brain can produce enough electricity to run one of the old school light bulbs. That's kind of what, what you usually hear is that sort of a metric of, you know, how strong the activation is. Because, you know, I can see that.
[00:27:37] Speaker B: The thing is that we, we've now MIT actually proved we don't have a thought. You know, we, we, we basically bring thoughts in and out all the time in the, the whole idea is that you have access to all your memories. Nobody has a bad memory. That's a misnomer. You have a bad recall system. So it's like you have a hard drive and your file allocation table has went corrupt, you know, and so that's what we're talking about. So. But when you have enough energy, that file allocation table can light up again because that's law, you know, the, those neurons that fire together, wire together. Those that don't fire, unwire. So that's why short term memory is different than long term memory. And people get them confused. They walk into a room, they go, I know I came in here for something, or I'm having a senior moment. No, you're having a stress moment because that part of your brain doesn't hold your memories. It basically is like RAM memory. It's holding them in stasis. And then at night you'll figure out if, was that a meaningful thing for me to do or not. And then you'll, you'll write it off or you'll encode it into long term memory. You know, so, and that's, but if you don't get to sleep and you know the voltage to do that, so imagine you have all this work to do every night when you go to sleep.
That happens in deep sleep, in, in deep delta. And it happens as you go through the cycles of alpha and theta, because if you don't go through those cycles, you don't make the neurotransmitters you need.
HRB actually can tell us neurotransmitter production because there's a, there's a signal. Your body needs to know, am I full or do I need to make more. And if you need to make more, the brain sends a signal to the brain, to the brain and the gut and says, hey, get the boys ready. We gotta make some more neurotransmitters, you know, and if you. If you have the capacity, you make them. But most of them are made while you sleep, you know, and so what. What we're. What we show people is, you know, your lifestyle is what's killing you. Not one thing or another. It's not one thing you're doing that's doing it. It's all things you're doing in the order you're doing them. So with what I tell people is, now that you can read your hrv, read yourself four times a day for don't do it every the rest of your life. That's just overkill. But do it when you change up your strategy for the day when you do this, find out how is your body responding to that? Because it should be more of a dance than a struggle. You know, if you're struggling between things, that means your nervous system. I always tell people it's. I love what Mike Tyson said. Everybody has a plan till they get here.
Most people don't. Most people don't have a way to know they got hit because they get hit all the time. But it's not the hitting that they need to change. It's. Of course you don't want to be hit, but you want to see how am I recovering. What is best for me to do? Is it time for me to go sit down in a chair, do some breathing for 10, 15 minutes? And then they can measure themselves or see it on their aura ring or whatever they have. You go, right, wow, that changed my hrv.
Yeah. You have a choice now. You don't have to take just because someone made you feel bad. You could say, okay, well, I can change my state. I can change my physiology. And when you change your physiology, you change your psychology so you get a more positive attitude, more better outlook on life. And that's really what we're teaching people, is that we have a lot more control over our nervous system than what we've been led to believe. You know, people that aren't sad, I'm happy. No, you chose to be sad. You chose to be happy. At some level, you have a program that. That runs and says, hey, you know, when I see little ponies, I'm happy, You know, or whatever. You know, whatever the trigger is.
[00:30:53] Speaker A: I'd love to talk a little bit about how you integrate this into your own Life with all this learning technology at your, literally at your fingertips, you don't seem like a person who just learns this and applies it to others. So, so I'm very curious about.
[00:31:15] Speaker B: I'm middle aged now, so I'm 65.
So I tell people I'm middle aged now, I'm 65, so I got to take care of my brain and my body. But if you came to our lab here in New Bern, we have 6,000 square feet and it's all health optimization gear. Now in the middle of that is of course our brain tap, but we use that with, with hydrogen, which you can measure the results. Everything we have in here can be measured by the hrv.
[00:31:37] Speaker A: So cool.
[00:31:38] Speaker B: Because that's, that's our gold standard. If it doesn't move the needle in hrb, it doesn't matter. It's not healing people.
And so we've seen it all. So. But if you came to, if you woke up in the morning, man, you're staying with me. I said, okay, it's six o', clock, let's go hit the cold plunge.
We'd go hit the cold plunge, then we'd go do the sauna, Then we'd go do my. If it's one of three days a week, I'd go do my exercise, which is usually involving qigong, which I do. And I use a vision body suit to exercise my muscles so I don't have to work so hard in the. It's electronics, so it does it. And then I'm going to eat healthy, I'm going to fast in the morning. I'm not going to drink my cup of coffee first thing in the morning. If you have hrv, I want you to test this because we've seen it a million times. Get up in the morning, do your HRV before your cup of coffee. Have your cup of coffee before you do anything else. If that's the way you usually do it. See what it does to your body, it drives it crazy, you know, it just regulates your nervous system for the whole day. So what I recommend people do is wait two hours before awakening. We found that that's a safe time for the nervous system. You should rely on your own body's norepinephrine, dopamine and cortisol to wake you up. If not, the brain will stop doing it and then you become addicted to caffeine. But if you wait till 2 o', clock, you can still have that lift. And some people do it at 2 in the afternoon. This is because your body has a biological low at 2 o' clock in the afternoon, wherever you're at on the planet, your body readjusts, you drop in temperature. Some people think it's low blood sugar, it's just your body resetting. But if your nervous system's out of whack, you might lose more of that temperature. At night, at 2am it does the same thing, but it heats up. And this is how your body regulates itself. It's called the circadian rhythm for those that haven't researched it. So when you do that, what, what I like to do is tell people, use your hrv. Here's the circadian clock. I want you in bed before 10 o'. Clock. Why is that? Because that's when you make the most melatonin. Between 10 and 11, be in bed. If you don't make it by 10, make it by 11, please. Because between 11 and 12 you clean your liver and your liver controls 300 functions of the brain. So so many people out there have fatty liver in pain. What we find is pain. And these kind of disorders really mess up your HIV reading because it's a constant stress. I've had people that had an aura ring and it says something's attacking me during the night. It's telling me that there's something, there's some stressor I need to be aware of. I said, yeah, that's your biological system telling you that it can't keep up, you know, that you need to do something to resolve that. You know, the, the body's telling you stress is not a bad thing with the body. That's what one of the things we had to teach. It's not bad. If we didn't have stress, we wouldn't grow, we wouldn't learn, we wouldn't adapt, you know, and so, but the bad thing is you can't stress out all day long.
And that's where HRV comes in. It tells you, hey, it's time for you to recover. And if you. And everybody has their own clock, so they have to. That's the nice thing about this technology is so affordable now that anybody could have it in their pocket, on their wrist, on their, you know, wherever they want it. And they can test this. So with me, I don't scan every day, but pretty much every day, you know, because I'm doing something that is kind of weird in the lab or I'm, I'm doing, I'm trying out something here that, that I want to see is that moving my nervous system because there's a lot of people out there. That make claims. And we always say if it doesn't, if it doesn't test out, doesn't mean it doesn't work. It just means this test doesn't do it. And I'm not interested in anything that doesn't do that. So, you know, if technology improves, then more things are doing that. Like just taking more B2 vitamin D will increase your HRV. You know, that means getting out in the sun if you can, but if you can't, then you're gonna do vitamin D supplements. So there's a lot of things you can do to increase the hrv. It's just people aren't willing to do them. Usually, you know, they'll do em for a while, but then they, they don't realize. Like with me I realized that I need to do my ritual every morning, you know, and I miss it when I'm outta town, when I'm done in my cold plunge and I sometimes, will I bring a bucket with me. If I have a bathtub, I'll throw it up and do some of that. Cause you kind of get addicted to it after you do it a while. And the shock, actually that's better than a cup of coffee. You know, you, your, your brain is ready to roll, you know, and then you cool down by getting in the sauna, you know, and, and then I stretch, you know, things like that. Cause my, my body is not as limber as it used to be, so I need to get, I need to keep it going.
[00:35:48] Speaker A: I, I find that actually because I've, I've started stretching every day. Probably more flexible than ever.
[00:35:55] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:35:55] Speaker A: But, but that the, the starting point was so poor. And it's not, it's not a brag, it's just I was, I never touched my toes until probably about three years ago because I just did stretching and not like intense an hour in the morning, hour in the evening, but just kind of like five or six different stretches. And now I could touch my toes because you know, I've done it on a consistent basis and you know, I'll probably do it for the rest of my life knowing the benefits.
[00:36:28] Speaker B: That's actually one of the, that's actually one of the brain tests also. How long can you stand on each foot? If you can stand up for 20 minutes, you're like average. But if you can stand on it for 50 seconds, you're like 1% of the world population. And that will tell you how your brain is balanced and working. So you know, there's a lot of little tests like that you can do to see the brain, but we can't really look inside and see the heart rate. Right. So we have to have a device that gets that signal. And the nice thing is about the heart is magnetic. So you can. They have devices now that I've seen that actually have HRV over on the wall attached to a monitor. And they use them in assisted living. So when somebody gets up out of bed, there's a shift in heart rate variability. They know it and the monitor kicks on and now they can see them if they fell down or whatever. So they're finding great ways to use hrv.
[00:37:14] Speaker A: So that's great. So I'm curious, I'll kind of ask a twofold question. Here is, you know, right, right now, at least on media Feed, which, which I try to only look at once or twice a day, I, I, you know, vagal stimulation is all the rage and you could spin, you know, I think neurofeedback, while I use that term very loosely for what I say next, it seems like for $300 you can change your nervous system for, for the better. And so, so I'd love to get your feedback as, as a hardware geek for, for decades now and somebody who seems to test a lot of different devices, I just love to get your opinion on that. And the second part of the question, do you use anything or.
You know, my favorite vagal regulation is breath work. I'm curious how you integrate breath work, if you do, into your routine.
[00:38:16] Speaker B: Sure. I probably have 10 different vagal simulators in my closet.
[00:38:22] Speaker A: Question asked, yes.
[00:38:23] Speaker B: Yeah. And because that's the golden if we could really get a way to do that. And I'm saying really get away because every time we tested them, we test them with humming, and humming always wins.
And most of them actually say this vagal stimulator hum while you're doing it. So is it the humming that's doing? So my science officer is very critical about those things. And he says, well, is it the humming or is it the thing you can't do these two things. So what we found was some of the electrical stimulators will do something, you know, but you can't use them as often as people are doing them because the it actually the nervous system will try to reset in 72 hours. So that's why you have to do something that's a little safer. And yes, I use brain taps involved in every brain tap session that we have recorded with voice because breath is your gateway to the nervous system. If you don't know how to Breathe. You know, that's why really I could beat any hrp. Cuz I do just do a breathing technique and make me look like I'm Superman. But that doesn't, because it's, it's, you can, you can just like synchronizing metronomes, you know, they have that video on the Internet where they do it in three minutes. Our brain will synchronize in about three minutes through breath work, like breathing in the, the best one for doing it the quickest is the four, eight breath. Because you're doubling, you're doubling down on the exhale and that's turning on the sympathetic. And what I tell people when they're breathing, I say part of your job is it's three times a day. There's three breath works that I really like to change brain frequencies. The first one is the psychological breath. That's the morning breath where you just breathe in as deeply as possible.
Just like you're a little kid and you just were told to clean your room or something. You know, we used to do this unconsciously, but do that for two or three minutes. This actually stimulates smr, that brainwave we need for cognition. It will trigger dopamine, cortisol, norepinephrine, but it will also bring the recovery. So you're training your body. This is stress, this is recovery. Now your body can make a better choice when you get into stress. You can now. So in the afternoon we do the box breath. And I ask people to start with four. And basically for those that don't know the box breath, you can go on YouTube, there's a million videos on it. And then at night you would do the, that's when you do that four, eight breath before going to bed and just keep doing that till you fall asleep. But myself, I do usually three rounds of Wim Hof every morning before I get into the cold plunge. And then I'll usually do two rounds when I'm inside the cold plunge. Cause I wanna be in there for five, six minutes. And that's how long it takes me to do the, the cycle. So he's a, he's a good one to use. I, I love him. I mean anybody that can do what he does with breath work is incredible. But he, he says we can all do it. Although I'm not gonna inject poison into my body just because I can breathe right. You know, but, but he did.
[00:41:02] Speaker A: If you felt I, yeah, interesting character if you want to google him.
And it's interesting because I, I, I know a lot of biofeedback folks don't like Wim Hof. So I gotta. I'd love to, kind of.
[00:41:17] Speaker B: Well, yeah, I think you're midways.
[00:41:20] Speaker A: Hyperventilating. I always like you if we ever talk about Wim Hof, please don't hyperventilate in water unless you really know what you're doing.
Google it.
[00:41:29] Speaker B: Right.
[00:41:29] Speaker A: People don't do that.
I'm curious because you're the first guest with your level of expertise that some get triggered, some just roll their eyes gently. But you're the first that's a practitioner of them. So I'm curious kind of how you came to say, oh, this actually is a valid breath work.
[00:41:57] Speaker B: Oh, we have studies, we have studies that show them all. I mean, all the prana breathing techniques from that. Yeah, we've studied it all. We've shown it doesn't only last while you're breathing. The nice thing is when you train your nervous system, we've had people that once they've done that three day, that three times a day breathing, over the course of three to four weeks, they no longer snore. Their sleep scores have improved. And we didn't even give them brainwave entrainment, we just did breathing because we know the breath work is going to change the brain. And the key is to unlock the sympathetic drive and get them into more parasympathetic states and teach them that they have the switch. You have the control switch, but it's controlled by your breathing. Because think of all negative emotional states. And this is how I tell it to my clients. I said, when you're in any emotional state, what's the first thing that happens? And they go, I said, you stop breathing.
And that's why when a little kid runs up to you, if you have a son. I have a grandson. I still remember his first time. He came running up to me and I told him to breathe. And he just got madder and madder because he knew as soon as he's going to breathe, he's going to lose that anger. And that's the truth. That's true with adults. So we need to let go of the, the anger, the negative emotional states because we're, we're designed for flow states, you know, that's why they call it breathing, not breath. You know, so when we. So people need to. And most people do not breathe. In fact, if you're watching this and or listening to it, next time you're in a conversation, just watch the person you're in conversation with most of the time. They're going to hold their breath. They're going to go, you know, they're going to catch their breath. They're trying to remember what to ask you when you're done speaking. So that's a cue for you to stop talking and let them ask their question. You know, the. That's what I used to tell my therapist. I said they're only holding their breath because they want to say something, you know, and so, you know, there's different cues like that, but we find that the best way to modulate that or. Or measure it, I should say, and monitor it is hrv. I mean, we've tried all these different breath metrics, and I tried.
Now, by the way, we do vagal stimulation with brain tap. We do it. We do it with no share frequencies and light and sound, and it triggers the inner ear. There's a vagal nerve stimulation inside the inner ear. So we're doing that to create it, but it's not intense. And we're not making a claim on that. You know, we're not saying. But it's just a byproduct of the process. You know, the. The body loves vibration and. Right. Vibration. It doesn't like. Like EMFs and things like that that are 50 million hertz and things like that, but it likes. It likes healthy Earth frequencies, you know, between 0.5 and maybe 300, the body can handle. But when it gets over that, which is almost everything electronic, then the body starts to.
For some people, 10% of the people have a really hard time around electronics. You know, it's a. Yeah, fascinating.
[00:44:38] Speaker A: I'm curious, as somebody who's been in the field and watched it evolved and been part of that evolution.
I'm curious where you tap, where you see your work and the field going in the next five to ten years. We got this thing called AI floating around now. So you got new toys to play with. Simon, I'd love to hear what Dr. Porter's brain's doing with all these new toys that are coming onto the market.
[00:45:10] Speaker B: We built a sandbox, or whatever they call it, where it's just me. All the books I've written. I've written 11 books, and I have courses on Quantum University that I taught and on the Integrative Wellbeing Institute. So all that material, every lecture, every podcast I've been on up to that point, everything's in this place. And that AI is smarter than I am, because when I ask it a question, it remembers everything I said along the way. I didn't know forgetting Anything. And.
But now what we've done is we've integrated into our app. So when somebody does a search, because the biggest question I get asked is, this is my condition. What should I do to improve it? And that's where our new technology here will look at the numbers and tell them, because we've, we've so many different case studies that we know, hey, when you're, when your HRV looks like this, these, the numbers are getting. This is because it all correlates to brain waves. And if you can get the brain waves fixed, you know, the heart is the one controlling the brainwaves. That's what most people don't understand. It's not the brainwaves controlling the heart. The heart controls the show. And, you know, it lets the brain think it does, because that's what the brain likes to do. It's got an ego. The heart just does its job in creeps, a unified field, a magnetic field, so that, you know, and so, and then the gut brain is actually doing more work than the brain between our ears. They say that we, that brain up top does most of its work while we're sleeping. So we're not even necessary. We're a passenger, you know, but when we're sleeping, it does all the, you know, categorizing and organizing and doing those things. That's why sleep's so important. So where I see it going is right now we're in a lot of school systems, especially in India, and we're in quite a few schools here in the US I feel that people will start to use more technology because we have a technology problem with mental health and we need a technology solution because it's not just their thoughts, it's. It's happening. It's from the foods they're consuming, their lack of mobility, their, their negative binge watching of social media. All these kind of things all play into that, that mental state. You know, there's a saying all unhappiness stems from unfavorable comparisons. So I think that, you know, when you think about somebody who do looks at social media, nobody's posting their worst days, they're posting their days. And if you're having your worst day, it becomes a clash. And then I, I believe that right now we have so many schools, like in Brazil, for instance, one of the largest universities in the, in the whole country is now they just finished a whole thing about brain infantry in the classroom where we played it over speakers. So they didn't even use our headset, they just used it over Speakers and we raised the GPA and the whole school. And now they want to start getting it out to other people in Brazil. So that's usually the way it happens. Same thing happened in India, which we've opened up now in. I'm going back in August because they, we have school, their test, their consideration with test mark is almost 200,000 people.
[00:47:51] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:47:52] Speaker B: Because you don't free up the people. So. And that's what we did the study with, with neurofeedback. And we showed that what NeuroFeedback does in 40 sessions, we prove we do it in 15. And ours last, we did a one year washout and still was there. So that's why we call it brain fitness. So we. I think that brain fitness will become as popular, not just our devices, a lot of really cool devices out there doing it that will become more and more into the foreground. I went to school, believe it or not, man, I don't know how old you are, but when I went to school, we tried to get a gym put in with weight room and the parents actually signed a petition to get us to stop because it was going to stun our growth because they didn't even believe building muscle was good for your brain. Now we know it's great for your brain.
It creates bdnf, miracle growth for the brain and all those things. But I think brain fitness is right there too. Because so many people, certainly the people we talk to, they go, my aunt's got dementia, my mother's got dementia, my father, whatever. And they think, oh, well, there's not a pill for it, so we can't do it. But we did it. We did a test. And the nice thing is about when you can measure something for stress and things like that. We did a study for pain because remember, that's what we did this whole thing for in Brazil. We had everybody take a surgery and opioids are only approved for four weeks of use. I don't know about you, but I know people get on and they don't get off them. Yeah. So I told them, I said, you don't need to have them take the pill even. They go, what do you mean? I said, I have painless surgery with no anesthetic. They, they cut my shoulder, they put my screw the screw, put my phone through. You don't have to feel pain, that's optional. And they're like, we can't do that. So I said, okay, our people are going to get off in four weeks. They go, okay, we'll see. Because they just don't get off it. So we conditioned our people that in four weeks they were going to get off their pills. Our group, everyone's off it in four weeks. They stopped because we taught them a skill along with the pill. The others are still on it, every one of them. And we're going to do up to six months. I think we're on the fifth month, we're going to publish that study because people don't think they can fun. They can change their autonomic nervous system. You know, it's not as automatic as we think. You know, our environment plays a big role in how our nervous system shows up in our thoughts, play a role in that too. So, you know, I think that, that we're going to see more of that. And I think what's going to happen is, especially in the workplace, we're going to do away with just coffee breaks. You can still have a coffee draw for that break, but you're going to see brain breaks. You're going to see people getting like all these super restorative practices that are out there. Like if you came to my lab, I got a bunch of them here that, you know, from a red light bed that recharge your body to a blue light booth that gives you all the sun you need in five minutes. You know, all these. So what's going to happen is it's becoming more and more like the Jetsons, you know, where, um. And people will accept it because we don't have time.
You know, there, there's certain things. Everything can be accomplished with time and money, but you can't buy time.
So. So not everything can be accomplished with time and money. So you have to. We only have so much time here. So I think people are going to start in and I do believe it already is. People that would never think of hrv.
I go to Joe now. Just everybody, even I know these women never did any physical labor in their life. And now they're looking at their Apple Watch is getting their HR because they realize in the sea of significance, if they have an argument with their spouse, they can look, oh, look what that did. Yeah, is that worth it? You know, and then, yeah, they're changing behavior so you can, you can get the good responses instead of the bad responses.
[00:51:13] Speaker A: I love it. I love it. So I just want to thank you for your work. It's been fascinating to explore your journey.
I will just extend an invitation once you publish that paper because, you know, I know, you know, obviously opiate addictions and other things are Huge. And one of the my just fascinations is around hrv, biofeedback and pain. And boy, if we could get people to practice what, what a powerful supplement to treatment. But, you know, maybe, you know, we could avoid a way, minimize the chance for addiction from opiates. And it's such a powerful work you're doing there, so I would love to have you back on. And that study, when it gets published.
[00:52:06] Speaker B: We just published one on pain that's in the Pain Journal, the most prestigious pain journal in the world, where we showed how breathing techniques and brainwave entrainment can help fibromyalgia, where medicine can't. These are all. Medicine would do nothing for them. But your brain, your body never becomes immune to your own, you know, neural network. You know, you can, you can change it. If you, if you change your brain state, you can create that healing state. Your body knows how to heal itself, your brain knows how to heal itself, but only in a parasympathetic state. They can't do it in the sympathetic state. It's. It's like, it's not important at that point. Your body's in survivor mode, so we need to turn on that recovery mode.
[00:52:45] Speaker A: Excellent. Well, Dr. Porter, thank you so much. We will put a ton of information in the show notes. I'm sure there's people wanting to learn more about Brain Tap and I sort of want to come to your clinic as well, because it sounds like my paradise. So we'll put a ton of links to your books and other resources in the show notes that as always, you can
[email protected] Dr. Porter, it was great to meet you. I really hope that this is the first of many conversations to have you back as a guest in the future. So thank you so much for your work.
[00:53:23] Speaker B: Perfect. Thank you.
