[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the Heart Rate Variability podcast.
[00:00:02] Speaker B: 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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[00:00:31] Speaker A: Welcome, friends, to the Heart Rate Variability podcast. I am Matt. Here just to do a quick introduction, we're going to bring back one of people's favorite episodes this week. My initial interview with Doctor Fred Schaefer. Fred has been on the show three times now. I just saw him last week at the AAPB conference where he celebrated and was celebrating his end of his tenure as president of AAPbase. He's done some amazing things in the field of heart rate variability. He has two additional classic episodes recorded earlier this year on the time domains and the low frequency. Some of our most listened to and liked episodes. So I thought it would be great just to kind of celebrate everything that is Fred Schaefer to bring on his original episode with us where he talks about his journey with heart rate variability gives us a peek into his research.
It was sort of my first time really sitting down with Fred, and it was a start of just my tremendous respect for, for the man behind the reputation. So I'm excited, if you haven't heard this, to share this one back. Just listening and prepping for this episode. Even though I recorded it, it was just great to, uh, hear this again and learn from Fred, uh, on this episode. So enjoy.
[00:01:58] Speaker B: Um, I will see you next week.
[00:02:00] Speaker A: With a brand new episode.
[00:02:02] Speaker B: Welcome, friends, to the heart rate variability podcast. I am Matt Bennett. I am here today with Doctor Fred Schaefer, who I feel like this, this podcast is ideally timed kind of towards the end of one year, towards the beginning of another year, to talk to Fred about his journey with heart rate variability.
Doctor Ina Hazan introduced me to Fred's work a while ago. I think we actually may have gotten introduced briefly at the AAPB conference a little over a year ago now or a little less than a year ago.
But a big fan of the blog and the work you do, and Ina could not speak higher, higher. And if Ina speaks highly of you, you can't ask for much more. So, Doctor Schaeffer, I want to welcome you to the podcast. It's a great honor to have you before I jump in and talking about your journey with heart rate variability in your career. Just love to just give a quick introduction to our listeners.
[00:03:08] Speaker C: I have taught experimental psychology and biological psychology at Truman State University for almost 47 years.
I run the. Well, actually, my students, my lab managers run our center for Applied Psychophysiology, which is primarily focused on HRV research.
So much of what I will talk about today comes from my students hard work.
[00:03:43] Speaker B: That's awesome.
So with that, you know, you know, I want to, not that you remember everything about 40 some years ago when you started, but love to say, like, how was HRV there when you started? Did you, did you bring it in? How, how sort of in your, as a, you know, in your earlier career, did you sort of get interested in a topic that you've often, you've given so much information, research to the world about?
[00:04:16] Speaker C: Okay.
It's hard to know exactly when our research team began, but around 1977, it was many years later that I attended presentations by Paul Lehrer and Dick Gewirtz, and they were inspiring. Now, I had already done training at the very start of my career with Eric Pepper. And Eric is one of those remarkable individuals who introduces so many people and mentors so many people in the field. And much of my early experience with Eric was about effortless breathing and posture and ergonomics.
But breathing was an important foundation and theme. I also attended a wonderful workshop at AAPB by Robert Fried, who talked about the hyperventilation syndrome and discussed the issue of over breathing and championed what he called low and slow breathing.
And these became the foundation so that after several years of listening to Dick and Paul, I decided that it was time to take a deep dive into HRV and to see, for example, if we could do effective training in our setting with healthy undergraduates, and then to explore how can you teach people to effectively increase their HRV.
[00:06:34] Speaker B: Awesome. So I'm interested. Is still an early pioneer in this, and I know you mentioned some of the great names. Dick has been on the podcast a couple times already, and it's just like he's one of those that I. What do you want to talk about? Because the show is yours kind of thing. So, like, when you started working with this, when you started working with those undergrads, just like, I just kind of been interested what sort of epiphanies or, like, okay, there's something pretty powerful with this biometric. I just kind of wonder what that as you started to integrate that in, started to do the research, just maybe some of the early epiphanies or findings that really inspired you to, to keep going.
[00:07:27] Speaker C: Well, I think we had reports from students who had used slow paced breathing and had really wonderful results.
I'll give you an example. One student had gone to conference with us, and he forgot his rescue medication for irritable bowel syndrome.
But he knew from the literature that HRV practice can impact this and can help to reduce symptom frequency and severity. So that's what he did during the conference. He had no problems. Now, was it his HRV practice that protected him? I have no idea, but he believes that's the case. And so these testimonials, with all the caution we need to extend the testimonials, students felt better, they reported better management of stress.
And so it looked like this was worth pursuing.
[00:08:54] Speaker B: So one of the things that there is, I wouldn't call it a drinking game, because alcohol has never been involved in it, but it kind of is along the lines of, that is Google heart rate variability and anything you're interested in, my friends and I will go back and forth, because when I was first learned about heart rate variability, you know, it just kind of smacked me across the face. Honestly. I was like, wait a minute. This helps to measure the stress response. I'd spent the last 15 years of my life really dedicated to trauma healing and trauma and folks who really have a dysregulated autonomic nervous system and neurobiology. And it's just like, I was like, you know, and I was like a dog with a bone. When I learned everything, I just kept googling like, hrvn. And your name came up, like so many times in those different research studies, and I just kind of like it. As you progressed, what were some of kind of maybe your favorite studies or works to be involved in that contributed to our current knowledge about heart rate variability?
[00:10:01] Speaker C: Well, the first thing I like to say is that it's important to recognize the giants on whose shoulders we stamped the late Evgeny Vashilo.
Paul Lair, Dick Gewirtz, my colleague at Brigham Young University, Patrick Stephan.
These beloved colleagues have really done the heavy lifting and have provided the foundation.
What we've done at Truman is tackled real world questions that might be helpful in improving the delivery of HRV training.
But I don't mistake our work for being foundations.
So we've tackled often small questions. And I'll give you an example.
There's debate in the field about the rate at which you inhale and exhale, and I'm always careful about accepting clinical lore, and I want to see it play out in the laboratory as I've gone through our data, we did a series of three studies many years apart, trying to tease out the effect of inhalation to exhalation ratio. By this, I mean, do you ask the client to breathe an equal length of time for inhale and exhale, or should it be slightly longer exhalation, or should be twice as long? So we have explored that, and we consistently have found that it makes no difference on a whole raft of HRV metrics, time domain, frequency domain, nonlinear. Now, let me make it clear that I am not saying that I would ever train a client to inhale and exhale for the equal duration.
I think there's a consensus among my colleagues that for many reasons, there may be benefits to longer exhalations.
But if the question is, does the ratio affect heart rate variability?
We've not seen it in our lab, and our studies have had enough participants and enough rigor that if it were there, we would have seen it.
So that was an important question. And Paul Lair used that finding in the design of one of his recent studies, using a sliding method for calculating the resonance frequency, which is the most effective rate of breathing, to increase HRV.
So, that's a small issue.
What I'm really excited about, and this is more recent, this is about three years of research, this is using slow paced muscle contraction, not slow paced breathing, but slow paced muscle contraction, to increase HRV.
Now, most clinicians and probably most researchers, if they are not familiar with Vasilo's work on slope, on what he called rhythmical skeletal muscle tension, then they won't know that this is another way to reliably, and sometimes even more powerfully, increase heart rate variability. Very cool. So we have researched that over the last, at least three years, in part because Paul Lair, at an AAPB conference that honored evgeny as our distinguished scientist, challenged us in the nicest possible way to replicate evgenies findings with a larger sample.
And I said, challenge accepted. And that has defined at least three, maybe going on four years of research.
And it has been exciting.
[00:15:35] Speaker B: Very cool.
Awesome.
And we mentioned AAPB several times. I just got to give, as somebody who went to the conference last year for the first time, it's amazing, as I've been more and more educated and had, had some of, you know, and I consider you one of those giants that if you'll have me on your shoulders, I will proudly stand on them, is y'all are still, a lot of y'all are still there. Like, you get, you get access to these wonderful people, and I think you all have been practicing what you preach for so long that you'll. A young punk like me comes up and wants to nerd out about algorithm, and you'll at least entertain me and have those conversations. So I just had to put that plug out. I think I just looked it up. March 31, this year, I believe in Orlando, so you'll actually be in the end of May.
[00:16:39] Speaker C: So you're really close.
[00:16:40] Speaker B: Yeah. May 31. Thank you. Yes. Yeah. So I'm interested, too. So very fascinating work there as the world in some ways has evolved. I'd love to. With your years of research, you know, heart rate variability, I think as probably, as far as I understand, the history gone through different phases of, you know, recognition of going through a master's degree in psychology. I had no idea it existed. You know, maybe van DER Koltz book the body keep score was the first time I may have heard the term, and there wasn't necessarily even enough there to get me to Google anything. It just was like, here's another measure of the stress response. So I kind of wonder, like, if you look at sort of, you know, the last 2025 years, and I know that there's probably different stages within that as folks like me now have sort of, you know, it's out there in a different way and are being drawn to your work and the work of the other giants in the field. And though the work of the brilliant people coming into the field, I just love to say, like, since 2000, how have you seen things evolve as we come and want to share, you know, learn from you and hopefully add something of value to the space you all have worked so hard to create.
[00:18:15] Speaker C: I'd start out by saying that our job is nowhere near done in getting the word out. Let me explain why.
When I chat with medical professionals and they ask, Doctor Schaefer, what do you study?
And I say, heart rate variability, it's very clear that these very bright and capable people have no idea what I'm talking about.
And that means that, I mean, to answer your question about since 2000, I think the emergence of wearables, it's far more recent than 2000. We're really looking at the last three or four years, the Apple Watch, the Fitbit, just as examples, have introduced this metric to the world. Now, when Apple's Watch was able to do calculations for heart rate variability, they were not immediately upfront about communicating what metric they were using.
I actually had a correspondence with their support people to ask, what are you measuring?
What are you calling HRV? It turned out that it was RMSSD, which is one of the metrics that optimal HRV uses.
But it took, I think it took years for them to even communicate that.
And when I look at your app and discussion of the metrics, you do a wonderful job of explaining RMSD and the others so that regardless of where someone enters the field, they'll be able to grasp the essence of it.
[00:20:45] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
So is this, you know, has, you know, and I agree with you, it's like my, you know, probably 30 hours a week, 40 hours a week of my. My existence goes to heart rate variability. And so I think, I'm sure you probably have is, well, everybody knows about this now. And then you talk to a cardiologist who doesn't know, it kind of makes you're crazy until he goes home and googles it and realizes and tells us, oh, you're onto something. And so, like, you know, as, as, you know, in these recent years, is there anything you're worried about, you know, with it really jumping out of the lab and on people's wrists, on people's ears, on people's fingers?
Are there cautionary things that you see as, oh, the world is coming around to where I've been for the last 40 plus years.
But is there anything there that kind of makes you worry?
[00:21:49] Speaker C: There is.
The wearables may do no data cleaning or artifacting, or they may do enough to be dangerous. And what that means is that the measurements, that unless the user is very careful conditions in which the measurements are taken, unless the user has relatively normal conduction, electrical conduction, the values are likely to be extremely misleading.
So, no, apparently that I'm aware of. And so I'm talking about consumer grade app does enough artifacting that we can be confident in the quality of the data.
Now, having said that, you can look at trends across a month if you take daily measurements the same way, same time of day, so you don't have a circadian problem because HRV will change across the day. If you are very controlled in the way you take your measurements, then regardless of how off they are from which I see in the lab, you can at least see trends.
[00:23:43] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:23:44] Speaker C: So I wouldn't trust the absolute value.
I would. The trends would be.
Could be meaningful.
[00:23:54] Speaker B: Yeah. And I would love to just to kind of follow up on that, ask something that I got really excited about. And again with the artifact, knowing that your equipment is better than my. My equipment. Right. You know, I've got. I've got just readers sit around my desk.
I know that you're not going to be able to purchase for $50, which you can purchase for $10,000 in a laboratory.
You know, and I'm getting a little frustrated that the though, I mean, we've, I've been looking and searching for quality readers at affordable prices, and it doesn't seem like there's been that much movement.
And the HRV geeks out there will argue all day about, does the Apple Watch give you good data so you can get lost in those? But I got really excited about the idea of a lot of the studies I was seeing was kind of pre, yeah, you have a pre experimental HRV reading. I'll just use a really generic one. So forgive me ahead of time, but, you know, one person practices mindfulness, the other watches some random video. Both of them stick their hand in a bucket of ice to elicit the stress response. And then you take a post HRV reading. And I understand, I'm very much oversimplified by that. But, you know, there's sort of a one, there was a couple, maybe three. You know, in most of the studies I was seeing, I got really excited about that. Boy, if we could take a reading every morning, what sort of baselines are we getting? What can we prepost then? And so it was, this really interesting thing is like, yeah, you give away some of the quality of not having the $10,000 machine, and you gain this idea of, hey, we can establish, you know, you, I've seen in places, five readings within a seven day period. Gives you a nice baseline in which to measure, then stuff off. So, you know, I kind of, I just want to kind of get your impression of, of, of that as the research versus the, hey, my alarm goes off, I roll over, I put on my reader, I click that three minute reading.
[00:26:17] Speaker C: Yes, I think that we can, if we can teach the consumer how to take a relatively clean reading if we guide them to use what you call a reader.
I would, for example, recommend a ECG or EKG chest strap.
An example would be the h ten, which is compatible with your app.
But teach them how to take clean measurements, which means reducing movement, among other things.
And that will go a long way to obtaining valid measurements.
There's no substitute for cleaning your data. Now, that's a problem when you have an app that doesn't export the interbed intervals to a open source program that can do that for you.
But that's one I would have more trust because I could then look at the data, take care of any false beats, because the problems can either be beats that don't exist or beats that are overlooked.
So you clean your data, you look at the measurements, and those I would trust.
Until I can do that, I'm cautious.
[00:28:13] Speaker B: Okay, excellent.
[00:28:15] Speaker C: But standardizing the conditions, educating your customers as to how to get the best recordings, for example, using a chest band, could go a long way to improving the recording quality.
[00:28:35] Speaker B: Excellent. Great advice.
All right, so we see here at the end, as we record this of 2022, you've got decades of experience, expertise.
You've seen a huge part of the history of heart rate variability. As you sort of look out, maybe not beyond next year and beyond, what gets you excited, what do you sort of see next steps? Maybe things also worry about you. But I just kind of wonder, as you look, with all your experience, five to ten years, where's this biometrics going to take us? What are some things that you sort of see from your.
With all the experience that you have had over the years.
[00:29:30] Speaker C: The challenge of being a futurist is you're often wrong by decades.
[00:29:36] Speaker B: I promise, at least I won't hold you to it.
[00:29:42] Speaker C: And I would not, of course, claim to be a futurist.
What I would say is, I do believe that with the greater computing power available on our smartphones, that we should be able to do some of some more valid, clean data collection.
And it's possible then, that this could be part of, just like in the morning, I take blood pressure, I take blood sugar measurement.
This should be part of someone's standard self care regimen.
And it takes a little time to take a quality measurement.
And I can see it monitoring me during the day and providing general reminders when it appears that I am stressing myself out in case I'm not aware.
And there are apps that do that that actually give you prompts when the app detects that your HRV has taken a major plunge.
So I see this as I could actually see a general practice physician, or at least an interventional cardiology practice, getting this information from the cloud so they can track their patients well being instead of seeing them, like, once a year.
[00:31:47] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:31:50] Speaker C: And, you know, my gosh, given that this could be, you know, when you think about plunges in HRV, if they're valid, you know, if they're not artifacts, that could be a sign that the patient has contracted COVID.
[00:32:11] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:32:14] Speaker C: It could be a reminder that the person is dealing with a great deal of stress, and that could possibly precipitate a psychiatric episode.
So it could be valuable. So I could see psychiatrists using that and clinical psychologists using that in their practice, I could see interventional cardiologists using it.
It's not sufficient to monitor a, to measure a client once a year, and so we may get better at that. This is probably the time where I like to give a shout out to my dear colleagues at the Institute of Heartmath.
They, more than any group I have experienced, have helped to explain the science of heart rate variability and have put a some really smart, well designed technology in the hands of providers and their clients.
I admire their sense of mission, but when you look at the scale on which they have been evangelists for HRV, I don't know the true number of people they have reached and the number of people using their apps and equipment, but it has to be far exceeds what the equipment manufacturers reach and far greater than more recent startups.
And their work is based on very solid science.
Now, they have a larger framework, theoretical framework that is controversial, and that's fine. I can separate out their technology and their very solid training in increasing HRV from their larger belief framework.
[00:34:56] Speaker B: Yeah, I did the hard math early on in my search as well. It's an interesting company, for sure, because you get, you get both sides of it. You get the research papers and other stuff, too, which is, it's an interesting.
[00:35:17] Speaker C: And I love, I love their research papers.
[00:35:22] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:35:23] Speaker C: I love the protocols they have developed. I love their hardware and software. Yeah.
And I just, you know, as with any diverse community, we're going to disagree on some other things, but the other things are so small to at least me, that I value the things that are closely tied to science.
[00:35:55] Speaker B: Very cool. Awesome. Well, I want to thank you. Like I said, when I think about the giants that this, I don't know, someone who caught the bug, I guess, and saw there wasn't a heart rate variability podcast and said, well, maybe this will help the world learn about work like yours. And now to have you on as an actual guest is just a huge honor. And, you know, to spread your work, you know, and to share this with our audience, a true joy for me. So I want to, and I know from the whole optimal team, thank you for all the great work that you've done. We would be doing what we been striving to do if it wasn't for folks like yourself. And I know in that head of yours, there's many more episodes and topics that Ena's told me, you got to talk to Fred about this. And I'm like, well, introduce me to Fred. And now that that introduction is made, I hope it's the first of many conversations because I know we've just barely probably scratched the surface on topics that we could discuss. But I just want to thank you for this overview and sharing your journey with the audience.
[00:37:15] Speaker C: My pleasure.
[00:37:17] Speaker B: Awesome. And I'll put some information about Fred.
Fred's blog is great. We are honored to be, uh, featured in some screenshots there. I know in his, uh, Ted talk, uh, that everybody I think should listen to is, I saw that, uh, intermixed in there as well. And so, uh, we'll, we'll throw some link in the show notes. Definitely check out Doctor Schaefer's work. Uh, like said, I don't think we'd be having this conversation if, if him and some of those other giants really didn't lay the, the groundwork for, you know, me to say, hey, how do we bring this into individuals with trauma, experiencing homelessness, foster families, and in doing my little piece of this with clinicians, and hopefully, as I like to say, HRV being a new vital sign, but one that measures mental health as well as physical health and one we can get every day instead of just like you said, once a year, where we're really just measuring your community. You to the doctor's office.
[00:38:22] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:38:23] Speaker B: Awesome. Well, thank you, my friend. I really appreciate your time and again, for all the work that you've done.
[00:38:30] Speaker C: My pleasure.
