[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 back to the heart rate variability, Podcast. I am Matt Bennett. I am back here with my good friend Dr. Scotty Butcher today. Scotty, how are you doing?
[00:00:41] Speaker B: I am doing super awesome on a Monday that we're recording this. Matt, how about you, man?
[00:00:47] Speaker A: Hey, I can't complain, my friend. So I realized that some of the folks who may have not listened to past podcasts but are picking us up recently, might not have heard the past episode with Scotty. But we talked a lot about Scotty's expertise on the physical health side. We went into biofeedback and other things as well. And then about a couple weeks ago, Scotty sent me this. He called it a brochure. I returned it as more of a manifesto about this program he is developing or has developed around anxiety. And I just had to have Scotty back on the show to talk about what he's doing because I realized, hey, we didn't do nearly the justice on this end of your expertise. So, Scotty, just in case people didn't catch the previous episode, just a quick introduction of yourself, and then I can't wait to jump into the Stoic. Tiger program that you've developed.
Yeah.
[00:01:53] Speaker B: Thanks so much, Matt. I appreciate you and appreciate the opportunity to come on to this podcast. And as you know, I'm a wide advocate for your work and the optimal HRV app is central to my program. So yeah, I've got to guess if I could wear a number of hats and one that I've just recently gotten rid of. Interestingly. I used to be a university professor. It used to be as of a couple of weeks ago, I taught physical therapy for 16 years. I've been a physiotherapist for 25.
I have done lots of coaching with varying in varying ways and probably most significantly to our conversation, I've had anxiety in varying forms across basically my entire adult life and everything from some bouts with social anxiety. I've had panic disorder, lots of panic attacks here and there, generalized anxiety disorder, anywhere from moderate to severe, depending on life circumstances and what is sort of, I think, a newer term, high functioning anxiety, which is where I do a lot of my coaching on.
As you know, as we've talked about, I'm not a mental health therapist. I am a coach.
As part of this, what this means is that I do a lot of work on trying to work with individuals on a very close basis to help them through their challenges that they're having with anxiety and not that that can't be therapy and that the therapist can't do that. But I look at this as a much more comprehensive I'm helping you day to day to day to day with lots of different activities that keep you active in terms of building your mental resilience. And we've talked in the past about physical resilience, mental resilience building is just as important. So anyway, yeah, PhD in Respiratory physiology. I've done some training with Ina Kazan, who is no stranger to the listeners of this podcast, with Biofeedback. I've done some work with Peter Litchfield, trained under him in terms of breathing behavior assessment. And so I guess I do a number of things so we can talk lots about that. I'll stop there for now.
[00:04:27] Speaker A: Yeah. So let's dive into high functioning, I think you call it high functioning anxiety. So let's talk a little bit more. I think I know what you mean by that, but I would love to hear your thoughts because as I see it, I work with a lot of high performers in the healthcare arena, and there's a lot of burnout and other anxiety fluing around there right now too. But I'd love to get your thinking about this concept.
[00:04:55] Speaker B: Yeah, it's interesting. High functioning anxiety. It's like anxiety, I mean, anxiety itself, by definition, is an excessive or inappropriate worry or fear about things that are going to happen or that might happen, or that you know will happen, or any combination of those things. And it can affect a lot of people differently, but it's easier to diagnose when someone is really stuck and they can't get out of the house, for example. Things like that are very obvious examples, but there's a huge subset of people who are the high performers. They're the ones that are out there just killing it day in and day out. But that's on the outside, right? To all people that observe them, that you look at them, they're super high in their field. They're doing really well. Again, I sort of look at myself, went through multiple grad school education professor, business owner, all of that kind of thing, and super successful, but like just dying on the inside, just this tornado of emotional dysregulation and just burnout overwhelm, fatigue. Basically it's go, go, everything's, fight or flight in terms of what you're doing and what you're feeling. And then it's crash and die at the end. So it's those that might not know they have anxiety, it's those that maybe they do know they have anxiety, but they're like, I'm strong enough, I can push it down, I can fight through it.
I can be the martyr and the hero for my family, my work, my life. But at the end of the day, like I said, they're dying inside and it takes a huge toll, not only on their mental health, but, as you said, the potential for burnout. And when they try and rest and relax. They just don't know how. And so they find that things like lashing out at their partner or their kids or their friends for no real reason because they're just so stuck that they can't get out of it. So really good mask on the outside for these guys and turmoil on the inside.
[00:07:28] Speaker A: So one of the things, as you were talking, and I see this a lot in some of the high burnout fields and organizations and systems I work with almost that fight or flight. And I think this will be a little bit of an exaggerated statement, but let me just say it and we'll throw some drama in here because drama is always fun on a Monday for us as we record this totally almost that I would say that energy is almost rewarded in some workplaces. I think about healthcare professionals I work with, the fact that you answer your phone 24/7 actually can help you in your career now. It's destroying you in other aspects of your life. But I see this kind of mentality of whether you want to say, like, if you're not burned out, you're not working hard enough or if you're not on 24/7, you're going to get passed by, but almost like this reward for this unhealthy behavior. And I kind of wonder with these high performers, how do you help them start to maybe let go of some practices that I would imagine at least some of them see as being very central to their professional success in life?
[00:08:51] Speaker B: It's a great question.
Everybody triggers and sort of holds on to things in different ways. So there's no cut straight answer in terms of how this works. But you're absolutely right.
In many ways, we are rewarded for our perfectionism and our lack of boundaries. And that's exactly what you're talking about.
The thing about it and what becomes a challenge is to try and reframe that. You don't have these boundaries that you're constantly go, go reframe that into, well, can we be more productive in the times where we're being productive and set boundaries so that we can still function as humans? Which it's a tough pill to swallow, but a really good analogy. And I don't know if this was a myth or I don't know, it was a story I heard somebody told to me a few weeks ago that I thought was really relevant to what we're talking about here. It's the story of two woodcutters. And so these woodcutters are basically high performers.
They're going out, chopping down trees day in, day out together, right? And the one wood cutter, he's like, okay, I'm going to work hard and works hard the whole day and doing a great job working hard, right.
The other wood cutter, he'll frequently stop and leave.
The one that's constantly going is like, what are you doing? Are you not cutting wood? Are you not doing your job? Are you not functioning at the level that you're supposed to be doing or whatever. And so what, what he does is he goes away for a couple of hours, comes back, but then all of a sudden his productivity is like through the roof and he's chopping more trees than the guy that's going constantly. And the guy that's going constantly is like, well, what is your secret? What are you doing? You're taking so many breaks and you're not able to I can't keep up with you, but you're taking all these breaks. Are you just that much better than I am? And the guy that takes the breaks, he says, no, I'm going to sharpen my axe.
Yeah, let that sink in a little.
Right. To me, this is exactly the work that needs to happen, is that you can go. Go. We know we cannot live and survive or thrive even in a state of high sympathetic activation. All the time, our bodies, our minds, our being, just does not work that way.
And we talked about this last time when we were talking about the physical. Teaching someone to activate sympathetically as needed and be able to get true deep recovery in between times is massive. And so learning that true deep recovery is like sharpening that axe. It's training in the mind gym. It's training in the nervous system gym, where we're training our parasympathetic nervous system to develop the connectivity in the brain and the neuroplasticity to be able to function appropriately as needed.
[00:12:08] Speaker A: Love it.
[00:12:09] Speaker B: So does that ring a bell?
[00:12:11] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. So what do you think? I know you got these five different sort of areas that you focus on. The first being understanding anxiety. Is there any other guy we're talking about some of the misconceptions, but are there any other? Like, I'm not going to ask you to give away all your insights, but any other kind of big things that you think people are kind of missing when it comes to their anxiety and how they kind of look at anxiety?
[00:12:39] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a great question. I think that we often think of anxiety as a very cognitive or emotional problem or concern, even to the point of being diagnosed and diagnosable. I think that one of the things that people miss is that, first of all, anxiety is there for a reason. First of all, I think that's one thing to understand is that anxiety can be absolutely productive. It can be helpful, it can be that cognitive workload that allows you to perform at a high level. It's that activation, being ready.
If we weren't stressed and anxious about anything in our life, we'd be super comfortable. We wouldn't accomplish anything. Right? Right. So I think that little bit of stress and anxiety is valid. And so if that's the case, then it's not necessarily that there's a diagnosable anxiety. I mean, I know we do this, but I have generalized anxiety disorder. I've been diagnosed with that but often what that means is that my anxiety responses are a bit out of control, right? So it's a malleable thing. It's something that we can change and harness really the power of our responses and understanding and teaching people about their responses with anxiety and what that actually looks like. And as part of that is understanding that it's not always and in most cases you could say that it's never exclusively cognitive, that there is almost always an emotional physiological tie. And so this is the work that I'm doing. And again, I'm not a mental therapist. I work in physiology and I work in the body in somatic work from a very science based perspective, which, of course, is where biofeedback comes in. And the power of understanding and connecting your mind to your body to understand what your anxiety is and why it happens and reframing that as this is your body getting ready to fight or flight or eventually freeze, and you just can't sustain that. So I think there's a big part of the education that says, you know what? This is just an excessive normal response that needs to be kind of harnessed in a bit. By understanding what your body is doing and then also understanding that you can change the state of your body, which then change the state of your mind. And that is where I found success way more often going that direction. Change your body first, change your physiology first to then change your emotions and your cognitive and your thoughts versus trying to use your thoughts to change because we know that that's not often super effective that we usually have to bring the body in.
[00:15:50] Speaker A: Well, I love this conversation because my training is the exact I guess top down, I think would be probably appropriate is how do you think about how do you reframe that's kind of cognitive behavioral therapy in a lot of ways? Is that sort of top down. I don't disagree with you at all and a lot of my conclusions are at least psychology needs to come up with a better balance of the two. And so this is why I love these conversations with you. And it kind of leads me to my next question is as somebody who focuses more bottom up, even though I know I'm looking at your list. We have some things to cover here that are bringing to mind. And you don't ignore that anyway, because I'm sure that when people you've worked with or people you're going to work with as you launch this program out, might be struggling with a diagnosable level of anxiety. And where from? Your perspective? Kind of. Let's just put ourselves in two different camps for the joy of the podcast as looking at body up and helping that with the mind. Where do you think sort of medication might come into this?
It's always a push pull in psychology. We know I've seen medication just be life saving and life changing for some folks. And I've also seen it be thrown around like candy by people who may not have a whole lot of training in what's really going on or what anxiety even is. So I would love, from that body first kind of perspective, if you're okay with just being in our two different camps for fun, when might you suggest somebody might go see somebody where you think they could benefit from psychotropic medication?
[00:17:49] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great question. I'm going to first acknowledge that. First of all, that is an amazing question and a super important one. I am not anti medication. I am not pro medication. I am someone who believes that if you have a need for medication and you take medication and it helps you, that that's a positive thing.
I am not a psychologist, psychiatrist, physician. I do not give advice on medication in terms of using, not using, that sort of thing. Having said that, there is absolutely a place for it.
Again, I think it's an individual response and an individual diagnostic criteria that would go into determining whether someone would need or would benefit from medication. I'll be honest, I am on medication. I have been for a number of years, and has changed it here and there.
And it was prior to me knowing a lot about what I do know now in terms of the psychophysiology of anxiety and our physiological responses.
I did take it, and it had a big impact.
It would be interesting to me, just as a personal anecdotal end of one study, to go back in time and say, well, what if I did some of the work now physiologically? Would I have needed the medication? I don't know the answer to that, and I actually don't think that that's an important question to try and answer. I think we do what we can to help in the ways that we can. So I think there can be a very much a synergistic approach to the psychology and cognitive behavioral therapy, to the pharmacology, to the physiological coaching work.
Looking at the top down, bottom up, I don't think it's one or the other. Sometimes I think there's a bit of a temporal arrangement that many people need the bottom up before they can really address the top down. Sometimes it can be simultaneous in that, and sometimes it's with medication, sometimes it's not. The medication side, of course, addresses both the top down and the bottom up because it is changing your body's chemistry, your brain chemistry, which can be powerful.
It's a big it depends answer, but hopefully there's a bit more context to the it depends than just sloughing it off.
[00:20:34] Speaker A: Yeah, from the psychological perspective, again, I'm not pro or anti. Like I said, I've seen it, especially working on the severe end of things. You find the right mix of medications, and it can literally be life saving for folks. And so there's no way I'm ever going to be anti. But I've also seen other people I've worked with that are just on all these medications. It's one on top of another. And it's like, almost got to dig in through the medication to find the person underneath all that. And to me, it's like, okay, what else are you doing?
What are we doing to help address the underlying issues? Because I think in at least American medicine, sometimes the medicine is the answer. And I don't know if it's designed it's not designed necessarily to heal with that. That's where I think you see the cognitive, behavioral and medication piece to this.
That's where we seem to see the really good results. And the other two pieces here, which I think we talked a lot about, but I want to make sure I don't want to skip over these because I know you and I both love nervous system regulation and the power of breathing, because those are two things. I think any physician or psychiatrist that somebody willing to do this should also be talking about these things as well. So I'm assuming with your passion for biofeedback and training, what we've already talked about, about nervous system regulation, anything you would add when you think about the Stoic. Tiger program, how these concepts are integrated in, like I said, knowing that we've already discussed this in some good detail already.
[00:22:23] Speaker B: Yeah, it's huge to me.
Again, I'm going to take the bottom up approach with this. That's my training, right? My training is from a bottom up perspective, and I highly value those like yourself that are in the top down training side of things because they can be so synergistic. So the mindset I think around how to change here is one that can incorporate both. But it really addresses the fact, a, first of all, we can change our neuroplasticity is powerful, right? We are not stuck in the circumstances where we are now. We have the ability to change our circumstances. We have the ability to change our physiology and to change our nervous system responses. And that is powerful. So understanding how to do that is where a lot of the challenge comes. And it's not as simple as just thinking yourself better. I can't think, oh, I have anxiety. Okay, so I'm going to try and change that great. Good mindset, right? But it's not as simple as that. You have to break it down into looking at the nervous system because as we know our body, our nervous systems respond way quicker than our cognitive processing of what we're experiencing, right. So by the time it gets to the level of a thought, it's way too late. Right. Because we've already experienced the fear that causes the fight or the flight. Right. So by then our thoughts have transformed. Right. And that's a lot of what anxiety is.
I say this sometimes to some people because I think it's relevant in certain cases. I don't want it to be conflated that this is like the be all and end all. But I often say our anxiety is thoughts that lie to us.
And it's because our body and our processing of what's going on in our nervous systems, the interpretation of that is flawed because we've learned through life, life experiences, adverse childhood experiences, trauma, any combination of a number of things to process our physiology in an inappropriate way. Because it would have been appropriate had there been a lion chasing us, right? Or we're trying to fight something off that's appropriate responses. But often these things get stuck, right? As we know these traumas, these events, the feelings, the emotions get stuck and we interpret a fight or flight sensation like, oh, I'm going to lose my life or I better start fighting, or whatever's going to happen, right? So we get that fear around that, even if cognitively, that's not the level that we're at. That's the level that our nervous system is at. So I talk a lot about the concepts of threat and safety related to the nervous system and really looking at the balance of sympathetic parasympathetic. I bring in polyvagal theory with all of its beautiful aspects and some of its flaws. And I think that there's a lot of story that can be told around understanding why things are happening by understanding what's going on with our nervous system. That's step one. Step two, after you understand what's happening and you really truly feel it's not good enough to understand it cognitively or to read it in a book or to listen to a video or this.
[00:25:59] Speaker A: Podcast or whatever, this podcast would be enough, Scotty. Let's be clear on that.
[00:26:04] Speaker B: This podcast is absolutely amazing, Matt. I love you guys and this is awesome. Yep. And I know you're joking, but no, it's not. You gotta feel it, man. You gotta feel it in your soul, right? You've got to feel it in your body.
[00:26:18] Speaker A: Sorry, I just had to throw that in there.
[00:26:22] Speaker B: Yeah, I know you're a clown, man.
[00:26:25] Speaker A: I know.
[00:26:26] Speaker B: In the best possible way. Thank you.
Yeah.
[00:26:31] Speaker A: So not enough to read a book, enough to listen to this podcast, but not everybody's listened to all 130 episodes at this point. So I'll let you continue that thought that I rudely interrupted.
[00:26:46] Speaker B: I really think that you got to feel it, right? You got to feel what that means for you and tie in your emotional cognitive responses, your thoughts in with what you are feeling because it's going to be different for everybody, right? Even the location that people feel it in the body is different. That's one of the questions that I ask people right at the very beginning of my program, is where do you feel your stress and anxiety? You get everything from between the eyes to between the ears, to the back of the neck, to the throat, to the chest, to the shoulders. To the stomach, to the pelvic floor, to the toes. Like it's just everywhere, right? Because everybody processes it differently. But I think it's an important thing to help people recognize again that there is some physiology that's going on here, that you feel it somewhere in your body and that there is something going on there. So that being step one. Step two is to learn how to change it, to know that when you're changing it, you're not just doing breathing exercises. Right? Like, I had one client early on in my work doing this where I didn't make that connection well enough.
And he said to me, Dude, what are we doing? We're just doing these breathing exercises. And it reminded me that, yeah, a lot of what we do is around using the breath as the bridge between the body and the mind or the bridge between the brain and the lungs, if you want to look at it that way. And it's a really powerful method of doing that. But you have to put it into context. You have to have the individual to have the mindset to know that they're trying to change their physiology. It's like going to the gym to build up muscles. If you're not going to understand why you're doing it, you're not going to continue to do it, right? So the context there is super important. So I tie in things like what are your life goals?
What would your life look like without anxiety?
What would you be able to do that you can't do now or that you're having troubles with? And we tie that in by going, okay, well, we use these exercises and these techniques like breathing and engaging the vagus nerve and harnessing the parasympathetic nervous system. We do that so that people can come out of that fight or flight and really learn how to be present. And this is where the stoicism side of the stoic tiger for me is a philosophy that relates to the practice of mindfulness. And I think that they're not one and the same, but there is a huge overlap in relationship there that what you're doing by working physiologically if you have the right mindset. What you're doing is you're doing it stoically and you're doing it with mindfulness in mind, being present in the present moment and being aware of what's happening.
[00:29:46] Speaker A: I love that and obviously support all of that in big, big ways.
The other thing, I guess one that kind of I really was fascinated to ask you about was the exposure therapy piece of the program. So talk to me about that because I got to ask Scotty about this as somebody who obviously you have a tremendous amount of information learning about the psychological aspects of anxiety as and for our listeners, we've had some great podcasts with Nate Igman and his work he's doing around biofeedback and exposure therapy. So I'd love to get your idea about how this fits in into the program.
[00:30:37] Speaker B: Yeah. It's a crucial part of always being a physiotherapist and a strength training advocate, and I always use that analogy, is that you need exposure to the things that cause you the challenges. Right. The reason for that is, like, you're going to the gym. Well, your body adapts when you present it with the challenge that it's trying to adapt to. So in the gym, we give people resistance. We give them weight to push against. We give them a fast treadmill sort of speed and incline to get their heart rate up and challenge their body.
It's about the challenge because you can't I mean, there's one aspect that's super important early on, and the exposure therapy is later in the program because you do need to know how to come out of that. Right. And that's where the parasympathetic side comes in. Yeah, but the exposure therapy side is like the resistance training of going to the gym. It's providing a challenge that's relevant to the individual in a slow, progressive manner. You start off with easy challenges and you build up to harder and harder challenges. And finding success is huge. But what you do is you train them to be exposed to that challenge. And can they, first of all, do it? Can they stay regulated? And then when you remove the exposure, can they come back down into a good parasympathetic state, a rest and digest state, quickly? Right.
And I will literally use exercise as an exposure challenge before I'll do a lot of the cognitive and emotional ones because it gives them that training of how to do this. So that if they do an interval, let's say they do a fast sprint or run up the stairs two or three times and then try and stop and come into a parasympathetic state. What they're doing is they're training themselves to go into challenge, come out of it and be like, okay, how well can I reregulate before I go to do that again? All right? So that's a good learning process. That's a good cognitive development process that then you take to the next challenge. So if the next challenge is thinking about a trigger rather than going anywhere near it, but maybe they're thinking about it, right. Okay, so let's get you to think about it. Put yourself in that mental visual state. I do a lot of visualization, too, because there's some power around that. Put that into the visualization side of things and then put yourself there. Right. And then can you regulate? Can you keep it back, then get rid of it and come right back down to rest and then let's do it again, and so on and so forth.
I recognize this is borrowed from cognitive behavioral therapy and the ideas around that. And depending on where people are going with that, this is where I do like to partner with psychologists and people training counseling, because then they. Can help with. What does that top end look like?
[00:33:48] Speaker A: I love that.
I guess maybe it's just not how I thought about that bottom up approach of using physical exertion as almost training the nervous system for exposure to psychological stressors. I love that. I love that.
Boy, I'm going to nerd out about that for about the next five days, so I appreciate giving me my most recent obsession.
So let's talk about the growth mindset, because, boy, do you go into this in spectacular detail here. 15 point detail, in fact, in this. So I'm a huge fan of Carol Dweck's work around the growth Mindset, and I obviously can't say enough about it, but I'd love to get your thinking with this.
Where does this bring in to the program? Especially around anxiety.
[00:34:55] Speaker B: Yeah, to me, it's that neuroplasticity side of things.
Yeah, there's a lot of points there, and there's a lot of things you can talk about. But to me, it's actually fairly straightforward. Not to say it's easy. That's not what I'm saying. I'm not saying that it's easy, but it is straightforward. It is about understanding at a true, deep, personal level that you are capable of growth, that you are not where you are. And there's a reason for that because that's who you are.
You don't have the skills yet. Right. I love saying this. Someone says, well, I can't do this. Okay, you can't do that yet.
But could you if you applied yourself in the right way with the right help and the right training and that some people will say, Well, I wouldn't ever do that. Okay, cool. Well, that's fine. That's not an area where you want to focus. But if you're thinking about something that you do want to change, and this is why coming back to really? What do they want out of their life? I actually ask my clients, what is their personal mission?
It's a question that I always get, people with question marks above their head going, what do you even mean by that?
I think it's huge, because if you look at the things that are holding you back and the difference between where you are now and where you could be in terms of your personal mission, then that disconnect is just about the things that you haven't done yet. It's not about that you can't it's not about that you're not capable.
I'm a big fan of really trying to dream bigger than you even think is possible. And so if you think, well, I'm stuck in anxiety and I don't know how I'm ever going to get out, that is the obstacle that you need to go through. Right.
So I think the growth mindset fits also well, super well with the concept of stoicism. There's two stoic tenets that really come into that. One is the concept of momentum more. And this is where I use when I think of personal mission. Memento more is literally you could leave this life right now. And that's not supposed to be morbid. It's not supposed to be like, oh, well, nothing matters. It's meaning to say that you actually have the opportunity to live your life the way that you want it.
So Marcus Aurelius coined that phrase. He says, you could leave life right now, so let that dictate what you think, what you say, and what you do. And that principle of stoicism is like, okay, well, if I could leave life right now, if I were to look back on my life, am I at the place that I want to be? Well, do I want to be anxious person? No. I don't want to feel this overcoming anxiety or this overwhelming anxiety. So what do I have to do to overcome? Right? And it sort of pushes them forward. The second tenant is one of my favorites. It's. The obstacle is the way. And we talked a lot about Star Wars and our mutual love for the geekiness of this world. And literally, that is one of the biggest things that people go through when they're learning about the Force to become a Jedi, is learning that the obstacle is the way. And that's one of the stoic tendencies or tenets that I really think is important here, is that if the anxiety that you're feeling is in your way, you have to address that, and you can address that, and you can do so successfully. And that is the way forward to lead a different life.
[00:38:48] Speaker A: Yeah. Love that. So let me ask you as we talk about this, because it's always a challenge or I guess maybe an awareness that I think can be difficult, because I think it's more of an and an either or, but it's on a spectrum at the same time. And that's anxiety sometimes can be one. It can be, hey, I've gone through stuff in my life. I'm bringing sort of narratives or a nervous system, depending on which fun piece. If we're going to be in our camps, we could argue about that. I need to change. I need to strengthen my vagal nerve. I need to reframe my thought processes.
But I also may be in an incredibly dysfunctional work environment or in a terrible marriage or another. I don't want to go the trauma side of things, because I think that can be, hey, if you're in a war zone, anxiety can keep you alive, and we want you to be on the edge of fight or flight, because you may need that at any time. So outside of that situation, I look at what's happening, like, in modern health care here, and we know the system is destroying its workforce, not the individual sort of maladaptive response. There's just too much stress in the system. So I kind of wonder, like, if you find someone in, let's say, a high stress, high anxiety environment, whatever that might be, you can pick your example as I used healthcare, how do you maybe approach that a little differently? How does that inform your thinking? Because there is almost a survival component to working in these kind of high stress fields, which we are a part of. So just kind of wondering how that informs your thinking around how am I a stoic tiger if I'm working in American healthcare, which is an absolute train wreck of burnout right now?
[00:41:01] Speaker B: Yeah, I was going to say something else other than train wreck. It started with shit and then there you go.
[00:41:08] Speaker A: Yes, it is. I bear witness to it every day.
[00:41:12] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a different range of things, but the process is still the same.
Like I said, anxiety is very useful. And from a survival perspective, you take somebody in an operating room, emergency room sort of environment, something where things are constant, there is high stress to that. I think what it is, is the training is still the same.
You have to engage the parasympathetic nervous system and know how to do that. That is a crucial first step before you start doing that. Now, I always say your external environment is what it is. And yes, there are circumstances where you can change that. You can quit your job, you can leave your marriage. But obviously I'm not ever saying those things to individuals. Right? If they come to that decision as that's the right thing, well, then that can be part of the process. But what I help people do is I help people work with their current circumstances and learn a few things. They learn physiological regulation, how to get out of that fight or flight, get into rest and digest in a true, relaxed way. Let's face it. Yes.
Outside of the 24/7, I'm in a war zone, I have to be always on guard. Right? Yes, you have a high stress job, but how many hours of the day is that high stress job? It might be twelve. Right. But most people don't have more than that. Some do. I understand that, but the point is that you're going to be at that high stress a lot of the time. You can use the off time, first of all, again, as a preliminary step, use the off time to develop that rest and digest parasympathetic vagal nerve response. That's a training that you can do. And that's a training that I think you should do in that case because you're not supposed to be in the high stress environment and just being all Zen, right? It's not about that. It's about being able to engage appropriately. And if you listen to Stephen Porridges talking about polyvagal theory, that is it safe mobilization or is it unsafe mobilized? Right? And so I think you can activate the sympathetic nervous system and use your ventral vagal system, which is the safe parasympathetic nervous system, the more social one. And if you can engage those at the same time, then you're highly activated, but you're also regulated and you're in control versus just being so far out there that you're just go go and you don't know how to come down, right? So there's some concepts around that and I do think that even within a twelve hour workday in an emergency room or something that's go go, you still have micro moments that you can take to learn intervention. And so you go to wash your hands. That might be a ten second point of time where you can intervene in a mindful manner and engage the parasympathetic nervous system to really help regulate when you do go up into that fight or flight again. So fight or flight, as we said, is not a bad thing. It's just when we're up there all the time and it's unregulated that that becomes the bad thing. So it's about learning that regulation. And like I said, I think in my experience it really starts with learning the parasympathetic. When you can do that as like you're training in the gym, you're training the mind gym. And then when you go to apply that in whatever circumstances you're in, you have the better ability because it's a stronger response. You have a better ability to apply that when you're in fight or flight. And in between those bouts of fight or flight where you have the opportunity to just take a moment and come back down.
[00:45:19] Speaker A: Awesome. Love that. So a little rapid fire questions here for you.
We talked a lot about your work with physical health, working out strength. Jedi, I believe I still have that. You know your Brandon well, but it stays up here.
I'm sure this figures in, but I kind of wonder how it figures in as somebody who might find you looking for more of, to improve mental functioning, cognitive functioning, where I'm sure this discussion comes in fairly quickly. So how do you broach that? How do you connect that to not just feeling better healthier, lifting more weights, but connect that with anxiety as well? I'm just going to throw a slow pitch right over the plate for you to hit out here, my friend.
[00:46:16] Speaker B: Yeah, it's all the same. It's like honestly, high performance in whatever capacity you look at it is. I mean, it's the same thing. It's about engaging your activation, your sympathetic nervous system in a regulated way and knowing how to come out of that. And whether you're talking about someone who has to perform on stage to someone that has to take high pressure sales calls all the time, or the executive that has to make really important life changing decisions on a regular basis, that can get super high stress, you want to perform well, you need focus. You need the ability to ability to regulate. Because we know when you aren't regulated, when you're in constant fight or flight, basically it's like flipping your lid, right? If you think of your sort of main part of your old school brain versus your you know, when you're in fight or flight, you flip your lid, this Peter Levine's concept in somatic experiencing and you don't think in the same way. So if you're in constant fight or flight and you're trying to think at a high performance level, it's not going to happen to the level that you want. So you need to be able to come back down and know how to come back down and to stay in a well regulated state, to be able to make those decisions, those thoughts, and perform at that high level again. Sports executives and for those with anxiety, sometimes it's about like, can I actually go outside?
Or how do I feel like being around people? So all of it's the same concept. It's just different range of things and different examples.
[00:48:01] Speaker A: Awesome. So heart rate variability in this weirdly we haven't really mentioned it, but everything we've been talking about up to this point is connected to HRV. So obviously with the biofeedback work you do going to be big in there. How else is heart rate variability informing the Stoic tiger program?
[00:48:23] Speaker B: Yeah, so I use it for two very distinct purposes.
Related, of course, I use the optimal HRV app, which was fantastic for two things. Well, it's fantastic for many things, but the two things that I really use it for, one is baseline tracking. So looking at what happens day to day to day to day and what's the beauty of the optimal HRV app, which is different than a lot of the other apps that are out there, is that it gives you multiple metrics of I mean, a lot of them will spew out. Probably the RMSD as their main one. Maybe SDNN, maybe the max minus min. You've got all three there. And then you flip it over to the frequency domain and you can break it into the very low, low and high frequency domains to really get a better sense of partitioning, which parts of the nervous system might be well regulated, or whether the Vagus brake is on, whether it's responding appropriately, those sort of things. So I love that in terms of looking at your sort of on the spot level of things, whether that be first thing in the morning, which is where I get my clients to do that, is they'll put on the wrist strap or the forearm strap or sometimes a polish chest strap. But I really like your forearm straps. Super easy to put on and they don't have to take off their shirt.
[00:49:51] Speaker A: To get it on.
[00:49:51] Speaker B: So it's good that way. Anyway, they'll do that first thing in the morning. They'll get a good five minute reading and I can track that and I get them to look at if there is a big deviation, why is that? What happened yesterday? What's happening today? Are there any high stress things going on? Did you have a late meal? Are you drinking a lot of alcohol the day before and just kind of thinking about those things? And so we can track over time what some of the triggers are and see if we can identify those. The second thing that I use it for, of course, is the biofeedback features of it. And again, I have yet to find an app that does as good of a job as the optimal app does in terms of setting automatically with good guidance the resonance frequency. So being able to figure out exactly what that resonance frequency is, I talk about it as the optimal load for training is what I tell my clients is what we're trying to do here. So we're finding the optimal load, the optimal way of training that's going to give them the biggest swing in their heart rate response so they get the biggest heart rate variability and then to actually train it. And again, the beauty of it is that I can see that they do that on the app, and I see that on my end, and I can look at the quality of their training. I can look at it minute to minute and look at the frequency response or the RMSSD or whatever I want to look at and look at. Okay, well, here your Vegas break. Didn't really look like it was engaged fully. Took a little bit of while for you to settle in. But look at this high frequency. Maybe you changed your breathing a little bit. Oh, here's the meditator's peak and low frequency. This was a really good one. They can reflect, then back on their practice and go, yeah, I was just focused on whatever. My dog woke me up early. I was stressed about my kids, so it took me a little while to get into it. The flip side of that is like, oh, they had a great practice, and then the last five minutes was not good. It's like, yeah, I was focused on what I had to do next, or somebody was starting to interrupt me or whatever. And so you get them to tie these things in. And this is the beauty of this that ties back to what we were talking about earlier in this show, Matt, is that tying that psychological, emotional side of things in with the physiology? They have the data in front of them that they can see that goes, oh, so that's what happened to my physiology when this happened. Yeah, okay. And it makes a lot more sense to them.
And for me, it's easy as a practitioner and as a coach to look at that and go, Right. That right there is what you were feeling when this happened. All right, so next time, let's do this right. Let's try it this way and see what happens. So it's a fantastic tool that I'm using and having a lot of really good success with my clients to show them their physiology because that's a big part of it and that's what biofeedback is.
[00:52:47] Speaker A: Awesome.
Last question before we tell people where to get more information.
Stoic, tiger brother one, you have great art on what you sent me. It is beautiful art. So I got to know where you got that and where did you come up with this amazing name?
[00:53:09] Speaker B: Well, you know what? Before we hit record, we were talking about the downfalls of AI. The artwork is AI.
[00:53:17] Speaker A: I was wondering that because it is spectacular.
[00:53:21] Speaker B: It's fantastic. Yeah, it's amazing what you can do. And then even though AI created, I take credit for it skynet's out in the world listening to me say that and going like, okay, well, here's the first guy that's going to get terminated.
[00:53:37] Speaker A: I'm thinking us who do good prompts will be the last to go. That's what I hope.
[00:53:42] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:53:43] Speaker A: It's the people that can write in good prompts. It'll value until we're not needed anymore either.
[00:53:49] Speaker B: Yeah, that's true. That's a good point. Stoic tiger. So I've talked about Stoicism and why that comes in to me, stoicism and the Force and mindfulness. Like the Force. Actually, literally from Star Wars. The Force. To me, there's just so much of a relationship there, so I had to throw that in there. I didn't want to say the mindful tiger because that was just too on point. But again, the Stoicism philosophies really resonate with me with growth mindset and the mindfulness piece of what I'm doing. Tiger is actually from the YinYang concept of tiger versus dragon in old Chinese Buddhist philosophy, which I'm not going to profess to be an expert on, but I really resonate with the concept of the tiger as a protector, as the yin side of the YinYang. And tigers are just freaking cool.
They are freaking cool animals that represent protection. Internal protection is why I'm using it in this program. I was born in the year of a tiger. I have a tiger on my arm as a tattoo.
Tigers are just badass, to be honest. So hopefully you don't have to bleep that out.
[00:55:01] Speaker A: No, I totally agree. Tigers are badass. So is your AI art here. So I just love it, too, because I think we almost as an industry of mindfulness can sometimes oversell almost a withdrawal. Like you're not energetic in some ways and I may not be verbal, but that's what I like about both your art, your program and the name is like, you're still bringing that energy into your life, especially as high performers. The goal isn't to not be a high performer anymore. It's actually to perform even better while living a better life. And that's why I love the name. I love the AI art that you sent me and everything about the program.
So just too long to be called a brochure, but like I said, more of manifesto, like almost a chapter of a book. I would throw that out there. But I'm really excited about this program. So if folks are listening to this, where can they find out? And we'll put links in the show notes. But if somebody's just driving along, what can we start to plant seeds of where folks can find out more information about this?
[00:56:23] Speaker B: Awesome. Thanks for all that, Matt. I really appreciate the comments and I feel strongly about it too, because it is my passion, it's my life work.
You know, I really believe in it and there's a reason for everything. So that's awesome. Easiest place to find me is on Instagram at the Stoic. Tiger. Everything else can go from there. So just reach out. You can DM me, follow me, and I'm happy to talk you through the process. If you're wondering about the program or you just want some more information or you just want some information on some cool stuff, I'll throw in some funny videos here and there. At least I think they're funny. My kids think they're cringey, but it happens.
[00:57:01] Speaker A: Well, I will say there are so few reasons I ever want to get on social media, and your videos are one of those very few reasons I want to get on social.
Yeah, especially Instagram, which, yeah, you are the reason I go on Instagram. You, Sasha, our other good friend, do a great job on that, and I aspire to be better. And you're a great role model for that. So we'll put some more information that link everything else in the show notes. You can find all
[email protected]. Scotty, my friend, I could nerd out with you for at least another three to 4 hours. I got Star Wars questions. I want to know how whales travel at ultra light speed. I need help with some of we need to have a conversation about some of this stuff. But it's so great to work with you. I just feel like you're a brother in this work and it's an honor to work with you and I can't wait for our next episode together.
[00:58:12] Speaker B: Feelings mutual. Matt, I appreciate you.
[00:58:14] Speaker A: Take care. Bye. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week.
