What Heart Rate Variability Really Measures

HRV is everywhere right now, but most people still can’t answer the only question that matters: what is heart rate variability actually telling me about my body, and what can I do with it besides stare at a score? We sit down with Dr. Jay Wiles, a performance psychologist and psychophysiology expert, to cut through the hype and translate HRV, vagal tone, and breathing biofeedback into plain English you can use today. 

We talk about why “higher HRV” isn’t automatically better, why you should never compare your number to your friends, and why stability and trends beat a single-day snapshot. Jay also shares a smarter way to think about readiness and recovery using context like sleep, training load, illness signals, and HRV coefficient of variation. If you’ve ever seen your HRV jump around after hard intervals, alcohol, travel, or a stressful week and wondered what it really means, you’ll leave with a clearer decision framework. 

From there we zoom in on the vagus nerve and what people mean when they say they’re “training” it. We separate vagal activation (a short-term state change) from vagal tone (a longer-term trait change) and explain how chronic stress can make the nervous system less responsive. Then we get into resonance breathing, the personalized cadence that best synchronizes breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure regulation (baroreflex) to amplify HRV and build resilience over time. We also share a realistic minimum effective dose: quick 3-minute resets and a weekly protocol that supports durable adaptation, better emotional regulation, and stronger recovery. 

If you found this helpful, subscribe to the Longevity Loop Podcast, share it with a friend who’s obsessed with HRV scores, and leave a review so more people can learn how to train the nervous system instead of just tracking it.

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Transcript

Why Stress Reactivity Happens

SPEAKER_03 0:00

Someone who has a very heightened emotional response, someone who feels really stressed or you know has a short fuse or it doesn't take them much to kind of like wig out, if you will. Typically, they have a nervous system that is very slow responding. It doesn't catch up when it needs to catch up. The whole intention behind that nervous system is to keep things stable, to keep things kind of at bay, make sure that we survive, we can think straight, we can get out of you know harm's way when we need to, but then we can also downregulate when we need to. If we do learn how to better manage those areas or we train that response, then we can tune that nervous system or tune that vagus nerve to listen more and actually become more responsive.

HRV Explained In Plain English

SPEAKER_00 0:40

This is the Longevity Loop Podcast, and I'm your host, Brent Wallace. In every episode, I bring you the leading voices in longevity, plus my own insights, put the world's best strategies directly into your hands, making elite longevity strategies accessible to everyone, regardless of your background. So let's jump into the loop starting right now. All right, everyone, welcome to the Longevity Loop Podcast. So today we got a crazy special guest. His name is Dr. Jay Wiles. We are going to talk about all kinds of cool things: HRV, residence breathing, vagal nerve, um, all those things related and all the science behind that. So, you know, kind of maybe like most of you, if you read anything health-related, longevity related, whatever, you kind of see that HRV is kind of becoming the new health flex, right? It's like, oh, how high can I get my score? And everyone wants this higher score, you know. And even with my whoop, you know, I'm part of uh a bunch of friends, you know, and then at the end of the week, it's like, who has like, you know, who's the winner this week? You know, it's like your recovery is the best, you know, something like that. So, but what's funny is that and including me to a certain extent, but nobody really knows exactly what the score is. They might know what HRV is, heart rate variability, but what does it mean? Where does it come from, you know, all those types of history and what it's actually measuring? So today I want to ask the bigger question, kind of the overarching question can you actually train your nervous system instead of just tracking it? Um, which is really cool today with the product we're gonna be talking about, which is the ohm health, uh, the the breathing device. And it's just cool that most things is track and this device is meant to train, which is a huge differentiator uh with a lot of these systems, you know, it's like a lot of them just track, but not many actually train your nervous system. Um, and this will train resonance breathing, and this is one of, and that's what this is in. And and and Jay will get into this, you know. I'm I'm butchering it now because I'm getting into the weeds already. But uh, but just a quick disclaimer before we jump into this conversation, it's for educational purpose only. We're not, I mean, I'm not a doctor, Jay's a doctor, but it's not personal medical advice. You always, always, always, especially with really high-level stuff in the longevity and kind of the upper echelons of health stuff, this isn't basic stuff. This is really something you want to talk with your physician about to make sure that you're doing the right thing for your specific body and condition, because a lot of this stuff is very much um personalized medicine kind of based stuff. And while the device today isn't necessarily for that, you just always want to talk to your doctor. So, just with that out of the way, um, we're joined today by Dr. Jay Wiles. And Jay is a performance psychologist and psychopsychology uh or psychophysiology expert focused on the nervous system. I butchered that word too. Well, I should have drank more coffee today or more ketones. It's a it's a big word. It's like sometimes I'm like, hold on, like I got these things. Um, it reminds me when I was like four or five, you know, I could never say ambulance for whatever reason, and just you know, and then at some point it just clicks. Um, so anyway, Jay is uh he's a badass, and he's the chief health and performance officer over at Ohm Health, which is what we're gonna talk about mainly today, is that device that's coming out uh this summer of 2026 as we record this. So we're gonna dive into the science behind HRV, vagal tone, resonance breathing, what's real, what's hype. You know, like I said, it's it's just a big flex now, and you know, like there's so much junk out there nowadays. And so it's really important to really cut through um what can really, really help you and move the needle in your personal life and just kind of what is bogus stuff. So uh just one last thing, and just this is the like the honest reflection for my one of the reasons I bought this device or pre-ordered it, it's it's one of the few devices that I actually want sitting in my home and to be like kind of a focus piece or um like a ritual object. And it and it just doesn't feel like a gadget. It really feels like a beautiful device that you actually want to be seen instead of hidden away in your you know workout room or you know, your closet or wherever it is. Um but you know, so the bigger question for me though is whether there's really any uh physiology under the hood. So I haven't used enough to make any actual claims. Um today we'll do a live demo and you know, kind of check out how it does work. So I've just been hearing a lot about the whole excitement around this resonance breathing. And it's just kind of, and you might have been heard in a on podcast here and there, but this whole new, I guess it's not new science, but it's it's seems to be a little bit more in the consciousness now is this resonance breathing. Um, and then, you know, what it does for stress resilience, broader downstream effects, and really just separating what's what's the reality of everything. So with that said, let's start with the HRV conversation. Um, like I said, it's just been like it's it's it's a buzzword, it's really buzzy. So, Jay, can you explain in plain English what is HRV actually telling us?

SPEAKER_03 6:24

Yeah, thanks for the thanks for the intro. I I love that uh we're about to dig into some really important topics. And, you know, I was just saying obviously I'm very tied to a product which is Ohm, um, and work for that company and have been a part of developing this. But I think more than anything, you know, as a researcher, uh, you know, as an academic and also as a clinician, one of my big priorities is how can I provide information and education out there that's tangible and usable and easy to understand because I think that the world of heart rate variability and the field of psychophysiology is a very complex field. There's a lot of granularity, there's a lot of nuance. Uh, it's not an easy field to understand, which is why um which is why HRV probably has become a flex and it shouldn't be. And we can get into all the reasons as to why like HRV shouldn't be like a metric that is um like a trophy, if you will. Uh, but but but I just wanted to kind of like start off by saying I'm I'm excited to be here and to be able to talk to you about this. I always like to start really high level and then get more granular. And so feel free, Brent, kind of as we as we go, if there's something that you want me to double-click on to kind of share a little bit more in depth, more than happy to do it. But put very simply, heart rate variability, and I'm gonna explain it not as a metric, but explain actually what it's looking at. It is looking at the adaptability of the innerbusystem. So it is the single greatest non-invasive proxy that we have for measuring the dynamic changes and adjustments or adaptations that the nervous system is making. So we know that if we have a nervous system that is not very finely tuned, so think of this almost kind of like a like a car, if you will. Um, so if you have one that's not very finely tuned, then you know there's a lot of creaks, a lot of scratching, not a lot of good adjustments. You know, you kind of press the gas pedal and there's lag, you press the brake and there's lag. It just doesn't function very efficiently. But we can train our nervous system and use HRB as a guide to become much more like a Formula One car. So Formula One cars are some of the most pristine, highly uh engineered, expensive uh cars and engines out there. And we can train our nervous system to become much more like that. So HRB kind of tells us where are we? Like, is our nervous system operating kind of like uh, you know, a 1970s, like really poor car, or is it like operating like an F1 car? And you can use that metric over time to kind of see whether or not your nervous system is making true adaptations or not. Another way to even think about this is in terms of its ability to tell you how your nervous system is adapting to stress load, whether that's physiological stress, so physiological exertion, but also mental health and stress resiliency from more of a psychological perspective. So put very simply, HRV just looks at the adaptations of your nervous system and kind of gives you a thumbs up, we're doing really good here, or a thumbs down, like things aren't operating very efficiently like we want it to. From a scientific perspective, um, a lot of people then say, well, how does HRV or the variance in heart rate in your heart rate, how does that kind of determine or tell more about adaptations of the nervous system? And what I would say is that we know that our body and our nervous system is trying to assimilate and adapt to millions of processes at any given time. And in order to do that, we need heart rate to speed up, we need blood pressure to actually increase, and then we also need heart rate to speed down, and we need blood pressure to decrease. We need everything to maintain balance, or what we would refer to as physiological homeostasis. We need that to happen. But in order for that to happen, we have to have a lot of things kind of going right and going in our way. And the single greatest lever that we have, or the influencer of heart rate variability, is our breathing. So as we inhale, the heart rate goes up. As we exhale, heart rate goes down. And as you inhale, the time between successive heartbeats, so the space between successive heartbeats starts to shorten. It gets less and less and less. And as you exhale, that space starts to widen more and more and more. And kind of as your heart rate changes across that cycle, we refer to that as respiratory sinus arrhythmia, we can derive heart rate variability. And the more variability that we have across that breathing cycle, the more adaptive your nervous system is. When the nervous system starts to pace itself, or say the heart starts to pace itself, that's when we know that there are distinctive problems because the heart doesn't operate like a metronome. It's dynamically adjusting to everything that it is uh that that that's coming in into its environment. And so basically what we're looking for is just like, is your heart rate variability stable over time, indicating that the nervous system is stable over time, which is why kind of just uh to kind of burst the bubble of anybody who's doing like the HRV comparison. I actually say that a comparison that I would make is less of like how high or the absolute value of your heart rate variability is, but how stable is it across time? Does it not vary from day to day that much? If not, great, that's excellent. Like that's actually what we want to see. That's stability, that the nervous system's handling everything that's being thrown at it. If it's declining day in over day, day over day, then we know that there's significant problems with your nervous system adapting. And if it's going in an upward direction, that's good, but it's not necessarily like we're chasing the goal. And I would say it's good to a certain extent. There's actually times when increases in HRV is not a good thing. It's an overcompensation due to uh overexertion and a significant amount of stress, etc. So I know that was a bit long-winded, Brent. I wanted to give uh more of the the uh the bird's eye view, but then also get a little bit more into the granularity. There's a lot more granular that we can get into, but that's HRV. No, that that was that was awesome.

SPEAKER_00 12:00

That actually, you know, it's it's so cool talking to people like you, because I'll take this subset of knowledge that I know, you know, and then and then you know it's always like supplementing with it. It's like, oh, okay, that's it. Because the one thing that I know, and and you just touched on it there, but the score isn't the same for everyone, right? Like I have buddies that, you know, they'll have, you know, 80, 90 regularly for HRV, but a good HRV score for me, you know, quote unquote good, is you know, 3540, right? And so, and I think what I heard you say there was that doesn't necessarily, you know, the higher score doesn't mean like, oh wow, you're way healthier. It's the regularity of your HRV and your numbers that kind of spell out like, hey, this is doing great versus kind of the all over the place or a declining HRV score, or even, you know, like uh what do you call it? Unintuitively, you'd think that uh a rising score might be great, but like you said, there might be some sort of overcompensating that your body is is is taking on there. Um and and I'm sure we'll get into this too, you know. Like you said, that there's two really big areas that this can really help with, and that's the mental kind of uh the a stress that we get today today, acute stress, and then also the physiolog physiological stress that we get. Like this morning, for instance, I did the Norwegian four by fours, right? And just like it sucks. Pain, pure pain. And I know yeah, and and and I know this tonight my HRV will be lower. I'll probably get a red score tomorrow and just say, hey, you know, like you trained really hard today, and you know, like give it a break, you know, and so I'll just probably do some, you know, jogging or some laps on the e-bike to kind of you know get back into it. But and maybe we're just getting already like a little bit too technical. So, like, what is that process there of you know, that lower HRV? Because I worked really hard and so my HRV should be lower tonight, but um, you know, then then I'll try to do all the things like, you know, let's drink some cherry juice and and you know, really hydrate and get some protein in there, you know, to try to like, you know, like quell those, you know, the inflammation and all stuff like that. So how does that all tie in, you know, as far as like you know, if it if it's low today for me because, you know, I trained or maybe I drank alcohol or jet lag. I mean, there's obviously myriads of different reasons, um, but it doesn't automatically mean anything, right? Or does it?

Using HRV Trends Not One Day

SPEAKER_03 14:34

Yeah, this is this is uh it's an it's it's a good question because I think that it comes back to the statement that you made earlier, which was one of the biggest problems we have in wearable data is that we are given this singular score, um, you know, typically like a readiness score, or you know, we can dive a little bit deeper into the applications and look at things like our resting heart rate and heart rate variability and our sleep efficiency. And these can be helpful, but making decisions on one day of reading is is typically pretty challenging to just look at, let's say, someone's heart rate variability and say, all right, well, now given that you know your heart rate variability is 50% lower than your typical day, like does that actually then mean that we need to change up our training routine for that day? And I would argue that the answer is uh mostly no. Now, that there are times where that that actually uh I would say, yeah, you can make a decision based off of one day's of data. I mean, if we see that your resting heart rate is significantly elevated, your um uh skin temperature is significantly elevated, also HRV is significantly depressed, that could be an indication that your immune system is firing on all cylinders and you're getting sick or you are sick. And so therefore, we might make some decisions on kind of either dialing down uh the intensity of the exercise, or we may just say, hey, today's a good day to take off. And a lot of times people will subjectively feel it. Like when all those markers are off, it's like, yeah, I know I'm coming down with something, or I feel you know already sick. What I actually tell people is that there is uh there are other metrics that utilize things like heart rate variability that we can use for decision making. Um, so one that is not particularly used a lot in wearable technology, even though I saw that Whoop recently released this. So very proud that Whoop's doing this because no other companies are doing this for whatever reason. But there's a metric called HRV CV, which is the coefficient of variation of heart rate variability, which is a long-winded way of saying how much does your heart rate variability vary from day to day? So is it consistent and stable? That's a good HRV. If anybody wants to know what a good HRV is, it's one that's normal for you. That's kind of holding together. We typically say anything that like doesn't vary um more than about 10% than your daily average, pretty dang good. Like we we don't really, we're not gonna mess around with training plans. Like you're making good adaptations. After about a seven-day, so this is a seven-day rolling window, I should say, too, that we derive HRBC from Z C B from. So it's just that seven-day rolling window. When we start to see kind of this consistent downward trend going more than about four days, uh, and typically equating to HRB CBs being about 15% or higher, mostly like in about 20% or higher, then that's when we're gonna say, okay, we need to dial down the intensity. And we also need to say, well, what's the context? Like, has this person been overreaching or overtraining, kind of in the gym? Are they experiencing significant like psychological stress, relational, work stress, financial, whatever it may be? And the other thing is is like, how was their sleep? And like if there's sleep, we know that in terms of nervous system repair, uh, the two kind of like main levers that we can pull for that are breathing and sleep. And so if someone's not sleeping really well and we see that impacting their heart rate variability score, it may not be necessarily the exercise regimen that we work on. We may try to improve things like sleep efficiency, and we may need to elongate their sleep time, we may need to shorten their sleep time. So there's so many, this is why it becomes really difficult, right, Brent, is because there's so many decisions that you then kind of have to make. And when you're just kind of relying on like, hey, I've got this data in front of me, let me see if I can make like a semi-informed decision, it becomes it becomes quite challenging. So my hope is that in the future, most of these companies that are you know producing these scores are truly creating more closed loop systems as opposed to just saying, hey, here's your score, good luck, but actually giving you something to do about it in an intervention.

SPEAKER_00 18:25

That's cool. I I've never heard of that CV. I'll have to keep an eye out um just on the next uh whoop. I mean, hopefully it comes out to the to the to the strap here pretty soon. Um but that that's really cool because it's almost concerning. I'm like, man, it's like is my HRV within 10% every day? And I and I think it is, you know, I'd have to look at the history, but it is funny that sometimes like it pops up to like 60-70, you know, and I'll have like a 90, you know, on the on the whoop, you know, with their metrics, you know, I'll have like a 98. You know, and then th those are those days that you're like, okay, let's go. But again, like you just touched on the a lot of times it's just subjective, right? Like, yeah, you you can do the device and know that like I kind of feel like I'm dragging ass today or something, you know, it's like you know, it's like a little bit of a temperature, you know, like the skin you said, a little bit higher heart rate. Um, maybe your sleep score wasn't as good. Um because that's the one thing that all I always struggle with, you know, is like like you said, like that foundational thing is that sleep to get a great HRV or to recover well, or even just like the mental, you know, even just like a conversation like this, you know, that's like pretty technical, you know, is like, okay, if I had a great night's sleep, I'll be able to perform way better in a conversation like this than if, you know, like I was like a tossing internal last night. You know, but but but it's an orchestra, right? There's so many different things to go into this thing. And so I I think a lot of times that you know the HRV is you know, people use it like a scoreboard, but it should be more feedback as part of a larger system, right? You know, like I wonder what it was asleep or or even diet or and like you said, the breathing part of it is really important. And that's why I'm so excited to, you know, when I get the the ohm health device, is that you know, be able to really train that, you know, because with our conversation with James, you know, the founder, um, we were talking about, you know, like meditation, you know, and like meditation promised all these things as far as, you know, like better sleep and better ex less anxiety and all these things. And even though I've practiced meditation so much, I can't really ever say that I've really felt any, you know, and maybe it's because I'm only like two years into that instead of ten years or whatever, but you know, it's like that it's it'd just be nice to have like a lot more instant feedback with things or tools that you can use to like bring your nervous system down to quell that anxiety, to, you know, I guess raise your HRV in real time. Um you know, and that's something that we'll we'll probably talk about in a little bit, but I used to be um turned on to the heart math stuff, and I remember like the very first heart math stuff that you know you bought the device and you're trying to train yourself to breathe, but the interface was so poorly designed, and maybe it was just a technological limitation from heart math. I I think they're probably a great company, but I just remember just like always struggling to like trying to do their exercises. I'm like, this isn't doing anything. Like, come on. Right.

SPEAKER_02 21:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 21:31

Well, the the other thing too is like the you know, you have to I commend companies like HeartMath, who were some of the first to the market in terms of like consumer-based heart rate variability. Um, it's just that uh there's just so much involved in terms of like, well, you got to have it connected to back in the day, it was you know, with the M wave. It was like connected to the computer, or like you just had like a little bar that we look at as just like a color facing bar, and hopefully you're like changing it to the blue and to the green. And then it was like, well, and then now it now it has to be connected to another phone, it's a w a Wearable PPG device on the ear. And again, all of these are great. You can there, it is evidence-based, like it is an amazing strategy. It's just that people had a hard time sticking with it. Just like meditation, meditation can be really hard for people to stick with because even though the science is clearly there, like meditation, mental attunement, mindfulness, it is an invaluable skill. Like you, you need to be able to have those things. The problem is, though, is that people getting to a routine doing that and creating a behavioral habit of that, just really challenging for a lot of people. And they may do really well for about a week, two weeks, maybe a month. And then after that, like people just fall off. I mean, that's kind of like why we see a lot of the phone-based meditation companies. Um, their churn rate, which is basically like how their retention, like it's their churn rate is like way into like the 95-96%. So 96% of people do not renew because they never stuck with it. So yeah, sorry to go off on that little bit of a tangent, but uh, I think that that's kind of the problem we're up against.

HRV Myths And What Matters

SPEAKER_00 23:05

But it's all but it's all valid, right? And and I think that's what's one of the cool things that hopefully the ohm device will kind of fix because it is something beautiful that, you know, like I said, in the you're not gonna shove it in your closet. Like it's a glass, beautiful, like I mean, it looks super cool. It's like in a you know, it seems like it's very inviting to the touch. It's like, oh hey, what's this rock in the top? You know, I'm gonna put it in my hand, you know, and then it's a very like intuitive. And if it's just there in your daily life, hopefully that will encourage you, versus an app. And like I said, the meditation thing, like you can, it's like here, try it every day for 30 days, you know, a challenge or whatever. And it's like, I think I feel better, you but I always feel like with breathing exercise, there's something a little bit more physical. Um, that at least me personally, I see a lot more benefits with doing that. Like um, I try to take like a couple breaks throughout the day just to kind of like focus on my breathing. Either do box breathing, or you know, like you were talking about like the longer exhale slows your breath down, you know. So I'll just do you know, four in, eight out, twelve out, whatever, you know, just to kind of drop back in and then um and then obviously a good cup of coffee over help always helps too. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's right. In there. Um, so is there any like HRV myths that you know about that you this is like simply aren't true or like you'd like to see it go away as as far as like I don't know, like again, like it's such a like uh this oh HRV, but it I I obviously it's very scientifically validated. It's a great tool, but I feel like there's myths and stuff about it. Like it's just like a little bit not given too much credit, but do you kind of get the gist of what I'm getting at there? Like, are there myths around it that just aren't true?

SPEAKER_03 24:49

Yeah. Totally, totally. I think that um the the biggest one that I think I kind of already alluded to it, but I wanted to expound a little bit more. The biggest one is that the higher the better. I think everybody just thinks, oh, the higher my HRB, the the better. And so I would always say that no, a good HRB is a stable HRV. So if nobody, if you take anything away from this, is that um uh in terms of like HRB metrics, is that a good HRV is a stable HRB. Now, that's not actually the case when we talk about biofeedback. So when we use like something like Ohm that we're gonna talk about here in a bit, we do biofeedback. The intention is to use HRB in real time and to inflate heart rate variability. Like our goal is to stimulate vagal tone and to really more so like stick stimulate the vagus nerve so that we do produce kind of high oscillations in heart rate variability. But from a day-to-day perspective, I don't worry about that. Uh the other component here is never compare yourself to anyone else. I have seen plenty of individuals who are immensely out of shape, whether it's they're overweight, their nutrition's poor, they're not sleeping well, they're really stressed. Their HRB can be really high. 100, 120. And this actually, you know, you if you you were to see those numbers, you would think, oh goodness, like that that's a great number. And I would say, like, yeah, it looks great. Now, however, this person, they wouldn't say that they're feeling very great. So you would ask, well, how is their HRB that high? Genetics, like genetics is a big contributing thing. Like, I I most people, well, actually, I'll say too, when we looked at twin studies on this, we find that most people's heart rate variability, um, or twins uh uh that is um, regardless of health status, stays pretty pretty close to one another. So uh I would say that uh comparing yourself is is useless because someone else may just have like a really quote unquote good genes, so they have higher heart rate variability. I actually sell people that the true test of good nervous system health isn't your baseline heart rate variability. It's when I put you under a state and I tell you to control your nervous system through something like slow paced breathing, how much can you move the needle then? Can you inflate your heart rate variability significantly when you're doing slow paced breathing? Um, if you can do that, then if you can go, let's say from 30 to 60, 70 just by doing slow paced breathing, that's a good nervous system. That's one that's really well attuned. If your nervous system, if your uh HRV, a baseline is 120, but when I do when you do some slow paced breathing, it only goes to like 125, maybe 122, like barely kind of rises at all during slow paced breathing. That's a nervous system that's a little bit more stiff. It's not, it's having a harder time adapting and adjusting. I would rather have the person who has got a baseline of 30 but can get it up to 50 or 60 during slow paced breathing than someone who has 120 and can only get it up to 122, 123, 125 max. So I would say that those are the biggest myths that that I see as well. And the other one too is just that you should make decisions based off of one day of reading. So I always tell people, like, Brent, for instance, if you came into my office here and I hooked you up to some sensors and I looked at your nervous system response and we just did like, let's say, a five-minute reading of your of your HRV, uh, and you said, okay, Jay, what can you tell me from that? I'd tell you, not much, honestly. Like, there's not a lot that I can actually derive from this one single snapshot. What's most important is watching how your nervous system responds over time. So the trends are actually way more important than these singular snapshots. The other thing too is people would tell you, like, if you took a snapshot of your HRB throughout the day, if it's not consistent when you're when you're taking that reading. So let's say, for instance, it's like, you know, yesterday I took it at eight in the morning right after I woke up. Uh, the next day I took it at 2 p.m., you're kind of comparing apples and oranges here because your nervous system after, let's say at 8 a.m. after you wake up, is gonna look completely different than it's gonna look at like at two. Two, you've had a lot of hours of potential stress that have been put on the nervous system, you're comparing the wrong things here. So, like this is again where it gets pretty nuanced. Like, if we're looking at measuring heart rate variability, one of the things that sleep wearables have done well is that it actually keeps that pretty consistent. Like you're you're sleeping. So it looks at HRB when you're asleep. If you're measuring it during waking conscious hours, it's like you need to be consistent when you're measuring it. Typically, you're gonna want to do it first thing in the morning if we're just looking at baseline. So all these things you just have to consider um in in kind of making decisions and and measuring. Um, so it gets again a little finicky if if uh if you're not kind of doing things in the right way or right order, which is why, you know, I've had the privilege of working with a lot of professional athletes. Um, and the reason that the athletes come to me is because they know that I can give them a protocol of what to do, but then also provide that layer of interpretation of what I see in their nervous system. And then the next steps that we want to take to kind of modify their approach to training their nervous system. So those are those are the big ones. There's probably some other ones that I'm missing there, but I would say that uh just I don't really care about your absolute value of your HRV. I care more about the stability. I don't want you comparing to anybody else. Um, and I think too, just like a great measure of someone's nervous system resiliency is to watch what happens when they try to control it. And then that's uh that's a pretty good indicator.

How Age Changes HRV

SPEAKER_00 29:58

Cool. Yeah, those are those are some great ones because that's probably the one I hear the most is the first one you addressed, is the high number is better, right? The higher the number, the better. And then that clarification you gave is actually it's not about that, it's actually the adaptability and flexibility of that when you do get into a a residence breathing pattern that you can actually change your HRV in real time versus it being kind of in that same kind of lane there. So that's a great um uh clarification there. The one thing I've never asked or even like researched, how does age affect your HRV? Is it is it something that, you know, when I'm 20, it's gonna be about the same when I'm 60, or does that change as I get older or something like that? Because it is a genetic component, uh like I mentioned. But how does that change with with how we age?

SPEAKER_03 30:50

Yeah, great question. So we see a pretty sharp declination, um, so decrease in RA variability as we age, typically kind of when we get beyond the age of about 40 to 50 is when we'll start to see more of the steeper numb decline. Why? Um because of a lot of things, um, increased inflammation, uh, things like arterial stiffness. Um, so a lot of people get, I mean, stiffer arteries. This is why we see kind of like the increases in things like cardiovascular disease and heart attacks go up. Uh, people with like congestive heart failure, um, cardiovascular disease, like really poor cardiac functioning, their HRV is horrible. I mean, it'll be, and when I say horrible, like appreciably, like nominally low, like I'm talking about single digits. Um, and that's mainly because cardiovascular functioning is so poor. Uh, so what I tell people is that like we are on a train here, even for those um like myself who are really focused on longevity, and I'm sure you in the audience here, is that we're on a train that when we get into our 40s and 50s, like expect to see like a natural decrease in heart rate variability. We will see that. And what I would say is that my whole goal isn't to say, hey, let's like um reverse that and try to increase heart rate variability as we age, but it's more of like how can we blunt the drop effect? How can we work on certain areas as it relates to nervous system functioning as to not have the steep decreases in HRV like most people see as they age, but to help to kind of like flatten that curve a little bit. And if we can do that, I actually think that that's gonna be really helpful. And we see too in the literature that as people improve things like cardiorespiratory fitness, um, even as they put on muscle mass, um, when you get older, uh, as you learn to better manage and regulate your nervous system, so you're breathing or biofeedback, like we can actually decrease the sharpness of that curve of decreasing HRB as we age. It just like most things in the world of longevity, um, there's no special pill, like it takes a lot of hard work. And uh and one of the other things too that I'll mention, because I um I'm a huge believer, given the research on this, that sleep um is just a key component. And so we know that like our sleep, um it's not even necessarily sleep need, but how much people do sleep as they age um gets pretty short. No, I mean it gets uh shortened. And so I think like sticking to at least getting about seven hours of sleep a night as we age is super important. So I tell people that if you're going like if you're in your 50s or above, um getting anything less than about seven hours of sleep is gonna have um it's gonna have an uh an appreciable um deleterious effect on your nervous system. So I would say that's a really good thing to target is getting getting good quality and quantity of sleep.

Vagus Nerve Basics And Training

SPEAKER_00 33:34

Yeah. Yeah, that's great to know. Yeah, I I feel like the last probably four or five years I've really buckled down with sleep as far as really consistent bedtime, really consistent wake time, and then always, and again, it's time of year. Like I'm in here in Arizona, so I was up about an hour before the sunrise this morning, but I was making sure to be outside when that sun did come up, and I'm like, okay, this is you know, like just so great to like reset your system. So when I do go to bed, you know, it'll really, really help with that. So cool, that that's been some great stuff. So let's let's move on to vagal, vagal toning, um, which again, it's one of these things that's a little bit newer. It's been around forever, obviously, and you start hearing it talk about. And just real recently, um, you know, I heard Tim Ferris talk on his podcast, you know, like how he's known about it forever. And I've heard Ben Greenfield talk about it way up in the day. And then Tim kind of dismissed it, and then now he's been revisiting the science in the last year and really seeing a lot of serious scientific efforts and research saying, hey, this is a real thing. Yes, it can be trained. So on training your vagus nerve, what do people usually even mean when they say that? And then again, just if you could give a high level of what Vegas nerve is, because again, it's one of those things that, like, I think I know what it is, right? It's kind of a nerve that kind of goes through your neck through, you know, like how do you train it? Like, what is this thing that everyone loves to talk about? And it sounds important. Um, and I am guessing it is with all the new scientific research, but you know, what are people talking about?

SPEAKER_03 35:14

Yeah, so the vagus nerve is your tenth cranial nerve. Um, so the cranial nerve are nerves that kind of operate and run from the central nervous system down into what we call the periphery or the rest of the body. Uh the tenth cranial nerve is not just a singular nerve, um, it's actually a whole bunch of nerves, it's branches of nerve. So when someone says the vagus nerve, they're not actually just talking about one nerve. Uh vagus means wandering, so it's called the wandering nerve. And the interesting thing about it is that this nerve runs uh from a specialized area in your brain. Um, so it's in the hind brain, and it's called uh the NTS and also the medulla. So the medulla is responsible for uh keeping you alive. So all of your automatic or autonomic um uh organs, which are like your heart, which you don't have to think about, it just operates, it just does its thing. Your lungs, you don't have to think about breathing, you just breathe. Um, all of these operate kind of via control of the vagus. Now there's other nerves as well, like the glossopharyngeal nerve helps to keep things kind of stable in a in a state of homeostasis, but the vagus nerve is probably one of the most like the stars of the show. And it was thought kind of before that like all of these processes were automatic, which is why it's called the autonomic nervous system that the vagus nerve is responsible for. But we actually found out that we can control things. Actually, we can consciously control this, these quote-unquote autonomic functionings uh by using something like breathing. And we'll tap into that here a little bit more, but I just wanted to kind of prime the listeners uh to kind of understand that these things are automatic, like we don't have to think about them, but it doesn't mean that they're outside of our level of conscious control, that we can actually control the speed of our heart. We can control the uh the our breathing. I think that's a pretty obvious one for most people. So this vagus nerve um it innervates, which means it's connected to mold to many organs, to most organs, but it has its most pronoun uh prominent interventions at the level of the heart, so the cardiovascular system, and then also at the level of the lungs. And we can stimulate this vagus nerve and we can cause it to make more adaptations over time through training. So it's funny, it's I kind of think of the vagus nerve acts a little bit like a muscle, like we can strengthen that muscle. Now it's not a muscle, obviously, but if I think about like if I go into the gym, let's say I'm heading down to the street and go to the gym and say, I want bigger biceps. So I go in there and I do, you know, three sets of curls and I put the dumbbells down and I'm done for the day. Will I grow bigger biceps? Probably not. But if I come back and I do this week over week, if I hit it twice a week, if I get in eight to ten working sets, well, now like we're starting to do some do some work here. I'm starting to actually break that muscle down, build it back up, recover well, and I'm I'm actually getting towards my goal of becoming stronger or getting you know larger, more beautiful aesthetics in terms of muscle mass. Like all those things are happening.

SPEAKER_00 38:07

I was gonna say your biceps look great, you know.

SPEAKER_03 38:10

Thank you. Um, the the thing that we want to remember is that we can do the same thing with our vagus nerve. We can train that nerve to become much more responsive and much more sensitive. A great way to think about this is that someone who has a very heightened emotional response, someone who feels really stressed or you know, has a short fuse, or it doesn't take them much to kind of like wig out, if you will, typically they have a nervous system that is very slow responding. Now, I mean it it doesn't catch up when it needs to catch up. Uh, you know, our fight or flight response and our relaxation response, their nervous system in general, the autonomic nervous system, again, mediated by that vagus nerve. The whole intention behind that nervous system is to keep things stable, to keep things kind of at bay, make sure that we survive, we can think straight, we can get out of harm's way when we need to, but then we can also downregulate when we need to. When that vagus nerve is kind of like being a little bit stubborn and not listening, it's typically because of this compounding stress that we have over time. Like over time, if we have our fight or flight response on chronically, which most of us do, we're not actually living lives that are helping us to downregulate that response. We're always kind of pinned up on the go, kind of what's the next thing? I've got this financial stressor, this relational stressor, this work stressor, this, you know, physical chronic pain, or I'm battling with an ailment, whatever it may be, that takes a toll. And our nervous system basically just is like, uh, you're not using me like as much as maybe you should. I'm just gonna kind of dial it down a little bit. And so the next thing we know, we have this heightened stress response. But if we do learn how to better manage those areas or we train that response, then we can tune that nervous system or tune that vagus nerve to listen more and actually become more responsive. And the vagus nerve is responsible for heart rate variability, it's responsible for managing blood pressure. It's responsible for a lot of kind of key physiological processes. But we have to, if we've gone through a significant period of time of chronic stress, we have to attune that nerve or that those branches of nerves to listen to us. And if it's not listened to us now, that can cause us a slew of problems, both physiological recovery problems, but also psychological recovery problems. And this is where I would incorporate something like breathing biofeedback, is because that is a way to both acutely uh turn the vagus nerve uh signaling up, but also over time, the more you do it, we can actually cause significant adaptations to where the vagus nerve becomes more sensitive. It becomes more strong, it listens to you kind of like that. It's that individual that I mentioned earlier who has a baseline HRV of 30, uh, but then after like five minutes of HRV biofeedback or resonance breathing, they can get it up to 50, 60, 70. It's because they have a vagus nerve that is like, oh yeah, I hear you. You're you're you're telling me what to do. I'm gonna move. Whereas the person who maybe isn't as attuned um to that or hasn't made these adaptations, they may have a high baseline HRV, but the vagus nerve is kind of stubborn. It's like, yeah, I'm not, I don't really want to move. I'm kind of good where I'm at right now. And that's where we can come in and reinforce that training.

SPEAKER_00 41:16

And so if I'm hearing you right, it sounds like the ones that are more quote unquote stubborn, maybe that's someone that has uh chronic stress, or I mean, would you say even PTSD or something like that, that's someone that is like constantly in that flight or flight area of their, you know, mental, physical space, it's a lot harder for them to adapt just because it's always in that like high pegged area and it's really hard for them to like bring it back down so they can settle it back down. So is that what I'm hearing you?

Stress Response Needs Two Pedals

SPEAKER_03 41:48

100%. 100%. The one thing that I would that I would tell people is that um stress is inherently good. Like we need stress. Stress is a good thing because it is there for our survival. We need our sympathetic or our stress response, that fight or flight response to turn on. Stress response is all about mobilizing energy. That's what that's what it is. Like when you need to use energy, we need that stress response to to come on. Like if your sympathetic response was too dialed down and not coming on, you would never have a great workout. Like it would be awful. Yeah, because you need your heart rate to increase. You need your blood pressure to go up. When we need all those things, it's great. But equally, we need our parasympathetic or relaxation response to be able to turn on as well. And so this is why like we need homeostasis. We need a good equilibrium of where we can dial that stress response up when we need it, and we can dial the parasympathetic relaxation response up when we need it as well. It's kind of like in Formula One. So I use a lot of Formula One analogies. This is my second one because I'm a big F1 fan and I work with F1 drivers. It's great. Um, they they they they they do what's called double-footed driving. So actually, just like, you know, if you and I, we're not we're out in our cars, we should not be driving with two feet. So if anybody does drive with two feet, please adjust that because you can get in some big trouble. You really would only well, one foot. And you're on the gas, and it's typically a person's right foot, gas with the right foot, and then if you need to go to the brake, you lift that foot up and you press the brake. And F1, they don't do that. They actually use both feet. Um, so they do like what you wouldn't want to do out on the highway. And that's because when they're taking a turn, like a hairpin turn, they need to keep the gas down or that guy's gonna fly by them. We actually can do that same thing with our nervous system. It's not a turn-on, turn off. Like you don't turn the vagus nerve on and turn it off. You don't turn the sympathetic fight or flight response off and turn it off. You dial them up, you dial them down, and sometimes you can dial them up at the same time or dial them down at the same time. Think about an athlete who needs to compete at a high level. We want their stress response on, but we also want their vagal response on so that when you know poop hits the fan, if you will, they're able to integrate kind of both systems at the same time to stay very mentally acute and alert and have heart rate high, but also not get tunnel vision to be able to kind of stay focused in the moment. So this is why these are not just antagonistic systems, um, the stress response and the Relaxation response, they actually are very complementary to one another. So I tell people never to frame it as this idea of like, hey, we're trying to dial one up or dial one down. No, sorry, sorry, to turn one off or turn one down. We're just kind of dialing. We're we're we're messing with kind of the tuning knobs.

SPEAKER_00 44:15

Yeah, that makes sense. Something that just came up there. I I did, you know, going back to the meditation thing, I did a 10-day vipassana retreat, you know, which is 10 days silent, you know, you don't talk to anyone and you know you're just in your head the whole time, which is a great experience. And I do remember coming out of that, being able to just like, I felt like I was such a beast on my bike after that because I could just, I had it felt like I had the mental acuity, like you said, like the brake and and and and gas pedal at the same time, where I could really be aware of like what my body was doing, but just still be laser focused on that thing. And I was able to kind of relax and put more power in the pedals. And I was just remembering like just setting all kinds of PRs all over the place. And I was like, wow, this is incredible. Like after this thing, and I was always trying to figure out I'm like, is this because I was just so happy to be back out, you know, not not being 10 days of isolation, or was it just really something that I was way more tuned in on a different level? And you know, like I just came to think that that was just me getting tuned in someplace because I was so much more in integrated with my mind and body, like where I could just like, okay, I really can feel you know my heart, and I was just present to everything in my body, but yet still able to like really put you know the force on the pedals and you know, just get over climbs faster and with less pain and everything. So it sounds like that's kind of along the same lines of what you're d describing there, too, is like, you know, all of a sudden you have this ability to kind of like push and pull or you know, brake and gas at the same time, you know, and and and use those in harmony um and synchronicity instead of just one at a time, you know.

SPEAKER_03 45:54

Right. Yep, yep. That's that's exactly right.

SPEAKER_00 45:57

So when we're looking at vagal tone, um how do you measure it? What's what what it so when you say you have great vagal tone, what are you actually measuring or or looking at? What is that metric?

SPEAKER_03 46:11

Great question. A lot of people don't ask that question. I think it's a super worthy question to explore here because I think a lot of people would say, well, isn't that heart rate variability? And the answer is yes, but not in the way that you would think it is. Um uh when you look at your heart rate variability score, let's say in the morning, and you have a whoopstrap or an aura ring or whatever it may be, you're getting one singular number. It's gonna be you're gonna see an MS behind it. So that's milliseconds. So in the world of heart rate variability, we look at things in terms of milliseconds. And uh that number that you're getting is actually looking at the variability or the amount of variability that is typically happening between the times and successive heartbeats. So let's say, for instance, if it says 100 MS, that means that from heartbeat to heartbeat, it's varying on average about 100 milliseconds from one another, the heartbeats are. That's a time domain indice. That's what we would call that in the world of heart rate variability, is we call it a time domain indice. And time domain indices are really helpful because they can help us to look at basically parasympathetic activation. Now, parasympathetic activation and vagal tone are actually very different from one another. Um, they're they're very related, but also very different. In order to say someone is having vagal activation, that is one thing. To say someone is having vagal tone is another very easy example. And then I'll talk about the metric we use to actually assess that. Uh, the example here is that I'm going back to the gym. I go into the gym and I do three sets of curls. Great. Got good blood flow to the biceps, like I'm feeling good. It was a really good workout. That's that's great. I stimulated my muscles during that period of time. Are my muscles now officially toned? No, they're not. What takes, you know, what does it take to get it toned? Time. We have time and continued consistency and practice. Same thing in terms of vagus the vagus nerve. If you want to improve something like vagal tone, this takes time. And in the research studies, we see that doing something like heart rate variability biofeedback, like resonance biofeedback, it can take anywhere from about eight to 12 weeks to really see appreciable, like significant changes in vagal tone. Now, how do we measure that? We measure that through something called um uh power domain indices. Um we look at, and I'll explain what I mean here in a second, but we look at something called power domain indices, which are very different than time domain indices, which is a way of looking at heart rate variability. So if I take like your heart rate variability data, we have what we call inner B intervals or heart rate inner B intervals. So this is like this raw data, kind of like a raw EEG, which is looking at brain wave functioning. And if I shine it through this prism, so basically an algorithm, I can look at the component rhythms of your heart. Uh, just like you can look at the component rhythms of an EEG, shine it through a prism, and we can find alpha, beta waves, you know, get gamma, theta, delta, um, you know, sensory motor, etc. We can do the same thing with our heart rate and heart rate variability. But the interesting thing about it on that end is that we can start to parse out um true changes in vagal tone through something called changes in high frequency power. High frequency power is one of the metrics that we use that over time, when we apply what's called a natural log rhythm. So we basically will make it um uh a logged, which is basically looking at it like on a normative basis, we can watch what happens to that number over time. And as it increases, then that can actually give us a true indication that vagal tone is happening. And we see that over the course of, again, probably about eight to 12 weeks of consistent biofeedback practice. Uh, we can also see that as people endure kind of significant stressors, that HRV, or we call LNHRVHF, which is a lot of like acronyms, uh, or or abbreviations, we can see it start to go down when people are under significant stress. So I would say too, this is where like this is where it's really important. Now, like I just sped out a bunch of stuff that like, hey, a clinician or a researcher in this space would know about and can be able to share about. But I don't expect people to be like, okay, so now do I have to go calculate this, calculate that? Like, that's why, like, within most of the apps that are out there, you know, elite HRV, optimal HRV, and then of course Ohm, like we're we're creating something that makes it a lot easier for you to understand. So basically you can just look at this and say, like, am I improving these adaptations of the nervous system and improving bagel tone over time? And we can kind of show you that plotted. But getting into the science of the metrics that we use could be can be quite complicated, as I just uh just spelled out there.

SPEAKER_00 50:48

So so are those pretty precise measurements, or is is it I mean, or or improvement like everything? I feel like everything's like, okay, this is the best we have now, like epigenetic aging clocks, for instance, but it's like it's still not perfect, right? So there's still something that's coming up on the horizon that we'll be like able to measure more precisely or or more feedback. Like, where are those measurements at today as far as like kind of quote unquote scientific progress?

SPEAKER_03 51:17

Yeah, I mean, it's pretty accurate in terms of looking at it from a non-direct, non-invasive way. I mean, you can actually measure someone's kind of activation of their vagus nerve uh by looking at and using different instruments that are way more invasive. Um, so actually, kind of like it's almost kind of like a biopsy procedure where you can um stick a needle now and look at kind of like the electrical current um signaling of the vagus nerve. But again, nobody's gonna do that. Like it's not something that's uh readily available or anybody wants to do and it's uncomfortable and it's very invasive. So as far as non-invasive procedures go, uh, which is just looking at heart rate variability metrics, and we're just kind of adjusting these metrics based on algorithms that have been developed over time, um, it's pretty, pretty good. It's a great representation because everything's normalized. Um, so when we look at this data, we're able to kind of take it and look at it um kind of on a normalized basis, which gives us much more of a better understanding of what is happening over time. And so, because of that, I would say that like something like high frequency power at baseline is one of our best metrics that we can use right now to truly look at whether or not your nervous system is making adaptations and you're strengthening vagal tone. Now we can use HRV and multiple metrics in real time to look at vagal activation. So activation means like, is the nerve being stimulated? Like, is it is it kind of like singing right now when we tell it to move? That's very different than like looking at has this made an adaptation over time? So when you're at rest and baseline, you're not slow pace breathing, like is your vagus nerve firing and more sensitive than what it was before you started?

Vagus Hype And Guru Red Flags

SPEAKER_00 52:54

Got it. Yeah, okay. That that that makes perfect sense. So again, with vagal tone, does it get oversold or or what a is there a component of it that gets oversold? You know, like again, we're talking about like things that are pretty new on overall consciousness when it comes to like the wellness field, right? So when it comes to vagal tone or vagus training, what gets oversold when people talk about it? If anything, I mean maybe it's worth every you know, every damn thing everyone's talking about, but is it something where like it's like, well, it's probably not great for you know XYZ or I mean, I don't know.

SPEAKER_03 53:33

Yeah, I mean, I think it makes sense for everybody to be caring for their nervous system, right? I mean, anybody that can train their nervous system to be more resilient, I don't see any negatives or downsides to that. Now, I could be wrong. Maybe we'll find something out later on, but right now, I don't think we have any evidence to suggest that it's um uh it it's good, it could potentially even have any negative side effects. Now, I think the way we go about training it, that's where we get a little bit lost. I get a little bit lost sometimes with people because I don't know if you've noticed this, but in like health and wellness space, like everybody is throwing up their shingle and referring to themselves as like a nervous system coach. Um, and or like there's the breath breathwork, yeah, like everyone's doing this. Uh new life coach. Yeah, exactly. Or it's like breath work practitioners who are like, hey, I've got this new way of tapping into nervous system control that is novel and proprietary and better than everything else. It's like immediately like my ears turn off and I get frustrated because like I'm sitting here thinking, I have got something that is very evidence-based. It's been um well defined within the literature to be efficacious for many different things. Um, so when someone kind of comes along and they're like, hey, I'm the new nervous system guru, you should listen to me and buy my$2,000, you know, four-week package, I get a little bit um upset with that. Uh I tried to kind of say, all right, let's steer, steer it away. Let's go do some biofeedback to get your blood pressure down. Um so that's what I would be weary of. Like anybody is saying, like, hey, I've got this quick fix, like all you got to do is like do 10 minutes of this breathing practice once, and hey, your nervous system is cured. Um, I always say, Where's the data? I always say, like, how do you know that this is appreciably changing acutely or longitudinally? So, how do we know we're making state change or trait change, which is the longer-term change? Because there's a lot of the technologies out there right now, right? That's like we stimulate the vagus nerve or we're some vibrational technology. And I listen, like, if this is really gonna work, that's great. Show me the data. Like, are there data to suggest that this isn't actually changing the nervous system, both now, acutely or longitudinally? And many of the products that like are being produced, or the you know, gurus who are coming out now who are in the nervous system space, they just don't have that data, nor can they speak very intelligently about it. And that's not me judging them, it's just me saying, like, these buzzwords are are true, like scientific buzzwords. Like the nervous system is real. This is not a woo-woo made-up thing here. But the approach to how we dynamically change the nervous system isn't found in evidence. It's just like a, hey, like I heard breathing affects the nervous system, so therefore I created this new breathing process. Like, yeah, it's your nervous system cure. And I'm like, yeah, I don't think so. So yeah, sorry, that was a bit tangential, but uh there's a lot of that that can fire me up.

SPEAKER_00 56:20

No, that's great. I mean, you know, it's like it's it's always good in you know, any space, but especially like with the health and wellness space, and even more so probably longevity and anything that's a little bit more fringe or kind of, you know, like trendy. You say, you know, if you got a good spider sense, you know, if your spidey sense is tingling, you know, that's probably a good thing. But I loved what you said about trait change. You know, there's the the state change, and then there's trait change. And I've that that's such a great later that, you know, because it's you always hear about state change, you know, changing your state of like, you know, especially sales or whatever, you know, you know, you that you always talk about changing the the prospect state, but the trait change, that's like kind of the long-term, you know, like, okay, is this really doing good? And is that the measurable part? And I I I I'm gonna take that and start using that because I really like that that differentiating because there's like, well, even just like you said, you know, you're going to the gym, you're doing your curls at one time. That's probably the the state, but the trait is going religiously and going and really building up that yeah, that tone of the muscle or whatever. So that's that's a really good thing.

SPEAKER_03 57:32

The example I give there too, because to make it even clearer for people, is like I can go into the gym and gym gym, people who go to the gym uh are gonna understand this this uh concept, but some who don't may not understand it. But if you go in and you lift you know enough weights, even in a single day, you'll get a lot of blood flow to that muscle. It's called pump. Like you'll get the pump of that muscle. And your muscle will appear much larger because of all that blood and water being pulled in because there's a lot of damage, so it needs to start reparations. Uh but give it a couple hours, shrinks back down. Then your muscle's about the same exact size it was when you first walked in the gym. Do that week after week after week, and it's not just the pump that keeps the muscle big. Your muscle is tearing and growing back larger and larger and larger. That is trade change. The pump, that's just your state change. The trade change is the muscle itself actually becoming bigger.

Resonance Breathing And Personal Rates

SPEAKER_00 58:24

Yeah, that's a great analogy. Yeah, I like that. I've just never thought about those two buckets, but it makes such perfect sense. So I'm gonna be using it from now uh going forward. So thanks. Thanks for that. So so let's kind of step into like and this is probably inaccurate, but like part three of this trifecta of HRV vagal nerve, and now going on to resonance breathing. Uh so let's get into this because this is actually what the ohm device is meant to train, right? The resonance breathing part of things. So, what is resonance breathing and just you know the plain English version that a fifth grader would understand?

SPEAKER_03 59:06

Sure thing. So resonance, uh resonance frequency was actually the initial term that was created by Dr. Paul Lair. I'm out of Rutgers Medical. Um so this is a uh researcher in the field of heart rate variability. He and a few Russian scientists who are studying heart rate variability actually found that there are certain breathing patterns or cadences, so frequency, so the how fast you breathe, that can stimulate the nervous system higher than other breathing frequencies for that person. So, for instance, we actually they actually found that you can breathe. Um, most humans, so this would be adults, have a breathing rate that optimizes their nervous system functioning, uh as high as six and a half breaths per minute to as low as four and a half breaths per minute. And when we put that person in that right range or at that number, we'll stimulate heart rate variability, we'll stimulate vagal firing, we'll do all these things at the most kind of like optimal level. So think about it this way. If I were to have a violin and I were to, and I'm not a violin player, by the way, but I always use this as an example. I'm I'm not I'm not a musician, so I should probably uh figure out another example, but I like this one. There's no violin comparable to this one. That's right. There it probably is. I just need to create one. Uh but if you have a violin, you put it up and you place your fingers on it, and you strum upwards or downwards, and it starts to make this really bad screeching sound, just like that really awful, like almost like nails on the chalkboard sound. Uh, you're not creating resonance. But if I have someone come in and they say, Okay, I want you to place your fingers here. This is how you press down, and then I want you to strum the bow like this, and then it makes this beautiful reverberating resonance sound. Like that's resonance within that system. So we can do the same thing to our autonomic and cardiovascular system through our breathing. So resonance is just when we synchronize two physiological processes at the same time. And the two physiological processes that we're synchronizing, there's actually three that we're synchronizing here is our breathing with our heart rate, with our blood pressure regulation, which is our barrow reflex response. When we put all three of those in synchrony, so we're breathing at that optimal rate to synchronize all three of those. This is when we see not only just the acute changes in our nervous system functioning and vagal firing, but over time, when we practice at that rate, and generally anywhere from about six to eight is upwards as like that 10 to 12 weeks, we start to see the significant adaptations of the nervous system. So the vagus nerve becomes more string strong, it becomes more sensitive, fires kind of at will. You're able to self-regulate or control your nervous system. Um, kind of at will. That's what resonance is. So when we do resonance biofeedback, we have to find that rate, number one. And it used to be that, man, you got to go into a clinic, they got to put on all the EKGs and electrodes, you got to go through all these trials, and then we find, okay, your breathing rate is five breaths per minute. That's your resonance rate. So we want you to set, you know, a timer or use an app where you're breathing at a resonance rate of five breaths per minute. That's kind of the old school way of doing it. Whereas, like with Ohm, we just do it for you. We have you hold the stone, which is a PPG or heart rate sensor, and then through your breathing and through your metrics, our algorithm that we've developed identifies what is your resonance rate. So you don't have to go through that. And it's very specific. It's not just like a, hey, four seconds in, four, six seconds out. It might be 4.37 seconds in, 6.294 seconds out. So we're very specific on how we maximize those amplifications of your heart rate and heart rate variability over time. So we're all about like how do we uh how do we do this as most efficiently and effectively as possible? And uh, so yeah, that's resonance frequency in a nutshell. That's super cool.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:55

So it sounds highly personalized for each individual. It's all going to be different because you do hear about, you know, like the old school, like take 10 breaths or you know, or or five or six breaths per minute, you know, is is is is a starting point. But it sounds like that's a little bit oversimplified. And what this ohm device is doing, or what's ideally, if you went into one of these clinics or whatever, it it's it's very precise, it sounds like, like you said, 3.7 seconds in, yeah, you know, 5.2 seconds out or whatever. And then that's that perfect resonance, like you said, like the violin um example that you do, you know, is like that. And and even now that I'm thinking about it, I was like, that's probably what ohms comes from, right? Because ohm, you know, that's the resonance of like that's yeah, you got it.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:42

So yeah, and and you're right. So to so just kind of to double click on the six breaths per minute, a lot of people do that, like four seconds in, six seconds out, five in, five out. There's nothing wrong with that. Um, most people respond pretty effectively to slow-paced breathing at six breaths per minute. Nothing wrong with that. Um, I think though, if we want to optimize the output, it may be that, hey, at six breaths per minute, like Brent, we may look at your heart rate variability metrics. And it's like from baseline, you improve your heart rate variability by 50%. Great, excellent. Like during that time, like you improved it by 50%. Cool. Then it means you went from 30 to 45. But maybe it's like we we find that four and a half breaths per minute for you actually raises it by a hundred percent. So instead of going from 30 to 45, you go from 30 to 60. That's a significant difference. So both very effective, but one way more effective. So I always tell people I'm I never you know dig on like breath work practitioners who are like, hey, let's breathe at six breaths per minute. Most people are actually going to respond pretty well to that. The research is pretty clear that slow-paced breathing is great. But resonance breathing at your resonance rate may amplify that nervous system response even more significantly. And over time, we can actually improve kind of the efficiency of the nervous system way faster and way stronger if we breathe at that rate, as opposed to just using like a generic six breaths per minute.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:02

Yeah, I mean, it sounds way, way more prescriptive than just, you know, it's like the multivitamin is like, great, I'm gonna get this multivitamin off the thing, but you don't really know if you're getting the omegas and the iron mounts and whatever. It just sounds like, yeah, it probably works. It's the 80-20 rule, let's say. That's right. Whereas this is very prescriptive, is like, hey, this is getting the highest of the peaks and the lowest of the lows, and you're really like nailing that there. Um, if someone's really doing this right with this device, you know, and you're you're getting that personalized feedback, what is something that they notice? Is it do they feel different than just the normal five six like we just talked about? Or is there something that you know obviously it sounds like it'll reflect back in your HRV readings or whatever, you know, because you're just like perfectly doing that. But as far as just if someone didn't have any device and they're just sitting here doing that, then and that's you know, and we'll we'll get into a demo in a little bit with this where we're you know, there's no screens. So there's no feedback other than you know the light and and how that reacts to your breathing. But if someone's gonna physically or mentally notice something going on differently or or just like in breathing in general, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:15

So typically typically they are going to notice that they feel more relaxed. So when anybody slow paced breathes or they do resonance breathing, uh, you just feel that that that weight. Um and the reason being is because your vagus nerve is being so stimulated. And so when the vagus nerve is stimulated and your blood pressure is becoming nicely efficiently regulated, uh, we feel uh a lot of times resting heart rate goes down and you just feel this sense of more calm. Um and so a lot of that is actually due to the release of a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine, now, which is an inhibitory neurotransmitter that will call cause us to feel more calm, especially at the level of the autonomic nervous system. Uh so yeah, I mean, of course it's great to get that feedback from data and to get that feedback kind of in the moment to know that you're in that state of resonance. Uh, but a lot of times, like if you just like, hey, I don't have the technology in front of me. I always say that I do biofeedback in a controlled environment. Um, so like with my own lamp, so that when I'm in an uncontrolled environment, I'm out in traffic or whatever it may be, that I can get into that state without needing the technology. You become your own source of biofeedback. So I train here so that it translates to something out there. That's the true reason that we do this is to make those adaptations so that we can become more self-aware of our own stress response and then self-regulate whenever we, whenever we need to. So yeah, most people are gonna see a pretty acute feel, um, kind of like that, almost like a uh a relinquishing of the weight off the shoulders when they do this type of practice.

Minimum Dose For State And Trait

SPEAKER_00 1:07:44

That's super cool. So yeah, well, well, let's get in. Well, I guess, yeah, and we can talk about this in live demo, but my question now is is what's the minimum effective dose, right? Like with meditation, you know, there's not, you know, I've heard so many people talk about like 20 minutes is the minimum effective dose because once you kind of quiet that monkey brain or monkey mind down, you know, you actually the last five minutes is probably the best part of the meditation because you know it took you so long to get into that thing. But with the ohm device and resonance breathing, is is there a minimum effective dose or what's the shortest version of this type of breath that would actually work and and move the needle?

SPEAKER_03 1:08:25

We tell people that three minutes uh is a really good, like just short-term, like acute session. It's like, hey, uh, it's between meetings, I need a little bit of assistance, like I just am feeling a little stressed. Do three minutes. Um, that's that's kind of like a good standard. If you want to make adaptations in the nervous system, so we want to improve vagal tone. The research has been pretty clear that doing this about four times a week at 10 minutes per session, so it's 40 minutes total a week, not a ton of time investment. 10 minutes a day, four times a week, like not a ton of time that you have to invest in doing this. After about anywhere from six to eight weeks, we can start to see true adaptations of the nervous system, improvements in vagal tone, improvements in stress resiliency, improvements in emotional regulation and recovery, and so forth. So I tell people it's like if you want the short, short state change, just do a couple minutes. Like you could even do one minute of this and still feel better. Um, but I would say that three minutes is a good kind of like rule of thumb. And but if you want those adaptations, 10 minutes. Um, four times a week, you'll start to see that really take um um you know, uh to kind of work. Um I won't say work, but really start to to to kind of um fully manifest itself at around about uh six to eight weeks after doing it.

Ohm Lamp Demo And Feedback

SPEAKER_00 1:09:38

Well, like you said, it's that it's it's it's not the state change, it's this it's the I very forgot what we're talking about, but you know, the the the static or or the long-term change of of it change. Sounds like that's yeah, yep, and exactly. So that's what you're gonna be applying as you do it. So yeah, so let's do a quick, you know, 60, 90 second demo here and coach me. Well, uh coach me like I am brand new because I am brand new to this. Um, and I don't have the device here. Um but let's take a look at it and then you know, like, you know, kind of coach me through what I should focus on, you know, forcing things, you know, those, you know, and and what are you watching for, you know, as I might do this.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:23

Sure. So what I'll do here, because I think this might actually be the most helpful thing, is I'm gonna show it to you, which is right here. So this is it. It's one piece see uh piece of molded glass. So as you can see, it's a lamp. It's a lamp that lives in your environment. It's very apple-esque. Um, and I don't know if you can hear it here on the microphone, but it is indeed glass, um, so don't drop it. Uh, but what you can see is that you if you want to use it as a lamp, you can just dial the stone to the left or right to dial it up or down. Even if you go beyond, kind of like off, it'll turn into like white noise. So you can keep it like right there beside the nightstand. So yeah, and this is like soundscapes, you can do it to actually white noise, and we're gonna put a lot of different like presets for that. And then when you want to turn the lamp on, you just dial it up by turning the stone on top here, and as you can see, and it'll light up. Now, I'll I'll kind of show you, and then I'll try my best to demo it. I'll have to like hold it, um, but I'll but I'll show you here in a second. Basically, to start a session, you just pull the stone off top. So it's just an induction charger on here that charges the battery and the stone. As you can see there, that is a PPG sensor, so that is a heart rate sensor. You might can see the green light flashing there. Okay, yeah. And all you do is you hold it in your hand. And once you hold it in your hand like this, um, you can even like just put your finger on top too, but I like to hold it in my hand. You can see that this lamp is now starting to oscillate and it's actually vibrating in my hand as well. So as it goes up, we're inhaling. So you can see it go up, inhale, breathe in, and as it goes down, we're exhaling. The whole time I'm feeling the vibration in my hand too with the pulse wave, so I can close my eyes and I can do it if I want to. But what it's doing is it's looking at your nervous system and how it's responding to this pacer. And then based on what we see in regards to your metrics, your nervous system metrics, we're making adjustments to this pacer. So essentially what we're doing is we're trying to dial in that resonance frequency. We're saying, hey, if we extend the inhalation or we extend the exhalation or reduce one or the other, we can actually create more amplification in that heart rate variability. And so we're just constantly looking at your nervous system and dialing in that whole time to see can we get it to exactly where we want it to, which is that state of resonance. Now, how do you know and what kind of feedback do you get in the moment to know whether or not this is actually working? As you get deeper and deeper into that vagal stimulation, to that parasympathetic state, this lamp will progressively change colors. So it'll go from like this white color to a deeper orange. And then finally, when you get it into that state of resonance, so we're amplifying the oscillations of your heart rate and heart rate variability at its highest, the whole lamp will start to glow blue. And the whole goal is just to keep yourself into that state, that optimized nervous system state. You're gonna fall out, and that's okay. Just focus on bringing yourself back in through some good mental attunement, through following that pacer. The great thing is that you never have to know, like, or you never have to kind of like focus on like, am I breathing too fast or breathing too slow? You're just following the pacer. That's all you're that's all you're doing. And we're making those adjustments to try to drive you into that state of resonance as quick as possible. And then again, I kind of did it a second ago, but when you're done, all you do is throw the stone back on top and then it turns back into like a normal lamp and you go on throughout your day. You're good to go. And that's it. So instead of having to put on a new wearable and open up your phone and connect it and make sure that like you've got everything set up and you have to stare at your phone the whole time, you just have the device that kind of lives in your environment. That's it.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:40

That's cool. I I love it that it vibrates in your hand. I don't think I got that um, you know, looking over the literature uh because that is cool that you can close your eyes and still, you know, know to breathe in or out and just kind of get that extra layer of relaxation. And then and then is is it timed session or is it just kind of whenever you feel done that you put it back in the thing?

SPEAKER_03 1:14:04

So on top, I don't know if you can see, but on top, I'm gonna see if I can hold it there, there's a halo timer up here. And remember how I said three minutes is kind of like generally where we want you to be. Can you see that little halo timer right there? That will see it showing up. Yep, yep. All the way around the racetrack is three minutes. Um, so let's say you wanted to do 10 minutes, then obviously you got to go three and a little bit more. I like to do about 12 minutes, so I'll just do four full rotations around there. But that's it. Um so as long as you kind of have this place to where you can see that little halo timer and you can see it starting to fill up, that'll give you three, three, three minutes around the clock, and then you can just put the stone on top and you're done.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:42

That's super cool. Yeah, I really like that. I mean, it's it's such a beautiful design. I mean, props to you know the the designers. Um, I'm sure it was James and you know, the and and a team with including you probably, but they it's it's it's really cool designed. I I was bummed. James said you guys went to Eudaimonia, and I was and I was like, oh man, like I I wish I would have been uh there this year.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:03

We'll be back there. We'll be back there again this year. Well, by that time too, when Eudamonia comes, which I believe is November. Yeah, it will be out of the selling. Okay, cool. Yeah, we'll we'll we'll be there again. And we'll we'll be out before then anyway.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:19

Yeah, yeah. I'll be I'll be out there this year uh for sure. And then I know James is saying the delivery was gonna be in August. Um right now. So yeah, that's gonna be super.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:29

So we're open for pre-order now. Um so ohm.health, uh, we're open for pre-order, but we'll be shipping in August. So everything right now is still pre-market, pre-order, uh, but everybody will have their devices uh kind of here in the summer.

Athlete Results Plus Sleep Pairing

SPEAKER_00 1:15:40

Yeah, and the the for anyone listening, I I I I believe it's still so. I mean, at least when I ordered mine, I know it's like a$50 discount now for as long as you get in that pre-order stuff. So um I think it's what$2.99 now and$3.50 when it goes to actually market. So you know, it's just as far as the incentive to get that in there. Um, but that it's super, super cool. Um so yeah, Jade, I mean, that's a super cool demo. Um, and I'm just trying to think if there's anything else I'd really want to ask you about here. Um but as far as like the devices, and obviously you've worked with people in your clinic. Um what are some experiences that people I know we've talked about kind of general and you've worked with athletes and stuff. Are is this some of this technology that you're using with your athletes as well, as far as you know, the HRV, vagal tone, and then the resonance breathing is something that they see and they're actually and obviously people are coming back to you. You know, you're a very successful doc. So, you know, like this is one of the big modalities I'm assuming that you're using with uh a lot of these people.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:50

100%. Yeah. So with most of my athletes, no, sorry, no, I shouldn't say that, all of my athletes. Um it's one of the things that's really they most of them identify as the most helpful thing for them because you know, when you go in and you do a meditation session, or even if you do like a breathing session, you might leave that session and think to yourself, you know, I I think that was helpful, like I think I feel more relaxed, and that's good. Like we want subjectivity of like, hey, this feels good. But what my athletes love, because you have to remember most athletes are immensely data driven. So I work with a lot of PGA players and the MLB players as well, very data-centric. They want to know, like, is this real? Like, am I actually moving the needle? When they see that with our technology, then they can say, oh man, I see that over a course of a 10-minute session. I improved my heart rate variability by 100%. I was in resonance for 75% of that 10 minutes. Like those things really matter to them because now it becomes less of just like, oh, I think that this was real and happening and having an effect. To now where it's like, oh, I see. Like my nervous system had an appreciable change during that time. So I feel great, but also I have the objective data. You have to think about it for them, that is so sticky. Like, because they're like, hey, if I can do something and I improve my outcomes, like I'm gonna keep doing it. And so almost all of them that try this see appreciable outcomes, uh, positive outcomes. And so they do it because they love it, because they're like, this is sticky. It feels great. I see that it's helping me in the moment and over time. So this is like a uh, I kind of build this in. There's kind of two things I build in as non-negotiables for all my athletes. Uh, one is focusing on sleep, and the second is focusing on heart rate variability, biofeedback. And both of them go together. Like people use this as a evidence-based practice for helping with sleep anyway. So I'm like, hey, pair it with your window routine. Do it as a part of a way to downregulate prior to sleep. And it's been demonstrated in science and the literature to help with things like chronic insomnia, with anxiety, with PTSD, and even other clinical disorders as well. Now, I mean, you know, at Ohm, we're not here to like treat any type of mental health disorder, physical disorder. Uh, but we certainly know many individuals that are working with like licensed providers and clinicians who they actually say that this is an amazing way to augment the therapies that they're doing or whatever it may be. So uh yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to get like too pitchy there, but my athletes.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:13

No, I mean that that's amazing. I mean, one of the use cases I was thinking about is like the the people that experience anxiety in a doctor's office or even a dental's a dental office. If you I can see a case, a use case for this where it's like, you know, I was just in the dentist not too long ago and and you know, just teeth cleaning, nothing super painful. Just having it there, and then he's like, here, just hold this pebble and try to, you know, and just breathe with it. You know, I can imagine that that could be a a huge use case. And even uh, I've got a five-year-old, and even with him, what's just like and I know James said that it it's not tuned to you know, someone so young, but I can imagine something like that being even even if it's not working for say a five-year-old, but still like that kind of interactive and like here, let's try to move this, the the light as I go, you know, almost distracting and and giving them in mind something else to put.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:07

My kids use it all the time. So I have three boys, and my two boys, my two older boys absolutely love using it. I mean, they find so much value in it. And for them, like they kind of like they're super competitive with one another, they're only two years apart, so they're like best bots, but also like super competitive with one another. And they'll race, they'll race to see who can do it faster, who can hold themselves into the blue home state longer. Uh, and also, too, for them, like the blue is really pretty. It's like a vibrant blue. Uh, they call it getting into their sonic modes, like Sonic the Hedgehog. They're really into Sonic the Hedgehog. They when they turn to blue, they're like Sonic mode.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:42

Nice. Yeah, that's so great. Now, now I feel like you know, just like with Rowdy Boys, it's like you need to sell one of the silicone covers.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:48

So if it does fall off the table, then yeah, we're making we're gonna make a kid's version, that's for sure, because like I love my boys and I trust them, but I do not trust them to have this in their room right now. So we're gonna do like uh, you know, like a bicarminate or like a uh plastic version that could live in their and live in their room. But also we could see this, yeah, we can see this being beneficial in schools as well, like in classrooms. So like in if you've got a kid who's like really pin up and needs you know some extra assistance there, just having one in the classroom where he or she could go sit over there and do a sure.

Simple At Home Breathing Protocol

SPEAKER_00 1:21:20

I think there's a huge use case for that because that's one of the things that we've tried to teach our kiddo from you know very young age is like dealing with the frustration response of you know, whatever, like dropping the ball or his Lego pieces not going together, or whatever. It's like, okay, let's chill, let's take a time out, let's connect with our breath, let's connect with their body and kind of get back in that state. But you know, it's it's still hard for kids to like kind of, you know, because it's such a I mean, they kids have great imaginations, obviously, but like getting to something like a a meditation or breathing practice, the objects help just a lot, I guess is what I'm saying. Is like anytime I have um we do a snake breath with with our our or boy, and you know, we have an actual card that has a snake, and it's like, okay, trace the snake, you know, and you know, the but it's like having that physical object just makes a lot of difference um with them as far as that. So yeah, I mean uh that's super cool. I'm glad to hear that you y'all are working on some sort of uh uh unbreakable and more kid-friendly version. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So uh kind of landing this plane here. I mean, you've been super generous with your time. We're we're to over an hour here, but um, let's make this useful for the people listening, watching. Someone who have this device, which obviously most people in the world don't know, even if they've ordered it, what's the simplest version of residence breathing that they could try tonight? Is it that five six? Uh is there some other kind of more beginning protocol that we can um, you know, pace duration when to do it? Sure.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:54

Yeah, I I think I think doing a uh just kind of like a timed breathing um of doing something like four seconds in, six seconds out, five seconds in, five seconds out, just getting around six breaths per minute is totally good. I mean, it is helpful. Like we know from the literature that you may not be, let's say, optimally stimulating the nervous system, like resonance breathing, but you're getting a long way there. Um, and so I think that, you know, it it may be feel a little bit boring to do that because it's like, oh, I'm just kind of counting up and counting down. But the thing is, is that like you can work on that mental attunement skill of staying in the moment, staying present, staying aware, um, and and and just kind of use it more or less as a placeholder until you get your own. Um, ohm will make it way more sticky behaviorally. It's kind of like, you know, think about it this way is like this is kind of like breath work that's been gamified because you get that instantaneous feedback. Uh, that can work to some people's advantages, um, but also too, it can be a little bit stressful because people have performance anxiety. Um, but I think that this is it's like a training ground. It's a training ground for the mind and for the nervous system to constantly be saying, like, well, if I do have that performance anxiety, how do I relinquish that? How do I take the time just to just find my breathing, become more aware, and allow my nervous system to downregulate? That's what I would tell most people. So, yeah, I mean, without any technology right now, even if you just count it into you know, an inhale of four, exhale of six, I think that's a pretty good place to start.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:18

Yeah, that's awesome. So if someone remembers one thing, uh someone remembers one thing from our conversation today, what would you want it to be?

SPEAKER_03 1:24:31

That tra that you can indeed train adaptations of your nervous system. No nervous system is too far gone. So if you have, you know, PTSD, if you have clinical anxiety, if you have some other type of mental health disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, uh, if you've just been under chronic financial stress, relational stress, work stress, whatever it may be, no nervous system is too far gone. And so the single greatest lever that you can pull to make your nervous system um change in terms of adaptations is through consistently practicing breathing, particularly something like resonance breathing. So I think that if you're really looking to enhance your mental well-being, emotional regulation, mental performance, and even physical performance and recovery, uh, do some resonance breathing. Like it's not something that that I think people should avoid. Because you go to the gym to train your muscles, to train your cardiovascular fitness. Uh, now you need to go to the nervous system gym. And that is what I tell people. I tell people like my own, I consider it my nervous system gym. And I train in this gym every single day. And what am I doing? I'm getting stronger. My vagus nerve is getting stronger, and I have the evidence to support that by looking at my data over time. So that was uh you asked for one thing, that was just a really long-winded one thing.

Where To Learn More And Closing

SPEAKER_00 1:25:45

Well, I mean, that it's just good to know because I I feel, you know, like the old the old saying of like when's the best time to you know start any habit? That was yesterday, you know, but but you can start today, you know, and that and that's right. And even with longevity, health, our bodies are so adaptable and so resilient. So even if you're you know 80 years old, like yeah, you can still start today and still get benefit from it. And if you have the benefit of starting, you know, younger or earlier in life, then then you're just better off for it. But it's yeah, it's it's just never too late to start any um protocol. So, Dr. J, this was awesome. Thanks for your time. So informative. I'm super excited to go back in and edit. And I I feel like when I edit these episodes, I always get like the full download twice, and it's it's it's such a great thing. Um, what's the best way for someone to find out more about you? Find out more about Ohm Health, um, whatever some uh places that you can send people.

SPEAKER_03 1:26:44

Yeah, so like you mentioned earlier, get onto the pre-orders for Ohm. Um so Ohm.health, so ohm.health is our website. And so it's gonna be 350 bucks retail, but we're selling it right now for 299. I think we have like a little under 2300 units left at that price. Um so we've done kind of like multiple runs of pre-orders. Uh, this is kind of like our second run. So once those sell out, they sell out. Uh, and then things will go to the retail price. So I still have people like go in and get it early. Remember, too, that we don't ship until August. So we get a lot of emails about people hearing me on a podcast and they're like, hey, I ordered like a week ago and I haven't got any shipment updates. That's because you're part of the pre-orders. So just be patient. It's gonna be worth it's gonna be worth the way. So home.health. Also follow us on Instagram um or other like social media channels. Um, so my handle is at Dr. J Wiles, so at D-R-J-A-Y-W-I-L-E-S, so at Dr. J Wiles, or then at Ohm Health is our is our other other um page that you can find as well. So and and then also the last thing too is that when you join kind of our pre order list, uh you actually can become a part of our circle community. So we just launched this. Um circle community is basically kind of like a curated area um of discussion of science based articles, all that's kind of like curated. Created by us here at Ohm, created by Ohm. So if you're like, hey, I'm super interested in HRV and nervous system regulation and resonance breathing, this is gonna be like a repository for like all things like nerd out, ask your questions. Like, hey, I want to spend some FaceTime with you know with Jay and the Ohm team. That's gonna be at our circle community as well. So we'll have more information out there for all the people who pre-order here pretty soon. But we're launching the circle group.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:25

Yeah, I was just saying I haven't I haven't seen an email come through yet. So so it sounds like pre-order in. Then the email that you'll leave on your order, you'll get an email that says, hey, circles open. Let's go. Yeah. Okay. You got it. Cool. Thanks so much. So, everyone listening, if you've enjoyed this episode, um, you can check out tons more conversations like this at spanner.com, s p-a-n-n-r dot com. That's our longevity hub. And also subscribe to this podcast, the Longevity Loop Podcast. And with that said, thanks everyone for listening and joining. Uh, I hope you got a lot out of this today. And uh, we'll talk to you soon again. This is the Longevity Loop Podcast.