[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the Heart Rate Variability podcast. Each week we talk about heart rate variability and how it can be used to improve your overall health and wellness. Please consider the information in this podcast for your informational use and not medical advice. Please see your medical provider to apply any of the strategies outlined in this episode. Heart Rate Variability Podcast is a production of Optimal LLC and optimal HRV. Check us
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Welcome, friends, the Heart Rate variability podcast. I am back here today with my friend, friend of the show, Stephanie White.
Stephanie has been on in the past. We talked about, I'll whisper this, one of my favorite episodes ever on the difference between coherence and residence frequency breathing. It was a master class in biofeedback. Uh, if you haven't listened to that, please do. I'm going to. If in case you haven't and you're just really interested in this topic. Uh, Stephanie, can you just, uh, maybe they can get the full introduction in the previous episode, but just a little bit of intro on yourself before we dive into a very fascinating topic today.
[00:01:17] Speaker B: Yeah. So I'm Stephanie White.
I am going to be so bold as to say I'm one of the best in the world when it comes into 24 hours heart rate variability.
I'm going to own that. In some circles, they call me the HRV guru, and I claim that too. I bought the domain, so if I want to take that mantra up, I follow the glucose goddess.
[00:01:42] Speaker A: Well, I got Hrv nerd and HRv geek. Maybe there's some website.
[00:01:46] Speaker B: I'll be the HIV guru.
[00:01:48] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:01:49] Speaker B: I specialize in health optimization through wearable data, using the numbers to determine what lifestyle, food choices, supplement choices, which ones are helping you move towards health optimization and which ones are taking you away. Because we've all got bio individual bodies that need bio individual approaches to health optimization.
What works for one person may not work for the next person. So you really need a bio individualized approach when you try to optimize your health.
[00:02:26] Speaker A: Well, and that leads us to this topic. And so, listeners to the show, this will probably be a new term. We've been kind of throwing out a lot of interesting stuff here in the last few weeks with maybe some new emerging measures. This, that the other, and we were talking back and forth about, you know, you brought up very high frequency, which I'll be honest with you, I've heard of very low, ultra low frequency, ultra high frequency, ultra low frequency. But this wasn't something. I mean, it makes sense that ultra high frequency exists along the way. But I'm just. I don't know. Does it make sense to define high frequency to begin with? Because we talk a lot about low frequency. I don't know if that helps us get to this metric. I'll kind of turn it over to you to how best to introduce a concept that's probably going to be a new to a lot of our listeners.
[00:03:27] Speaker B: Well, this is. This is going to be a teaser, because I'm not quite ready to completely unveil very high frequency. Today. I want to talk about 24 hours hrv recordings and how to do that. But just as a teaser, if you have 24 hours data, that means, by definition, if you can calculate the heart rate variability, you can also calculate the heart rate.
[00:03:51] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:03:52] Speaker B: And through algorithms, you can also calculate the respiration rate.
So when you have this data, I specialize in fatigue related illnesses.
And some of the doctors and researchers I work with specialize in pain and PTSD and traumatic brain injuries.
In our folks with pretty significant health issues, we're finding they have a significant amount of power in the very high frequency range. And I'm a PhD in applied psychophysiology candidate at Zapro. There's only 49 journal articles in the world that mention very high frequency. And so, just to define it, typically, high frequency is reported in a power spectrum analysis using HRV statistics as the 0.15 to the 0.4 range.
And so, depending on the article you read, other researchers have defined it as 0.4 to 0.9.
Some have defined it as 0.4. I apologize to one for my personal measurements. I've been going all the way to two, just so I can see if there's anything I'm missing. Yeah, but the other researchers are stopping somewhere around 0.90.1 and 1.0, and I've pretty much found the ones I'm looking at are under 0.9. So I feel safe defining VHF as 0.4 to 0.9.
[00:05:29] Speaker A: Interesting. And I know with the ultra low frequency, I believe we're looking at, in some ways, 24 hours cycles.
[00:05:39] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:05:40] Speaker A: Really. I mean, really slow. Yeah, we're not, we're not.
[00:05:44] Speaker B: There's.
[00:05:44] Speaker A: I mean, if we gave it to you on the optimal HRV app, we'd be giving you just nothing, really.
[00:05:49] Speaker B: Right, right. It's really hard to figure that out.
[00:05:51] Speaker A: Are we talking about the same sort of loss cycles?
[00:05:55] Speaker B: Well, whenever I. I like to teach people math, whenever you're trying to convert a frequency into a number you can understand, you take one divided by the frequency. And so if you take one divided by 0.4, you're talking about 24 cycles or more a minute.
[00:06:20] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:06:21] Speaker B: And so then when you start asking researchers and doctors what happens 24 cycles or more a minute? And they're like, huh. That kind of sounds like over breathing, which is Kazan's expertise.
[00:06:34] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:06:35] Speaker B: I sat in y'all's breathing. You did? The two. The two classes. You know, I participated in that class. And when Kazan's talking about breathing, you greater than 21 breaths per minute and how that changes the ph of the blood, and then your blood holds onto the oxygen, and then things aren't oxygenated. It's a downhill slide from there.
[00:06:56] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:06:56] Speaker B: So, you know, what's really interested is what's controlling that process that Kazan is describing as the carotid body, and it's sitting right there at the carotid junction right there by the baroreceptor. The baroreceptors, that little thing that's setting the pace for your optimal resonance frequency. So it is no mistake that all of those things are right there together.
[00:07:20] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:07:21] Speaker B: There is no mistake. So, resnet breathing using optimal HRV tools or other tools, they're critical. They're. They're dealing with the power center that's controlling all of this.
It's super cool, super fascinating.
[00:07:39] Speaker A: So, as we explore twenty four seven, and we talked a little bit about that in our last episode, you know, of challenges but also benefits of doing 24/7 it's actually kind of been a theme of longer monitoring. How do we account for artifacting? And also the fact that, hey, on a Monday, I might have went for a run, on a Tuesday, I didn't. It's going to look very, very different. And so how are you looking at all this? As you're putting these pieces together, what are some of the things you're thinking about?
[00:08:16] Speaker B: Right. Well, what you just said, there's a lot of people who are predisposed to negative thoughts about 24 hours heart rate variability, because they think there's too many artifacts where there's. They think there's too many differences to make any sense out of the data, and nothing could be farther from the truth.
And I think I've put together some points that I can help explain what that means.
And so you do the podcast where people can listen. So I like to talk in words that if people can't see, they can still follow along. But I do have a slide deck, and I know you put things on YouTube, too, so I'm hoping we can publish this in both formats so I can include some slides. I have a curve to throw you that you don't even see coming yet.
[00:09:11] Speaker A: I'm excited.
[00:09:13] Speaker B: Yeah. I am blown away.
I participate in a meeting with the doctors every Friday morning.
And so this morning we had a researcher whose specialty is the glymphatic system.
And so I'd like to open sharing just a couple things he shared with the glymphatic system because it is all related to what we're talking about.
[00:09:39] Speaker A: Sounds good.
[00:09:40] Speaker B: Sounds good. Okay, so let me share my screen and I'm going to talk you through it so people who are listening get what we're talking about. The people who can see it get a visual treat as well.
[00:09:53] Speaker A: Awesome.
[00:09:57] Speaker B: I thought I started my slideshow. I must not have. Let's see what I can do.
We're going to talk about taking out the trash.
So, yeah, this morning I was able to meet with the people with the CAC Aware center at VCU, which is Virginia Commonwealth University here in Richmond, Virginia. CAC aware stands for the comprehensive Autonomic center and Autonomic wellness research and education. Every Friday, researchers and doctors from all over the world who are interested in autonomic health, which HRV is a significant subset of that. We all get together on Friday mornings. And so this morning's presentation was about the lymphatic system with Jeff Alif, and he is out of the University of Washington School of Medicine. And so the glimfac system is really cool because we did not know this thing existed until 2012.
[00:11:07] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:11:07] Speaker B: Brand new stuff. If somebody's got an old medical education, they weren't taught this in medical school.
So, for people who can't see this, the glymphatic system is a brainwide network responsible for clearing wasteland from the central nervous system. It was first described in 2012 by a research team led by doctor making at the University of Rochester medical center. This system was named glymphatic due to its reliance on glial cells, specifically astrocytes, and it's functional, similar to the lymphatic system, which clears waste from other tissues in the body.
So your brain has its own special little lymphatic system that is made to clear out the trash.
And if you aren't able to clear out the trash in a matter of decades, it can result in Alzheimer's disease.
So having this not work effectively can set you up for some pretty serious cognitive issues that can lead to things like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and other brain related health issues.
[00:12:27] Speaker A: So it's fascinating.
[00:12:28] Speaker B: It's pretty important see if I can get this to keep going. Come on.
So it's the body's way of taking out the trash. Now, this theme of taking out the trash is going to come up in several places, because the way your body takes out the trash from all over your body is through the lymphatic system.
And the lymphatic system does not have a pumping mechanism like the heart.
So if the lymphatic system does not have a pumping mechanism like the heart heart, what does the lymphatic system in your body rely on to do its job?
That's a pop quiz. Matt. Any ideas?
[00:13:21] Speaker A: Electricity.
[00:13:23] Speaker B: Burgh.
Thanks for trying. Want to try again? You want to phone a friend?
[00:13:31] Speaker A: I'll be humbled by my lack of any backup questions. Yeah.
[00:13:36] Speaker B: You know, this, to me, is something every child should be taught in school.
If you don't know how your body takes out the trash, that is a missing piece of crucial information.
When you move your muscles.
Movement, what provides the changes, and the muscle squeezing that gently makes the lymphatics able to do what they do. So if you're combined to a bed all day or if you're confined to a desk all day, and if you don't take those little movement breaks that Matt recommends in his book about business informed HRV organizations, you don't take those little breaks and move like every 2 hours, every 1 hour, your body can't take out the trash. And if your body can't take out the trash, there's no way you can be healthy just because the trash is building up.
But if you're not moving enough to take out the trash, you're not going to be healthy. Yeah, people don't know that.
They don't know that. And people that are confined to bed, if you can't get up, things like resonant breathing, the pumping action that creates in your chest.
Resonant breathing activates the lymph system.
So that breathing effort, if you do nothing else, if you just do your resonant breathing exercises and you get that rhythmic movement going in the chest, having movement any one place in your body.
I have an old house and I have a shoot, what's the word my heating system is based on? Oh, what are these things called? The heating registers. It's an oil based system.
Huh.
[00:15:35] Speaker A: Baseboard heat.
[00:15:37] Speaker B: It's kind of like baseboard heat. It, oh, shoot. It's hot. It's a hot water boiler system. Shoot. What are those things called? But they, you know, once you keep the water up, it creates a natural loop that is always in continuous motion. You know, if you have any part of your body moving, it creates that continuous loop with your lymphatics to make them all activated.
So movement, you know, if you don't learn anything else today, movement is key to taking out the trash. Your lymph system can't work without it. And if you can't do anything, just breathing at that deep level, effortless level, that can help activate it. So that's one of the reasons why resident breathing is so beneficial.
[00:16:23] Speaker A: Awesome.
[00:16:24] Speaker B: So, yeah, taking out the trash is really important, and your brain has a glimpatic system. And so here's, you and I were talking a minute ago about how important sleep is, and sleep is featured heavily in your book.
What happens overnight is when your body gets into this recovery, deep sleep phase, all of the cells in the brain shrink, and that creates extra space that allows the fluid to drain to get.
[00:17:01] Speaker A: Because you always hear about sleep with the lymphatic system is almost, I compare it almost like a shower for our nervous system. In some ways, yes.
[00:17:12] Speaker B: And so if you don't sleep, if you're sleep deprived or if you don't sleep well and never really make it in that recovery mode because your body's activated all night, if that never happens, the trash never gets taken out of your brain.
[00:17:28] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:17:29] Speaker B: And that leads to health issues over time due to the wear and tear on the body of the increased trash buildup.
So it's really important.
And so they've done the research showing people that were not allowed to sleep versus allowed to sleep and how much more effective the glymphatic system was when they got high quality sleep. And the people they didn't allow to sleep all night, if they just allowed them to sleep like 2 hours, like from eight to ten in the morning to try to catch up. It worked a little bit, but it didn't get the complete job done.
You know, these, these little bitty cycles of sleep, I mean, they, they give a little bit of benefit, but not the benefit of having seven to 9 hours of uninterrupted sleep.
[00:18:13] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:18:14] Speaker B: That's really what you're shooting for. So it's super beneficial, and they've got the research to prove it.
And so something he shared this morning that I wasn't aware of is this concept of a Jack curve.
So this guy named Clifford Jack, with the help of lots of other people, have created this curve, and the horizontal axis is time.
And so over time, we've got all these curves that happen in sequence. What's happening is decades before dementia shows up. There are markers that show up decades before that. The damage is already starting to take place. That's going to lead to this if nothing else happens.
And so there's amyloid beta factors, there's tau factors, there's other things, but they can show that decades in advance, these things start to occur before you actually get dementia. So there is an opportunity to prevent this from happening.
And so the reason I share this chart and how they know this with brain health, they know the exact same thing when it comes to diabetes. Heart rate variability decreases years before diabetes develops and years before autonomic neuropathy associated with diabetes develops.
So we can come up with the same thing for metabolic health issues.
High blood pressure. Hrv decreases years before high blood pressure results.
And so if we're looking for a non invasive way to track allostatic load in the body, which is the wear and tear that leads to all these things, heart rate variability is a wonderful way to do it.
[00:20:17] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:20:18] Speaker B: So that's. That's exciting. That's really exciting.
By the way, before I forget, we've got kids playing football that get hit hard, and they're like, coach, I'm okay, let me go back out on the field.
If the coach has their heart rate variability history and they're wearing something where they can do a quick hrv test, HIV tanks. So coaches on football fields with kids in high school and, you know, little league sports are starting to be educated that you need heart rate variability on these kids because if you have a traumatic brain injury, the first thing you're going to see is an immediate drop in heart rate variability below their baseline. And if that happens, do not let them back out on the field.
[00:21:05] Speaker A: Yes. Yes.
[00:21:07] Speaker B: It's important.
[00:21:09] Speaker A: Yeah.
And to me, it's such a better metric than self report because.
[00:21:14] Speaker B: Oh, because kids won't report it because they want back out on the field.
[00:21:17] Speaker A: Yep. Absolutely.
[00:21:19] Speaker B: And you can't rely on what the kid says because kids want back out on the field. They.
[00:21:24] Speaker A: Soccer is such an interesting sport because substitutions are limited. So I'll watch this play as, like, that person. That ball should not hit that person's head. They need to be off the. The field. And because of, I think, how the sport is structured, they're still there. And it's just like, I almost have to turn it off because I can't watch that the first hit is hard enough because I know about traumatic brain injuries and concussions, but, like, the fact they're still on the field is just, I can't watch it because I know, I know the cost there. So I'm so excited HRV is playing a role in that.
[00:22:08] Speaker B: Yep. Sports teams that are in the know that have a high quality coach. The coach is either through an oura ring or some other mechanism. They know what the kids baseline is, and they have the tool on the sidelines to get an immediate HRV measurement to see if it matches their trend. And if it doesn't, they're getting because the kids won't report it.
[00:22:29] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:22:31] Speaker B: So that was just an aside, but, yeah, it's interesting, the whole Alzheimer's disease, which can be brought on by this lack of adequate recovery. The comorbidities are things like hypertension and diabetes and cerebral vascular disease and traumatic brain injuries and chronic sleep disruption. So I bring this up because all of these things represent wear and tear on the body. And so that concept of wear and tear is going to be important in just a second. So it's important to know at any given time how much wear and tear your body's experiencing.
So what impacts how well the lymphatic system works when you have lower nighttime respiration rates, when you have lower nighttime heart rates. And by the way, if you've ever worn an oura ring, one of the things the oura ring will say is your heart rate did not lower earlier enough last night or your heart rate lowered late last night. You know you want, as soon as you lay down, to efficiently get in that rest and recovery slate. And one of the ways you can tell is how fast that you achieve your minimal heart rate overnight. You want that to happen early if you have alcohol, if you have a big meal, if you exercise late, you might not get that lowest heart rate reading until four or 5 hours after you go to bed, which means you didn't get into recovery all that time. So you may have been in the bed 7 hours. People are always saying, I wake up unrefreshed. Ding, ding, ding, ding. Because your body was still doing work and it never got into that mode, because whatever you set it up for, it didn't get to get into that mode until 5 hours after you laid down. That's not setting you up for adequate recovery overnight. And people, this isn't in people's mindsets. They're not thinking about it because they can't see it yet until they get a device that gives them this kind of information.
So this is a huge educational opportunity for people to start to learn how their body works and what's helping them and what's hurting them. So low respiration, lower heart rate, the lower beta power, and the higher delta theta requires equipment that's not cost effective yet, but I can definitely help someone see what their respiration and their heart rate was overnight. It's reduced when your respiration's higher or when your heart rate's higher.
And again, things like alcohol, big meals, late meals, and late exercise can make all of those kinds of things happen.
So, again, you're set up for this type of curve where you can tell decades in advance that these things are imminent if you don't change your lifestyle and change the wear and tear that's going on with your body. And so someone recently, I can't remember who it was, they said it was like cooking on a gas stove.
And we've just gotten so used to stress.
You know, we think we've got low stress, but it's really like turning your gas stove on low. You never really completely turn it off.
And so we need to give people a tool to be able to measure.
Did they really turn it off or not?
[00:25:51] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:25:53] Speaker B: One of the jokes I like, that's good, clean fun, you know, it's the cop who writes the guy a ticket for not stopping at this stop sign.
And so the lady says, but I slowed down. And the cop takes his Billy stick and starts beating her over the head.
And he says, now, lady, do you want me to slow down or do you want me to stop?
Same kind of thing. With stress, you need to learn how to stop it and take control of your autonomic nervous system and put it in that recovery mode. And so people need to know, and they need to be able to measure, have you turned it off or have you just turned it down?
And so, just to give you another with optimal HRV, you know, over time, people, their parasympathetic nervous system or their ability to switch between the parasympathetic and sympathetic efficiency, they lose that. And so one of the ways to get that back is by exercising this on off process in your body, by using a tool like optimal HRV to breathe.
Because when you lose that ability to efficiently switch back and forth, the symptoms that are going to show up when you get persistent sympathetic activation are going to be things like light sensitivity and migraines and tension headaches, irritable bowel syndrome, low back pain, neck back pain, pots, tachycardia, dysautonomia, hypertension, alopecia, indigestion, chronic fatigue, crohn's, artherosclerosis, heart attack, strokes, poor sleep, fibromyalgia depression, sexual dysfunction. None of those things are fun.
[00:27:37] Speaker A: No, don't want those.
[00:27:40] Speaker B: A lot of people talking about it these days because their lives have just gotten so overwhelming.
In the not too distant past, we didn't have light bulbs. We weren't staying up all hours of the day. We were following a very daylight, determined schedule, and we were cutting off and shutting down and going to bed. I. This is new for our bodies. Air bodies haven't been living this way very long. And that's why all these diseases just are showing up where our bodies just weren't built for this, and we're pushing our bodies farther than they were ever intended to go, and the diseases are showing up.
So, yeah, these are the things that can happen if you just keep pushing. You need to do exercises to get that flexibility and resilience back. And the best way to do it is to build something into your schedule, just like you do with brushing your teeth, something you do every day, preferably twice a day. I advocate for breathing 20 minutes twice a day, first thing in the morning, last thing before you go to bed.
And so, yeah, tools like optimal HRV are perfect for that.
To be able to facilitate that practice and measure and report the results so that you can see how you're doing. I strongly believe and encourage that.
So, yeah, what I wanted to share that's related to this is the role of stress and the HPA access, because I want to share some graphics from this.
[00:29:10] Speaker A: Great.
[00:29:11] Speaker B: When people think of stress, all too often, I'm hearing people equate stress with trauma.
And so if you've never had trauma in your life, people think they've got to get out of jail free card. Stress isn't going to overwhelm them because they don't have trauma.
You don't have to have a big t trauma. I've got a big tree trauma. My husband tried to kill me. He had to be removed from the house by the cops. He died shortly thereafter. That's a big t trauma. I got a bunch of little t traumas. But you don't have to have any of that to have the kind of stress that can result in a state of dis ease or symptoms in the body. And so I love this particular graphic up in the upper left hand corner, that 25% of the pie is the trauma piece, the external piece, the external things that happen that put stress on your body. The other 75% of the pie are all of the internal things that can happen. And so the bottom left hand of the quadrant is glycemic dysregulation.
If you're constantly having blood sugar lows, blood sugar highs, that's stress. And wear and tear on the body, that's not good.
So I love putting cgms on people while I've got 24 hours heart rate variability devices on people so they can see both things. Inflammation is a stressor in the body. Circadian disruption, either through shift work or going through lots of time changes. You guys mentioned travel in your book about how disruptive time, you know, the time zone changes are on your body and what you guys do to mitigate the impacts of that so that you can recover from that. So 70. According to this chart, it appears that 75% comes from internal stressors and 25% comes from external stressors.
Nobody knows what the exact percent is, but I want to share this piece with you.
Where is my. I'm missing a graphic. This one. I'll go back up. We have a vagus nerve. Your vagus nerve is what? Sense parasympathetic signals throughout your body.
And so looking at the 25%, 75% PI, your vagus nerves has two different kinds of fibers in it, afferent and efferent. So one starts with an a, one starts with an e. The afferent goes up from the body to the brain. 80% to 90% of those fibers are information going from the body to the brain, and only ten to 20% are coming from the brain to the body. So if people think they're going to think their way out of stressors, that it doesn't work that way.
If you want to lower stress in the body, you need to deal with the hidden stressors that are internal, of internal origin.
You need to resolve those three to four times more than you need to resolve the external stressors, because they are significant. So now I'm going to go back up. I kind of went out of order.
[00:32:39] Speaker A: Can I ask you a question? I just love to hear your thinking on this, the 80% to 20% brain to body.
I think a lot of people in the HRV world say, oh, look how important the heart is. And I'm obviously, you can see behind me, big fan of heart rate variability. I actually think that it's telling us something else I'd love to get your thought on. This is the brain is so spectacularly amazing that it is able to take in this vast amount of information, process it mostly unconsciously, even though some consciously, but probably a very small fraction, and then give signals back which are much more efficient to guide the body again, most of which is just unconsciously. And so I would. I'd love to just get your thought on that, because I hear that from most hrv folks to say, oh, the brain is almost.
And I didn't hear you say this, but we can kind of, like, downgrade the brain.
It's not as important as we thought, and I think that actually is showing us it's just as spectacular, if not more than we've ever thought it was.
[00:34:06] Speaker B: So, ten years ago, when I bought a computer, my computer had a single processor in it.
[00:34:16] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:34:17] Speaker B: And that processor would have been the equivalent of the way we thought about the brain in the past. It's doing and making all the decisions.
So the next computer I upgraded to had a quad processor. There were four processors. So when I've got a program running and I'm downloading something and watching, and maybe I've got something else going on in the background, it's got four processors that can all be working on different things simultaneously and passing information back and forth. Turns out we've got our brain, which is intelligent. We have heart intelligence, we have gut intelligence.
Those are the three I know of.
And so then we've got the little baroreceptors and the carotid bodies, all these little air bodies have distributed sensors and distributed intelligences that are all sharing information back and forth.
[00:35:26] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:35:27] Speaker B: And it seems like the vagus nerve is the super highway for all this information.
And because it innervates the heart, the heart just gives us a way to listen in on all the signals that are going at one time.
[00:35:42] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:35:43] Speaker B: So it's the way we listen in. I call them radio stations, the radio stations that are going back and forth between everything. The heart just gives us a listening post to kind of hear all the stuff going on at one time.
And to me, through power spectral analysis of the heart rate variability, we can see all the different messages at all the different frequencies that are going on in the body.
[00:36:06] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:36:07] Speaker B: And when I said you need to turn the gas off when you take over the system with resonant breathing, and you turn everything off but one signal, that's what I'm saying when I'm saying you need to learn how to turn it off.
[00:36:22] Speaker A: Love that. Love that.
[00:36:23] Speaker B: That's how you turn it off. You hijack all those signals to send an all clear, all health optimization. We're in good shape. There are no tigers anywhere close to us. There are no health things going on in our body that we can't take care of. We're in this super efficient state.
[00:36:44] Speaker A: Yeah.
And I love that, too. Because, you know, it goes back. Because the other thing that gets me a little frustrated in my field of trauma work is like you got the polyvagal theory that forgot we have a brain, and then you have the brain. People who believe that's the nervous system. And I love what you said about the heart being a listening station, tapping into this integrated system, because that's where we really need to do in our thinking, is like, you take any real part out of this and you're dead.
Another way, you can't. You take your gut out, you're dead. Your heart out, you're dead, your brain out. You know, you're not. You know, you may be, technically, some part might still be working, but not going to be very pleasant regardless. So I love that, that, you know, we got this little listening station to all this, how all of these systems, and that's what I love about the vegas nerve as well, are functioning and working in cons. I love that analogy. Thank you for sharing that.
[00:37:46] Speaker B: And so, just so we don't forget, we got these little aliens in our body we need to not forget about. That's another source of information. The last time I went to the hospital and they prescribed an antibiotic, I refused to take it. And the doctor's like, why? I said, because I've worked hard to create the relationship I've got with my microbiome. I take care of it. It takes care of me. I'm not going to let you do anything to upset those guys because I rely on them. So unless you have an imminent threat to my life, you need to tell me under what circumstances I have to take this. And he says, you don't have to take this unless you have uncontrolled, uncontrollable diarrhea or blood and stool. Because I got an enterobacter infection.
[00:38:34] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:38:35] Speaker B: He said, in most people, yes, you've got some immune issues, and we're suppressing your immune system. But unless you get uncontrollable diarrhea and blood in the stool, you don't have to take this. And I'm like, good. I needed to know that because I worked hard to get those guys where.
[00:38:50] Speaker A: It just breaks my heart that so many people just feel like they don't ask the question that you kind of ask. And we've thrown antibiotics around.
[00:39:00] Speaker B: Well, the doctor was surprised. He's like, good for you. You said, I applaud because he probably.
[00:39:05] Speaker A: Most of the year, just people want antibiotics.
[00:39:08] Speaker B: Yeah. He's like, good for you. I applaud. Your tenacity, I can totally understand.
You know, with your health issues, we might lean one with you way, but with your health issues, it is important for you to take care of them. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm like, yeah, we're not going to upset those guys because they have their own intelligence and they're feeding their own information into the system.
So that's part of the distributed intelligent is what the microbiome is communicating back to the rest of the body about the state of the gut. That's an important source of intelligence.
[00:39:43] Speaker A: Absolutely, absolutely.
We should do a whole show on that because I would love to get, I know. I'm not going to ask a follow up because I know where that leads us.
[00:39:54] Speaker B: I take care of those guys.
[00:39:55] Speaker A: They're, oh, I've got my kombucha right here, so probably too much fiber because I want to make sure that they're well fed, so.
[00:40:06] Speaker B: Absolutely. And so just another little nugget.
If you don't feed your body the right food and if it's only easy to digest carbohydrates that are crap, if your body digests those easy to do carbohydrates too quickly, the only thing left by the time it gets to the end of your gut is for those guys to eat you.
So either you feed it the right food, that there's something left at the end of the gut for them to eat, or they're going to eat you and you're going to get leaky gut and you're going to get autoimmune issues. And people don't get taught that either. You got to feed those babies, you got to feed them what they want, you got to keep them happy all the way through your gut. You got to have food that's going to last the entire time, or they're going to eat you because they don't have anything left to eat.
[00:40:57] Speaker A: Right. Yeah. They seem to like variety and they love safe. That's the two things I've taken out of the research and integrated.
[00:41:06] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:41:07] Speaker A: Those two things seem to keep them very happy. And then I give them some new neighbors every once in a while with permanent foods that I like. So. Yeah.
[00:41:18] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:41:19] Speaker A: Don't let them get bored down there.
[00:41:21] Speaker B: I like the way you think. We're on the same page.
[00:41:24] Speaker A: Yes, we are. Shockingly. Shockingly.
[00:41:29] Speaker B: Yep. So I want to go back.
A lot of people have a perceived notion of what stress is, but it's probably not matching what stress is to me. And so I'm going to go back to what stress meant to the original guy on cellier, for him, stress was anything that places a demand on the body.
So trauma didn't have anything to do with it, really. I mean, it ultimately did. But anything that puts a demand on the body is a stressor.
And so Hans Selye did some pretty crazy experiments where he put mice through everything he could think of. He injected crap in them that wasn't supposed to be in them. He put them on cold roofs, he put them on hot roofs, he withheld water, he withheld food, put him through obnoxious noises, all these things that would put their body into distress.
And he found out that no matter what noculous thing he subjected them to, all of them ended up having the same things go wrong in their body.
And the three big things that went wrong in the body was hypertrophy of the adrenal cortex, shrinking atrophy of the thymus and lymph nodes, and erosion and ulcers in the duodenum.
So ding, ding, ding. Remember that word, lymphedem. Lymph is what takes the trash out of the body.
So when there is a lot of stress and wear and tear on the body, you lose the ability to take out the trash. The trash system atrophies doesn't work as well.
And so taking his research and going a step further, it's like a cell phone. When your cell phone is about to run out of battery, what does your cell phone do when you get down to 15% and it needs to make it till another 3 hours when you get home to plug it in, the way it conserves and makes that 15% go as far as possible, it starts to cut things down or off.
[00:43:54] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:43:55] Speaker B: All of a sudden, your screen won't go to full brightness.
May have to turn off Wi Fi or put off processes that were going on in the background or shut down some apps, your body has a way of conserving energy. And so, for example, these young girls who are experienced reds, which is reduced energy.
Oh, shoot, I just drew a blank.
Young girls are exercising so much that it's putting such a stressor and energy demand on their body.
Their body has to start conserving resources. And one of the first places it conserves resources is in sexual reproduction.
Your body knows if there's not enough resources to go around, you don't need to be bringing babies into the world.
[00:44:47] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:44:48] Speaker B: So women stop cycling, and unfortunately, these young girls are thinking that's a good thing because they don't have their period anymore. So they keep doing it because they don't want to have their period.
They are putting huge wear and tear on their body.
Women who have pcos or endometriosis or other having difficulty conceiving, it could be because there's a lot of wear and tear going on in their body that they don't know about and their body's conserving resources and cutting back on the production of those hormones and maintaining those body functions because it's just under resourced and it's trying to save energy.
[00:45:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:45:29] Speaker B: So this is, again, people need to, this is an educational process. People need to know if you're not taking care of your body, if you're putting it through too much wear and tear, internal or external, it's going to start cutting corners and they may not be the corners you want them to cut.
[00:45:44] Speaker A: Right.
[00:45:46] Speaker B: So that's, that's a really important learning opportunity, is that's the way the body works. If you're not giving it everything it needs, it's going to start cutting corners. And that's what leads to a state of dis ease and symptoms. So if you want to get out of that state and if you want to head towards health optimization, you need to be doing all the things that you mentioned in your book that are health optimization strategies that improve heart rate variability, because that's going to be what walks you away from that and gets you towards optimal health.
So it goes back to taking out the trash. If, if you're not, if you got all this stress going on, the trash is just not getting taken out.
[00:46:30] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:46:31] Speaker B: So that's really important.
I've got an FBN certification as a functional diagnostic nutrition coach. Reed Davis based his whole certification program of how to use functional labs to measure the toll this has taken on your body in the digestive detoxification, energy production, autonomic nervous system, oxidative stress hormone, and immune system. So he's created a whole health coaching program to help people determine how this has negatively impacted their body. We can measure it in all these symptoms, but what people don't know is HRV all by itself is a proxy for allostatic load the body. All you need is that one measure to tell if you're gaining ground or if you're losing ground.
[00:47:24] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:47:24] Speaker B: So I kind of call it my figure eight ball. You know, if I make a change and my HRV goes up, it's like I asked the eight ball, did I make the right decision? And it says yes, no, maybe try again tomorrow. Well, if HRV is going up really well, I'm headed in the right direction. If HRV goes down, I'm probably not headed in the right direction. So it gives really good biofeedback as to whether what you're doing is working or not for your bio individual body, not anybody else's, just yours.
[00:47:57] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:47:58] Speaker B: And that's important.
And it's a cheap way to do it. That's non invasive.
[00:48:03] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:48:04] Speaker B: Nobody has to stick needles in you and draw Buddha or anything worse than that. This is non invasive.
High allostatic load will reduce your ability to recharge, recover and repair. And if you can't recharge, recover and repair, you can't take the trash out.
[00:48:22] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:48:23] Speaker B: And you can't repair the pieces of your body that are doing all the work. So not only do you have to take the trash out, you have to have enough energy left over to repair and rebuild. If you don't have enough energy left over to repair and rebuild, you are really rotor, right.
[00:48:43] Speaker A: You almost, it seems like. You mean, I've been, I've seen this with people. Never get out of the stress. So you're.
[00:48:49] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:48:50] Speaker A: Yeah. You're not. I mean, it's not only that you're not recharging recovery and repairing your, your allostycload is so high because you're always checking emails, you're always, you know, you're, you never stop working, you never go on vacation, that, you know, it just, you're all in that overwhelmed state. So not only are you missing the opportunities to clear out the nasty stuff throughout the buy, take out the trash, but it's like the trash is piling up on top of you.
[00:49:17] Speaker B: Oh, heck yeah. Heck yeah. Heck yeah. And your body's doing all of this unnecessary work that it's just overloaded. It's just a state of overload, complete overload.
So, yeah, that's going to lead to symptoms.
The guy that presented this morning at the end of the presentation turned around and talk about the garment he was wearing on his wrist. And I took the opportunity to make him aware that Garmin exclusively licensed and then bought the consumer side of first beat because they believed in it so much.
So one of the ways you could get a reading on how well your body's doing this is by wearing a Garmin wearable and using their body battery information.
Garmin has incorporated that into most of their wearables, and you're looking for the body battery feature. But firstbeat is the company out of Finland that created those metrics and analytics. And so I am a distributor for the first beat life device. So I am biased. I do have a conflict of interest. I am a device representative, manufacturers representative for them. So to do your due diligence, I do make money off the sale of these devices.
I was the first in the US. There's about four of us now that sell the first beat device in the life subscription. But this is a non invasive two lead ECG device that you wear on your chest with two electrodes, sticky pads, like you're getting an EKG. One goes right below your right clavicle, one goes on your left rib cage. It cannot get wet. So it's a 24 hours device. As long as you don't take a bath or swim during those 24 hours.
[00:51:10] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:51:11] Speaker B: So typically, you know, when we're getting a 24 hours measurement, we ask people that they put those things off so we can get a full 24 hours measurement.
But yes, this can get 24 hours. High quality heart rate variability data. It's used in Europe a lot because they're so much more conscious about lifestyle choices and health ramifications than we are in the states.
In the states, we're used to taking pills to solve health problems. In Europe, it's a lot more in vogue to try lifestyle options first. And so this device is used quite a bit more in Europe because that's the way they think and that's their value system. We could take. Learn a few things from them.
[00:51:54] Speaker A: I think so, too.
[00:51:55] Speaker B: Yeah, but yeah. When we talk about need to turn it off and measuring where you are and how high the allostatic load is in your body, this little device can tell you how much stress you have, whether you're recovering enough, whether you're exercising enough or too much. Because the other mistake people make is as they age, their body changes. And if you're still doing the exact same thing you were doing five years ago, your body just may have changed and that might not be right anymore. And people have lost the interoception to know if they're still doing what's right. This helps you figure that out, and it lets you know which lifestyle changes matter. For example, I've got several food sensitivities, and when I eat a food I'm sensitive to, it shows up on here, it lights up in red. So I can tell by my response which foods are helping me and easier to digest in my body and which ones aren't.
So it can give you all kinds of feedback.
There is a journal associated with it on your smartphone, so you can keep track of what you do when. So it's easier after the fact to make sense of the data. And as you're going through the day, it uses your heart rate variability information to paint things red because you're stressed, green because you're recovering, light blue because you're in light exercise, or dark blue because you're in moderate to vigorous exercise. And heart association recommends 150 minutes a week of moderate to vigorous exercise. So you can kind of keep track of if you're on target for that or nothing. And so you can see what you were doing when that resulted in those colors. The taller the bar, the greater the impacts. The higher the red, the higher the stress. The higher the green, the higher the recovery. The higher the blue, the more intense the exercise. So the height does indicate more intensity.
[00:54:00] Speaker A: Gotcha.
[00:54:01] Speaker B: The height is important.
Lower means less. Higher equals more. And so then it gives you four scores. The first three are the breakdown of stress and recovery, health effects of physical activity, and restorative effect of sleep. Those three scores are based out of 100, and then it averages them to give you one total score for the day.
But what you don't see here is it also tells you what the net effect is and whether you recharged your battery back to 100% or not.
I don't know anybody who's in business who would only charge their cell phone up to 50% and go back to work the next day, right.
If people woke up and their phone was only at 50% after a complete night, most people get upset because there's no way they're going to make it through the day at work with a 50% battery on their phone.
Their body should be no different. We should know how recharged their body is going to work on. A 50% battery is not good for anybody. You're going to be short tempered, you're not going to make as good a decisions.
It's a recipe for disaster. But there's people doing it every day.
So, yeah, these 24 hours devices can measure stress, sleep and recovery. Your body's resources. When you're in a state of overload, they can help you track symptoms to see if you can discover patterns, your exercise and your training.
This is a research grade device. Above it are medical grade devices that are FDA approved. FDA approved devices that have gone through that process have a price tag that would probably be four or five times more than this device costs. So it's in our best interest to have a more attractive price product as opposed to an FDA approved product.
But below it is the consumer type wearables that are light based, that you wear on your wrist or your ear or what have you.
In Europe, this is used by over 1000 sports teams, over 23,000 athletes. There's over 210 publications. That number is probably up to 400 by now.
And there's over 150 million wearables using burst be analytics through Garmin and others.
If you use a watch based product, it's like looking at the moon with a binocular. If you use this ECG quality device, it's like using a Hubble telescope. It's just going to be a lot better.
So it is a lot higher quality. And so you're going to know without a doubt, where you stand with how recharged your body battery is.
And that's going to be a good indication of whether all the trash got taken out and whether your body had sufficient time to rebuild, repair all the important organs and things that you rely on to do the work to keep your body going.
You know, anything short of 80% to 100% and it's like a bank account.
You're operating in the red and constantly having to borrow, and at some point you have a finite amount of vital reserve. At some point you run out and that's when disease takes over. Over. So you don't have an infinite bank account that you can just constantly overdraw.
You have to at some point take accountability and start building up your reserve again and consistently getting back to 100%, or you're never going to have optimal health. It's just not possible. Yeah, so I'll hush. Have you got any questions about that?
[00:57:58] Speaker A: No. I mean, it's interesting.
So to distinguish between, like, good stress, bad stress, like.
Like for running, for example. Is that all done like in a journal, or how do you.
[00:58:11] Speaker B: You can label it.
It doesn't really matter whether it's good stress, which Cellier referred to as Eustress, or whether it's a bad stress, which sell ye referred to as de stressed. His definition of stress is anything that places a load on the body. So you're to your point, it can be good.
It can be the excitement over a new job or a new baby. It can be really good things that are making you really happy and really joyful. It could be going to a concert, rocking out with a band, half a night. It can be really good things that you enjoy, but they are a load on the body.
[00:58:54] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:58:56] Speaker B: So it doesn't really matter whether it's good or bad, it's a load. And that's kind of part of the education process. You need to think of the overall load.
So it doesn't matter if you're driving to Florida for vacation or whether you're driving to New York to go to work.
You still use gas, you still used energy.
Even though one's for good and one's for work, you're still. It's still a load on the body.
[00:59:24] Speaker A: Very interesting.
[00:59:29] Speaker B: So, yeah, we can measure the allostatic load. We can get a good read on whether or not all the trash is getting taken out.
You guys do an excellent job in your book about talking about all the lifestyle things you can do to increase your heart rate variability, which are the same things that are going to increase your ability to repair, recover, rejuvenate.
They're one in the same.
They come out, you know, they've all achieved the same things. So I really applaud you. And every talk I do, I'm bringing up the slide. You know, if you aren't, if you don't know which lifestyle changes to make, these three people are very healthy individuals, and they do these things day in and day out to maintain their health. And so when I'm talking to people who aren't healthy, if you want to walk away from being unhealthy, what you're doing got you to where you're at. If you don't want to be where you're at, you need to do something different, and you need to look at what these three people are doing, because it's the exact same things I've been taught to do by my health professionals that are HIV savvy, exact same things.
[01:00:41] Speaker A: And when you look at it, too, I always like to reinforce is it's creating habits. You know, I think you can look at what I do each and every day and wonder about my mental health, because if you look at it all, it's like, what in the world is, you must not do anything else with his day, but they're just there habits. And yes, I do a lot with my day.
So it's that understanding of, yeah, just, you know, maybe breakfast can be a little bit different, or maybe a component of breakfast can be different, or maybe weekday breakfasts can be different and you can have waffles on the weekend. Like, just trying to find that pattern for the individual. Because for some people, an all or nothing thing, actually, we know works for most of us, it is small incremental adjustments through this, and that's where you know and we don't. Stephanie, what works for you might not work for me and vice versa. Um, so what is a great measure to tell you that, you know, heart rate variability. It's my favorite.
[01:01:45] Speaker B: Exactly.
Yep. It's your bio individual crazy eight ball to tell you what's the right answer for you at any given time.
[01:01:54] Speaker A: I love it.
[01:01:55] Speaker B: You know, I liked the book eat this, not that, um, you know, you're going to eat, you can just make better choices. So with a lot of lifestyle changes, it doesn't take any more time. It just takes making a different choice and learning to do do this, not that. And so for me, part of what I teach is you need to create your own. I'll always. I'll never.
[01:02:17] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:02:18] Speaker B: So it is about atomic habits. That's another good book. But you need to learn what your I always and I never list is. And, you know, once you start putting that list together and you start getting about 2030 things you're doing every day, your health is going to change.
[01:02:35] Speaker A: Yeah. And a lot of that can be in your morning shake or, you know, when you. How you think about walking the dog and, you know, getting steps in, taking the stair, you know, all those little things really add up.
[01:02:50] Speaker B: Yeah. You know, my heart math training, you know, every time you sit on the toilet or every time you walk through the door, every time you put your hands on the steering wheel, you know, take a ten resonant breaths. That's easy.
[01:03:03] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:03:04] Speaker B: You know, there's easy ways to sneak this stuff in. You just have to think different and start to recognize the importance and value it so that you'll do it. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
[01:03:15] Speaker A: Well, I wonder if you. So. Okay, go ahead. Any final thoughts? Because I know we're in time here, so.
[01:03:20] Speaker B: Yep. You know, you guys aren't the only ones that believe in this. The pulse is about fire, is about afib. They're telling people to do the exact same thing.
I've got the FDM, by the way.
[01:03:32] Speaker A: We have the author. Podcast has come out by the time this one does.
[01:03:39] Speaker B: That's exciting. So, I mean, he's saying the exact same thing. Yeah, for different reasons, but you get the same results. My FDN certification, they believe in diet, rest, exercise, stress and supplementation. Same things when I teach it. Measurable resilience, style. I've got eight health priorities that are covering the exact same thing that I do and use firstbeat to measure.
I do sell this device. If anybody wants to explore it, there's other people in the United States that they can get it from as well. Firstbeat maintains a website. If you go to the bottom right, you can look for partners and see who offers this in the United States. If you want to know more? More. I am one of them, and I am at measurable resilience.
If people have health conditions, and there is a reason why they need to know their 24 hours heart rate and heart rate variability every day for a month or more, the electrodes might get old. There is another way to do this, and that's through a polar watch and a polar chest strap. Because I've got health conditions that make me need this almost 365 days a year. There are very few days you catch me without my polar chest strap on. And then once a quarter, I'll wear the first beat device for three days. I think the first beat device is going to become another vital statistic. You get your heart rate, you get your blood pressure, you get your temperature, and you get your heart rate variability that is coming at the doctor's office in our lifetime. We will see that it will become a vital statistic.
I've got a four week breathing class coming up. I'm using a new sliding method to determine resident frequency. We're testing out for the doctors at BCU, so if anybody wants to contact me to participate in that, we're trying to run that protocol through its paces. I've got that coming up. So, yeah, those are the kinds of things I wanted to share with you as opportunities and give people. We've given a lot of little nuggets that people don't know about.
[01:05:41] Speaker A: Yes. Yep. Absolutely.
[01:05:43] Speaker B: Somebody listens, they're gonna get a lot of little nuggets out of this.
[01:05:46] Speaker A: Absolutely. Well, my friend, I appreciate you. I appreciate your work. I could talk to you all day long. Stephanie White, thank you so much. We'll put information and links, as always, in the show notes so you can find
[email protected]. dot, my friend, thank you for your work, and I'm already looking forward to our next conversation.
[01:06:08] Speaker B: You too, as well, Matt. It is always fun and a pleasure.
[01:06:13] Speaker A: All right, everybody, have a great weekend. As always. I'll see you next week.
