Latest / EEShow (Everything's Energy Show) / The Ultimate Guide to Heart Rate Variability (HRV) | Everything’s Energy Ep-3
Transcript
- 00:00:00:00 - 00:00:17:56 Michael All right. You are tuned into everything's energy show. Where we talk about everything is actually energy from our head to our toes down south, all the way north. And I have two lovely co-hosts with me or hosts Marino and Roland. And today our discussion is going to be about something that everyone should really know about. 00:00:17:56 - 00:00:31:25 Michael And really, no one knows enough about H RV heart rate. Rick, heart rate variability. And Roland, you're an expert in RV. Can you tell us why that's important to monitor and what exactly is RV? 00:00:31:30 - 00:00:50:58 Roland So if anyone was a group or an offering, they'll know that RV is this number that's typically correlated with recovery status or your readiness for the day. Heart rate variability is essentially looking at how your nervous system is operating, your physiology by the pattern or the rhythm of your heart rate. So each time there's a breath in, there's a breath out. 00:00:51:12 - 00:01:01:12 Roland There's a yin and yang aspect to your nervous system, which is represented as the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system. Can I give people a little background in understanding how the nervous system works and what it looks like? 00:01:01:13 - 00:01:08:36 Michael I like your yin yang. Drop there is that balance. Active and passive, but maybe, maybe go a little deeper into, sympathetic comparison. 00:01:08:36 - 00:01:34:13 Roland Okay, so there's your central nervous system, which is your brain and spinal cord. That's the command center. It's the CPU of the body. The brain is always looking for all the different inputs in your external reality to appropriately coordinate the internal responses. So if you need to upregulate your stress response, it does so. And it can down regulate your stress response so that your central nervous system is your peripheral nervous system, which is all the nerves that go out to your muscles, your arms, your legs, so it moves you. 00:01:34:26 - 00:01:50:46 Roland But there's a division called your autonomic nervous system, which is where the sympathetic and the parasympathetic come in. The sympathetic is the fight or flight system. So it is that because it is sympathetic to the needs of your body, when you go from a lying position to standing up, if your blood pressure doesn't go up, you might get dizzy and pass out. 00:01:50:47 - 00:02:10:45 Roland So that's where a sympathetic nervous system response is really good. The parasympathetic job is to bring you back down to a state of regulation or homeostasis. We like to call in the chemical world, so your body doesn't need to always be stressed in order to get through the day. Most people have this wrong because they think sympathetic is associated with bad. 00:02:10:49 - 00:02:26:44 Roland Parasympathetic is associated with good. If you had pure parasympathetic, you and the couch would just be one. There would be no reason to do anything because you were just exist in this Zen like state all the time, which is cool. In a monastery, you're not necessarily good if you want to live as a normal human in 3D reality. 00:02:26:49 - 00:02:41:12 Roland So the idea of how the parasympathetic and the sympathetic nervous system resonate to have an optimal health is you want the appropriate coordination for how it's able to regulate your body physiologically. 00:02:41:16 - 00:02:50:38 Michael It's fascinating. And so there's a lot of different ways people can, measure these. You know, I guess the most are common. Are wearables, right. Like, can you dive into how someone might monitor this? 00:02:50:52 - 00:02:55:17 Roland So this might trigger some people, but that's okay because it's objective, say trigger alert. 00:02:55:17 - 00:02:55:44 Michael And trigger. 00:02:55:44 - 00:03:17:24 Roland Alert. Wearable RV isn't real heavy. So what these devices are doing is they're measuring your pulse. They're running the pulse rhythm based upon your heart rate and beats per minute through an algorithm. Because each beat technically where the variability comes from and heart rate variability is, your heart should not be like a metronome. You know what a metronome is on a piano to keep time. 00:03:17:29 - 00:03:31:21 Roland If your heart's like a metronome, that's a very bad presentation. Physiologically, those are the people who are close to cardiac events because there's no variability left in their heart rhythm. The body's locked in place because the body's so stressed it doesn't have adaptability. Your bandwidth. 00:03:31:21 - 00:03:32:01 Michael Makes sense. 00:03:32:06 - 00:03:57:03 Roland So what the devices are looking at is they're looking at your pulse rhythm and a wooper and Oring will put it through a proprietary algorithm, and they'll give you a number 46, 57, 62. It's a nothing. It's a it's a fairy dust kind of in terms of its scientific representation. But it will correlate with true HIV, which can only come from using a chest strap, because HIV isn't what's called a time domain. 00:03:57:03 - 00:04:17:19 Roland It's not measuring the number of beats. It's a frequency domain because the parasympathetic system resonates with high frequency heart rate. So the admittance off of the what's called the sinus. No, this is very technical, maybe boring, but the sinus node in the heart emits a high frequency waveform of energy every time it beats. The sympathetic is associated with low frequency. 00:04:17:23 - 00:04:40:37 Roland So when someone's got high vibes, they got more parasympathetic recruitment and activity. Maybe. But what you're measuring is the relationship between the two of them. To get a sense of how well your nervous system is operating your physiology, and if it's a helpful presentation of representation, or if it's a disease or a pathological presentation. And we can talk about how that correlates with all different kinds of health conditions. 00:04:40:42 - 00:04:58:04 Michael Well, maybe diving to that after I want to actually bring up the because Merino is wearing a loop. If anyone from Whoop wants to send us free ones go for it. You actually have a story about both the E system and the loop which I thought was fascinating. And I'd love for you to tell that story. 00:04:58:10 - 00:04:58:28 Michael Yeah. 00:04:58:28 - 00:05:21:48 Marino So often when I meet people they kind of want devices that measure the system and its effects and it's, you know, kind of challenging. But one of the things that I always like to refer to is like my experience that I had when I came into a system, which was my first overnight, I, I, I was flying to the East Coast, like, lost a bunch of hours and I was like, sleep deprived. 00:05:21:48 - 00:05:44:20 Marino And I pulled up at like 3%, so set by woop and, in a single night with less than seven hours, it was like, like six hours and 49 minutes or something like that, if I recall correctly. I had jumped from 3% recovery to a 96, which has never happened. Usually when you're sleep deprived, it takes you a couple of days of that of recovery, not sleep. 00:05:44:20 - 00:06:01:27 Marino That to get back up into the green. Always has always been that way. I've never jumped from the red to the green in a single night. So, so that that's like, you know, one metric that I was able to use is by proxy, right? But in a sense, it kind of gives us some light into the effects of the system. 00:06:01:31 - 00:06:22:21 Marino But, Roland, I wanted to ask you, even though it's not an accurate measurement, is there value in the correlation between increases and decreases? So, like, maybe I don't know what exactly the measurements are, but I can see that there was a 30% or 40% increase. In my RV as, like a valuable thing to, to utilize. 00:06:22:30 - 00:06:43:30 Roland Absolutely. Just because I say it's not true, RV, it doesn't mean it's a meaningless metric. Yeah, it is correlative as long as the algorithm is good, which I know that they are good because they've probably put millions of dollars into researching not only the algorithm, but the ability to sensitively gather the data from the device. And I've done some stuff where I've correlated real RV with wearable or wrist clips. 00:06:43:30 - 00:06:54:45 Roland It's called pulse, analysis. So having that representation is going to be absolutely validating the fact that your HIV did jump from your experience of the system. 00:06:54:50 - 00:06:55:48 Marino Yeah. Okay. 00:06:56:02 - 00:07:05:40 Roland It's just we can't represent that. Say, if we wanted to do a study or represent specific data as it correlates with someone's physical changes being in the system, which we have done. 00:07:05:45 - 00:07:15:46 Michael That makes sense. And what system did you go to when you were doing your little, metric there? Emily Graves oh, okay. Well, yeah. Fair enough. The 24 year system. 00:07:15:46 - 00:07:16:55 Marino Yeah, it was a 24 units. 00:07:17:06 - 00:07:35:57 Michael We'll just say it was a 24 year system. All right, so now, Roland, actually, you did an RV study inside a 48 unit here in Las Vegas. And so you were talking about some of the health metrics that RV could be beneficial in monitoring. Maybe you want to start with what the metrics should be and where they actually went to start, and then discuss some of that. 00:07:36:01 - 00:08:00:11 Roland Yeah. So I often get asked this question and people want to discuss what the optimal RV is. There's no such thing as optimal. It's individuated. It's like saying who has a better thumbprint. You can't really compare them. You can just talk about the subtle differences because RV is truly unique, because your state of regulation, how your physiology operates is entirely a one, one of one that makes sense. 00:08:00:16 - 00:08:28:39 Roland So you can't have an ideal that you're trying to get to. You can just have an optimal state of regulation. The general sense of a healthy person will have a high amount of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity available to them. Elite people, we're talking Olympians. Navy Seals, deep sea divers. These are people who have an incredibly powerful parasympathetic system and can down regulate their sympathetic system instantaneously. 00:08:28:44 - 00:08:50:54 Roland I've actually, I have a good friend who works in the NHL, and he always archetypally analyzes a lot of the athletes he looks at. And he said there are the sympathetically wired guys. These are the twitchy people, the ones who, like they don't need caffeine to get all upregulated. They have a really good ability to up regulate the release of adrenaline and cortisol, and providing that they're healthy. 00:08:50:54 - 00:09:12:38 Roland That's an okay pattern. I wanted to actually add to Marino's, story. The fact that you jump from a 3% to a 90 plus shows that your physiology, although was severely stressed, your recovery capacity meant that that wasn't something that was detrimental to you in the long run, you're able to recover quite quickly. The people that we saw were not that. 00:09:12:43 - 00:09:35:28 Roland So there is a correlation. If you have a down regulated parasympathetic system, what that means for your physiology is you have the inability to heal to some degree. You have a recovery capacity diminishment. So what these people have is a presentation is they have a very low amount of vagal tone, low, low amount of high frequency. 00:09:35:33 - 00:09:55:37 Roland And they have a either very high or a weakened sympathetic system, which is a different presentation. Most of the people we saw who had these kinds of presentations also had correlations of, I don't want to divulge too much information, but they're physiologic presentations where as a clinician, I would go, this is someone who is not on the path to health. 00:09:55:42 - 00:10:11:10 Roland This is someone who's struggling to recover, and their body is in a bit of a spiral of becoming ill. So that's what we saw as a baseline with a lot of people that we measure. And fundamentally, because I'm a clinician, I see that more often than not then I see the freak athletes. 00:10:11:15 - 00:10:19:37 Marino Yeah. So what are some things that people can do then to regulate their nervous system and kind of increase the capacity to, to heal. 00:10:19:42 - 00:10:22:19 Michael Outside the system by day to day? Yeah. 00:10:22:24 - 00:10:46:30 Roland Amazing question. Because the most obvious thing that I've started to elucidate with people is figuring out how they breathe. And this is an interesting thing as we're doing this conversation right now, if you find yourself involuntarily holding your breath, believe it or not, that's a sympathetic stress response. Most people, and I've noticed this about myself because I've become very self-aware of how I'm regulating my breathing pattern. 00:10:46:35 - 00:11:11:21 Roland I hold my breath when I'm about to do something that involves a lot of focus, but if people are doing that all the time, they're basically wiring their neurology to upregulate sympathetic tone all the time. And if they're chronically being engaged, they're doubling down on that to the point where that's becoming their way of engaging with reality. So the first thing is learn to breathe every breath into sympathetic, every breath. 00:11:11:21 - 00:11:13:51 Roland Now, this parasympathetic, your mom talks about this all the time. 00:11:13:51 - 00:11:14:33 Michael Everything's breath. 00:11:14:45 - 00:11:38:13 Roland Everything is breath. She said. God's just a breath away. So focusing on, regulating your breathing rhythms and really focusing on long outbreath, there's a process where I take people through where they do a 3 or 4 second inhalation, a 3 or 4 second hold, and an eight second exhalation. Because when you drag out the exhalation, that's the parasympathetic regulation in the breath. 00:11:38:15 - 00:12:09:28 Roland That's the first thing. The second thing is regulating your circadian rhythm. So the human body operates on this rhythmic 24 hour cycle that is determined by light and light signatures. The reason that we're energetic in the morning is morning sun hits our skin and hits our eyes. The light energy, the photons get into the brain, and they stimulate the brain to essentially wake the physiology up and coordinate all of the physiologic processes that are determined by the morning time race, cortisol, get adrenaline going, raise blood sugar. 00:12:09:28 - 00:12:44:13 Roland So the hormone release all of those things are melatonin. Exactly. Because you want to be wakeful in the morning. But the counter regulatory side of the equation is true in the evening when you want to block excessive amounts of artificial light, because evening light exposure is correlated with lower HIV. I had a pro hockey player I was, trying to counsel with, and I got him a pair of these blue blocking glasses because he was watching the office in his computer at 2 a.m. in his bed, and he's wondering why his HIV was so crap the first night he put it on, he had something similar, not quite as massive as a bump as you 00:12:44:13 - 00:13:09:54 Roland did, but he had a massive jump in his recovery status because his his eyes were getting blue light at 2 a.m. when he should be sleeping and actually recovering. So the second thing is regulating the circadian rhythm really quickly. I'll go through a couple others. Three is touching the Earth. We're negatively charged beings. A healthy cell has a millivolt charge that's negatively charged, because that's how the cell wants to regulate its electric chemical signaling. 00:13:09:59 - 00:13:34:55 Roland The less we're in touch with the ground, the more the body can accumulate positive charge, the more we're in touch with dirty electricity. Wi-Fi. This is one reason the E system is so powerful is it's helping to regulate the body's natural electromagnetic rhythms. So if we don't touch the Earth, know on the ground, getting direct sunlight, drinking high quality water that's free of contaminants and impurities, then we can't regulate that negative charge in our system. 00:13:34:55 - 00:13:59:39 Roland That's another thing, because the body wants to not be positively charged positive charge and inflammation to me are kind of correlations to getting some negative charge into the bodies. A third thing, and then moving the body, eating well and prioritizing sleep. Those are the six things immediately. If someone starts to focus on those over the course of a week, a few weeks, a couple of months, they should likely see positive trends in their RV. 00:13:59:40 - 00:14:08:22 Roland If they are wearing something like a group or an aura ring. Because one data point doesn't make a trend, you want to see things going up over the course of time. 00:14:08:27 - 00:14:29:33 Marino Yeah, woop allows you to kind of journal your activities, and it tries to find correlations between your behavior and your RV. And for me, something that really affected my RV was journaling. But part of that was the fact that I wasn't on a screen at night. So an hour before going to bed, I'm sitting there journaling. I'm just using a pen and paper. 00:14:29:33 - 00:14:43:43 Marino And so it goes back to not staring at my phone or looking at a screen an hour before I go to bed. So between that and also just spending some time kind of, thinking through my day and adjusting things for the next day, I think, all correlated to towards that. 00:14:43:48 - 00:14:58:21 Michael Yeah. I've seen a lot of research on blue light affecting I think it's melatonin and, basically stopping you from being able to fall asleep. You're literally it's like, I'm awake. And then you're like, I want to fall asleep, but yet you're staring at your phone or your laptop or your TV and you're wondering, why am I not sleeping? 00:14:58:21 - 00:15:11:40 Michael Well, it's literally the blue light. Yeah. So. So we're on you. Did you have any? Actually, we did the study. Here with the 48 unit. Did you have a percentile stay of the increase of Opt or I should say optimization of the RV? 00:15:11:45 - 00:15:38:24 Roland So because I couldn't give it a baseline number, I couldn't calculate a percentage increase. So what I did was, a regulation state analysis. So looking at someone's overall fitness score. So the device I have gives you a baseline score of your overall vitality based upon how your nervous system is regulating itself. So it gives you, the amount of energy the body has and the amount of adaptability the body has as an assessment of how it determines that. 00:15:38:29 - 00:15:44:16 Roland So what I saw, by and large, of the 25 people, if I remember. 00:15:44:16 - 00:15:45:36 Michael Correctly, and to drop out, we had. 00:15:45:36 - 00:16:15:45 Roland To drop out. Yes. So we had the 25 people, 21 of them definitively had an increase in their overall fitness score. To me, that's a correlation between health status. Yeah. And the regulation state change on average that I saw because most people were in the negative parasympathetic zone. I either saw an increase in parasympathetic activity coupled with a downregulation of sympathetic, or I saw a stabilization of parasympathetic with a downregulation of sympathetic. 00:16:15:50 - 00:16:20:48 Roland Both are fancy ways of saying the person got more chill or the person got less stress. 00:16:20:52 - 00:16:22:39 Michael And now could all use more chill. 00:16:22:39 - 00:16:46:25 Roland We could all use some more chill. Paradoxically, there were a couple people who actually went the wrong way a couple people, a couple people, three specifically. Yeah, and I shouldn't say the wrong way. Their system chose to regulate itself differently, and I've actually spent a lot of time thinking about this because in my world, the physiology is smarter than any practitioner and the body doesn't do anything by accident. 00:16:46:30 - 00:17:04:01 Roland My thought process is because I spent a lot of time in an EEG system myself, and I know other people who have, and I spoken to them. You mentioned journaling, and you mentioned how you were not only in an optimal environment, but what are you doing when you're journaling? You're kind of unzipping the inner world of what's going on with you. 00:17:04:01 - 00:17:13:12 Roland So another thing that we could talk about is sometimes people have to deal with their nonphysical stuff, their psycho emotional aspects to their reality. 00:17:13:12 - 00:17:14:55 Michael The inner workings. 00:17:15:00 - 00:17:19:46 Roland With this study, we put a bunch of perfect strangers in a room together. 00:17:19:51 - 00:17:21:44 Michael And not optimal sleeping conditions, either. 00:17:21:52 - 00:17:33:18 Roland In reclining chairs and blow up mattresses. And we did not have the ability to control what they did the entire day prior to coming to the system. So we had a lot of confounding variables that we couldn't account for. 00:17:33:28 - 00:17:39:54 Michael Actually, I remember seeing like we were leaving and almost everyone was on their phone or talking to the person next to them was one of the other. 00:17:39:59 - 00:17:52:08 Roland And, you know, I was doing initial and follow up measurements. If I really wanted to be scientifically optimal, I would have restricted the variables. But we were asking a lot of people in the first place. They were donating their time, they got something from it, but it was, you know. 00:17:52:08 - 00:18:02:24 Michael No telling people to take their they can't use their phone is like telling a crackhead that they it's it's such an addictive thing. There's literally studies on that is like literally one of the most addictive things in the world. 00:18:02:24 - 00:18:06:16 Roland But the phone is not a separate thing from us. It's now an extension of us. That's how I look at it. 00:18:06:21 - 00:18:08:03 Michael We're at that point. Yes. 00:18:08:07 - 00:18:28:57 Roland But I was asking myself, why would someone go the wrong way? Because the assumption should be going in. A system should make everything better all the time. Being a clinician for many years, you start to realize the more you learn things, the more you don't know a lot. Because you're being humbled by the fact that your assumptions were actually leading you down the wrong path. 00:18:29:02 - 00:18:38:28 Roland One aspect to the process of healing is sometimes things have to get worse before they get better, because ever done a parasite cleanse before. 00:18:38:33 - 00:18:46:39 Michael I mean yeah. And it involved drinking like a lot of green juice. And it was definitely not comfortable. You felt better afterwards. Yeah. 00:18:46:39 - 00:18:49:57 Roland But the first couple days did you not feel terrible? 00:18:50:02 - 00:18:51:14 Michael I felt really low energy. 00:18:51:14 - 00:19:09:46 Roland Exactly. So that's not an accident. Because in some scenarios, when you're trying to treat the body, there can be something called the die off reaction. When you're trying to kill a parasite. If you're killing things, there's not only the awareness of these creatures knowing that their life is imminently over inside of your system, but your immune system's becoming aware of it. 00:19:09:46 - 00:19:44:26 Roland There is die off metabolites and various inflammatory insults, and the person experiences that. As I'm low energy, my moods dysregulated, I want to lie on the couch and watch Netflix because your body wants to push you into a parasympathetic state, but it can't because it doesn't have enough energy yet. So what I am actually thinking is happening for some people is being in the system is actually activating the response in the body to initiate the healing cycle, which is preceded by a negative physiologic response, sometimes based upon who the person is and what they're suffering with. 00:19:44:31 - 00:20:03:54 Roland One person broke out into a full blown herpes simplex a cold sore. Yeah. So why would that happen if the body has enough energy to heal, it's going to present the symptoms before it actually pulls the thing out of your physiology. That's silently stuck there. And as an HIV analysis, you see that as a person getting more physically stressed. 00:20:03:59 - 00:20:12:10 Roland But it's actually a good thing because theoretically it's initiating the cycle of healing. But sometimes, as I said, things get worse before they get better. 00:20:12:10 - 00:20:14:20 Marino It's like the setback for the for the comeback. 00:20:14:22 - 00:20:20:22 Roland Exactly. Healing is not a linear straight line. It's this whole cluster mess. So God knows what. 00:20:20:22 - 00:20:42:52 Michael Well, we'll see your point on, you know, every person is very unique. So it's funny that you bring up that you can't, like, give it a score because everyone's so unique. Every body is unique. Every body person has been through a unique experience here on earth. You have no idea what environment they grew up in they live in now, so it's always interesting and fascinating to hear about this topic. 00:20:42:57 - 00:20:48:20 Michael Is there anything you guys want to wrap up with? So I want to keep this episode a little shorter. 00:20:48:25 - 00:20:52:59 Roland I'll leave it to you guys to figure anything out first, and I can just kind of end on some final stuff for the Chevy. 00:20:53:04 - 00:20:58:10 Michael Yeah, I think we covered a lot and we gave people a lot of takeaway knowledge. I think that's a. 00:20:58:15 - 00:21:18:40 Roland I would say one thing is, if you want to have one variable in your life that you can use as a way to see if your system's being optimally regulated or if you're pushing it a little bit too far or in your need of you're in need of recovery. Rather, HIV is the one clinical tool that is assessing everything, but making no claims about anything. 00:21:18:45 - 00:21:28:54 Roland That's why I love it as a clinical tool. It's objective, but it doesn't have to allude to anything specifically for the person. But it's a good way of just keeping tabs on yourself and your body. 00:21:28:58 - 00:21:31:31 Michael That's a great wrap up. That's fascinating. Thank you guys. Yeah.