Celebrating our 150th Episode!

[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 [email protected] dot. Please enjoy the show. [00:00:31] Speaker B: Welcome friends from the Heart Rate Variability podcast. I am Matt Bennett and I am flying solo today for our 150th episode. This is a big milestone for us here at the Heart Rate Variability podcast. When Jeff and I started to record some of the first episodes back three or four years ago now, we kind of had a question of how many episodes could you do on one biometric. One of my little bit of frustrations that I had with other similar podcasts is they wouldn't talk a whole lot about heart rate variability itself. There would be wellness, there would be other things that seem to come in and maybe HRV would be mentioned once or twice if that, during the interviews and the conversations and we really set out as, hey, there's not a heart rate variability podcast out there. Could we fill this space? And here we are at 150 episodes. So I guess we've proven one thing is that you can at least accord about 125, 150 hours worth of conversations around heart rate variability. So I've got a few questions here that I ask from Friends of the show to kind of submit for this episode. So I'm just going to kind of answer those questions and hopefully kind of set us up for the next, I don't know if we get to 300, but hey, we're going to keep going. So we'll kind of set up the next part of our journey as well. So the first question that came in is, looking back at the journey, how is the understanding awareness of heart rate variability evolved? The first episode of the podcast, I would just say heart rate variability is out there more and more. You know, it's still an interesting thing because I have to be careful. I sleep, eat, breathe, think about obsess about heart rate variability pretty much all day, every day. So I've got Google alerts on it. I'm following the guest of the show. So things come up on my social media all the time. You know, I get journals about heart rate variability. So for me personally, I have to be a little bit careful to balance is I'm obsessed with this stuff and I search it out. Still, the majority of people that I talk to even if they're wearing an Apple Watch or they're wearing a higher end Garmin device that can give them HRV, they may not be familiar with the biometric itself. And so, I mean, we're still at this interesting point, is, I would definitely say that our knowledge about heart rate variability is increasing, and yet there's still a gap there. And I really hope, and I've gotten some good feedback about the podcast is for a lot of people to go back to some of the first episodes where we weren't necessarily starting out talking to the world experts and the founders of HRV and HRV biofeedback. But Jeff and I were kind of struggling with our own learning curve at the time, too. So what I love about the podcast, and looking back years to some of those first episodes, as I kind of went down memory lane preparing for this episode, is we've come so far. My understanding, again, looking back, and somewhere along the line, too, I published some episodes from the Trauma Informed Lens podcast, where I first really got introduced by Kurt and Jerry to the concept of heart rate variability, is, I think where I was during those initial podcasts was where I would say a lot of people we talk to now are still trying to understand this biometric, still trying to get a hold of the science. So I've seen, I won't call it an explosion, but an expansion of understanding and knowledge. We still have a lot of room to grow. I still don't think that we're maximizing the potential power of heart rate variability. So that keeps me motivated, keeps me excited for the next 150 episodes. In terms of guest speakers, who has been most influential and impactful in advancing the conversation around HRV and why? This is a great question and I'm going to avoid maybe picking out one speaker because we've had so many great ones. You know, I would, if I were to answer this question a little bit more generally, it's some of the real founders of this movement. I am amazed and incredibly humbled by the fact that this guy, who is still relatively new to heart rate variability, gets to interview, gets to talk, gets to document, uh, the journey of some of the founders of this field. It's. It's kind of like Freud and young and, you know, Skynyrd are walking around and I get interviewed them on the podcast. And that has just been such a, what would I say? Humbling, but also a highlight. A highlight of my. My whole career is to. To give a venue to document these stories and then follow up. Doctor Gewirch's episode on Concussions, where we're bringing this research to the surface, to our listeners. So I would say if I were to look at those founders, and then we got the new younger generation of folks, I include my collaborators, Ina and Dave, as part of this, is taking all this great foundational work and applying it in different areas, applying it in chiropractic care, applying it in high performers, applying it with trauma in these different areas. I'm not going to pick one person because there's been just so many, but to want to learn about the journey to get us to where we're at today and then where people are taking it moving forward, it's a tremendous honor on our part. All right, next question. Considering the feedback from listeners, what has been the most surprising, unexpected learning about HRV that the audience has gained from the podcast? You know, this is fascinating because I meet a lot of our listeners, you know, it's great. And sometimes I meet them virtually in this zoom world we're in. But it's kind of fun to meet someone who's may have heard, you know, me do. I mean, I don't. I think I've been on most of these podcasts, maybe 145 out of 150, but feel like they know me over the years. And so what I love is that we're keeping it accessible. That's the feedback that I'm currently struggling with and striving for is how do we keep engaging the listeners who may have, and some people tell me they've done this, listen to every episode we put out. How do we give them something new to help further their learning? Wow. If you're brand new to the podcast and the 150 episode is your first episode, welcome to to the heart rate Variability podcast. How do we give our new listeners a way to jump in? And this, honestly, is a big thing I think a lot about is cause I'm not sure if it ever makes sense to go back to episode one. Cause 130 plus hours of listening to get caught up may take you a whole year and of itself, and then you're a year behind already to catch up on another 50 plus hours a podcast. So it's always this challenge of, and I always encourage my guests, and some of my guests will chuckle, is like, feel free to nerd out, right, that the audience is okay with you going deeper, because that's one of the other pieces of positive feedback we get as well, is that we do allow our guests not just to introduce their work, but to dive in a little bit deeper. If there's one piece of feedback I get as an interviewer, which I really cherish, is that people like how we go deeper into subject matters. I think it also scares some people off who I want to be as guests because they think I'm going to push them to the edge of their understanding. And I try to convince them that I can be very gentle with that as well. But those would be some of those key concepts. The other is just appreciation. And that's another thing that I know keeps us all going as well, is that there, there were a lot of people out there, sort of like I was listening to other podcasts out there. I still, there's some foundational ones that I was losing. The WHOOP podcast elite HRV had a great podcast for many years that just, you know, I feel this challenge can like maybe mention HIV. Maybe you can go through a week or two of WHOOP. And I, again, I've listened to every episode of the WHOOP podcast, every episode of Elites podcast where HRV doesn't get mentioned. So people do appreciate about what we're trying to do is keeping HRV in this one biometric centric to what we do. I think most episodes, the typical episodes, has heart rate variability, smack dab in the middle. There's a few other ones where heart rate variability, at least it should get mentioned ten times. That's my rule, is we need to get that, make sure that it stays central, though it may compliment somebody else's research along those lines as well. So that I'd say if you rank the top few things we hear back from our listeners, we also get appreciation that we put this out weekly. I will be honest with you, it can get difficult at times trying to find guests to do this. So if you're out there and you've been using heart rate variability, hey, come on the show. I'd love to interview you and share your expertise with our audience as well. All right. Reflecting on past episodes, could you share some memorable moments or turning points for the podcast that stands out to you? Yeah, I mean, one is, I thought it was great to share our audiobook, the heartbeat of business, with Dave and Ina, going through the chapters and really talking about those. For me, it was great because even though I co authored the book with Dave and Ina being virtual, you don't always kind of, you're talking about the to dos of writing and not sort of sitting back and processing what you've written. So one, it was great to get the audiobook out there for free. If you're interested in that, you can go back into the feed and see it with that. That was just kind of a special because writing a book is a huge process. Doing it with two brilliant people is a lot of fun. And then really kind of as a celebration of getting this book out there into the world, just talking about it, talking about how they thought about the things that we wrote, even though we wrote it together, was really a cool process for me. Other past episodes, I would go back to some of those early ones where it was Jeff and I just talking about heart rate variability. Because one of the things I like about those early episodes is there was a lot of curiosity sometimes I really love to look back early on in my learning curve, whether it's about heart rate variability, trauma, motivational interviewing, because what I love about that initial part of the learning curve is it's so rapid right now. I'm still learning so much and absorbing so much, yet I've read so much on it. I've read research journal articles. So, you know, every step forward is just a little gradual. Whereas when you're right at that beginning of the learning curve, which Jeff and I knew enough about, heart rate variability to probably legitimately call ourselves experts and to develop a very, what I'm still proud of, our initial minimum, valuable product to get out there into the world with optimal HRV. But we were exploring these different issues around that. And so those would be another some past episodes that I really appreciated with our work, a few other ones that stand out. I would say Ina's work on interviewing her around, residence frequency breathing, those have been so powerful for me personally. I know I've been practicing mindfulness for probably about 15 years in one way, shape or form or another. And boy, once I got my residence frequency breathing rate and started integrating that into my mindfulness practice, it's just really improved my stress levels, improved probably my overall health and wellness. It's hard to measure as an end of one sometimes what would have happened if I didn't do it. But I'm just looking at my heart rate variability. Being able to maintain that over years now really has been a real powerful thing. So another one with those past episodes, really working and probing with Ina around that key topic has really been a great way for this to introduce it into my personal journey as well. I always love, you know, we probably had about a dozen or so of these on over the years of trauma experts, you know, working with PTSD and other trauma related conditions. Obviously, that's a huge passion of mine, is what brought me to heart rate variability to begin with. So it's a really great to always for me to connect with people around that issue. And then we got Germer and others that are just like, have been teachers of mine over the years that I've read their books before I met Ina and before I got to interview them. So sometimes meeting your heroes along the way has been a great thing as well. And now that I know about the field, the gervirzes, the Mosses, the Schaefers, and others that have been so fundamental in developing this science over the years, just an absolute joy to be, I would say, humbly, a part of their community. I'm still a newbie. I'm not going to jump in and say, hey, I'm at the levels of these great thinkers. No way would I do that. But the fact that I can bring their research, their work out into the larger environment has just been such an absolute joy. So those are some of the ones that have really been great for me in my learning curve with those episodes. All right, so the final question here, looking forward, what are some topics or guest speakers you're excited to bring to the podcast in the future and continue the conversation around heart rate variability? So, I mean, topic wise, you know, really, the continued application of heart rate variability, one of the things is so practical. It's so, and I know we and others have worked on this, it's accessible to so many people. It's affordable. It's such a powerful metric. So, I mean, just the continued application of this, a lot of the studies still, and I think some of this is just getting people to practice, to measure can be difficult. You know, still a lot of them happen in laboratory kind of settings, typical study settings, getting this more longitudinal data out there, getting better population norms, those sort of things I'm really excited about seeing as we move forward and also just where we're going with the idea of heart rate variability, one of those episodes that sticks out around residence frequency that I've been able to record with InA over the years is the optimal zone. And trying to internally, you know, how can we introduce, while being incredibly well grounded in the science? So we're not taking any steps outside the science at all. How can we introduce maybe more practical measurements? So, optimal zone being a range of low frequency where you want to hit during your mindfulness or biofeedback training, but bringing that into the way to not say, hey, it's a peak low frequency, which for a lot of people is just, what the heck's that mean? The ongoing joke, because I'm still trying to really master the frequency domains with this because of the complication there. And how do we in many ways communicate around these really complex issues? And how do we brainstorm what is the next metric out there? Or how do we utilize metrics and very scientifically good. We're not making jumps of a readiness score or something like that, which, you know, is there research backing this up, but really strong grounded biometrics? As far as guest speakers, I'm just excited for the next AAPB journal to come out. This will publish a week or two before the AAPB conference. So, you know, I'm just really excited to not only invite our past guests back because, you know, we've got so much more to tackle with these great thinkers that have been in rotation and just providing some amazing educational content for our listeners, but also meeting who's out there doing new stuff. What are these thinkers thinking about moving forward? And that's one of the really exciting things to be in this field. And I know I talk a lot about this in the episodes, but in the podcast we get very quickly up into the wall of knowledge about heart rate variability with the world experts. And I actually love that. Yeah, it can be frustrating because not every question has an answer, but there's so much specialization in science and healthcare, like, you know, that it's for a kind of a layperson like me, or at least one that started out with it. You know, I could take a doctoral, you know, I could get a doctor in something and still not kind of hit the edge of knowledge in a topic. Whereas heart rate variability still being relatively new and again since the sixties, so it's not new, but again, the research has exploded in the last few years, really looking at where are those questions? And then really interviewing the people that are saying, okay, we know this, what is next on our journey? What's the next question we should be asking? And what I love about the podcast is we ask some of those questions. Now that doesn't always get us answers in the next three weeks, but we really push that for individuals. And hey, I think it's a great episode when we're saying, okay, this is what we know. We can speculate about what's on the other side of this wall of knowledge, but until the research, until we see it, we're going to really own that. We think this might be what's going on, but we need more research out there to really validate this. That's what I'm really looking forward to continue to do. And really, again, another just really a joy of 150 of these episodes. And some of my favorites have been. Dave has done some interviews solo over the years, and I can't tell you how much I love just to sit back and listen to him interview people with those episodes as well. But just how people are utilizing this to make people's lives better, I mean, that's the core of this podcast, is utilizing this biometric, utilizing the science to make people's lives better. Maybe that's to get a personal best for an athletic performance. Maybe it's to help experience post traumatic growth and recovery from trauma. Maybe it's to address gastrointestinal problems or concussions or heart disease. And all these great things the HRV and HRV biofeedback can really help address. And that's. That's what I'm really excited about, because we know it works with so many different things, yet we still have questions about, you know, what are these other areas that we can really do? So I'm really excited to keep bringing new voices on board with this as well. So final thing is just kind of a huge thank you if any of my past guests are listening. Thank you. A heartfelt thank you again. It was like I've spent the last kind of 20 years of my career identifying gaps, whether it's writing a book where no book exists on that topic, like heart rate variability with trauma or trauma informed motivational interviewing or trauma sensitive early education. HRV in the business world, like I always am looking for, hey, where are the gaps of knowledge transmission? And can I. In a. In a good way. I don't want to go through and do it poorly, but in a good way, can I help fill that knowledge gap? And I hope for those. Again, whether you're new to HRV or whether you've been working with HRV for decades, that the guests we bring on the way we think about this gives a little bit something to everybody, and that's my real hope moving forward, is one, is we can just keep bringing these great voices on. I still think it's an open question, is how many episodes can you have of a podcast based on one biometric? We answered the question, at least 150. And I've got a few guests lined up, so I could probably say with confidence, 160. But we always do need guests, so please don't hesitate if you're using HRV, HRV biofeedback, doing any research on this, I am really always looking for great guests. Please know that we don't always have to hit the barrier of knowledge every time. You don't have to be the world expert on HRV to be a great guest. I think a lot of our guests who are also in their learning curve, but applying it to their work are some of the best for our listeners because they're not looking at somebody who may have helped found it. I think those episodes are really great too, but somebody who's integrating it in. So please, if you're using HRV, please reach out to me. I'm always looking for great guests. Also, if you're out there and you're a student listening to this, I am desperate to bring student voices onto this podcast. It's one of my shortcomings. If I were to list one failure that I've had as a host to this podcast, I have. I failed to engage students. I want that next generation of researchers, of people who are writing papers and thinking about this in undergrad or graduate work to get on the show. I think maybe it's intimidating when you've got, you know, the founder on the week before and now I'm a student, you know, and do I know enough to be a guest? My answer is yes. So if you're out there doing some research, writing papers on HRv, reach out to me. I really want to bring. I think we've done a good job with the current generation. Like I said, we've got the founders of this movement. We've got a lot of their voices on the podcast. I really want to know now that I'm pushing 50, what are people in their twenties, thirties, students, undergrad, graduate work, really thinking about and utilizing this biometric. I went through a master's degree in psychology undergrad without ever hearing this term or polyvagal theory or autonomic nervous system. I want to hear what people are learning and thinking about this from those younger generations as well. So with that said, I want to leave with just a huge thank you to the folks listening to my voice right now. We look at our listeners sometimes we're amazed how many people listen to the podcast from all over the world. It's a real cool thing to log on because, you know, sometimes is there anybody listening to what we're doing? And you log on and yeah, we get thousands of listens every week, which is really humbling and in so many ways that there is an interest for this. So I want to thank you for listening. Thank you for your support. I'm going to dedicate to you. I will keep doing this as long as I can find people and topics to talk about. This is why you know, again, if you feel like you're part of the heart rate variability community and you haven't been a guest, reach out to me. We want to get your voice on here as well. So with that said, thank you for 150 amazing conversations. We look forward to maybe 150 more. Let's see how us nerds can keep something moving, moving forward with this. But I appreciate you all, as always. You can find show notes, [email protected]. Thank you so much. And we'll see you next week.