[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
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Welcome, friends, to the Heart Rate variability podcast. I'm here today with the guest that I'm so excited to get on the show.
I read her book, the compassion remedy and so should you.
Great book, I could say. Now award winning author doctor Katherine Schweiskert. I think I hope we got that pretty close. I've been practicing that. Thank you. But Katherine, which I one, I want to just appreciate saying, Katherine, but I'd love for you just to introduce yourself. I'm so excited to dive into your book and how it relates to heart rate variability, but give us a quick just introduction to yourself.
[00:01:13] Speaker B: Oh, geez. Okay. Well, like you said, I'm Katherine Schweigert and I've been practicing medicine as a PA for 23 years and did a master's in public health. But most recently, and most importantly to me in my life's work is I just finished a PhD in applied psychophysiology and my research is in healthcare workers and their long term stress levels measured with hair, cortisol and heart rate variability measurements and how they relate to compassion, self compassion and fears of compassion. And this is just where I feel most alive in this area and this topic of research and getting the word out about how compassion is so beneficial to not just healthcare workers, but to all of us.
[00:02:08] Speaker A: I love it. One of my, in my journey to heart rate variability, the discovery of self compassion, like being a mental health person, I probably could have talked about the importance of it, self acceptance, self compassion, all this. But I've been fascinated with the research specifically around self compassion as somewhat distinct from what we traditionally might call mindfulness meditation, which I am just, I've been geeking out about it ever since Doctor Ina Hazan alerted me that, hey, Matt, you need to look at some of this stuff. So it's, it's been a cool journey for me in this. I'd love to hear with your journey. When did you become familiar about self compassion and then interested in it and now published a great book and an expert on this topic.
[00:03:05] Speaker B: Expert. That's a fun word.
[00:03:07] Speaker A: You did write a great book. I'm using it.
[00:03:11] Speaker B: Well, you know, for me, self compassion, it is still a struggle. But for me, I started looking at compassion, self compassion when I was angry.
And my anger led me to this place because I was angry about, I mean, macro, like, the state of the world. I was angry at the world. Like, this world is so messed up, and it's also very beautiful, but that's not where I was at the time. I was angry. I was seeing what was wrong, and I felt helpless and hopeless.
I looked around in my own personal life, and I was very dissatisfied with the quality of relationships within my family of origin and some relationships I was experiencing at the time. And I was, you know, thinking to myself, what's the point?
And so I started looking for the point, and then I started looking for ways to not only see what's beautiful in this world and to see what's beautiful in difficult relationships, but to embody it and to bring it so that it is a physiological hit. It's not just something you talk about, because I see so many people talking about it, but I don't see many people embodying it. And then you don't receive the benefit of it, the peace and the resilience and the qualities of healing. And it's just so anger got me to healing in a very, you know, winding road.
[00:05:05] Speaker A: And you share in the book, and I think this gives us a great context for our listeners, you and I, I know, could probably do an eight hour episode on the state of the healthcare workforce right now, and some listeners might benefit from that. Maybe that'll be something to put on the list. But I love for you, because in the book, you do a great job of talking about sort of that dark place, especially during COVID with everything going on in healthcare. And as you and I were talking before, we hit record that the healthcare industry workforce is really experiencing a crisis right now on several different levels. And so as you were on the front lines of COVID and just the. And I don't use the word trauma lightly, but I really believe for so many people in healthcare, it was a traumatic time, and I don't use that lightly. We also had the biggest civil rights movement. We had political unrest, a whole heck of a lot of else going on with this. And so I'd love to just kind of hear about, you know, going through one of the hardest times that I think healthcare providers have gone through in recent memory. Um, and. And you're, you know, your work with self compassion in a real traumatic situation.
[00:06:30] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, I think that the. The most important thing is to have an awareness, you know? And. And I think that when we were going through that experience and the pandemic, we did not have an awareness because it was unprecedented. How could we be aware? I mean, you have to have knowledge base knowledge of something to have an awareness of it, of its existence. Right?
[00:06:55] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:06:55] Speaker B: You can't know the color green if you've never seen the color green. And somebody didn't tell you, hey, that's green. So, so what we had was this experience that we collectively lived through.
We survived it, if we're lucky, a lot of people didn't. And so dealing with that and trying to come to terms with the enormity of not knowing, and I think that was one of the greatest things that hit us the hardest, was the not knowing and the not being able to do what we came here to do, which is to help people uncover their healing, help to get people to healing. And when we couldn't do that, I think that would be classified as somewhat of a moral injury. And I don't use that term lightly because I know that is a combat military term where soldiers have to do things in the name of the United States of America or whatever country they're from, and those things dropping bombs on villages, that's moral injury. Also having the absolute worst health care crisis that we've seen occur before our eyes and not having the tools to fix it and the craziness that surrounded on accessing those tools. Again, moral injury. And so I think about that. I think about the trauma of what it felt like for me personally. Am I going to get my family sick? Am I going to bring this home? I need to help these people, but helping these people could harm the people I love.
It was very dramatic there for quite a long time. And so I think that coming out of that, we need to really honor and respect and have awareness for what we've been through. And I think what's happening right now is there's this movement to just move past it. Yeah, it's over. Let's go.
And I don't think that's going to happen in a meaningful way until we address what's actually occurred and having an awareness of that.
[00:09:19] Speaker A: And I think that that's so important, especially for healthcare.
I try to really get people thinking as we sort of enter different stages of COVID and things maybe start to get. When a vaccine's not going to improve your mental health, that doesn't help you recover from trauma. It's going to be good. Don't get me wrong. But it's not going to be the magical fix. And the dirty secret about healthcare is healthcare was an industry that was an absolute train wreck before COVID hit. When you looked at most burned out industries, healthcare usually is number one on that list. And so if you go back to dysfunction after experiencing a trauma, that's a recipe for disaster. And that's where I was like, I loved your thinking about new ways to look at this. New ways we were talking. You challenged some of the ways I was kind of thinking about this in my work with healthcare providers and new ways and innovative ways to think about the health of the workforce. And I wonder, just some of the lessons, by the way, you got to get the book to get the whole, whole thing, but just some of your lessons that you kind of taken out of the experience and now, on the other side of that, helping, I think writing a really powerful book for those that are still in, I think, the trauma of healthcare and post Covid healthcare environments.
[00:10:46] Speaker B: Right. And so one of the things that I think is really important is we've all. We've. We keep going back to this avoiding burnout. Yeah, we can't. We're. Well, number one, we're already burnt out, so avoiding it isn't going to help. And then. And then saying, well, how do you recover from burnout? And it's. It's this focus on burnout that's causing part of the problem, because it's just like, if you're on a bicycle and you see a pothole, and you're like, okay, I gotta avoid that pothole. Gotta avoid that. But you end up, boom, going right into the pothole, because that's what you're focusing on. And so with the same thing, what we keep putting our attention on, we just give more energy to it. And so we say, well, we can avoid burnout. Well, you kinda can't avoid burnout when the conditions are made for burnt out. Yeah, that's out individuals. It's. It's right there. So one of the things to focus on is what makes us flourish? What makes us come to life, what makes us want to not only show up because we'll show up all broken with crutches, we'll show up.
But what does it take for us to flourish in this type of situation where we've been through a lot, we're traumatized, we're tired, we are burnt out. But it's. You got to go back to the basics. And I always think of, like, a flower. So you have a flower in the dirt, and then you have. And it's like. And then you have another flower next to it. So you have a daffodil, you have a tulip, you have a sunflower, you have a hyacinth, and then you have this orchid. Right? Because orchids always die, in my experience.
So you have all these different kinds of flowers that have all these different kinds of needs. Well, guess what? That's humanity. We all have. We are all the same underneath. We need the same. We have roots, we need the dirt, we need the earth, we need the sun, we need the, you know, all of this. But what we need is going to be a little bit different in each person. And can you individualize that? Why, yes, you can. And people will say, well, that's impossible to know what every single. Well, it's pretty basic. What we need.
We need to feel seen and heard, right?
[00:13:08] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:13:08] Speaker B: We need to have some kind of agency over what we do, and we need to be appreciated for our gifts and be able to express them where we are at. And when we have these things, we are able to flourish in a way that we can't otherwise do.
[00:13:29] Speaker A: Love that. I love that.
[00:13:30] Speaker B: And that's kind of missing, if you think about it. It's, you know, we can't really get there until we start having an awareness of its absence, too. And that's the thing, is that you have to be aware of what's there and you have to be aware of what's in it. Just like in a garden, if you have a bunch of pests coming in at night, eating all your flowers, you have a deer coming. Well, then you're going to have to say, well, how do I control that pest?
[00:13:56] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:13:57] Speaker B: How do I pollinate? How do I get my pollinators coming in, my little bees spreading everything around with goodness? How do we get that to happen? It's. You can, you can take this metaphor and build on it, and build on it, and you'll actually start to see your garden grow or your burnout dissipate. You know, it's a really interesting thing, and it's so simple, but it isn't easy.
[00:14:24] Speaker A: Yeah, I love that. So let's talk about defining self compassion again. It's sort of, in some circles, it's a buzzword. I think other people could not even begin to try to really define it in any meaningful way. You do the book just a great job of laying this out. So I'd love to. I loved it before because we got to get to the Vegas nerve soon, so. But before, I want to delay gratification here. And for those that might not be familiar with this area, well, what is. What is self compassion?
[00:15:03] Speaker B: Well, you know, it's so funny because there are so many different ways to define self compassion, but here it is. I would say, if I had to give an elevator speech, I would say that self compassion is the capacity to be with your own humanness in a kind way.
[00:15:24] Speaker A: Yeah, love that.
[00:15:26] Speaker B: I mean, we are human. We will mess up. We will clean up.
And to be able to be with your lovely side and your not so lovely side and love them both equally, that's self compassion. I mean, love that being with what is. With who you are.
[00:15:52] Speaker A: And I love about your book to just. Just really, you know, putting definitions around it. Like, I think that, you know, in my field, too, like empathy versus compassion. I think empathy. You know, you know, it's interesting that with self compassion, sometimes I think empathy gets a bad name because I think there's a couple. And I learned this at business school, which was weird. This was, as my. I had basically a master's in psychology at the time. And never, like, there's the types of empathy of one. And what we want to avoid is feeling what the other person feels. One, because you can't really do that. Two is because it'll destroy you unless you're just around joyful people all day. The other is to really try to understand. And that's where I think empathy and compassion on one hand can really go hand in hand. Whereas if you look at empathy as you're feeling what the other person feels, that is. That is scary. And I know, and you make a good argument against the term compassion fatigue, but that's where we see those sort of terminologies, I think being used is that. And we also know on top of it, emotions are contagious. So it's, if we're not careful, the people's emotions, and you're an ice field who a lot of them are struggling, are fearful, are maybe hopeless, are a whole bunch of things can become our emotions as well. And I love how you talk about self compassion is almost protective, but not in like a.
You're not protecting it from another person.
You're really kind of what you just said, you're. You're bringing the best of that in and the best of yourself into that. That relationship. And I found that incredibly powerful, how you put that.
[00:17:44] Speaker B: It's approaching suffering with an open heart and boundaries.
And as long as you don't close your heart and you can have as many boundaries as you need to protect your own sensitive self, but keep your heart open while you're doing it. The minute that you shut down your heart and other people, you know, that's them. This is me. I can't believe they do this or they do that or they believe this or they believe that. Then it becomes something that's not. Compassion.
[00:18:23] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:18:24] Speaker B: Compassion has room for everything.
You say that.
[00:18:30] Speaker A: Can you say that one more time?
[00:18:32] Speaker B: Self compassion has room for everything. The totality of who you are.
[00:18:40] Speaker A: I love that.
All right, so let's talk about the Vegas nerve.
[00:18:47] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:18:48] Speaker A: You have a whole chapter on the Vegas nerve. I read it twice.
I probably missed something the first time because I got so excited that there was a chapter just on the Vegas nerve and the mind body connection.
So I think just a little bit curious. Let me lead you into this topic of when, as a medical professional, were you. When did you get fascinated? What brought you to our friend the vagus nerve?
[00:19:21] Speaker B: Honestly, when my blood pressure started dropping into the eighties, over fifties, and my heart rate was like, 40, and I was still walking around and I thought, and my healthcare providers thought, what's going on? Checked all the things that it could have been, and nothing was wrong with me.
Nothing was wrong with me.
It's because it's the things we don't measure.
[00:19:52] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:19:53] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:19:55] Speaker A: And that is really fast. Yeah, go ahead. Sorry. That just struck me as really powerful. Yeah, right.
[00:20:02] Speaker B: That's what led me to the Vegas nerve. You know, it's like people, you know, I have to say, when stuff is going terribly wrong in your life, pay close attention, because there's some glory in there. There's some beautiful, rich stuff in there.
And I'm talking abuse aside. I'm not talking, like, being abused. Right.
We can all gain strengths, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm just talking about when you're feeling overwhelmed, when you're getting sick repeatedly, when you're having difficulty, check out your autonomic nervous system, right? See what's going on. Because chances are you're out of balance.
And another thing that I like to help my patients with is the vocabulary that they use when talking about their health issues is instead of saying things like, I have this thing, saying things like, my body's out of balance versus I've got a chronic disease, I've got this, I've got that. That may be true, and I'm not saying to deny the truth, but the true truth is, is that your body's out of balance because your body works for homeostasis. All the time. And that autonomic nervous system is working over time, and that parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system are working together constantly to make you feel good and balanced and to bring you to your natural state of being, which is peace, calm and compassion, because your body fights for the natural states. And when you are calm, peaceful and healthy, that's actually a natural state. Disease is not a natural state. It's what happens when things get out of balance. So that vagus nerve, that's why there's a whole chapter on my vagus nerve, my little buddy.
[00:21:59] Speaker A: Yes, I love it. I love it. And that's why I'm hoping, and I hope to be somewhat of a positive force in this, of how do we start to get heart rate variability, you know, these metrics into, you know, the vital signs, you know, how do we start to get this information?
And it's not the easiest thing to measure in the world, but, you know, how do we get, start getting this more and more into the medical profession? Because I still meet cardiologists who have never heard, well, they've heard of heart rate variability, but until they go back and google it, they don't. They. It was something they heard in school and they haven't thought about it since. And I'm like, just go Google it. Don't listen to me. Like, go, go Google it. And they come back and say, oh, this is pretty powerful stuff.
[00:22:51] Speaker B: Right. See, the thing about heart rate variability, which I know, you know, is that when we are in an optimal state of heart rate variability, our body is in balance.
[00:23:04] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:23:05] Speaker B: And that vagus nerve, I'm going to go back to it again because you know how much I love it.
[00:23:09] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:23:10] Speaker B: Innervates almost every organ in our body.
Our gut. Yeah, I mean, our gut, we have a lot of difficulties with our gut, and it shows up everywhere in our body. But when we're in balance and that vagal tone has hit its sweet spot, our body is, it creates the conditions for healing to occur. Now, is the vagus nerve going to heal every disease? No. But is the vagus nerve going to create the conditions so that healing can arise? Yes, it is. And that's the thing, because it's multifaceted. I mean, it's not just the vagus nerve. If you're smoking camel unfiltered and drinking scotch every day while your Vegas nerve, I mean, your Vegas nerve is going to have a little trouble. Trouble being balanced with all the booze but. Or the cigarettes. But I'm just saying that none of it's going to, you know, help but it's a multi factor thing. But really the one thing and we have so much control over it and we wasted away by not utilizing it. And it is one of the easiest, but also or it's one of the simplest things we can do. It is not easy because if it were easy, we'd all be doing it all day long.
[00:24:30] Speaker A: Yeah, well, which is my ultimate goal.
I don't know. All day long is still a tricky thing, but at least to get, make sure it's at least affordable for everybody who's interested in doing it. That's my kind of mission in life right now.
[00:24:47] Speaker B: And it is kind of interesting to think of it as a vital sign because what would be more vital exactly?
[00:24:55] Speaker A: I don't have an answer to that. Yeah, because if you could get daily read and this is, I think one of the real, I think cool things for healthcare, also for mental health and pretty much put health on anything is if you can get people to take those daily readings on a regular basis or get have a wearable. What they're getting those readings, I just can't think if a PA physician, nurse practitioner goes in, looks at, looks at their EM, you know, their electronic medical record and gets a summary of the last months or since they started the meds or since they seen them last, get a synopsis of their heart rate variability.
I mean, that's going to tell you that little blood pressure thing they do on me is basically measuring my stress from the commute and that my appointment started five minutes late. Like, what are we measuring? And that's the tricky thing about heart rate variability. If you do it in the office setting only, it's probably going to tell you. It'll tell you something, but not a.
[00:25:56] Speaker B: Ton, but it doesn't give you a good picture of what's really happening in their body. And it's really interesting because you can look at the vitals and you can see what the blood pressure is. The respiratory rate is very telling because it's usually 16 to 20 and that's too fast, you know, and then, you know, Ina Kazan, she's, you know, right there. Low and slow breathing. Not a deep breath. Do not take a deep breath.
[00:26:27] Speaker A: Don't take a deep breath.
[00:26:29] Speaker B: That sends a message to the other side where it stresses you out more. It's, you know, sends a sympathetic nervous system, you know, warning, warning.
[00:26:40] Speaker A: Let's remove what virtual break there is right now. Let's get it out. Just get it, get it. Get an anxiety flow.
[00:26:47] Speaker B: Get it let's make it worse. And so it's that low and slow breathing that when I see anxious patients, I do say, hey, you know what? Let me show you a trick.
And I get them, you know, pretty close to the resonant frequency breathing rate.
[00:27:08] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:27:09] Speaker B: While they're there. And they're like, what just happened? And I'm like, you just happened. Your natural state just came and rose up because you asked it to. You asked it to by taking that low and slow breath, because our body communicates by physical motion and sit in and then messages from the brain. And it's like this combination of these two things flowing back and forth, you actually have way more control over your life experience than you think.
But it's tricky.
[00:27:45] Speaker A: Yeah. And I'd love to lead us into. From that, too, that. That connection, really, between heart rate variability, the vagus nerve, and self compassion. And this is where I think the science and research gets really, like I said, there's a whole. I've discovered this whole beautiful segment of the research, which, again, is not necessarily mindfulness meditation. Um, I think that we're seeing some. I mean, it's good. Residence frequency seems to work for both, but it's distinct. So I would love for you to talk a little bit about, you know, as you are now, doctor, in this and expert in this, just kind of your thinking about that connection and self compassion kind of being. It could be seen as just, oh, a concept out there, but you really bring the science into it as well.
[00:28:38] Speaker B: I really am excited about some of the findings of my research. So let me tell you. Let me tell you some stuff I found. So when we categorically measure self compassion, compassion, fear of compassion, and heart rate variability, and I did cortisol as well. But when I'll stick with the heart rate variability and when we categorize, like, high, medium, and low. So it isn't like if you have a score of five of compassion, your heart rate variability will be 25. It's not that simple.
It's not linear in that way, but they are. They are correlated, because when we categorically measure high, medium, and low and high, medium and low, we just kind of give them that. Those. Those qualities that the RMSSD and the high frequency actually increase when we have higher compassion and self compassion and decrease when we have higher fears of compassion. And those two measurements give us more information about vagal tone than its counterpart. The SDNN, gives us a little bit more of the balance between sympathetic and parasympathetic.
[00:29:58] Speaker A: But, yes, I love RMSSD. So yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
[00:30:03] Speaker B: Yeah. So the RMSSD and the high frequency, the natural log of the high frequency, and that actually showed change. It just changes in the population. Like those with higher levels of compassion had higher RM SSD's, and they had higher high frequency and those. And it didn't show a correlation with the SDNN in my study.
But what I think, because, you know, now, because I'm like, wow, okay, so what does that mean? Well, the STNN has more of that kind of sympathetic, you know, it shows you a little bit more of what's going on sympathetically and parasympathetically, opposed to more vagal tone, which is more parasympathetic. Right. And so it was really interesting. And I have to have to just check my note here because I don't want to misquote my own research, because, you know, because sometimes you're working with a human brain, and this is what happens.
Right. But when we analyzed it differently with the spearman's correlation, then we had the HRV showing just with compassion, having the natural log of the SDNN, the standard deviation of normal to normal beats had a correlation with just compassion. Okay. Not self compassion, not fear of compassion, but compassion. And this is why I think so.
Okay, you ready?
[00:31:39] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:31:40] Speaker B: Okay. So, in a state of compassion, you first have to have an awareness. You have to recognize that somebody's suffering.
And then you go, oh, geez, they're suffering. And you get that empathetic hit where you actually, for a minute, feel their pain. You feel their pain, and in a compassionate response, you move from that empathetic hit, that boom, that paint the pain centers in your brain lighting up. You move from there to the front of your brain. And now we're finding even the cerebellum has stuff to do with fear and recognizing things. It's really cool. But for now, we're just going to talk about this. And so you have this frontal lobe saying, oh, shoot, you know what? I've been there. I've suffered. Maybe I can do something to alleviate their suffering. And then you start coming up with a plan. The pain shut down a bit. The planning comes up. The dopamine centers start bing, bing, bing, firing a little bit, because it feels good to come up with a plan to alleviate somebody's suffering. It feels good to just imagine alleviating somebody else's suffering. And then that's when you start getting that vagal tone and that innervation and that calmness of, like. Because, you know, when you go into planning mode and all of a sudden, you go boom. And you're calm. You're like, you're in the mode, you're in the flow, whatever you want to call it, but it's that point. So you have this empathetic hit. Then you have this pain centers of the brain. You have this lighting up, that lighting up, and then you go into the compassionate action, and that's where the reward centers start lighting up, and all of this great stuff is happening. And you get that oxytocin from bonding when you're feeling somebody else's pain, too. And you get that throughout your compassionate experience. Compassion is an action. Right. But with HRV, I believe that that SDNN, that that little sympathetic nervous system hit that you get when you recognize somebody's suffering, because it's a little shocking at first, right? Like, oh, and that's a little sympathetic nervous system kind of activating you. Right?
I bet that's showing up there in that STN, don't you think?
[00:33:54] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I've never. I've never, like, connected in the way you have, but, I mean, it makes total sense, and I.
[00:34:03] Speaker B: Don't be wrong. Yeah, more and find out.
[00:34:08] Speaker A: I would like for you to do that, too, now that you're a doctor.
Well, you find where, you know, I think that one of the future excitements I have with HRV is, what are these different. So SDNN and armst. Sometimes, you know, you. You've got to kind of get to HRV 201 to understand, really, what are they that different? You know, they kind of trend together most of the time, but there is those subtle differentiations and what those. What those are telling us, I believe, is really the. The exciting future of this incredible biometric to show what is that? And then this is where that sort of the negative empathy or the negative impact of some empathy, of if you continue to feel someone's pain, you know, that vicarious potential trauma risk, that, you know, a sympathetic, you know, piece of that are we are we. Can we give people the skill to switch into the more parasympathetic? And that, that's where I'm just excited. We can measure this. And so I could you and I go teach the world on this, and then we actually have data to show, you know, this isn't Catherine and Matt just making something up. Yeah. There's real science behind what we're trying to do and get really specific about it, which I find fascinating.
[00:35:35] Speaker B: Yes. And, you know, it's. You can help people, and you want to know that the easiest way to help them is to help them remove the blocks that get in the way of their natural state of being. You create the conditions for their natural goodness, their humanity, to rise up. That's it. You remove those blocks. Because we were born good. We were compassionate. We were born with all of this ready to be expressed. And stuff happens in every human life that blocks it. Blocks it with fear. We get hurt, we. We get. See, you know, we are. We are supposed to fall into roles. And sometimes these roles, like for men especially, it can be very difficult for men because they've been taught to be a certain way. And compassion is more of a feminine quality, and that's not true at all. Compassion is 100% badassery because it takes incredible strength to be with who you really are and love it in its totality.
[00:36:49] Speaker A: Yeah. And boy, will that guy vulnerabilities, you know? And. But to look, that's where that strength, I think, comes in, is to. To sit with those vulnerabilities and accept where you're at. And maybe it's not where you always want to be, but just that, that sort of self acceptance there to help move forward.
So such a powerful concept.
[00:37:17] Speaker B: And it's like talking about hospital systems. It's the same thing talking about the individual system. You have to have an awareness of what's happening. So being with those parts of ourselves that are difficult to be with are essential, because without the awareness of these parts, there is no healing and growth. There's no condition that allows for the arising of our most true self.
[00:37:44] Speaker A: I love that. I love that.
[00:37:46] Speaker B: And that's the same thing.
[00:37:47] Speaker A: So I gotta ask, squeeze this into our time here.
So we talk a lot about whether it's severe burnout, whether it's secondary trauma, vicarious trauma, whether it's just trauma, trauma, whether it's moral injury, which I think can quickly rise to trauma from a biological perspective, you know, in that, and it's funny, you've done more research than I have. I actually thought it was a healthcare term to begin with, not a military term.
[00:38:18] Speaker B: Oh, no, it was a military term.
[00:38:20] Speaker A: Yeah, that's. Yeah, I just know I've studied it in the healthcare context. So that's interesting to learn that history. So we got all these things happening to us, maybe even our nutritional intake, our sleep quality. I mean, all these things of modern society and the stress of the condition. Yeah, so it's hidden espermaldre, and we carry those, you know, our ventral vagal, our HRv will show. Show that.
And the kind of question that I have for you and you do a good job in this book. But I want to. I gotta ask it to. Is like self compassion, you know, residence frequency, breathing. Self compassionate, residence frequency, breathing.
We're strengthening that part, helping to heal that part that has been impacted by stressors.
Name your stressor. That impacts your heart rate variability. So I'm interested how you help people come to that, because all I'm doing is you trying to talk to some of the physicians I've tried to work with over the years who just don't want to hear it. Right. And how do you maybe do a skeptical person talk about how self compassion can become an aspect of. Maybe if I could use the word resiliency or healing from what someone's been through.
[00:39:46] Speaker B: Right? So, so funny you should ask. So I just. I just spoke with a group of physicians recently, and by the end of the.
The conversation and the presentation, I had changed some minds.
And this is how I did it. It's very simple.
It's pointing out, first and foremost, our common humanity, because there's that thumb again, pointing out our common humanity. Even the bot. Even the bot agrees. And so knowing that we all want to be happy, healthy, safe and free, there's nobody in this world that doesn't want to be happy, healthy, safe and free. Now, what that means, what my happy, healthy, safe and free is could be wildly different than yours.
But we all have to start from that base that all of us want. Happy, healthy, safe and free. And then once we can get. Grasp that and wrap our little noggins around that, then we start looking at, okay, so now that I. Now that I have this capacity, I've created the conditions for my own compassion, for myself and others to arise, then what the hell do I do with it? Yeah, now that I have this capacity, how do I keep it?
How do I keep this from blowing up in space?
Well, you're gonna have to start practicing. And how do you practice? Well, you just interact with other people, and then you start realizing it's gonna be difficult with other people than some people.
And so that's when you have to start diving deep into what blocks compassion.
Or a better question is, what creates the conditions for it to flourish?
And that's it. And you can even stop if you have to stop talking about compassion altogether and start talking about your true nature, start talking about your fundamental goodness like you're a good person. Look at this is. I mean, people who go into medicine are good people, by and large, who want to help other people.
So tapping in on that fundamental goodness and recognizing that and going from that space into the next level, which is now, how do we keep this going? How is this sustainable? How is this ecosystem of flourishing, compassion, self compassion. How do we keep this going and not get distracted by, oh, we're going to get burnout. Oh, my God. This is. How do we avoid this? Oh, my God. Look at this. This is happening. We don't have enough money. There aren't enough people. What's going on? No, stop. Yeah, stop it. It's like you're, you know, it's like, stop it. What we need to start looking at is the humanity of what we're doing.
How are we connecting with ourselves?
Because if we're going to be leaders, if we're going to be leaders in healthcare, and everybody who practices medicine is a leader, because every patient we have, they're looking for our guidance. That makes us a leader.
However small or big, we have to be right with ourselves, and we have to create the conditions within ourselves for compassion to arise and set that example for our patients so that they have the conditions for compassion to arise. And then the more people that do it, the harder it is to deny that it truly is the cure, the remedy, if you will, for what ails modern medicine.
[00:43:55] Speaker A: And I would. The only thing I would change that is, I would say modern society.
I mean, healthcare is a special kind of train wreck right now, as you and I both know. But, you know, we know that, you know, Gallup came out with 59% of workers are burned out right now. You know, so it's. It's like, that is, I think, such a amazing message. And, boy, maybe I can. I feel like I haven't even touched on, like, chapter seven through nine yet in the book. So I will hope that you come back at some point, because I am just love this conversation.
So the book is the compassion remedy. Where can people find out a little bit more about you? We'll put this information in the show notes as well.
[00:44:45] Speaker B: I have a website, Katherineschweickert.com. you can get my book on Amazon, Barnes and Noble.
If you're in Iowa at Prairie City Lights. They have it in the window.
My father had it put in the window, but that's okay.
[00:45:03] Speaker A: Awesome. That is awesome.
[00:45:06] Speaker B: And so you can. You can. You can find it anywhere. Yeah. Any bookstore can order it for you through Ingram. So, yeah.
[00:45:14] Speaker A: Awesome. And I just got to throw out there because we did. She also has a chapter on the brain as well. So for you hRV geeks out there, like me, it gives you. You do a great job of just bringing, I think probably somebody who hasn't heard about heart rate variability, really studied the brain along while giving us nerds out there just plenty to chew on. So your breakdown of the aspects of the brain with stress and self compassion was just brilliantly done. So yeah, I definitely couldn't recommend the book more. So congratulations.
[00:45:51] Speaker B: Thank you so much. I really appreciate.
[00:45:54] Speaker A: Yeah, and like I said, we'll put more information, we'll put links to the book and optimal hrv.com dot. You can see it in the show notes. Katherine, I really hope in a few weeks or months here we can have another conversation because I got like a dozen more areas I'd love to explore with you. But. But thank you for this gift and thank you for your work. Healthcare. Healthcare is a desperate need, and I think society is desperately in need of solutions and strategies and really just the permission to love yourself and do it in a scientific way.
[00:46:33] Speaker B: How does science back this stuff up, man?
[00:46:36] Speaker A: Absolutely. Well, thank you so much. Thank you for listening, and as always, we'll see you next week. Peace.
