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 to the Heart Rate Variability Podcast. If you're listening to us on this podcast, I just want to give you a quick note that we use a lot of visuals throughout this podcast, so I will put the link to the YouTube video of this podcast in the show notes below.
Please feel free to reference that. If you just want to listen to it, you'll probably be okay, but there are a lot of graphics and visuals that will really supplement your learning throughout this episode. So so again, you can check out the YouTube video as well to see the visuals that we reference here. Enjoy the episode.
Welcome friends to the Heart Rate Variability Podcast. I am back here with dear friend, Dear friend of the show. HRV Genius beyond belief, Stephanie White, one of my favorite people to talk and nerd out about HRV with, talking about some potential new HRV metrics as well today. So Stephanie, welcome back to the show.
Your one on coherence and resonance frequency breathing is one of the top episodes we've ever done, so I know for the HRV nerds out there like myself, having you on the show is always a joy. So just in case people have not heard your past episodes, just let's give a quick introduction if you could just introduce yourself and then we'll start to, you know, nerd out like we always do.
[00:02:02] Speaker B: I'm Stephanie white. I'm the CEO of Measurable Resilience.
Back in 2016 when I did my first heart math reading, my power could not break 100 for love nor money.
And so I was coming off of breast cancer surgery, immediately developed lymphedema, immediately developed pneumonia.
You know, following the post infection, developed chronic fatigue and pots and I was stuck in a Lazy Boy four hours a day on a pneumatic pump to get my lymph to go back where it belonged.
And during those four hours a day I had a lot of time to watch every YouTube episode. Dick Gefort, Roland McCready, all the big guys wrote I got Heart Nest certified because that was the only game in town back in 2016. Now we got optimal HRV, but it took me four months to get the results. I wanted or start to get the results I wanted. And I knew at the moment, if I had a good coach, if I understood more about it, I could have gotten those results faster. And so I'm on a lifelong mission to be able to help get better results faster and turn this into a lifelong practice that has benefits and allows them to perform better and achieve more optimal health.
So all of this is my journey to help people do that.
[00:03:39] Speaker A: Awesome.
[00:03:40] Speaker B: So.
[00:03:41] Speaker A: So what are you nerding out about nowadays? So I'm excited when you reached out. I'm like, new, new metrics, new measures as listeners know, it's always like, why don't we have new stuff? So I'm curious what would. How you're thinking about this now?
[00:03:57] Speaker B: I'd love to answer that question. And I need to tell a story.
[00:04:01] Speaker A: All right. I love stories.
[00:04:02] Speaker B: So I've got graphics. Some people listen to the podcast and some people watch the YouTube episodes of the podcast. So if you're listening to this first, you may want to check out the YouTube because I'm going to share some pretty cool graphics.
Yes, I want to talk about how cvnn, which stands for coefficient of variance of the normal to normal beats, can be used as a new health metric.
So anybody who's involved in the heart rate variability research space or has been certified by bcia, it's only a matter of time before you're pointed in the direction of this amazing article written by Fred Schaefer and Jack Ginsberg about the heart rate variability, metrics and norms. So this is a review of everything we know about statistics that can be used to report heart rate variability and heart rate variability by biofeedback results.
Last time I checked, it's been referenced by over 800 other published journal articles. So this is a very reputable source of information. And it's absolutely the place I started.
Now, just to paint a picture, half the people that look at this graphic, and it may not be half, but some people look at this graph initially. Matt, when you initially look at this, what do you see?
[00:05:33] Speaker A: Having seen this graphic a lot, I. I still see the. The two people facing each other.
[00:05:39] Speaker B: Yep. And so if you focus on the black, there's two people facing each other. If you focus on the white, it's a face.
And so depending on where you're coming from, when you first look at, you see one or the other, but you can usually transition to see the other one. The other one is this one.
You know, you look at it one way, it looks like an old lady. You look at another it looks like a young lady with a interesting hat on.
So depending on where you come from, you might be looking at the exact same thing somebody else is looking at. But you see it differently.
And I absolutely see the world differently. And I need to explain why, but I need to be respectful.
There are some amazing people in this space that I'm absolutely standing on their shoulders. So I consider Matt and N at the top of that list.
And everything they've written is amazing. I'm a big fan of Matt's books. The other players are Paul Laird, Dicka Burs, Jack Ginsberg, Fred Schaer, Stephen Porges, Julian there, Roland McCrady.
I am leaning on all the came to the conclusions that they came to.
But I have a unique lens, so you need to understand why my lens is unique.
First, their lens. They all typically have psychophysiology backgrounds.
They're pretty much applying these tools to emotional regulation issues.
For the most part, they're working on a specific problem. So they may work with a client for one session. They may work with them up to 12 sessions, but very rarely do they work with them for a lifetime.
So they may only. And research projects for sure don't typically go past 12 sessions. So the research isn't really helping us with what happens after that.
The positions that people are using this in are typically laying or seated.
And they're operating under an early creative belief that resident determination is a one and done proposition. Once you figure it out, it never changes.
So that's the lens they're operating under.
The reason my lens is unique is, number one, my training is as an instructional designer.
My master's degree is Instructional Design and Technology.
And so I'm trained to observe both beginners and experts.
Because instructional designers know the way the beginner does something and learn something is completely different than the way the expert automatically executes whatever it is you're trying to teach. And so the instructional designer's goal is to break down things into minute pieces and walk the beginner through the early stages of skill acquisition, all the way until it becomes automatic, like the expert does it.
And so that's my training. And that's why I really get, I get, I get into the minute steps and knowledge pieces that have to come together for all this work. If you want to get me excited, bring me in a room of professionals and have one of them say, it's just slow breathing. This has happened before.
And most people who know me could see the smoke come out of my ears.
There's a lot more to it than that and the power is a lot more extraordinary than that. So if you want to get excited, you know, just say those words. That'll get the smoke to come out of my ears.
I have extraordinary clients, and I use the word extraordinary for a reason. My clients have something extra they're bringing to the table and that extra shows up in their readings and it kind of has to be accounted for. So what makes them extraordinary clients? They typically have me, cfs, chronic fatigue, pots, long Covid treatment resistant concussion, fibromyalgia, or some kind of pain management issue.
And that underlying physical condition makes them unique.
You'll see why that is in just a little bit.
I also tackle it as it being a lifelong skill that needs to be automated into people's routines.
And if they learn to do it that way, it will change their 24 hour HRV patterns. They will see a difference.
I want people to maximize return on their investment for their time. If I'm going to ask you to invest 10 to 20 minutes of your day multiple times a day, I better be able to give you the biggest bang for your buck and help you understand what's going to give you the biggest bang for your buck.
So this has to translate into 24 hour changes.
If it doesn't, I haven't done my job right.
And clients often come to me.
They don't have the stamina to be able to determine a resident's frequency the first session. And it may take multiple weeks before they have the stamina to be able to determine resonance frequency. So I have to build that up first.
And my clients are extraordinary.
If they come to me for a morning session, their heart rate may be 65.
They show up in the afternoon, it could be 85. Same person.
And consistently there's a difference. Mornings lower and afternoons higher. I need a way to take the impact of where their baseline heart is when they come to see me because it's often different in the same person.
This is what made my lens unique. This is what I experienced with my extraordinary clients.
So the current metrics that were outlined in Fred Schaefer and Jack Ginsburg's article don't address what I need to accomplish with my clients.
The coherence ratios and the LFHF ratios don't let you know when the client, they let you know when the client is heading the right direction. But they don't adequately track improvement.
They don't measure higher order skill acquisition. So it's not clear when one person goes from one stage to the next.
They don't accommodate Harnessing the power of accentuated antagonism. So that's a teaser for a future episode.
And they don't triage health risks.
I need something to where real quickly when I start to get measurements. I have an idea how impacted the person's physical health is due to autonomic dysregulation.
And so the current statistics didn't do those things for me. And that's why I needed to come up with something different.
So just to review, HeartMath started all this work and published their coherence ratio in the coherent heart part. So other researchers could do similar research.
To make this really simple, we're going to talk about the power spectrum in just a second. But when you get power spectrum results, you take the B part, the power in the B area, divide it by the A plus the C area. And so for example, that could give you a coherence ratio of 3.3.
But in my clients you could get a 3.3 if your power was 500 over 50 plus 100 and you could get a 3.3 IF your power is 2500 over 150 plus 600.
So I was getting a 3.3 and a 5 and an 8 and my power wasn't breaking 100.
[00:13:27] Speaker A: So for, for those that may not. So if you're looking at a 500 over 50 plus 100 versus a 2500 over 150 plus 600, what are the differences?
Talk about what the differences of those two, you know, equations would, would be for the individual.
Well, what, what are we kind of talking about there with these numbers?
[00:13:55] Speaker B: So for me, when my power couldn't break a hundred and I, I was getting a beautiful sine wave pattern, the difference in the max to min of my sine wave pattern, that top heart rate might have been 60 and the bottom may have only been 57.
I was only getting a three point difference.
[00:14:13] Speaker A: Gotcha.
[00:14:14] Speaker B: So when you start to get a power of 500, you may have graduated to a six point difference.
And when you get up into the 2500 range, you might have a power difference of 10 points. You know, you're going between 50 and 60 or 60 and 70.
[00:14:29] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:14:30] Speaker B: And when you start breaking 10,000, you may be getting a 20 point difference. So the height of the sine wave pattern is going to be what determines the overall power.
[00:14:43] Speaker A: And let's, let's define if you could for us, when, when you talk about power. For, for those that may not have done the deep dive in the research, what, why do we, why do we care what what is when we talk about power? What, what are we. Let's, let's.
[00:15:00] Speaker B: I am totally getting there in my story.
[00:15:02] Speaker A: Okay, gotcha.
[00:15:04] Speaker B: It is coming up. It is going to be clear in just a few slides.
[00:15:08] Speaker A: Perfect.
[00:15:10] Speaker B: And so the same thing happens with LF HF ratio. It's got the same limitations.
Three of the leading vendors all use similar metrics and all have similar constraints. So it's a universal problem. I don't have any options right now that help me with this talk about power.
And so to talk about power, we're talking about power spectral analysis.
And some people use a PRISM to demonstrate this concept. So if you've participated in like Matt's sleep class that he did last week or the BCIA course, they use a prism. I use radio stations.
And so this used to be what a radio looked like. You had a dial and you had to dial in the frequency of the radio station that you wanted to listen to.
And so your body is sending information back and forth between multiple systems.
And each one of those little frequencies or radio stations has their own frequency.
And the heart is picking up and making sense out of all of that and is completely influenced by the number of stations that are active at any given time.
The way it beats, the variability between those beats is completely determined by those radio stations that are going on throughout the body.
Each radio station has its own signature frequency.
And so depending on how many of those are screaming at one time, depends will show you what your heart rate variability is doing.
So knowing that when you decide to regulate your breathing, a couple of phenomenons occur. The first one is coherence. We talked about that before. Two systems synchronized and so the power gets bigger. And those two systems are respiration and heart rate.
Resonance is the next step up. And it is not the know all be all. There are a couple of other situations that get a even better results. But for right now, resonance synchronizes three systems. Respiration, heart rate and blood pressure. It turns out blood pressure sets the pace because there's approximately a five second delay.
You find a person's individual resonance frequency when you find the peak oscillations that synchronize all three systems. And that's what resonance is all about.
Going back to the radio station phenomenon, when you synchronize those three systems and you get amazing power.
The variability in your heart rate. If you create a heart rate trace, that's the instantaneous heart rate, every beat of your heart.
When you synchronize all those systems, the magic that Occurs is in a healthy body, all the other radio stations go away and the entire body is bathed in a single radio frequency. So your. All of your systems are singing the same song at the same time. And that's a very highly efficient and regulating state that allows your intuition to bloom. Everything operates a lot more efficiently.
And practicing at this level reestablishes the neuronal linkages in your body. So your autonomic nervous system comes online more effectively. And the effectiveness improves over time with practice.
So this is what we're trying to achieve when we regulate our breathing. I want someone to hush. Does that part make sense? That.
[00:18:59] Speaker A: Yes, absolutely. That's great.
[00:19:00] Speaker B: At one end of the. At one end of the extreme, you've regulated your breathing, you synchronized multiple systems. The magic occurs, and you only have one frequency, one radio station. This is one end of the spectrum. It's the most optimum.
[00:19:16] Speaker A: Awesome.
So I love that. I love how you put that forth.
[00:19:22] Speaker B: Yeah. So that's one end. Let's look at what the opposite end looks like.
Okay. I'm going to call that spectral consolidation. I'm going to give it a name.
So the power is consolidated into one peak. Overall power is significantly and really exponentially higher as a result.
And rsa, which stands for respiratory sinus arrhythmia, is the overwhelming force behind the power.
And so I'm going to blow it up so you can see what I'm talking about. This is the sine wave pattern. Each one of those red circles represents an individual heartbeat.
Respiratory sinus arrhythmia is the natural variation in the heart rate that occurs during the breathing cycle. Specifically, heart rate increases during inhalation and decreases during exhalation. The phenomenon is driven by the interaction between the respiratory system and the autonomic nervous system, particularly the parasympathetic branch.
So early research debated whether there's parasympathetic or sympathetic engagement producing this.
The current research appears to indicate that the sound wave pattern is because the parasympathetic nervous system gets engaged and disengaged.
Engaged and disengaged.
So what you're really practicing is the ability to turn it on and off on demand.
And over time. And specifically, as we age or get stressed out, we lose the ability to do that.
So the practice of deliberately turning on and off the parasympathetic nervous system is beneficial because you get better at it the more you practice.
And when you turn on and off the parasympathetic nervous system, one of the physiological processes that occurs is you you squirt acetylcholine out, and the more you practice, the better you get at making and squirting acetylcholine.
So it's a key part of the process. And as you practice, you get a.
[00:21:24] Speaker A: Better do it myself Acetylcholine, which I can barely pronounce. What, why does that, why does that matter?
[00:21:32] Speaker B: It's one of the chemicals that allows the body to calm down and allows the heart to slow down. It's what makes the heart slow down. So it's very influential in how the body functions.
It's one of the communicators that its presence or absence helps regulate multiple systems in the body.
And so in people like myself and other health conditions, myasthenia gravis being one pots me cfs. Some of us have trouble handling acetylcholine. So I actually have to take a medication for my body to be able to do this like a healthy body does.
So some of us have what we call vital void. Their body's incapable of either making, processing or eliminating something. I live in one of those bodies and that's one of the reasons why I developed the health problems that I did, because we didn't know it at the time.
So if a person has a hard time getting this pattern to emerge, they may need to go see the doctor because there may be a reason why they can't do it.
So if you take a reading at rest, it usually looks like this. It is not a beautiful sound wave pattern. It's kind of chaotic. And that's perfectly normal. This is normal.
And so why is it chaotic?
And just so you can see them side by side. The left is what a typical resting measurement looks like. The right is what a regulated breathing measurement looks like. Why is that the case?
Because in a resting measurement there's a lot of peaks.
Why are there a lot of peaks?
Well, there are a lot of peaks because each one of the peaks is its own radio station.
And if you have a radio station at the top that's operating on a very slow frequency, you get a peak closer to the left hand side of the graph. And this is all power spectral analysis that's done with most heart rate variability analysis tools. If you have a second radio station that's operating at a little bit faster frequency, the sine wave pattern occur this quicker. And there's another peak a little bit to the right. And if you've got a third one that's operating even faster, there's another peak to the right of that.
And when you combine all three. And in the body, there could be 50.
But if you combine those three patterns, you get that fourth pattern at the bottom, which more closely resembles what we see in heart rate variability measurements at rest. Because it's a combination of all the radio frequencies that are going on in the body at any given time. Makes sense, Matt.
[00:24:23] Speaker A: Yeah. And so are we, I'm assuming very low, low, and high frequency. When we talk about the different radio stations is am I putting the pieces together halfway correctly?
[00:24:37] Speaker B: And so you need to know that the break points between very low, low and high, the cutoffs for how those are reported are completely arbitrary.
And so when I get in a room.
So I told you what makes steam come out of my ears.
If you want to have fun, get in a room of heart rate variability, biofeedback professionals, and make a statement about when parasympathetic is functioning and when sympathetic is functioning across the power spectrum, a debate will ensue. There's no agreement, and there's all kinds of scenarios that skew it. So, honestly, in my work, I throw that out the window.
And I only look at power spectrum as the frequency with which the radio stations are operating within the body.
And I only look at the peak being the communication of the time signal, how many times that signal is repeated. That's all the power spectrum means to me is what radio station is operating in the body and at what frequency it's oscillating. That's all I care about. And the fact that there's one peak or many peaks, okay, My work, that's all that's relevant. It doesn't matter where it is, whether it's ulf, vlf, lf, hf. That part doesn't matter.
[00:26:10] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:26:11] Speaker B: I have one individual who has been in a car accident and completely rearranged and had multiple surgeries in her upper body.
When she resonantly breathes and gets like 10,000 plus power, she's always in the high frequency range. She never breaks the low frequency range because she has limits for her rib cage excursion.
She can't do it. Yeah, but she's. She's kicking off the chart, my other metrics because that she's adapted to what she can do and it works for her. But she can't get in the LF range with her breathing regulation.
[00:26:49] Speaker A: Okay?
[00:26:49] Speaker B: So she can't. Her volume won't go bad. She just can't do it.
So, yeah, I don't care about LF, hf. I just care that there is a peak there and that that's the Timing associated with that peak signature.
[00:27:05] Speaker A: Gotcha.
[00:27:08] Speaker B: So, yeah, we're gonna call that spectral dispersion.
There's a lot of peaks.
And so when there's a lot of peaks, the power has to be distributed to each one of them because the body only has so much energy and capabilities.
So no one of the peaks ever gets to be very powerful because the power is distributed amongst all of them.
So power becomes much lower as a result.
So just a reminder, the opposite is spectral consolidation, where you've got one peak and a lot of power. And so when you compare the two, if you look at the scale that when you have a single peak, the scale goes all the way up to 0.3.
When you have a lot of peaks, it only goes up to 0.0008. It really screws up the power.
You cannot build power when you've got a lot going on in the body.
And so I see this a lot in my clients. Some of my clients can only go so far until we address what else is going on in their body because it's always pulling power off. Yeah, so I see that a lot. And as my client's health improves and as their practice improves, I see them walking away from it and able to build their power over time.
So that's definitely consistent with my client experience.
So skill progression.
Beginners have more competing peaks on day one when I start to work with them on breathing regulation.
Individuals with poor health have more competing peaks until their health improves.
Experts with optimal health can achieve a single peak with a beautiful sine wave pattern. Frequently have 20 plus beat differences peak to trough. If you look at their sine wave, so they can really hit it out of the park.
So power is limited until the competing peaks are resolved.
That's totally consistent with my client experience.
I'm going to break this chart down because it's going to be important. We've got the beautiful sound wave pattern. We've got the red dots where individual heartbeats are. I'm going to turn them black so they're super obvious when you regulate your breathing and you get the beautiful sine wave pattern. The sine wave pattern is not normally distributed.
And so just looking at this raw graph, what I hope you'll notice in this particular person when they hit their trough, there's like four beats really close together where the difference is very small between the beats.
But pretend there's a median line drawn across here as you cross the median.
There's. There's big differences, there's huge spaces between the dots.
And then when you get to the top, there's just a couple of dots together and then as it starts to go down, there's only one.
And then as you get to the troughs, there's a whole bunch of beats together.
That is mathematically a definition of a sine wave pattern.
All sine wave patterns distribute that way.
And so because of that, it's going to influence whether RMSSD or SDNN is the better measure for breathing effectiveness.
And this knowledge is not widespread.
So sine wave patterns, they're not uniformly distributed. There's points of clusters at the peaks and valleys where the change is slower, and then there's steep changes in the midpoint where values change the most.
So RMSSD is all about measuring the difference between beats.
So if you got a whole bunch of beats at the top and a whole bunch of beats at the bottom that don't have a lot of change, it's going to make RMSSD look like crap.
And sdnn, on the other hand, you have to know what the median is and you calculate every beats difference from the median.
And so because you're getting a sine wave pattern and there's a lots of points at these streams, it's going to make STNN really bloom.
So STN is much better measure when you're dealing with a sine wave pattern because of regulated breathing. Does that make sense, Matt?
[00:31:49] Speaker A: Yes, it does.
[00:31:51] Speaker B: Yep. And so what I have found is when you've got a person of poor health, even when they're resting, if they're healthy, respiratory sinus arrhythmia is the predominant pattern.
And so STN is going to really let you know when the respiratory sinus arrhythmia is the dominant pattern, or it's going to suck.
When there's a lot of competing things going on, a body that's unhealthy.
[00:32:21] Speaker A: Gotcha.
[00:32:23] Speaker B: That becomes important.
That becomes really important.
So STN outperforms RMSSD in determining breathwork effectiveness.
And also in resting measurements, it's going to be better in people that have fewer competing peaks, which means they're healthier.
So I'm going to give you an example.
For example, in optimal hrv, you aren't able to see the heart rate trace after the session is complete. So you've got to look at the numbers and make sense out of them.
I typically put people's numbers in a chart and I typically paint the winners darker to try to pick the resonance pace.
And so many times, whoops. The RMSSD differs from the SDNN.
You know, when they breathed in at 5.1, in and out, which is 5.9 breaths per minute, they got an RMSSD of 34.8 and an SDN of 69. But when they breathed in and out at 6, they got an SDNN of 70.98, which by the way, also corresponds to the highest LF score.
So I look at SDNN very closely and I've noticed that as a person improves, one level of skill acquisition is when they can consistently get the STN divided by the RMSSD to be greater than 1.5.
So I start to show them the ratio of the two, and I tell them, you haven't established enough stamina until that ratio is above 1.5 across all five steps. When I test for resonance, I only test five steps. I do them from two to three minutes each, depending on my time constraints with the paper, with the client session. But I tell them, you haven't arrived with stamina until you can maintain that across all five steps.
And so we're going to stick to this step until you can maintain that ratio across all the steps.
And that's how I can tell has this particular client graduated to the point where they've got good readings for all five steps.
And so I had, I had to find a statistic that did all the things I previously said I was trying to accomplish. And I found it.
And to give credit where credit's due, I hated statistics until I took a research statistics class from Jan Nesper at Virginia Tech.
And Jan made it fun and he made it practical and he gave us data sets to play with so we could see what changed what. And so one of the reasons I know this stuff is I created hypothetic perfect heart rate variability examples where it was a perfect sine wave pattern or it wasn't, or I started to change the frequency at which the sine wave pattern occurred in the height that the sine wave pattern occurred to see what the patterns were.
And I know CVNN from other work.
This is a standard statistics that's applied across multiple applications, but it has never been applied to the individual reading. I'm going to talk about when it has been applied, but I'm applying this to the biofeedback reading.
It's the coefficient of variance. And so it, it means the percentage change one standard deviation represents from the mean.
And if it were cvrr, it would be the raw uncorrected data. Because it's cvnn, it means error correction has been applied.
And so to calculate, you take the standard deviation of the NN intervals Which is sdnn. You divide it by the mean N interval, multiply it by 100, so you get a whole number, and that's how you calculate cvnn. Does that make sense, Matt? Yeah, very easy statistic to work with.
So if you take the same person, I, you know, give them their LF to HF ratio, and again, I use it as an acid test. You know, you have sufficient stamina when that LF to HF is consistently above 10. For all five steps, I have to know the mean RR.
And so if all you know is the mean heart rate, you can take 60,000 divided by the mean heart rate and it'll give you the mean rr. But some places give you the mean rr. By the way, in the optimal HRV download that the practitioner has access to, it is in the download, so you don't have to calculate it.
And so taking the mean RR divided by SDNN, multiply it by 100. Gives me the CVN in on the right.
This person is in the eights.
And so eight is a person who works with me that has fairly good health.
And it's four to six weeks into the training program.
These are the results that I see with them.
This person is 12 weeks into the program, they're in the 13 to 14 ranges. And I have people that can get all the way up to 20.
So CVNN adequately grows as their physiology improves and their health improves.
This is the only metric that adequately differentiates between people from that standpoint. And for that reason, I love it.
So, just so you know, what I do with my people, I know they've got the stamina. When SDNN divided by RMSSD is greater than 1.5 and the LFH rep ratio is greater than 10 for all five steps. If both are true, the highest LF power wins. And very rarely does SDNN differ, The highest SDNN differ from the highest LF power. Very often RMSSD completely differs because it isn't picking up what I want to pick up.
If more practice and more consistent practice is needed, if all five don't meet those criteria, if they get to the last step and their LF powers never drop, I tell them to keep adding steps, which is consistent with most protocols, until LF power falls.
But an interesting thing is happening.
My people who have been with me three months or more, some people are into it two years with me and we're still meeting.
At some point, power grows no matter what rate I throw at them.
I personally have never taken people past three breaths per minute, but the research has been Done.
And you get the highest power when you get down to one to two breaths per minute, which should not be done by newbies. We're talking Zen monks who do this for a lifetime, breathe at this rate and get the maximum results. So unless you're a Zen monk, I don't want you to start there and I don't even want you attempt it without a professional.
You're not ready to do that six months into breathing. You're just not. So that, that's an extreme skill acquisition, but at some point my people blow through this and their power constantly increases.
And so it's like, what the heck is up with that? Yeah, and it has to do with the greatest resonation occurs when you pick up other body systems that they aren't sure what they are out to one to two breaths per minute. But not everybody can do that. So we're. I'm not advocating that. I'm just saying when it comes to skill acquisition, at some point resonance becomes a non issue because they can grow their pep consistently.
And so at that point it becomes what is there benefit to slowing it down.
And I have a hypothesis of what the benefit is.
That's another episode. But just know that when it comes to skill progression, my guys graduate to the point where this is irrelevant. They can grow their para consistently.
So at that point I have to know what their resilience range of function is and I have to tell them what CV&N to shoot for. And they do different things in different scenarios and they just try to keep their CVNN in the right range.
So that's one of the skill progressions that my guys go through.
Optimal HRV for optimal HRV users. We met, we had this conversation with your technical support staff where I asked for the mean heart rate and they said, oh, that'd be easy, we'll do it next release. But it didn't happen. It got forgotten.
[00:42:01] Speaker A: I think it's because the release has happened yet too. So by dev team there, they're working on something else. So just FYI.
[00:42:09] Speaker B: Gotcha. So on the optimal HRV biofeedback screen, if you look at your history and your results, these are the numbers you get.
So you currently don't have everything you need to calculate this.
So the practitioner that works with you that you signed up for your account through can export these results and calculate it for you. The exported fields that you need are median, NNI and sdnn.
We need this across all three readings, Morning, anytime and biofeedback.
And so if you could pretty please on the screen give the user the mean heart rate, the mean NN and the cvnn, they wouldn't even have to calculate it.
I think you're going to find that your users start to need this information.
Why would that be?
I'm going to answer that question just a second.
In people whose resting measurements who are healthy, the respiratory sinus arrhythmia really pops out. And so this is an example of a very healthy gentleman that's a little bit older, he's a naturopath, but when we do his baseline assessments, his RSA definitely pops out. And so you can see, you know it's going to be better.
Let's talk about what research knows about stn.
The research has been done where SDNN has been used to triage people's health risk for all cause mortality. So people who recently experienced a myocardial infarction, what they found was if after surgery or after the infarction their SDNM was less than 50, they were very unhealthy. If it was 50 or 100, they had compromised health. If it was greater than 100, they were healthy to the tune of people under 50 were 5.3 times more likely to die within the next 31 months.
So this is the research that has been done that says SDNN is an excellent way to stratify health risk. That research has already been done.
I am piggybacking that research, but taking it one step further because I said before I need to take out the impact of the heart rate that the person comes to me with because it might be 65 in the morning and 85 in the afternoon.
The coefficient of variance allows me to compare apples to apples, so it solves that problem.
So it's very much based on that health stratification risk plus taking the effect of heart rate out of it.
Just to be clear, CV has been used with heart rate variability in the past, but not the way I'm presenting it. The CVNN is different from the CV hrv. The CV HRV is when you look at the RMSSD one morning to the next in like a readiness measurement.
And elite athletes are very stable, they can get that down to 6%. If you have poor health and or varying symptomology, it might be 30 plus.
So that's another way I can tell if a person's struggling is if I, if I have a daily measurement that's taken at the same time under the same conditions, if that's highly variable, it's not good. Healthy people are very stable.
And so this Statistic was mentioned in Matt's sleep class that he did last week.
And so this is different than what I'm discussing.
So I've taken this one step further. I want these results to translate in 24 hour improvements so that the way you live your life is different once you have this knowledge.
I call this the resilience transient function. I calculate the CBNN every minute of the day from a 24 hour heart rate variability measurement device.
I have two devices at my disposal right now. Either a Polar H10 strap married to a polar watch which will grab the 24 hour data or a first beat research grade two lead device. I can do it either way.
So yeah, I do it for 24 hours and then I rank order it from lowest to highest. This is four different people, my blue person at the bottom whose midpoint is a 1 or 2. They are debilitated by their health conditions.
Activities of daily living kick their butt.
And so a lot of my people that come to me once or twice, I do orthostatic measurements.
They have pots and they don't know it.
So ones and twos are at an extreme, extreme health scenario. You can't tell people what that health problem is from hrv, but I can tell you it's significant and it's debilitating when there are one or two. And then as your health improves, you get to be green and then you get to be orange and then you get to be blue. You'll definitely see the curve change as their practice improves or their health improves.
And so when I work with someone and I want to see 24 hour improvements, if they start here, this is their baseline of operations.
One way I can get them to improve on a 24 hour basis is get that whole line to shift upward.
One way I can get them to improve as their physiology responds is that line gets steeper, which is an improvement. It means their physiology is coming around because they're probably practice.
One way I can get them to improve is when the inflection point moves to the left. It means their heart singing a bigger percentage of the day and so that's an improvement. The other way it can prove is the inflection point can get taller, which means their practice is getting better and more effective and they're reaching higher CV and numbers, all of those recommend improvement. So there's four different ways I can show them over time that they're incorporating the skills without they don't have to be hooked up to other devices to do practice sessions. The skills have become a grain. They Know when to apply them and it's resulting in a 24 hour improvement over the entire day. Does that make sense, Matt?
[00:48:47] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:48:50] Speaker B: So there's an opportunity, it would be nice if a smartphone app existed that you could set up on a shelf and it would constantly display your CV in a number and or be like a mood ring that colorized it.
And so let's say I have an argument with my spouse or let's say I get off a contentious phone call with a client or I come out of a board meeting.
If I can can just casually look up if I'm at my low range, I know I need to reset. I need to pull the tools out of my toolbox to reset, improve things and be able to put whatever it is behind me and reset so I'm ready for the next thing and I'm not dragging the impacts of what I just went through into the next thing that I want to do.
So you can clearly identify when your resilience is tanking and you need to reset, you start to recognize what the behavioral changes are you need to do to be able to reset quickly and automatically so they're habituated and you can start to see what the big drains are because most people are surprised when I measure them on a 24 hour basis what the big drains are.
So things like not taking a shower before you go to the bed, things like not asking the kids to pick up their toys all day long and when they go to bed, you pick up all the toys before you go to bed. That's a drain and it screws up your overnight hrv.
So people start to learn the crazy things they do that are dreams and they're they without measuring, they would never dream that these things are what the drains are.
So individuals learn what the drains are and they quickly learn what it means to return to baseline. Which by the way humans performance experts are starting to define optimal performance as a performance that you can quickly return to baseline after it ends. If you can't return to baseline for hours, you exceeded your body's ability to perform.
So yeah, the book Burnout does an excellent job of talking about the stress cycle. And stress is any load on the body body. It could be a large meal, it could be a sugar laden meal, it could be a shower before you go to bed. Whatever the event is that puts a load on your body, you have to complete the cycle and reset and come back to baseline.
And this book is one of the first ones that clearly outlines the need to do that.
Interestingly enough, when you look at the reviews. This last one talks about living more joyfully.
I'm incorporating portable capnography into my practice and so I took a two day class a couple months ago and then this weekend I took my coaches through it.
You'll never guess who was there. Dan Berlay, author of Breathe Coach to Tony Robbins.
And Dan said his clientele has subtly changed over the last couple years to where they're not coming to him wanting to perform better, they're wanting to come, they're coming to him for wanting to be able to leave work at work, come home, be more present and get more joy out of life.
Be able to squeeze the joy out of life. And unless you learn these skills, you can't do that because you're carrying around the load that the rest of your day put on you. And so if you, if your goal is to squeeze all the joy you can out of life and have the most fun and be the most presence for your family, these skills are essential.
They're essential to do your job too because you can't do your best job if you can't reset.
So I would challenge people to learn how to operate in their higher range for a bigger percent of the day.
All of us have things that tank us. We don't live our entire day there. We're gonna have things that tank us. But the ability to reset into air baseline is really important.
But yeah, that's what I want to challenge people to do. Learn what your baseline is.
Learn how to practice at a level significantly above it. So you expand your physiology, which is going to expand your functioning during the entire 24 hours.
Yeah. And if Elite HRV can be a part of the solution.
So these numbers are easily available and you can use it as a tool not only to measure where you're at at any point during the day, through the anytime readings, but to be able to do a biofeedback reading and achieve higher results and come back to baseline. That would be amazing.
[00:53:42] Speaker A: Awesome.
Very cool. I mean it's such a fascinating thing because, you know, it's how and this is why I love our conversations. How do you use what's out there to, to really bring the field forward in a meaningful way? And I love how you think about this, my friend. I love that the, the device, you know, and from a technology side like, you know, it's 247 is a, a, you know, you almost have to just focus on that because of battery life things and how do you send alerts and all those things. But I love that option that you're giving folks to do that, you know, you know, more intensive tracking piece of it as well. I think that's fabulous for the folks that you work with.
That's great.
[00:54:40] Speaker B: Yep, yep, yep, yep. So that's where we're at. And that's what I've learned from my extraordinary clients that can benefit the rest of the world.
Even if they don't live in an extraordinary body, they can benefit from what we're learning.
[00:54:55] Speaker A: Excellent. Well, my friend, as always, it is an absolute pleasure to spend this time with you. I gotta go digest this for the next three hours.
So as always, I appreciate you. I appreciate anytime I interact with you, I've got challenges to go go think about. So this has been great. I appreciate you. We'll put information and links to Stephanie's work in the show notes, her website.
She is a great resource and if you're struggling with any of the conditions that we have mentioned here, I would highly encourage you. Stephanie, if this is okay to reach out to Stephanie.
[00:55:38] Speaker B: Oh, absolutely.
[00:55:39] Speaker A: Both Stephanie and her coaches are incredibly well trained.
I, you know, I don't know how many or any of them have PhDs, but if you've got a Stephanie White supported coach, you're kind of scratching.
Yeah, I've got and beyond.
[00:55:56] Speaker B: I've got nine coaches that have gone through my training program. And Matt, let me tell you another thing. I love my doctors, but one of my doctors said to me, if your pat, if you've lost, if you've lost cardiorespiratory coupling and you don't have a typical RSA pattern, I can't help you.
[00:56:14] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:56:15] Speaker B: So if people have unusual heart rate variability or heart rate variability patterns and they're trying to make sense out of them, I specialize in and that absolutely. I'm here to help them. I don't want them to ever hear, I can't help you because you are not normal.
Bring me the not normals. I love getting you back to normal. I can help you with that.
[00:56:36] Speaker A: Awesome. Well, my friend, always a pure joy to spend time with you, to learn from you and now to go obsess about what you've taught me. I really appreciate you and in the work that you do.
[00:56:47] Speaker B: Thanks, Matt.
