[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 Matt. I'm here with my good friend, Dr. Joe Deduro. I think I got that right, correct. I love that last name. And Dr. Joe and I have been, I think, talking for well over a year now, nerd out about Heart rate variability. He's just come out with My Brain Matters, a book that for the HRV nerds out there, it's pretty much a must read, in my opinion. Really great positioning of Heart Rate Variability ties it into a lot of great things. And Dr. Joe, one of the things I really appreciate about your book is pretty much every point that you make using Heart Rate Variability is really referenced incredibly strongly, so really great scientific while in a digestible usable form. So I enjoyed reading it and I'm excited to dive into your expertise talking about the book with you. But before we do that, give yourself a quick introduction to our listeners.
[00:01:34] Speaker B: Well, this is the thanks Matt, for having me on there. And I'll say hello all HRV friends. Maybe we can be friends too. I think after this you're going to understand through my perspective and that's kind of what I wrote the book for is because I have a perspective that I think is important to share. I'm 40 years in clinical practice now. We're doing everything online, remote patient monitoring or remote client monitoring. And HRV is our main outcome measure. So it doesn't matter. The name of the book. If I pull it up, is My Brain Matters, how to have more Brain power for you or your loved ones. And that's kind of the thing is the brain is really connected to the heart and we kind of make that story of the neurometabolic solution, how to Have More Brain Power for Your Loved Ones and yourself. They made me change that a little bit because my grammar so I'm a chiropractic neurologist. I have a master's degree in clinical research, and the clinical researcher is the type of person that says if you read a study and they say eating grapefruit is good for reducing cold symptoms, you would say, well, who says?
And it says it's me. I say that because I'm the clinical researcher. That's what we do. So I always grabbed data and my clients and then I had to figure out what to do with it. And we kind of go through that story in the book of how I made that little path to become from clinician to researcher and then back to clinician and then back to researcher. It's sort of like a ping pong thing on that. But yes, we use HRV as our outcome measure, one of our big outcome measures. So yes, we do cover it extensively in the book. It's 1000 references, but it's pretty readable, wouldn't you say?
[00:03:39] Speaker A: Man oh, yeah, absolutely. Definitely. The practicality is just everything. It seems like on average at least five references for every piece of research. That would be my guess. I didn't track it all the way through, but it was really backed up in a very impressive way.
[00:04:00] Speaker B: You have to make it. It was really my co author and editor, Elizabeth Goodres, who did a lot of the heavy lifting. I tend to talk in a circle and it's a conceptual thing and I think you're going to see a little bit about that as I speak on a little bit new research that I'm putting together right now. But it's a circle, so the circles sort of intermingle and if you get on the outside, you can see what I'm talking about, but you have to make it so that someone else can actually understand it.
[00:04:36] Speaker A: Let's get into pro neuro.
I don't know if System definitely an acronym, but really informed seemed to in many ways be the central theme of the book. And I thought for the podcast to go through kind of these concepts and how they relate to heart rate variability would be a good way to give readers a good snapshot of what they could expect with the book. So I would love to start out here, which I've been working on this word, photobiomodulation. I love that for some reason it just brings a smile to my face every time I say that. So what is photobiomodulation?
[00:05:22] Speaker B: Dr. Joe the good part of that is photo is light. Bio is cell or living cell.
Modulation is change. So it's the science of light changing a cell.
It's kind of general, but really it's quite specific.
The point that we make is that as you talked about in the Pro Neural program, that's an acronym for how we be proactive in our nerve health.
So Pro Neural, we're not really anti anything. We're pro everything, specifically pro nerves. And that's kind of what we say, how to have more brain power. And you ask yourself how many people raise their hand and say, no, I don't need more brain power.
You need it.
When we look at the Pro Neural program, that's sort of what we outline as the recipe because the book is sort of a how to get more brain power. So we use P is photobiomodulation, R is repair, regrow, and regain. And that's sort of how we need to do this. If we want to increase the function of our brain, we need to increase the structure and the tissues and the neurons and the blood vessels and everything like that. Right? O would be optimization. That would be supplements and antioxidants and all that stuff. N would be nutrition and Detox is part of that.
And E would be exercise and proper movements and getting enough activity. U would be unwind and unstressed, which is very important for our heart rate variability.
Biofeedback extremely important. Restore means getting our restful, sleep so we can recover and reenergize. And O is a oneness or a spiritual social connectivity that people really need and that we can do that in our communities and by sharing our experiences with others. So you got the full rundown of the Pro Neural program.
[00:07:46] Speaker A: I'd love to hear about how you work this program, work with patients, clients. But let's start out I think the one that was not new to me, but I know it's such a focus of the work is Mark.
[00:08:05] Speaker B: Mark. You could just say PBM.
[00:08:07] Speaker A: PBM.
[00:08:08] Speaker B: That's easier, right? Like PBJ.
[00:08:11] Speaker A: I kind of like saying it though, dr. Joe. I kind of like photobiomodulation. Like, don't take that away from me, my friend. Let me have it.
[00:08:19] Speaker B: You got what?
[00:08:22] Speaker A: What is it and why is it important?
All these other things, I could probably justify why they would be in a model for health and wellness and neurosystem, the polyvagal, all that. But this one, I think, is probably going to be new to some of our listeners. So I'd love for you to get in a little bit to the science here in your work with photobiomodulation.
[00:08:47] Speaker B: Well, one thing is we have to make maybe as a disclaimer disclosure or something like that, that I actually am the president and CEO of Pro NEUROLITE, which is a wellness device manufacturing organization where we make these devices and various devices. It's a suite of devices that we sell to people to get more brain power. And it's sort of like you get the stuff and then your clinician and a clinical researcher, you put it on and you say, what does this do and how can we measure it? That's the big deal, is how can we get data from it? So the connection is photobiomodulation changes cells, changes stem systems, the organ systems.
How do you measure that as you go along? How can you do that at a distance? How can you do that for people and show them that things are getting better? Right? Because think about it. Let's say we used to ask our clients, how are you sleeping? Great.
Well, how do you know? How does anybody know, right?
How's your wife sleeping? She has dementia. How's your wife sleeping? She sleeps good. How do you know? She doesn't get up at night. Where does she sleep? She sleeps in the other room. So that doesn't really help us. So we needed to have some data to bring this stuff in. So I'm just pointing this out and what we realized is that heart rate variability scores or your measure or your parasympathetic tone, if you will, is a good outcome measure because we can see it change. We can see it changed instantaneously. When we use the devices, our style of devices are set up for that thing to make a change in your heart rate variability.
That's sort of how we kind of put these things together. It does a lot of different things, but what can you measure it can do?
Just as an example, I wanted to get this while it's fresh. There was a recent study that came out on transcranial photobiomodulation that's putting the light in your head and it goes through your skull and into the tissues and down to the cortex and blood vessels.
They did it like a session, and they found that it increased divergent creative thinking in the clients.
So you think, wait a minute, I'm a healthy person. I don't have any problems, really, so to speak. Yet if I put the light on, I can have more creativity, right? And they've also shown that if you put the light on the head, transcranial photobiomodulation, it increases your cognition and your memory and your ability to make decisions and tasks, all this stuff. So if you put the light on the head, it changes your cognition and your brain and healthy people. And there's a whole list of all the stuff it does for sick people, which we're going to touch on.
But the thing about this is when you look at HRV and cognition, as your HRV goes down, your cognition goes down and your cognitive reserve goes down. And again, there's not a ton of research on this because that's not a drug. HRV is not sold by a machine, is not sold by a huge $10 million MRI company. It's sold by regular people who are investigating non invasive therapeutics and non invasive diagnostics.
[00:12:56] Speaker A: Do you think it's just because I've been seeing especially like infrared and red light therapy, probably for the last I mean, I bought a fairly expensive red light therapy system. It's since broke, which was like $300 is a lot of money for Matt to spend. So I bought it, sold me up to paying $300 because I looked like a big thick pin that shot out a very strong red light. So I've been fascinated with this and a little puzzled of why it hasn't kind of taken off in a way that since I've been seeing the research. Because I would argue it doesn't work because I've seen a lot of stuff, but it just still seems to be lagging in the background of the wellness healthcare space. And I'm wondering if you're seeing, as somebody who focuses more on it and admittedly, I don't, are you seeing more mainstream uses for this? Are you seeing more coming to medical providers? Because the research seems to be out there, but the adaptation doesn't really seem to be there. Is it a cost thing, do you think? I'd love to get your opinion on kind of the market as somebody that's in there.
[00:14:17] Speaker B: That's a lot to unpack there. But let's start off with kind of the first thing matt would be photobiomodulation.
You have to change a cell, right? So you have to be able to measure it.
If you're talking about a red light panel or some kind of little dealio that shines light on you, more likely than not according to physics, those things at a distance from your body. A panel is not going to have a therapeutic effect because the farther away the light is from the skin, the less power, penetration and juice it has. And really red light by itself it does something I make the example, the headlights of your car are really not photobiomodulation. The street light is really not photobiomodulation. The lights in your house are not photobiomodulation but the Led lights have a negative impact on your circadian rhythm.
So perhaps the benefits from these external panels and they have a huge marketing push for these things, they make a lot of money on them is because you're reducing the garbage light that's making you sick so allows your body to become naturally more in tune with the circadian thing. Because photobiomodulation is circadian medicine and we use it as such. So we use ours at night and in the morning and maybe during the day, depending on the client and what they need. But that's the sort of the scenario is light is circadian medicine and it really messes us up. So I'm pointing out that the physiologic changes of the light, red light hitting from a distance, hitting your arm and then they talk about changing your microbiome and the indirect effect on melatonin. These researchers, I don't think it's really true because it doesn't really get into you. And our devices use two, three and four different wavelengths of light in contact with the skin which is sort of like exponentially better if a panel is going to get you better. Well, one of the pro neuro light devices that you could put on your skin and wear comfortably and do it lay down is important too.
One thing that they show is that sometimes the lights and the way that they put them in it increases anxiety and decreases sleep which is exact opposite of what our devices do. So you got to really pay attention to what they're doing and what they're talking about and then kind of put it together with some common sense.
It's important because I coach a lot of people from all over the world and they may have a lot of devices around but they're not getting the results. It doesn't go the right way, I hope. I picked out one part of that that says even if you have a big marketing mouth doesn't mean you're going to have the same kind of outcomes that if you do something quite specific and kind of goes along with what the science says is it getting more mainstream?
Yeah, I suppose, but I don't know, it helps with it. But look, we could come out with a research project that shows light photobiomodulation reduces brain fog in everybody. No matter how you do it, putting it against your head or against your body helps you people recover from brain fog. And people are quite amazed at how quickly these things can change. I mean, my original brain research paper on photobiomodulation was Rapid Reversal of Cognitive Decline, where we took somebody from dementia to normal in 28 days. Right. So I don't know how much more flash you need. Right. That was in 2018 or so. I published that paper and it comes I mean, there's research. My TikTok is full of me doing research things and I don't know why people aren't getting excited to do it.
[00:19:07] Speaker A: Let me ask with what is it about the especially if we can bring this a little bit back to the HRV, because I'm fascinated with what's going on, because why does red light, why is that more powerful than me going out in the Colorado Sun today and sitting out there for 510 minutes? With if you're watching this on YouTube, you know I have this luscious head of hair which isn't going to block any kind of sun from hitting me. But what's going on there that just going outside or how's this red light transition into improved heart rate variability? You're not putting it on your heart, which we both know that and everybody listening, that heart rate variability is taking in a lot more information than just your heart. But still, what is going on there? I stick the device on my head. I'm getting infrared light different into my brain, and my heart rate variability improves. Can you fill in some of those blanks for us of what the heck is going on between putting that on and improved heart rate variability?
[00:20:20] Speaker B: So you going out in the midday sun is like five professor and director Michael Hamlin did the explanation of that to show how much juice you get if you go out in the midday sun stand out, you get like 5 million joules.
The heart rate variability, again, is the B to B difference in your heart that is controlled not only by the nerves of the heart, but also the nerves of the brain. So the sub theme of this book is the heart brain connection. Everybody talks about the gut brain connection and not too many people are referring to this scenario that if we can look at the heart rate variability and vagus nerve function, we're actually examining 90% of the nerves of the body. Yeah. So it does reflect anything that reflects anything is reflected in heart rate variability. So what we found is if we put the light up the nose we have a device that shines light up the nose that you're actually going to hit the medial prefrontal cortex. And funny enough, the medial prefrontal cortex is one of the primary areas that sends the information down to your brain stem and then runs the rest of your I think it's the solitarius nucleus tract of solitarius NTS that then sends the signals down to your heart. So that's an intriguing aspect is that if we're actually touching the brain tissue and that can light can impact those neurons again photobiomodulation then those will have a downstream effect on heart rate and gut changes and all that. Stuff that we really kind of know that that's what the nervous system does is it runs the body, and your autonomic nervous system is that it's kind of automatic. So you really have to think about it. So that's one way. But basically if you dig in a little bit deeper and what are the heart rate variability changes what you see whether some of our devices go around the head, some of ours go up the nose, some of us go around the neck, some of them go on the body. Like you can put it on the chest right there. And what that does is we see that being having a surge in parasympathetic activity and it's very calming. That's why people just feel better when they do that sort of thing and they feel better when they go in the sun and they kind of chill out or relax in nature, what have you. So they've done that too with nature bathing changes your HRV, looking at picture, the Japanese arts of those calligraphy nature pictures, they were to calm you down.
So it has that same effect. Did I lose you? No. So one of the things that we find is that when you put photobiomodulation on is that there's an evasodilatory effect.
So this vasodilation can only happen in a parasympathetic state. Sympathetic closes down your things. And if you are in a hyped up state, in a sense you can have global hypertension which will reduce the perfusion into your brain, which over time will make some cells become hypoxic and they won't turn on as much. And if those happen to be in the parts that run your HRV, it's a pretty bad loop, wouldn't you say?
[00:24:08] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:24:09] Speaker B: And that's kind of what we find is that structure equals function. So if you kind of lose the oxygen and you do that over time and you stress out these cells, they're going to shut down and then they shut down and you lose more control and it's just a downward cycle. So one answer is the vasodilation. One answer is that it creates this maybe electromagnetic change in the way these things work. Another one is that the big thing that people talk about is more energy, right? So mitochondrial exponential function and growth and they get bigger and they hypertrophy and they just produce more juice and that's really a good thing, right, for all tissues. So we don't know really how that fits into the HRV quotient, but you're going to have more energy to do more things and that's sort of what is in your brain. You could do what you want with it.
[00:25:11] Speaker A: You see this with the mitochondrial piece of things as being such the powerhouse for our cells. What do you think is like I mean, this almost seems like a hack versus a hey, this is an evolutionary piece because you would think just being out in the sun would trigger it otherwise. So do you think the photobiomodulation is just science being really good at discovering something that is I don't know. I don't use the word hack as not a powerful I mean, I do tons of hacks every day, so it's not in any way saying that it's less than scientific. But I'm trying to figure out why this red light difference than why would that in our biology improve mitochondrial functioning? I think your example of heart rate variability kind of looks at that. But do you have any that or is it just like this great hack that we've discovered that really improves mitochondrial functioning and nerve functioning?
And feel free to replace hack with a more professional sounding no, I don't.
[00:26:23] Speaker B: Think there's anything wrong with it. It's like hack the stack is really what you want to do. And the Pro Neural program is stacking things on top of each other until you get the result that you want, which is the physiologic changes. So I have no problem saying it's a hack because that's what you want to do. You want to up the good stuff. And that's what we do is in the book. Those are the recipes. Who would have thought a cold shower would have changes heart rate variability?
Remember, let's not call photobiomodulation red light therapy because it takes away from really what its power is, right? So every type of wavelength of light has a certain effect, right? So microwave is a wavelength of it's not visible light, but it's a wavelength and it has an effect. And an X ray is a wavelength and it has an effect. So when we use in the Pro Neural light system, we use far infrared, near infrared, red, blue, green, all out of different lights. So they all have a different receptor. And that receptor is going to change the way the cell kind of functions and then it actually changes the genetic expression afterwards after it has these effects. So it's kind of complicated. It's like playing chess on five levels so you can move up and down and left and right. So it does get a little complicated. So let's not just put it into red light. And on the other side, that's a singular light. We're talking about multiple wavelengths. But when you're talking about outside light, remember, we live in little square boxes, little clothes, and we stay in a room, right?
Stare at screens. There's a lot of artificial, artificial stuff we were born with bare back, right.
And we were supposed to be accepting light. We just don't do it that much anymore. So do aboriginal cultures have better microbiomes and less dementia and diet and everything? Of course. Right.
But on one side, a light shower of all the light that you can have doesn't really have the same therapeutic effects as putting a light right on your skin so that it can go to a certain part of the body to hit a certain receptor to have a certain effect. Right. That's kind of the science of it. So, yes, there is a natural quotient of it. And I think that a paleolithic man had a lot of hacks that he had to use to survive. And I think we can pull those back and use them for ourselves in a scientific way.
[00:29:31] Speaker A: Excellent. So talk about the stacking, because I love that because it's not just photobiomodulation. You have that as a part of an overall system. So I don't know if you want to go through them one by one or just kind of walk. Folks, the book does a great job of this. So you're adding photobiomodulation to, I would say, holistic wellness regime. Like, you're bringing in best practices, stacking those. So I would let what would you like as we approach this model, I think we got a good idea of photobiomodulation. How do you talk about the rest of this? Because I imagine in the book it seems like they're on par with this.
Obviously your expertise lies in the photobiomodulation and all this other stuff. So how do you bring that into your thinking about overall health and wellness?
[00:30:30] Speaker B: It's a functional medicine approach. And really how we started to do this was the talk that I'm working on right now is on peripheral neuropathy. So back in the old days and I say that because it was like 2007 and we talk a little bit about this in the book that my mother was diagnosed with peripheral neuropathy. Actually, I have diagnosed her because she couldn't walk and it was statin induced neuropathy and she was a diabetic and everything like that. But we used red and infrared light to bring sensation back, reduce the pain.
They start to sweat and they can have better balance and strength. And it was like unbelievable.
Peripheral neuropathy is one of the worst things that can happen to you. But it is a chronic progressive neurodegenerative disease.
I know a lot about nerves, but I didn't know a whole lot about neuropathy. And I had to kind of learn it on how to build these nerves back up because it wasn't light worked. And then we gave them fish oils and then we gave them Lcarnitine, whatever we could find that would help the nerves function. We just would stack them on know, we basically were building the plane in the air because working in Arizona and all the snowbirds would come down we call them and they would show up and they would like, my feet don't work. And I'm like, okay, let's do this and let's do that, and let's do the next thing. Vibration and vitamins, we did whatever it took, whatever the research said would work. And we had like a 92% satisfaction rate in the first couple of weeks of the care. Wow. So we knew we were on to something, a functional medicine approach. And there's a lot of people out there who are going to offer you take this vitamin and do this thing. But the overlying layer of stuff that you can spread these things out nicely is the photobiomodulation just accelerates the process of what you're doing. So we kind of developed a neurorehabilitative program based on regrowing nerves in the feet. And I step back and I say, well, you know, I would go to these conferences all over the world, basically, and go to the speakers, and they make a great presentation. I go up and talk to them because I'm the guy in the back that raises his hand all the time. Basically, I'm that guy. And the point is, it's all one nervous system, right?
The nerve in your toes goes all the way to your head, right? So if you pull this thing out, I would say numb foot, numb brain. And the reality of it is most of these people were having cognitive impairment. Yeah, right. And so it wasn't really until almost 2017 that we were able to have enough evidence to say putting light on the brain directly can have a good effect. Putting it on the body has a good effect on the brain and the body also. But putting it right on the brain had a better effect or a different effect.
So it's just that I don't care. Really what you want to do, you want to do neural feedback, you want to do hyperbaric chainure. You want to do all these things. If you put the light on, it makes everything go a little bit easier, and it makes the clients able to follow directions and everything like that. Interesting because their cognition we've talked about it cognition is going to improve, things are going to get better. But I want to point out a little known fact of science that your listeners or our listeners really might find important, because we always talk about what can we put in? Like you're talking about what vitamins can we use or how do we do this and how we do that to make our brains work better. And I want to make a very important statement. You cannot green juice your way to a better brain because you cannot stimulate a toxic brain. You cannot accelerate a brain that is stagnant. And what we're finding now, and HRV is another very important factor in this, is that neurotoxicity, neuroinflammation, gut dysbiosis, just chronic inflammation, is very bad for the brain and why it's. Bad for the brain is because it increases the toxic load that the brain can't clear out.
So the main thing that really that we're focusing on these days is demonstrate that photobiomodulation. And even we viewed it on the head, on the neck, on the body, up the nose is very important for the brain's detox situation or the Glymphatic system. Now, the Glymphatic system was only really discovered like 2011. Yeah, 2012. And here I'm writing research on it and I'm thinking this is a new thing and there's guys giving YouTube videos, everybody's talking about it. Now, what they don't kind of follow along is that that vasodilation that photobiomodulation does it also vasodilates the meningeal lymphatic vessels, right? And those are the ones that take the toxins out the brain and they drop them down into the neck and it comes out through the nose and through the vessels and out to the body. So this is another twofold factor, right? Because you need to have a good heart rate variability bandwidth, right?
We don't just want higher is better than lower, right? But you want to have both. You want to be able to go high parasympathetic and high sympathetic when you need it. And so these sleep stages, the Glymphatic system works when you're in your deep sleep stage.
So we found that using the photobiomodulation with our clients, we have a 100% increase in heart rate variability scores and numbers and readiness and everything like that. And we have an increase in our deep sleep percentages by like 67%.
[00:37:33] Speaker A: That's when these things turn on, when you say 100% increase in heart rate variability scores.
So if I'm a 30 RMSD, 60 RMSD, you were seeing those bigger jumps.
[00:37:50] Speaker B: Yes, I think that's really consistent. Whatever it is, I can essentially double your score if you fit into these parameters. And if you're sick, if you're sick, you're not going to have a 60 score. Right. So that's the easy part. Right. If you have systemic inflammation, your HIV is going to be reflected in it. Right. If you have neuroinflammation, your HIV is going to be affected by it. So these are the parameters that we use. And that's the funny thing is we didn't really design the pads to make you sleep more. What we find is that as your system kind of kicks in and the healing power of the light is utilized by your body, everything starts to work better and you just have to get out of the way. Don't do the wrong thing. Right?
We balance the circadian clock. We use the light therapy for that. We get the lights down. That's the first thing. We make sure that they're not doing the wrong stuff so that they can get their sleep back to where it belongs and we make them pay attention and away we go.
So, yeah, it really facilitates on the outside. You can look at it and say if you just had to use one parameter. Yeah, it would probably be heart rate variability. How am I doing? You're doing better. You're doing better.
We're not comparing it to me, we're comparing it to you. Two weeks ago. Two months.
And if you think about it, Matt, it's a lot like photobiomodulation is a lot like exercise without exercising because it's the hormetic effect.
Hormesis. Right. So in the book we say, as BJ. Palmer, the founder, the educator, developer of Chiropractic said, in the farmer's hand, the hoe gets smooth and the hand gets callous.
And that's sort of how it works. Exercise is going to lower your HRV, but if you do it for two, three weeks there, your HRV goes up. That's that bandwidth we're talking about. That's kind of the same thing. Same thing. So we're having these positive effects on the brain, just like exercise. And that has a cardiovascular benefit. Isn't that weird? Right? This heart brain connection is right in front of us, but we don't really pay attention to it.
[00:40:28] Speaker A: Fascinating. Well, one of the things I love is as we kind of begin we got a little bit of time left, but as we begin to wrap up, I want to give enough time to tackle this is like I said, I was really impressed all the way through.
And I think this for me, honestly, was needed because even though I've gotten to know you respect your work, I got the book as well about the same time. Just looking at the reference section, like I said, everything really well positioned with research and then which I loved, yet it might not be as intuitive to some folks is the oneness piece, the spirituality piece in this book packed with really wellness practice, most of which I was somewhat familiar with. You gave me different ways to think about things, which I always love. When I pick up a book that does that, especially when it gives me five or six references to say, okay, here's further reading on it. Spirituality.
How does this inform your thinking? How does this inform your work with folks?
You don't have to convince me, but I think for a lot of folks it might not fit as well. We're talking HRV, we're talking science, we're talking microcontroll DNA systems of the body and then a oneness there to wrap it up at the end. I'd love just to give you some time to talk about how that made it into the model and how that sort of informs your thinking as mixed in with all this scientific talk that we've been doing for about 45 minutes now.
[00:42:15] Speaker B: I think you took as usual, Matt, you're a good interviewer and you picked an interesting topic. But we're not all about the funny thing is that we are all about science. And if you think about we have this whole research section on and so does a lot of the photobiomodulation people work on this sort of thing. Like brain waves of meditators. And does photobiomodulation help these people? Right? And so a lot of my long term meditators are drawn to this photobiomodulation because when they put the light on, it gives them that feeling of oneness.
I'm trying to remember the word that they use, but it's like they can get to that place of not ubiquitous, but something like that, where they're relaxed. They're in tune, they're in the zone, they're in the flow.
Like I say, I'm not a guru. I don't want to be your guru. I don't want to be a swami. And so that's not a kind of a practice that we talk about, but it is about changing your consciousness. It is about getting you to become a little bit more relaxed. Remember, in the book, we'd say the cause of disease is trauma, toxins, and autosuggestion, which is thoughts. So people with no faith are freaked out, right, because they have no positivity about the future. Right. On one hand, putting the light onto you is sort of like a hug, really, because remember I said we're infrared emitting beings, and if you have infrared light that's coming off of those pads, you sort of kind of can become like being held in your mother's arms, basically. Right? So that's a positive thing. And it helps you get into the flow. It helps them become relaxed, helps them sleep, helps them meditate. So that's sort of mindfulness without doing anything, right? So exercise without exercising, meditation without meditation. But if you look at meditative practices, they talk about breathing, right?
And what breathing does is it changes your oxidative stress. Right. It changes your amount of CO2 in your brain. And guess what? It increases vasodilation. And at the same time so wow. So you're saying if I put the light on, I get vasodilation. If I do respiration, I get vasodilation. And you tell if I put it's the same as meditation. Yeah.
And if you add the heart rate variability, biofeedback where you're breathing and you're getting in tune with your interception, which is nothing. There's not a religion on it. Right. I don't have a dot on my head, and I don't want everybody to come follow me in front of my house. But it's a scientific based practice of changing your person, your personality, your mood, what you have. You right. So the thing that we are finding is that most of these therapeutic practices or meditative practices or spiritual awakening practices also have a strong influence on augmenting the glymphatic flow of the brain.
Very important. If you do yoga, right, yoga practices, and you do downward dog, the fluid flows up into your head. Yeah, guess what? It's got to go out, too. And that's the dishwasher cycle of cleaning the brain. That happens mostly at night, but it can be augmented during the day. Right. So breathing, postures, right? Standing on your head, doing your breath, all these things increase the cerebral spinal fluid. And really that's a lot of where rebirth and healing happens because that's where neuroprogenetor cells come from in the CSF, they have to flow around. So again, if you're in a hyped up state, if you're in a parasite, a sympathetic state of tension, you're not going to push stuff into your brain and you can't push stuff out of your brain and you become toxic in the inside.
These practices help people get better for reasons that are difficult to non invasively examine. But it's the same thing, the same physiologic signature of changes in heart rate variability, of when you sleep, of when you exercise, of when you meditate, of when you do yoga, of when you breathe, or when you do photobiomodulation, is the same physiologic healing signature. I hope that's a good answer.
[00:47:35] Speaker A: I think that's not only a good answer. I don't know if we can end the podcast with any better statements.
I know you and I can go on for another 2 hours, but boy, when you get that high note this late in the show, dr. Joe, I think we should let your words of wisdom kind of roll us out will for our audience. Can you name your book one more time so they know?
[00:48:02] Speaker B: Well, we'll put a link into the.
[00:48:05] Speaker A: Links in show notes, but just if somebody's driving around in their car, give them the book title one last time.
[00:48:12] Speaker B: My brain matters. The neurometabolic solution how to have more brain power for your loved ones and yourself.
[00:48:20] Speaker A: Perfect. And like I said, we'll throw links in there. If you're interested in Dr. Joe's products, his book, like I said, I highly recommend it. I would also just put out there and we strategically did this for another episode later on. If you're interested in traumatic brain injury, you've got to read Dr. Joe's book. I think again, when we talk about very highly researched approach to what I find in my work, a subject that we struggle with honestly in the mental health arena. There's a lot of great people doing great work, yet it's so kind of different than typical mental health that we don't do I don't think we can do a better job, let's put it that way. A lot of us see that as a place of growth. So don't hesitate if you're interested in that topic. Don't wait till that second episode. Go ahead and pick up a copy. Now we'll have Dr. Joe back to talk about that because I was delaying gratification this whole time because as somebody who's interested in TBI, this book was a real resource to me as well. So Dr. Joe, I want to thank you. Like I said, we're going to throw a lot of links in the show notes. You can find
[email protected] and we'll see you next week, everybody. Thanks, Dr. Show. Bye.
