Episode Transcript
[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 out at optimalhrv.com Please enjoy the show.
Welcome friends to the Heart Rate Variability Podcast. I'm excited to be interviewing Dr. Seth Rose today. Dr. Rose gave me my new favorite vocabulary word, which is elite tactical population. Dr. Rose, I'd like to be the chief officer someday of elite tactical populations. I want that in my title in some way, shape or form. So I appreciate you being open to coming on and sharing your experience with a high performing population that can face tremendous amounts of stress from time and obviously performance can be a huge consequence in those high stress situations. So I am really excited to dive into your expertise before we get started with the interview. I'd love just to give an if you could give an introduction of yourself for our audience.
[00:01:27] Speaker B: Yeah, thanks for having me here, Matt. Appreciate the time.
So, yeah, so my name's Seth Rose.
Currently I'm a cognitive performance specialist working with elite tactical populations. I'm a government contractor.
So my background is in the sport and performance psychology realm. So I'm a non clinical trained practitioner starting out in the sport world actually.
So back when I was getting my master's in sports psychology from Cal State Fullerton, I was working with some athletes and some clubs in the local area to kind of get experience doing the work, you know, helping athletes on the mental side of sport.
And then kind of took like a couple of couple years of a gap year before going on and getting my my doctorate in sport and performance psychology from the University of Idaho. And there I was also working with a couple of programs on campus. And in that gap year I was doing a lot of teaching, research and applied work in the sports psychology world at Cal State Fullerton. And that's where I started to really dive into the heart rate variability biofeedback realm.
When I finished my master's, we had stood up at Fullerton, our performance psychology lab, and the goal with that was really to allow bachelor level students and first year master students to get their feet wet with research.
So that way if people wanted to get into the PhD realm, they could have a little bit of experience to make their applications, you know, a little bit more competitive. Right? Yeah. And so a mentor of mine and friend and colleague Dr. Lenny Wiersma at the time was at Fullerton. He's now a senior mental performance practitioner with Cal Berkeley and their athletic department.
We both started nerding out on. On hrv, and we had a lot of tech because there were some startup funds. And so we thought, hey, like, what. What about, you know, how can we do more applied research? That was our goal. Right. We wanted to take what we knew in the literature and. And what we knew about HRV biofeedback at the time, which, looking back, I knew very little compared to what's out there. Because you can go in the weeds, right? Yeah, absolutely. And so what we did is we took the tech that we had and we wanted to answer the question, like, can a brief contact intervention with HRV biofeedback improved performance and mood and. Right. And so it was a. It was. We tried to keep it like a very simple design. And I had shared the paper with you. I don't know if you want to share that with some of the audience, but essentially what we found was that, yes, one session, one brief session of HRV biofeedback could improve performance. And in our case, we used reaction time with some fit lights. So it was kind of fun.
And then we were also using the NASA tlx, which has been used for. For decades now. It was developed back in the 80s to measure mental and cognitive workload. And we found that there was some. Some differences. They, although they weren't significant, and there was some limitations to that, but we also looked at mood, um, and arousal levels. And we found that mood improved and then arousal levels kind of decreased before executing the task. So that was really kind of like the Kickstarter to my journey with HRV biofeedback. Um, you know. Cause I sometimes in working with athletes and performers, you. You need to keep it ground level for them.
[00:05:22] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:05:23] Speaker B: And obviously with hrv, there's a lot of, you know, the psychophysiology behind it, and there's a lot of science and nuance behind it, but at the end of the day, as practitioners, you need to take all that information and be able to boil it down into a. So what? Right, exactly. Yeah. Which leads me to, like, where I'm at currently working with some of the lead tactical professionals.
You know, they are very cerebral and they love to know the details and so having the understanding. But, you know, if somebody comes into your office and you only have five minutes with that person. Right. You know, how are you going to explain it? And then how are you going to actually, like, do something with it, to like, show them, like, hey, here's what happens when you actually lower your. Your breath rate and lowering, you know, your breathing and the changes in physiology. And it really is like a aha. Moment for them to see that feedback if you're using biofeedback and, you know, it's really fun. And then also to using heart rate variability to.
As a, like a recovery metric. Right. And there's a lot of nuances behind that. And so we, like, monitor it over time and guys really, like, eat that up. And so, yeah, that kind of brings me to, like, where I'm at today is I use it a lot in my practice, both on the clinical device side with, like, thought technology.
Being trained under Dr. Ina Kazan, who's with Optimal HRV. So I took both of her diademine.
[00:06:59] Speaker A: Friend of the show, for sure.
[00:07:00] Speaker B: Yes, yes. So she's definitely been kind of like a great person that I look up to when it comes to the work that she's done and incorporating, like, mindfulness into it, which is just right up my alley. And then also being trained under Dr. Tim Herzog. I don't know if you know him. Yeah, big psychophysiology guy. Shout out to Tim if he's listening.
But yeah, so that's kind of like a very, like, scratch the itch kind of where I'm at today and how I got here with hrv.
[00:07:31] Speaker A: Awesome. Well, I'm curious what it was like for you to shift from sports to the military. Obviously, performance is huge in both arenas.
The consequences, however, are very, very, very different. I think sometimes in our culture, we forget a sport is an actual game. Like, you know, we're. We're recording this about the time the final four in college basketball is around. It may not feel like a game when you pack a stadium full of 60,000 people to watch young people put about a ball through a hoop, which I spent most of my childhood doing, to the consequences of the tactical folks that you work with. Both consequences for them, but also others as well. And I wonder what that shift was like for you. Did it seem like, hey, this seems very familiar, or there are shifts both just for you professionally and also for how you work with heart rate variability?
[00:08:32] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a really great question and one that I get often. Right. I grew up playing sports.
My. My partner, she. She grew up playing sports, played college basketball, and all of my friends, like, were just like, that was the culture. Right. Like, we were just always playing in something.
And then that's obviously why I got into sports psychology right after, like, doing sports psych with college athletes for, like, five or six years. It wasn't that I was getting tired of it. I was just seeking. I wanted, like, a different challenge.
[00:09:08] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:09:08] Speaker B: And I always knew that, you know, because right now, the military is the number one hire of fresh master's grad students in sports psychology.
[00:09:18] Speaker A: Really? That's fascinating.
[00:09:20] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:09:20] Speaker A: So there's, like, a lot of sense at the same time, like.
[00:09:23] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's a lot of money invested into, like, developing this idea of, like, the human weapons system. Right.
Humans. That one of the. The things they preach is that humans are more important than hardware. Right. So, you know, I'm. I'm a part of an embedded team, an embedded human performance team with a strength and conditioning coach. We have a performance dietitian. We have a physical therapist. We work with our med staff very closely. We have a clinical behavioral health specialist that we work in tandem with. And so think about, like, in. In an athletic department. Right. You have that team that's helping an athlete get better.
[00:10:06] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:10:07] Speaker B: We essentially model that in the military world to help our service members get better if they get injured, recover quickly from injury, to get back onto the training or the battlefield, so to say. Right. For me, at least, it was. It was a very, like.
I don't want to say difficult transition, but because I was always seeking, like, to grow. Like, that's one of my, like, things is, like, I want to grow and learn and just get better at my. My. Myself.
Getting into the military space was always like, oh, that'd be so cool to do, Seth. Like, and then the opportunity came up, and I took it. And we're here. The first year was very like, drinking from the fire hose because they, you know, not only do they love acronyms that I don't know any of them.
[00:11:01] Speaker A: Yes, they do.
[00:11:03] Speaker B: The military. Military culture is, like, different than athletic culture.
But as long as you're following, like, the values that you work in, say, the athletic setting, like, I'm always trying to be authentic. I'm always trying to put the person first, to develop rapport and relationships and trust.
And if I don't know something, I tell them that I don't know.
And I was doing that in the athletic world, too.
And, you know, sports psychology has evolved to this idea of performance psychology because, you know, everybody's a performer. Right, Right.
Whether you're an athlete, you're a coach, you're an athletic trainer.
[00:11:48] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:11:48] Speaker B: You know, whatever supports a parent exactly. Like, you're. You're performing in your own realm.
[00:11:55] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:11:55] Speaker B: And taking that same mentality and holding true to those values into the tactical space has been just like the, the way to do it. Because I'm. You can't work with somebody unless you develop trust. You can't, you know, you can't work with anybody unless you've developed rapport and they want to hear it straight. And if you don't know, they can sniff BS from a mile away. So you can't do that either.
[00:12:21] Speaker A: Yeah.
So. So as you make the transition from. From athletics to. To military, you know, you're talking about sort of that there is a lot of crossover with those populations. I'm curious because growing up as an athlete and never being in the military, you know, we, we talk about the values and wanting to, to perform at our peak, those commonalities there. I'm just curious as the mentality of the military from the outside, you know, what I've learned, I've learned, you know, historically from the movies, which I know is, you know, not, not reality as well, but you kind of, you tear people down through basic training or hell week, and then if they survive that, maybe building them back up, but really, you know, trying to really put tremendous amounts of stress on folks. So I think the theory is they perform well and some of the most traumatic high stress situations there. There are. So I wonder how that shift has kind of been for you with these shared values of high performance. But. But in a very different sort of setting from a game to, to combat.
[00:13:40] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
So. So like I was saying there, the similarities, you know, they have a shared mission and purpose. Right. Between athletics and here. They know when to work as an individual and then they also know when to be a teammate.
And then there's also, you know, this pursuit of excellence that they both share. Right. So they're just trying to get better every single day. And I think being here, I also, the people that I serve are, you know, they're in their mid-30s to mid-40s, so they're older population.
They have, you know, a partner, multiple kids potentially. So their family, their family members as well. They've done multiple deployments. And so when you talk about this idea of people kind of, you know, like, like we see in the, in the movies or like from the outsider perspective, we see people going through these trainings and getting kind of like hammered down and then also to like build back up, I think that's even more important to talk about heart rate variability and the autonomic nervous system as, as a Whole with this population because all of those really like hard moments in their life during their military career, you know, the body's gas is going. Right. That sympathetic drive is happening a lot. And over time, at least with the population that I work with, it's kind of a mixed bag. Half of the, half of the time I see people not knowing when to pump the brakes or, or not even knowing to how to pump the brakes anymore. Right, right. If we talk about like parasympathetic nervous system and that kind of like the, the vagal tone and like being able to calm down. Right. They're, they're essentially pumping the brakes and nothing's happening.
And so when we start to actually work with them to understand heart rate variability and their nervous system health, not only from my perspective as mental performance, but from like the PT side of the house with maybe how it's chronic pain is showing up, or with strength and conditioning on some of the physical things that can help regulate some of that stuff or even diet. Right. We know the gut brain access is there. Right. So I work very closely with our performance dietitian on how diet can influence the, the mind and helping calm, calm the mind and body down and, and vice versa. Right. How helping them with some of the biofeedback stuff might help them if they have gut irritability or if they're dealing with any sort of like, like leaky gut and stuff like that, which those are extreme cases, but that's just an example. Right.
And so I think that's another reason why it's so important to discuss and talk about HRV and biofeedback within the military space to get them to really understand that over time your, your foot's on the, on the gas, you're hard charging and they're used to it. Right. It's their new norm. And sometimes we just need to remind them, like, hey, we need to, we need to work that. We need to modulate the brakes a little bit better.
We need to use it strategically and effectively and doing it more consistently to manage even the little stressors over time because we know where those little stressors do build up.
That's where I see the similarities. Yeah.
[00:17:25] Speaker A: And I kind of wonder too, because where I have hit the military population in my career is with oftentimes severe post traumatic stress disorder once they hit the VA or unfortunately struggle with addiction or homelessness, which I know is not representative of the military population as a whole as they transition out. But one of the things, especially like working on bases and again with my Work. Being with the school population where most of either the spouses or the teachers are in or have military experiences. It's those transitions in and out of combat that just seem to be such. Maybe the most demanding state change that you can ask somebody to do. I remember I was talking to, you know, I think they would identify themselves as a special operator, though. I know that the tactical language I'm fascinated with in the military, but, you know, was talking to them is like, you know, what I need to survive and who I need to be to survive. And this was a gift, you know, as we were doing massive deployments at a regular basis off this base here in Colorado. You know, it's like being home and going to the grocery store. I just struggle so much because I need to be this person on the battlefield, and that person isn't a good parent, isn't a good spouse. You know, when I come back and just people struggling with the ability to make that state shift, I think, especially unconsciously, if they know they're going to go back into combat, like, this has kept me alive so I can survive the grocery store, even though I feel more uncomfortable there than I do out on patrol. And I wonder if you kind of consider that deployment and the return and how to help people with those huge states and trade shifts that they experience in military service.
[00:19:25] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, you're exactly right. You know, and there's actually a really great book that a service member here had shared with me called Tribe and the. The book, I forget the gentleman's name who wrote it, but essentially what it was saying is how people, when they reintegrate into normal society, they often miss being deployed or miss the culture of being deployed, and they often feel more uncomfortable when they're here in Garrison versus when they're out and about. Yeah, and we see that to a certain extent here, you know, because when they're deployed, they're not needing to deal with their family or their kids or their sleep schedules or going to the grocery store. You know, they're. They're there doing their thing, and then when they return, that's where we see, like, the reintegration piece being pretty stressful, because now it's like, okay, all of however long they were gone, you know, now the kids are there. Now they're back in the house with all the chaos and commotion. Now they're back here, and they're trying to do, like, an administrative work and, like, all the checking those boxes. So, yeah, so we definitely try to support them that way. And going back to the Similarities between athletic populations and military. We. We have different cycles very closely related to like preseason during season, postseason slash off season. Yeah, right. And so that's the way my, my athletic sports cycle, I love that comprehends their, their approach. So when they get back, we, we literally it's. It's like a recovery cycle. Right. And in my mind, that's their, that's their off season. And just like you would, you know, regenerate from a long, you know, train up preseason and then like grind it out during the whole season, we. We take care of them in the same way. So that's where we do a lot of our re. Baselining to, to capture where people are at. That's where some of the HRV stuff to monitor it long term is.
And then when people have time after they've taken some like, vacation time to be with their family, when they come back, then they get to, they get to have like a choose your own adventure. Like if they want to go get, you know, back into their level of fitness that they were before, they go work with the strength coach. If they're dealing with some pain or they got hurt, they'll be with PT or if they want to work on the mental performance side of the dietary side of the house, then they come work with us. And oftentimes during that, I'm focusing a lot on this idea of just recovery, right.
Physical mental recovery to get you back to baseline and, and heart rate variability is a part of that.
[00:22:25] Speaker A: I love that. And I wonder too, like, I know what I've seen in sports happen, unfortunately, since I've left being an athlete is that, that focus on recovery. And I think it took a while for, you know, to, to shake the mentality of. You push yourself until you're ready to vomit in that trash can, right? We all that gym. That trash can in the gym, like, was a badge of honor. Like, if you can push yourself enough to throw up in that thing, you know, you've done your, your, your job for today. And I've watched this huge shift, you know, into recovery, and I just, I'm a huge basketball fan. So I, if you would ask me 20 years ago if I ever thought that maybe five out or six out of the top 15 basketball players in the world would be 35 or older, I think you were crazy like that. That rarely did somebody hit that age, much less be on the top. And now we have the LeBron James, Kevin Durant of the world who, you know, are. Are still in that, that realm of greatness later on but the mentality had to be, like, challenged. We needed LeBron to be doing what he's doing in 40, I think, to say, okay, we should be hopefully starting to pay attention to this when people are 16, 17, and 18. And I'm curious, you know, as you introduce, you know, cognitive performance and mental health and paying attention to what you eat and drink, like, you know, are you seeing that same kind of shift in mentality in the military? Or maybe they were ahead already in that sort of level of thinking.
[00:24:08] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think it's a. It depends. Right. So, like, the people that I work with, they got here because of a certain reason, but one of the high performance tenants that I focus on is what got you here won't keep you here. And so they. They have done a very, very good job of just being high performers. Right. They go to selections and they just crush it or like, you know, the. When everybody else is having a hard time, like, they're just kind of doing it and then they just move on to the next thing.
So it's no surprise of the type of people that we get here, but oftentimes what we see is it's kind of like the NFL, where, like, you have high performance that make it to the NFL and then the average time of NFL athletes is what, like three or four years?
[00:24:59] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:24:59] Speaker B: Right?
[00:25:00] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:25:00] Speaker B: So, like, that's what we see here is like, once they actually get to us, they've just been like, redlining for so long.
[00:25:07] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:25:08] Speaker B: And then with age coming into the factor.
Yeah, we see that people don't last a long time here. And so that's another reason why our team is here, is because not only are we here to help you enhance your performance, that's, you know, performance enhancement. That's what we do. Right. Yeah.
We are also here for sustain. Sustainment, because I, I want to increase shelf life. And so oftentimes guys come in and. And they never focused on any of those things. Right. And then when they get to us, they're like, oh, no, like, I'm not as good as I once was. Right. Yeah. And so we would get them to think like, okay, you got here for a certain reason, but that's not going to keep you here. Because the, The OP Tempo acronym, their operational tempo is very fast and they're task saturated and there's multiple deployments and there's a lot of stressors.
And so we, we kind. We kind of like go back to the basics with. With a lot of those things that will help them improve their cognitive performance. And improve their ability to perform at a high level over a longer period of time.
[00:26:21] Speaker A: And I love that too, because unlike the NFL where you draft somebody in their early 20s and yeah, you might get three years of productivity out of them, hopefully more, but, you know, get them through a contract cycle whether or not they renew or not. You know, the military has invested so much resources and time to develop the performance of these individuals. To extend that, you know, is not just benefiting the individual, but also there's a huge, I would imagine, ROI for the military to, you know, extend that, that peak performance for four years, if not maybe a decade or so, again with changing expectations. But at the same time, you know, that there is that, that great investment that has been put in and to extend that, that performance has to be a huge part of sort of what you're helping people do as well.
[00:27:22] Speaker B: Yeah, 100%.
[00:27:24] Speaker A: Awesome. I would love to talk about a little bit about that research you mentioned with the short term biofeedback intervention.
As I am a history student, so I'm way out of my range of expertise. There was some quote which I will not hear right off the top of my head, but the combat is really, really boring. And then there's an immediate rush and then it gets really boring again. You're sitting around, you're sitting around and then there's something tremendous that happens, you know, really potentially traumatic or dangerous or whatever. And then you're back, you know, being kind of bored again, waiting around for the next thing. So I'm curious about, you know, wanting to bring that performance in and keeping the baseline hrv, I would imagine as high as possible at all times. But then like using, you know, brief HRV biofeedback or breathing exercises. I'm curious how you brought that research into your current work with, with, you know, military folks.
[00:28:31] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, really good question. And you know, if you think about it, right, all, all the people who work with HRV biofeedback or any sort of breath work or meditation, the tenant is like, we, we want to get them to train and practice these skills before the thing happens. Yes, right, yeah. Like, because if you don't train it, if you just talk about it and don't practice it, then when you go out and compete or if you're going out to perform and then you pull those tools out of your tool belt, you know, they aren't, they're not going to work. Right. It's not mental magic, it's mental training for a reason.
So that's kind of the line that we with here at least, and how I brought some of that brief contact intervention stuff here is because I'm every chance that I can get.
We're talking about it, we're practicing it, we're doing the thing.
Because I want them to develop those skills, right?
I know that if we talk about it and then they go on their way because they're so busy, that's going to be the lowest thing on their totem pole list of things to do or focus on or practice.
Every once in a while, get like a star student. And they are telling me, like, hey, I've been doing the breathing. You know, you told me to do four days a week, 12 minutes minimum. I've been hitting it, I'm doing it. And like, I'm giving them. I'm giving them a high five and like, giving them more, right. I love those people, but that's just not the case. So the brief contact intervention stuff stems from some of the clinical counseling work, and it's molded into some of the performance psychology because a lot of embedded sports psychology practitioners are like, in the trenches, right?
Baseball, prime example. Like, there's a lot of people that are in the dugout and they're on the field at practice and they're. They're in the hallways in spring training and like, they are seeing people passing by in the hallways. And our job and their job, I have really close friends in those spaces too. You know, if you only get a couple of minutes with that person, how are you going to provide value and how are you going to make impact? Right?
And so maybe some of that's through some motivational interviewing and you're asking them questions, right. For them to reflect on things.
In my case, if I'm. It's not like I'm walking around with like, biofeedback technology, right? But if they come into my office, like you, you know, I have my laptop set up with the thought tech already plugged in. It's ready to go. Like, everything set out. So that way if I only have like a guy comes in, he's like, I got 10 minutes. Like, you know, talk to me about this. Like, I can put him. I can set him down, you know, spin them up real quick on, like, if there's anything that we. If he's asking me any specific questions or some people just come in and want to do a session, right? And so I have to be. I have to take advantage of the time that they allow me to work with them. And I want to make sure that I'm providing the best value that I can. And if, if biofeedback is a part of that, or if just talking about heart rate variability is a part of that, then that's kind of where we, where we are.
[00:32:04] Speaker A: I love that. So you talk about being part of a team. Like, I'll use a comparison here with a physical therapist. And I think that there's, there hasn't really been, hey, if I hurt, I'm gonna go see a pt, especially if one's available for me, you know, right there. You know, I'm curious of has, and I'm sure it differs from individuals to some extent. Have you seen the movement towards mental health or cognitive performance?
You know, has it, has it sort of integrated in the same way where, yeah, I've got to do certain things to build up my, my mental cognitive resiliency. Like I do my physical strength, but then when I, I get hurt there, there's also that ability to use this to help heal. So I get back to that performance. Has that sort of mentality kind of seeped in at your level yet, or is that still something that's kind of evolving?
[00:32:59] Speaker B: I think it's always evolving.
You know, I think when it comes to sports psychology, we're, we're a few decades behind, say, like strength and conditioning. Okay, so our, our field is, there's, it's, it's definitely growing. Right? Like every, every organization in the pro sport realm is, is hiring. The NCAA is also on board. There is, there is like a separation though, of like, people who are clinically trained who work with athletes, and those who are not clinically trained who work with athletes. So if I'm over on this side working with athletes not clinically trained, there are some organizations that hire somebody who does both. So that way, if there were mental health issues that arise, they can take care of that.
At least in the military, that's not the case. They hire performance enhancement practitioners primarily to be embedded on these teams. And you know, there's a lot of investment from higher up to trickle down. And so I think, I think we're still getting to like, because you're not going to get everybody, right?
And versus, like somebody who thinks, oh, I want to get bigger, stronger, faster, I'm going to go see the strength coach. Right. We're not there yet, but I think when we start to prioritize hiring qualified practitioners into these embedded units and organizations, that's just going to continue to rise. And then also too, with like, the way that like the media and like, sometimes they're dropping like oh, he works with a sports psych or he's working on his mental game. Like those little plugs here and there are just helping our field. That's awesome. Yeah, yeah, so.
[00:34:46] Speaker A: So you know, with that as well, like, I'm curious about how or if you know, either the individuals or also the military. You know, my experience of military contract is sort of if there's money left over at what I assume is the fiscal year, you may be able to buy a gazillion memberships. I think that the military has a warehouse of polar straps sitting around somewhere where it must have been one of those fiscal cycles that hey, we've got a few thousand dollars, let's buy out Polar, Polar supply of heart rate monitors. You know, is there is HRV tracking also I'm curious how that kind of informs this as well, because I never had data as an athlete to talk about how my sleep, how my alcohol use, how, you know, just maybe a day off could, could quantitatively prepare me for what I really cared about was showing up during the game for my teammates, for my school, whatever, for myself, what that might be. And I'm curious, you know, as folks are starting to have oura rings or whoop straps or optimal HRV or whatever it might be, you know, are you seeing that help with the integration of, hey, psychology is not this mushy thing over here. But it's actually. I can measure all the nervous system stuff you're teaching folks.
[00:36:09] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And that's come a long ways too. You know, it's funny, I'm in a, I'm in a field that is, is hard to quantify. Yes. And there's a lot of it depends and people don't like that answer all the time.
So the reason why I like HRV is because it does provide that hard metric to quantify either recovery or getting better. And using it as a metric, not a standalone metric. Right. Like to rely just on one metric, I think does a disservice and doesn't paint the whole picture.
And especially with heart rate variability where there's a lot of nuances that can influence the way that the number is, is, is working.
But, you know, at least, I don't know how it is at other units, but at least in our unit, we're pretty fortunate that like we've been using HRV for about a decade or more now. We started out with Zephyr and we were using Zephyr to monitor some of our service members and collecting a lot of data on that and then using it to monitor different practical exercises that the service members were doing and then seeing how they then rebound from those practical exercises on the back end and using that as a teaching coaching point and then informing instructors on like when to, to dial it up or back it. Back it back a little bit when it comes to their training.
And then in current present day we, you know we did invested a lot in Aura and we did invest a lot in polar heart rate monitors. And at one point we tried.
[00:37:54] Speaker A: I.
[00:37:54] Speaker B: Think it was biofeedback HRV for biofeedback and HRV for training.
Marco Altini Aldini his, his apps.
Because of this, the, where we're at like people using their phone wasn't necessarily doable all the time. So we switched to Elite HRV and we've been using Elite HRV for a little bit with all the funding stuff lately. Switch. Making the switch to optimal HRV has been a little tough, but yeah, I think and then also too with like thought technology. So like I'm, I'm fortunate enough to where I, I can basically go to my leadership and say like hey, I'm the, I'm the SME subject matter expert and I think that this stuff is going to help our people the most and here's why. And then I get the training done and you know, here's all the things that we did using these different technologies show different use cases and then I'm able to get those things. So pretty fortunate here.
But it's just providing different, different capabilities to use heart rate variability to, to build awareness at the end of the day or the service member like people are always going to ask me for metrics and people are always going to ask me like did this person get better? Well, if you're using just hrv, like that's even hard, right? Because you know, you got to, you have to almost do it like in a, an applied research study almost. So you get two weeks worth of, of morning baselines at five minutes and then you, you get those trends which, those can be all over the place based off of where they're at in their life and how their diet is and like how, how, how their sleep is or their stress levels, right? And then you put them through some intervention and then you hope that they do two weeks of baselining at the end. That's, that's pretty, pretty hard. Which we've done here.
There's been a couple of star students that have gone through something like that and I have like maybe like 40 to 50 people that have done something like that. And just like the research shows, we know that on average about 20 to 22% rise in SDNN values or RMSSD values with those interventions. And so having that data to then say like, hey, here is how this stuff actually helps improve these things and tying it to the HRV metric. And so, yeah, it does give it a little bit of teeth, I guess.
[00:40:37] Speaker A: Yeah. I would also love to get your thoughts on one of the things that now having contact with different aspects of the military and also just being a nerd and reading a ton of stuff.
The military's focus on resiliency. I know they were sort of an early adapter of positive psychology along the way. You know, the focus on resiliency, having witnessed, you know, and I, I think it's not controversial to say combat can be traumatizing for, for a lot of folks. It's some of the most stressful situations and pinch, potentially traumatic situations. And then seeing that sort of on, you know, my work, when there's bad outcomes to that, I, I've just been impressed with the focus. I, I prevented. It might be the wrong word, but I, that and you know, of how do we prepare people to go through some of the most stressful human experiences you can imagine, perform at a high level and then successfully make that transition back eventually into changing your identity and not, not maybe ever being deployed or in that situation again. And I'm, I'm curious kind of maybe if preventative is the wrong word, that resiliency building that, that, you know, does that inform your work as well as kind of the long term outcomes of the folks you work with?
[00:42:10] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. And you're, you're exactly right. You know, the, the military did invest a lot early on with some of the resilience positive psych stuff. Right now the program is called like the R2 program.
And so they do a lot of resilience work.
On the, on the special operations side, how it's a little bit different is we don't, we don't have the R2 program here.
So I, I guess the, the better term is proactive.
[00:42:39] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:42:41] Speaker B: Not saying that your, your term was, was.
[00:42:43] Speaker A: Yeah, I like yours better. I like yours better.
[00:42:47] Speaker B: But it, it's kind of the same idea that I was talking about earlier. Right. Like we want to train these people, mental training. We want them to practice these things before the thing happens so that way it doesn't shock the nervous system. They don't get that like adrenaline dump. They don't get the tunnel vision, they don't freeze. They don't crack under pressure, they have control over their nerves. They have, they're confident in their ability to perform and execute. They can make complex decisions. You know, the decision making is, is there. They can solve complex problems. So like all of that happens through the training aspect. And you know, if you talk to any sport and performance psych practitioner, all we, we are doing a lot of, you know, to your, to your terminology, preventative. Mine is proactive. Like we are proactively getting them to build awareness, to build confidence, to have tools in their tool belt to cope effectively and adaptively to situations. So that way when, when the stuff hits the fan, they, they can effectively manage those things in the moment.
Just, just like you would in the sports world. Like we're, we're helping them to proactively get their mindset ready.
You know, how, how can they, you know, mentally think that, you know, the final Four isn't this final Four, it's just another game. Right.
That you do a lot of work on the front end.
So yeah, we are proactively teaching them these things.
The other thing that's interesting at my place that I'm at is I usually get guys on their tail end of their career.
[00:44:36] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:44:37] Speaker B: You know, if they're, you know, upwards in their mid-40s, they've done multiple deployments. This is kind of like the last stop for them, which is kind of, it's, it's fun. But it's also sad because I build relationships with a lot of these guys and then I see them retire.
[00:44:52] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:44:52] Speaker B: And then they move and then I never see them again. You know, in the last two months I've had three really, really close, I'd call them clients that I serve that have retired.
Nothing ever will really prepare them for the transition. Right, right. That you can talk about it all you want, you can work about it all you want, but like everybody's going to have different reaction emotionally to it. And I'm hoping that the work that I've done with people to build awareness, to manage emotions, to respond versus react, maybe some of the HRV stuff that has helped them regulate better, you know, that when the time comes and they're like, okay, I'm retiring, today's my last day. That next day they're going to get hit with that wave of emotions, but maybe they're going to be able to expect it versus it slapping them in the face.
[00:45:53] Speaker A: I love that. Well, let me, let me get you out on my favorite question here. So let's keep you in the position you're in. Let's just pretend you have an unlimited budget. Let's make this question even more fun. Where do you see, five or ten years from now, where do you think we will evolve into? I think we've just hit an incredible time not only for hrv, where you can slip a relatively inexpensive device on your chest or your arm and get what you used to have to go to a laboratory to get.
But I'm just curious, as you look into the future, what do you think HRV, HRV, biofeedback. What do you think will you'll be doing five to 10 years from now as technology, AI, all this stuff evolves at just a rapid pace?
[00:46:50] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a really good question, I think.
Well, one I hope that there is.
If I had all the money in the world, you know, and all the time to work with the people that I work with in the world, you know, everybody would have their own device that they can, they can use, which there is that right now. But you know, sometimes there's money constraints and stuff like that, but everybody has their own device where they can use it to, to monitor or to train whatever their focus is, their goal is with, with AI and stuff like that coming out. You know, I, I know with like the aura ring, that's kind of like the one thing that guys in, in my unit talk about is, you know, I know what the ring is going to tell me based off of how the last few days have went or the last night went. Right.
You know, so there's, there's already rings out there in like Kickstarters right now to, to like use and integrate AI. So that way when you, when you wake up, you see your numbers and then it, you know, the machine learning basically pumps out insights for you and then they're actionable insights. Right. My, my ideal would be like you always want to put the person first and you always want a human aspect to all of this stuff to help with judgment and with interpretation of some of those things. So, you know, in a perfect world, somebody wakes up and their HRV is telling them something based off of the last trends that have happened. And the AI pumps out a actionable insight and then they can click call Seth and then it'll basically like ping me and I can like get a report of what their, their numbers are telling them and then give them kind of insight into what that looks like and you know, talk about, hey, like, well, what's been going on and how can we manage that better? And so it's an integrated coaching, you know, aspect So I think that's, that's kind of where I see things going and I would love for like the ability to use, because I love using my thought tech and, and I love doing like the sit down, the biofeedback sessions. But I would love if that was like the size of like an M wave which has maybe like a little screen and then if I'm in the gym and like I pull a guy aside and I can hook him up real quick and show him and get that immediate feedback.
Yeah. So something like that. Which I'm sure there's stuff out there but sometimes I'm in my, my own little bubble here and I just.
[00:49:31] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, the united thing with, I love it. If you would let us develop it. We'll, we'll put a call Seth. But on an optimal, you just make it a lot, a lot of phone calls. But you know, it's that sort of like where we see the really impact of this. Is the human still in the loop? Because the thing I think that's tricky about heart rate variability in AI is AI can give you really, really good advice based on your RMSSD morning score. However, if it's high again the next day, it's going to give you pretty much the exact same advice, which is still really good advice.
If the AI doesn't get to know you as a human being, which, you know, we have some ideas about how that could happen but you know, I just don't think it ever replaces the human interaction that as you mentioned, that support, that trust is still the foundations of your success. Without that then you know, you're, you got an Excel spreadsheet or something with data in it. But without that trust, without that partnership that you're able to create with folks, your impact is, you know, or HRV's impact is going to be not nearly what it could be. If they're, they're working with you and you see their hopes, their dreams, their fears, all those things, you know that I, AIs a lot better at that than I thought it would be. But again, to have that ongoing human relationship, I don't think we can replace that.
[00:51:02] Speaker B: No, no, not at all. And you know, I think there's, there's work being done to make virtual sessions with people with biofeedback even more easily like optimal HRV's platform, some of the other apps that are out there.
So yeah, I think we're trending in that way. But I know AI is just going to get tied in somewhere and my hope is that it just it doesn't remove the human aspect of it.
[00:51:32] Speaker A: Yeah. I think we'll need each other. Yeah, I hope. I mean that's, I don't want to live in the world where we don't, so. Yeah. Well, Seth, I really appreciate you, your time, your service to our country and our service people as well.
This has just been. I really have learned that folks like yourself are doing really some of the cutting edge implementation of HRV and HRV biofeedback. And it's one of my honors in my journey is to work with folks like yourself who are serving our military. Folks again, having been exposed to when they don't maybe get all the help that they need and what some of those life consequences are, knowing that there's so many great people working on the resiliency, cognitive performance side of this has just been a huge honor for me along this journey. So I appreciate you and the work you do.
[00:52:30] Speaker B: Yeah, I appreciate it and I, it's, it's more of my honor serving the people that serve our country versus me. I'm, I'm just the guy here helping them try to get better. Right?
[00:52:40] Speaker A: Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, hey, I appreciate you. You've been great guest and just for our listeners, as always, you can find show Notes Other information optimalhrv.com Dr. Rose, I hope you come back on soon because I feel like there's many, many different doors that we could walk through to explore your expertise. But this has been a joy and I just appreciate your time and your work.
[00:53:05] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks Matt.
[00:53:07] Speaker A: Thanks everybody.
