[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 am back today with friend of the show, one of my favorite people to talk to about basically humanity or any other subject I can start a conversation with. Doctor Fred Schaefer. Doctor Schaefer, welcome back to the show, my friend.
I've been nerding out about this topic of introception, and I just, it kind of popped into my head. I wonder what Fred thinks about this, because I love our conversations, how you think about things. So, Fred, just welcome back to the show. Maybe for our guests who have not listened to what I would call some classic episodes that you've been on, especially the time domain and frequency domain episodes we had earlier this year, I would give people permission. You could stop this right now, go back and listen to those two and come back to this episode. But in case people haven't heard those, Fred, can you just give a, just a quick introduction of yourself before we nerd out a little bit about introspection?
[00:01:41] Speaker B: I think the Cliff notes version.
[00:01:43] Speaker A: There we go.
[00:01:44] Speaker B: I'm a professor of psychology at Truman State University, where I've taught for 48, going on 49 years.
My lab, Truman center for Applied Psychophysiology, primarily focuses on heart rate variability, and we're particularly interested in what strategies allow us to increase heart rate variability, especially if people do not have access to tech, which fits in very nicely with your topic of interoception.
When I think about interception, I think about the conscious awareness of our physiology without using the Fitbit or an apple Watch. Yeah. And it is a skill that we refine over time.
It requires mindfulness.
And the point of it is, it allows us to keep track of how we're doing, whether we have equipment or nothing. We tend all the equipment is using a buddhist metaphor, is it's a raft. The equipment, regardless of whether it's an HR, the reader Fitbit, or what, aids our development of awareness.
But ultimately, there's a point at which you no longer need confirmation.
Fitbit. Yeah, there's a point at which you know when your heart rate is faster or slower.
There's a point in which you can judge whether you are fatigued and this is not a good day for you to run, whether you are distressed and you need to take better care of yourself.
[00:04:14] Speaker A: I love that. So one of the, I love how you mentioned it as a skill, and obviously a repetition or practice of a skill or components of a skill make you better over time. And I sort of wondered how, if I wanted to be more in tuned with myself, what are some of the skills that when you think about building this capacity, what kind of practices? You mentioned mindfulness can really help in a day and age where, and I deal with this irony every day, is, I hope, optimal HRV helps people get in touch with that. Yet we operate on a smartphone that probably destroys, you know, any focused attention on anything except the smartphone. For a lot of people.
[00:05:07] Speaker B: Yes, there undoubtedly are individual differences in our sensitivity to internal physiological cues.
But having said that, there are individual differences in athletic performance, individual differences in breathing, so that you can always take what ability you have and improve it.
[00:05:41] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:05:42] Speaker B: And so your question is, how do you improve it? And the answer, as with many things, there isn't just only one way to do something and be very suspicious of those influencers who try to tell you that their way is the best or only way.
[00:06:08] Speaker A: Only way. Yeah.
[00:06:11] Speaker B: I'd like them to show their receipts.
[00:06:15] Speaker A: And stop trying to sell me supplements. Fred, I always find those people who have found the one thing always one to sell supplements afterwards.
[00:06:25] Speaker B: So instead of looking for one way, find the way that works best for you. Yeah. One element that will be shared by many of these methods is quieting things down.
Now, it used to be that I would visit before pandemic, I would visit a city you may be familiar with. It's called Golden, Colorado.
[00:06:56] Speaker A: A little bit of a fan, a little bit of a ban. Yes.
[00:07:00] Speaker B: And I came to know about golden because of AAPB, association for Applied Psychophysiology and biofeedback and BCIA biofeedback certification International alliance retreats.
We often went to golden.
And while at golden there are many opportunities for walkabouts besides some really beautiful streams.
And there are rocks right beside the rushing whitewater, and you can perch yourself on the rock and meditate.
And that is a remarkable way of quieting your world down.
Even while there are cars that are maybe 100ft away from your rock beside the stream, they fade to insignificance. And the quiet allows you to focus internally.
Is that making any sense?
[00:08:18] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. As somebody who sat by that river for about two or 3 hours yesterday, I could applaud that. And one of the things that I've been curious about with mindfulness, because I would not call myself an expert on it at this point, though I've been building this knowledge base at least for a few decades now, is that ability to.
I guess when I look at it, is also a skillset. Mindfulness means sort of a practice where I kind of compare it to shooting free throws. Not the best. Most exciting thing about basketball is free throws. In fact, I kind of wish they find a way to get rid of it because it just slows everything down, stops the game. But if you. If you're bad at it, it's not a good thing. So I would practice free throws each and every day. Not because for the joy sometimes of practicing free throws, though, you know, in mindfulness. To be honest with our listeners here, I don't always, like, get really excited about practicing mindfulness. I do it every day. Good, because I know the long term benefits it has on my life and research and all that. But it's not like it's kind of like practicing free throws. It's something you need to do to bring your best in this point to life, but basketball to the game. But then it provides you a skill set when you need it. And that was like, I often tell the story. Like, I. When I first started practicing mindfulness, I accidentally took a deep breath when I was late for a meeting, which that really stresses me out for some reason, being five minutes late. And all of a sudden, the calm and the practice came into that moment. And instead of, like, going 80 miles an hour through residential neighborhoods, I just said, you know, it's not going to be the end of the world if I show up five minutes late. And I can't tell you what a big moment in my life that was, because all of a sudden now, mindfulness became also a tool for me to the introspection of seeing I'm getting stressed out and then being able to interrupt and then choose a different. What? Path forward. And I think sometimes people don't. That's, oh, I gotta sit and breathe without much tangible, you know, real life benefits. And that's why I like to look at as a practice and a skill.
[00:10:42] Speaker B: Oh, it is. It is.
With mindfulness, you allow yourself to be aware of. Of your experience inside and outside the body in the moment without judgment.
And let me make it clear, I do not have any mindfulness street cred. I have not written or researched mindfulness, so I depend on the expertise of other people.
Again, it's important to stay in my lane. But mindfulness is a skill that can. That one can. It's a practice that can build a skill.
And ideally, it directs you to where you need to focus your attention.
And it's done effortlessly, it's done fluidly, because attention needs to be shifted depending on your immediate needs.
Life is complex, it can be challenging.
And so you need to be able to shift your attention inside, outside, in the shower, which can be, instead of being just a social convention, a way that we maintain social acceptability because we don't want to be malodorous.
This is a great opportunity. The shower is a great opportunity for mindfulness.
I shave, as you can see, I shave my head. I finish the shaving on the shower. And that requires mindfulness. It requires focusing on the contour of my head. And when I get wrong, I nick myself.
Only a flush phone. But you get the idea, that's good. That's good, but mindful. So in that case, we activate the default mode network, which allows us to focus inside rather than work on a task.
[00:13:28] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:13:29] Speaker B: And so during a shower, I may allow my default mode network to come out and play and do whatever it needs to do without giving it direction.
But yes. Now, the connection, by the way, to what my difference at optimal HRV do and interception is that there is an association between HIV by feedback and the ability to be. To gain immediate awareness, at least indirect awareness of, say, the action of your baroreceptor system that regulates blood pressure and heart rate.
So that with training, you not only learn to increase the effectiveness of the too closed loop system to regulate blood pressure and heart rate, but you also gain greater awareness. You can gain greater awareness of, say, heart rate.
Now, that is not to say you gain awareness of blood pressure. Blood pressure is way too stealthy.
It's too. We think of it as silent until you experience headache, pain when you have elevated pressure. But blood pressure most of the time is outside our conscious awareness.
Heart rate, not as much we can. If we quiet ourselves, we can perceive our heart rate.
A beautiful example of this was when I experienced isolation tanking.
And here you float in a buoyant tank with constant temperature, no light, very little sound.
You can hear your heartbeat in your chest.
So we have the capacity under extraordinary circumstances to do this.
And the point of mindfulness and of HRV training is to be able to pull this off in everyday life when we are bombarded by all our sensory channels.
[00:16:22] Speaker A: I love that, you know, because that is like something that, weirdly, I think when we talk about mindfulness, we talk like, you'll see. And I think I've probably been guilty of this as well. Like, and here's the research. Like, you see all these great benefits, and you kind of gotta, like, it is a motivator because that's kind of the thing that got me on my butt. Breathing finally, consistently was like, the wounds heal quicker, and I'm like, it's. That's kind of like a Jedi mind trick to, like, wait a minute, your wound. And maybe I get one less cold a year. That was enough for me to, like, to dive into it. But I think these deeper, like, things that you're talking about is something that oftentimes when we're just trying to convince people with research, it doesn't come to that kind of personal benefit point of, you know, feeling mindful. And what does that eventually turn into? Not just in the mindfulness practice, but in your greater life as well.
[00:17:25] Speaker B: Let me give you a brief story that illustrates the idea that mindfulness interception can save your life.
Many, many decades ago, I was walking in my neighborhood along a fixed ground, and I did have a watch on that monitored my heart rate at every point of the walk, and it would map the instantaneous heart rate against the actual route.
I noticed during one of the steeper grades that the walk, the exercise seemed a little harder.
I looked at the watch and confirmed that I was around ten beats a minute faster than I normally would be.
And so it confirmed what my body already told me, that it was harder.
Would it reflect it was a increasing blockage of my left descending artery. Oh, wow. Left anterior descending artery that would later be detected during an angiogram.
And that led to angioplasty and a stent. Actually two stents.
And it saved my life.
Although the left anterior descending artery is not known as the widowmaker. It isn't. I mean, if you have to have an artery partially blocked, like 98, 99% blocked, that would be one of my candidates.
You. It was important to be able to walk across a parking lot without being out of breath.
It made a lot of sense to get that taken care of. So I was aware that. I was aware as soon as it happened that I was having blockage and was able to confirm it. So part of the reason that wearables are valuable is they can confirm and also fine tune our perceptions.
[00:20:15] Speaker A: Yeah. So I'm curious about, because one of the. Your areas of research that I've been totally, you know, just nerded out about, excited about, is that using contractions for residents, if I'm using that, you correct but for resonance frequency, am I.
[00:20:37] Speaker B: The way I frame it is to increase.
Simple way of saying is to increase heart rate variability.
[00:20:44] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:20:45] Speaker B: That of low and slow breathing.
[00:20:49] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:20:50] Speaker B: At rates that are fairly unnatural in the sense that we typically breathe 1218 breaths per minute or faster at rest. And here we're asking people to breathe at six, sometimes more.
This is another way.
[00:21:11] Speaker A: Yeah. And I wonder how you think of that, because I wouldn't really initially.
I mean, we're working on the same system. If you do, like, hr, you know, mindfulness, whether it's in your head or, you know, you're getting guided.
How, I wonder, like, when you bring the concept of mindfulness into this practice. Cause you're. You're strengthening the parts of the nervous system I'm focused on with my breathing. I just. I'd love to just kind of get your reflections on something that may not seem mindful, but, you know, we. Body relaxation and other things. I just love to get how you see that as a mindfulness practice or not.
[00:21:58] Speaker B: I don't think you certainly, if you were doing classic jacobsonian progressive relaxation, you would, at the end of your training, be aware of residual muscle tension.
Here, we're simply having you do reps, which is different, and you can perform rhythmic muscle contraction without developing greater interception of at least your musculature, because you're just doing reps.
[00:22:47] Speaker A: Right.
[00:22:50] Speaker B: With breathing, you have.
Once you have learned low and slow breathing, which is a term that was popularized by Robert Fried, you can compare low and slow breathing with your everyday breathing, like when you're distressed, and then you can quickly decide whether you want to change it or not.
You don't do low and slow breathing every moment of your day. You just do it for practice, and you do it in circumstances where you are challenged, where you are distressed with muscle contraction.
I just see it as reps, as one more way to stimulate your baroreceptor system that regulates blood pressure and ultimately increases heart rate variability.
[00:23:58] Speaker A: Yeah.
Fascinating. So, you know, so when you think, like, if you're working, like, conceptualizing the work, building the parts of the nervous system associated with interoception, I'm assuming we're talking vagal break from a nervous system perspective, are there things to think about that we can help to build this concept? Because working with individuals with trauma histories, I'm just aware of the disconnect between themselves. And those can be extreme cases, though, I think with our technology and the stress of everyday life, I would assume introception is a skill that not a whole lot of people, if not intentionally develop, just kind of naturally have. So what are maybe some other like, you know, we talked about maybe focusing on your heart rate. Just any other ways that you might think about building this ability up over time.
[00:25:11] Speaker B: The easiest way to think about it is just become a better observer of your own physiology. It really, whatever our gifts are, whatever our capacity or sensitivity, for example, there are people who are super tasters, and there are people who have normal taste.
There are people with full range hearing, and there are people in my age group who are lucky to cover, say, the FM bandaid, which is about 50 to 15,000 cycles a second.
Whatever your gifts, just be a better observer.
Take the time to observe. Realize there's something to be observed, that there's an advantage. I'll give you an example.
You can scan your body for muscle tension.
That is interception.
You can listen to your heartbeat. That's interception. You can become aware of your hand temperature, which is autonomic in the sense of the dilation of peripheral vessels. And one of the if you can't feel your hand temperature, then put your hand beside your cheek. You don't have to put it on the cheek, but just put it. And that will give you feedback and will tighten your ability to perceive.
And the cool thing is that when you become very good at this, and this is temperature by feedback, you can actually feel your hand cranking out more heat. You can actually, when you vasodilate, when the small muscular arteries expand, you will release more heat. You'll radiate more heat and you'll feel it.
I often give a shout out to my dear friend Don Moss.
Don Moss is a licensed clinical psychologist in Michigan, and I've always noticed in the hotel rooms, meeting rooms, that we often find ourselves doing workshops that don's hands in these cold rooms are freakishly hot in front of audiences. Tom, why are hands so hot?
And I know the answer. He in Michigan, his practice included children, and children. Ask dement, show me that you can do it before you ask me to do it. So if he's teaching them handwarming, he has to demonstrate. So he taught himself to warm his hands reliably. Even in cool Hyatt hotel lobbies, I'm.
[00:28:53] Speaker A: Well familiar, well familiar. Or those windowless conference rooms that I spend way too much time, send me to a beautiful place and stick me in a room with no windows. It's almost torturous.
I wondered, maybe just speculation on your point. Maybe you have some thoughts on this. One of the things that I really am fascinated with from a mindfulness perspective, is working with a lot of people, you know, around behavioral change.
And from how I understand the brain after studying it for decades now, is it's really. We're kind of in the default network, so to speak. We repeat certain behaviors that we have.
I'm just so fascinated with the unconscious nowadays because it kind of got thrown out because we talked a lot about Freud in my early education years, and then we kind of threw all that out because we couldn't find the id in a brain scan or the superego. And now it's back. I just don't know if we've got good language to talk about it. But for me, my understanding that if we're not mindful, we're just. We're very likely to repeat behaviors that may have served us well in the past or may have just kept us alive, you know, to do that, and I'm always thinking about, where is the ability, call it free will, call it volition. I know I'm throwing out a bunch of kind of controversial words. It's just you. Yeah, but how do we disrupt those behavioral patterns that may not. They may be functional in some ways, but are now preventing us reaching our long term goals?
And I wonder, my wonder is, is interoception in some ways? If I feel that craving, can I disrupt the behavior? Is there a way to kind of get out of that default that can get a lot of people I've worked with in trouble by being more in tune with my body, my mind, and what's going on under the skin, so to speak?
[00:31:09] Speaker B: Following the theme that we have been discussing, it's important to be a good observer.
Let me tell you what that means.
It means the ability to step back in your life in a moment in your life, and be an observer of your behavior in a given situation, especially in challenging social interactions.
And as an observer, you can see the setup of the situation, what you did, and the consequences, and then you can judge whether you're happy with your habitual response. So what you're talking about is habit. I mean, most all that the nervous system does is under the hood or unconscious. We're not privy to it because our attentional spotlight is generally focused. First of all, it's limited. It is a spotlight, as in a flashlight, and it can only illuminate a small corner of our experiential world in a moment of time. And you focus on what's most important. So typically, we are not aware of what's happening under the hood, but the clinicians will encourage their clients to develop this perspective where they can see themselves in a situation, see their actions, and then see the consequences of the action. What you're talking about is that we tend to repeat habitual behavior that may not be adaptive in a given situation. And we need that error message that tells us, hey, this overlearned response isn't working.
So you need to recognize one. It's not working. And sometimes that recognition comes from social cues that you observe that something you've said or not said or done or not done has upset the person you're interacting with.
[00:33:51] Speaker A: I love that. Yeah. And it's just that, like, you know, that moment, because as far as I understand the nervous system, we have maybe a fraction of a second, which is kind of a longer period of time in the brain in some weird way to disrupt that. And that's where I'm wondering. Introception being one of those tools that just. That little bit of awareness, however it might be, that can disrupt, again, just a pattern of behavior that's well ingrained in our synapses and obviously correlating. Bringing mindfulness can help. I see that as part of that skill that we're applying of mindfulness to situations. But I just came so much to appreciate that little window that we have to disrupt historical responses gives me a lot of empathy for folks.
[00:34:52] Speaker B: The prolific writer and researcher Antonio Damasio.
[00:35:00] Speaker A: Yep, yep.
[00:35:01] Speaker B: Used the term somatic marker.
[00:35:05] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:35:06] Speaker B: Let me tell you what that means in this context.
When we are alert to a feeling of unease, discomfort, we may not know what is producing it, but it is like a warning to us that we need to think more carefully about the immediate situation.
Let me give you examples, because I hate to just present an abstract concept and not make it concrete. Love it.
Imagine you, I think about undergrads in a bar, and let's pose it is a female student and a male she does not know tries to hit on her, and she feels creeped out. That's her somatic marker. She doesn't know why she is uncomfortable, but she's aware that she is, and that's the time that's a red flag. And I I'd extrapolate that to other situations.
When I'm in the classroom interacting with a student, there are times when I get that same reaction, that sort of a spidey sense saying, you're about to deal with something that is very risky, that a student may have very strong feelings about this. So be careful the words you use, because they're likely to be misunderstood.
It's often the case where students expect special accommodations.
And these are not students who have health issues like being blind, confined to a wheelchair, problems like this. It's rather that they may believe that they need more time or they may believe that to function they should have an environment with fewer distractions. So the words I choose in that situation can create a controversy that none of us wanted.
And so that marker is very useful for me. And I can't always say what caused me to be alerted, what triggered my spidey sense, but it does alert me that there's an issue here.
[00:38:16] Speaker A: Yeah, I love that. So I want to wrap up on this question because it's one that I think I've interviewed folks like yourself without asking this question. Now, I think three or four or five times now. And I think it may be the most important question I can ask folks like yourself. And I'll preference this by before. I kind of have just nerded out over the last several months over introception. I would have used if I had one word to describe Doctor Frederick Schaefer. I think the. Well, I know the word I would have used was grounded.
That you just seem, my friend, to be grounded. You're always on that rock by the river and golden.
And I'm sure you have your hard days as well. But whenever I see you, whether you're meeting somebody for the first time or whether we can now give each other a hug as friends when we see each other, the kindness that you have. And again, groundedness would be the word that I would have used. I'm curious how you've developed your practices over time too. And I know you're humble, so you'll probably argue how you're not always grounded. This, that or the other. I don't even want to waste time with that. I would like what have you done over the years with your own practice to develop introception, to, again, at least from an outside perspective, this ground, this groundedness that I just think I feel when I'm in your present. What have your personal strategies been over the years with all the research that you've done and read?
[00:40:09] Speaker B: First and foremost, I have days very.
[00:40:13] Speaker A: Much like I told you. I told you. I don't want to hear it.
[00:40:16] Speaker B: I do. I totally do. I totally do. And I'm sure without making any false comparisons that people who are far more spiritually advanced than I will ever be, like the Dalai Lama has days that are, shall I say, embarrassing.
Having said that, as with anything, it's trial and error. Yeah, mostly error.
But I think growing up I had the remarkable opportunity to study Judah in central California, Fresno, I was taught. Among our YMCA teachers was Yamauchi Sensei, who was in Professor Kano's first judo class in the Kotokon in Japan. He came to northern California at the turn of the century. He stayed in northern California because he loved the trout fishing.
And so through the martial arts, I learned calm, I learned quiet.
I learned this.
And now I'm changing philosophies.
I learned Taoist Wu Wei, which means without action.
I also learned Wuxian, which is without thinking, and just incorporated as very informally as just life went on. What I've learned to do is celebrate the quiet moments of joy in everyday life.
And what I mean by that, again, you talk about grounding.
When I get up in the morning, I have two german shepherds on my bed.
I take. Instead of rushing off to my day, I build in time so I can stroke their backs, give them hugs, tell them how great their fur is, and most importantly, and this is many times a day, tell them that I love them.
And so it's very common in the morning for me to say, emma, who's my oldest at seven, roughly seven. I adore you. So if you're doing this many times a day, you become grounded and grounded in the. Without getting new age and without pouring on the saccharine in love.
And then you go out into the world, and you treat people the same way in the sense of you approach them with gratitude and appreciation.
I have a young college student who is doing landscaping for me, and the project is really his vision.
And soon, within a day of his proposing it, I met his grandmother, and I met his grandfather, and I met his mother, and his whole family got involved in this project, and now the front of my house. But you're shaping up quite beautifully, all because. And so I approach this with gratitude and appreciation.
And so, you know, so that if you perceive me to be grounded some of the time, it's because I know what my core values are. I don't have grievances.
Instead of. Instead of grievance, what I have is appreciation.
And my life isn't perfect.
There are challenges, but whatever the challenges are, I know that I'm up to the task, and I know that I'm not doing it alone.
And I know that my life is awesome, even with those challenges.
Does that give you some answer?
[00:45:30] Speaker A: It does. I mean, I think that mindset is. I mean, I mean, just because I think, like, I get to meet folks like yourself, because I'm sure there's probably 20 plus years of mindfulness practice. 30 plus years of mindfulness practice behind that as well. But that mindset that you've developed over time, I don't know. I mean, it's a way of, and I love that you mentioned values because that's something really core, you know, to me as a person and focusing on those as well, that helps you establish again what is perceived, I think, for me and everybody else I've talked to ever about you, that, you know, just that, that level of kindness and ground groundfulness, I've never. I'm sure you get rattled. I'd love to see it. Like, I don't want to see you rattled for your sake. But, like, I think there's a lot of us. Does Fred ever get stressed out?
[00:46:28] Speaker B: But, and there are times that I'm not kind and there are times that I'm not patient, but what I strive to do is simply do the right things more of the time. And the other thing is what you call decades of mindfulness practice is really quite informal.
It's not.
I don't set aside 20 minutes a day to do any of these things. I just do them.
And in the same way, I don't book 20 minutes of grooming time with my dogs. I just make sure that I work that in. And it's so rewarding.
But it's important, especially in the time, as challenging as it is right now, it's important to provide a small amount of nurturing, sometimes sheltering for people who are facing it just as you are and I am.
And you can make.
I'm all about lighting candles, and the candles may not illuminate a huge part of my world, but illuminate enough it makes. It's the contribution that I can make.
[00:48:04] Speaker A: I love that. Well, my friend, I appreciate you lighting one of those candles now for several episodes here with me. It's just been such a great honor of mine to bring it and get to know you, call you a friend and have these conversations that really, I think, get us to a deeper core spot of some of these issues, whether we're talking about time domains or our individual practices. I just appreciate you and the time you've given to our audience and just the gifts you've given to the world. There's a lot of candles lit, I think, off your initial flame, and I'm lucky to have a little about that vicarious light passion that you bring to your work. So I just appreciate the heck out of you, my friend.
[00:48:59] Speaker B: Back at you. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me.
[00:49:03] Speaker A: Absolutely. And as long as you can find show notes and everything else. We'll put a little information about Fred in
[email protected]. dot thank you for joining us, and we'll see you next week.
