The Essential Hormone Balancing Tool Almost Everybody’s Missing - What Is HRV & Why Is It Necessary?

Do you feel like you have lost your balance in life? Is your hormone fluctuation disrupting your overall health and well-being?

 

This week on The Hormone Prescription Podcast, we are delighted to have Dr. Jay T. Wiles, an international speaker, scientist, clinician, and influencer on the subject of heart rate variability (HRV) biofeedback and how it can help restore balance in your life.

 

Dr. Wiles will discuss why HRV is so important for midlife women and how it can be used as a powerful tool to create hormonal balance through breath-work exercises and other techniques. He'll also explain the effects of stress hormones on health performance and optimization, providing practical tips on how to manage stress naturally through diet, exercise, lifestyle changes, and more.

 

In this episode, you'll learn:

- What is heart rate variability and why it is important for midlife women

- How to measure your HRV and optimize its impact on health performance

- Practical tips to manage stress naturally through lifestyle changes, such as diet and exercise

- The connection between the human stress response and health performance/optimization

 

Don't miss this opportunity to join Dr. Jay T. Wiles in unlocking the essential hormone-balancing tool that almost everybody's missing! Tune in now for an insightful conversation about HRV biofeedback on The Hormone Prescription Podcast.

 

(00:00): "We suffer more often in imagination than in reality." - Epitectus And this affects your health and your hormones. Stay tuned to find out how.

 

(00:11): So the big question is, how do women over 40 like us keep weight off, have great energy, balance our hormones and our moods, feel sexy and confident, and master midlife? If you're like most of us, you are not getting the answers you need and remain confused and pretty hopeless to ever feel like yourself Again. As an ob gyn, I had to discover for myself the truth about what creates a rock solid metabolism, lasting weight loss, and supercharged energy after 40, in order to lose a hundred pounds and fix my fatigue, now I'm on a mission. This podcast is designed to share the natural tools you need for impactful results and to give you clarity on the answers to your midlife metabolism challenges. Join me for tangible, natural strategies to crush the hormone imbalances you are facing and help you get unstuck from the sidelines of life. My name is Dr. Kyrin Dunston. Welcome to the Hormone Prescription Podcast.

 

(01:05): Hi everybody. Thanks so much for joining me for another episode of the Hormone Prescription Podcast with Dr. Kyrin. Today my guest is gonna help you get a concrete idea about what stress is doing to your body and how to know exactly what it's doing in an objective and quantified manner. He uses one of my favorite tools. Maybe you've heard me talk about H R V heart rate variability in a very unique way. So you're gonna wanna stay tuned and listen up. He really is a proponent of health and helping people optimize their health and has created some great tools that you can use. So I'll tell you a little bit about Dr. Jay Wiles and then we'll get started. He's an international speaker scientist, clinician, influencers, subject matter expert and authority on the interconnection between the human stress response and health performance optimization. Dr. Wiles is a clinical health and performance psychologist with board certification and heart rate variability biofeedback and peripheral biofeedback, and works as a leading consultant in psychophysiology to health influencers, professional athletes and teams, executives and high performers.

 

(02:20): He is the co-founder and chief scientific officer of Hanu Health and stay tuned to find out what HANU means. He has pioneered new and innovative means of using heart rate variability, H R V and respiratory training as both diagnostic indicators of the dynamic nature of the human stress response alongside therapeutic tools for regulating and conditioning this response for PCU performance. Dr. Wiles has an extensive history of working with top performing athletes in the PGA L P G A M mls, MLB, A T P and W T A. That's a lot. His consulting firm, thrive Wellness and Performance, has held contracts with leading biotechnology and health technology organizations where he has engaged in research development of therapeutics and development of behavioral retention programs. Dr. Wiles has operated as the co-host of the Ben Greenfield podcast since 2019 and host the Hanu Health Podcast. Welcome, Dr. Jay Wiles.

 

(03:22): Hey, thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

 

(03:24): So I'm really excited to talk about this topic in the unique way that really you pose it because I think heart rate variability is very complex and people's eyes glaze over the minute you start trying to explain it, but really you come up from it from the perspective of stress resiliency, which everybody's interested in. So let's start out by talking about stress and you know, what it is in a, from a more scientific biologic perspective and why people should be important about its effects on their body. And then we can get into this unique way that you have for people to really monitor their stress so they can manage it better.

(04:11): Yeah I think first and foremost, I always like to dispel the myth that stress is the bad guy. I think so often we, you know, read in the tabloids or we hear on the news or we listen to podcasts that stress is bad. Like it, it's just inherently this bad thing. And I would actually argue the exact opposite. I would argue that stress is inherently good. Now it's the compounding nature of stress that can be problematic to people's overall health and their wellbeing. But stress in and of itself is simply a warning sign. What stress is is a mechanism of taxation. It is just saying that your resources are being taxed. That can be physiological resources, that can be psychological resources. It's re experiencing some level of taxation and there are warning signs that we receive from that taxation that hopefully should signify and kind of ho help us to hone in that we need to either do something effectively to help ourselves out of this situation or maybe just acknowledge that what's going on isn't going to inherently harm us and therefore be okay with it.

 

(05:17): So more of like a mindful approach to stress, but kind of from the get-go. Stress in and of itself is not bad. It is inherently good. So we should always come in with the mindset that it is not this kind of, you know, nefarious thing around the corner. So when we think about how stress affects us from different perspectives, it affects us physiologically, it affects us psychologically. If it ever affects us psychologically, it always affects us physiologically. And then vice versa as well. It's a bidirectional two-way street. They're very much interconnected. And again, what I always come down to is that it is not just the singular experience of stress, but it's the compounding of stress experience that is the thing that can be problematic for people. Has it stacks up without dealing with it or acknowledging it or learning how to regulate it. That's where we find more problems.

 

(06:08): Yeah, we need stress to live actually , right? Yep. We need the stress of gravity on our bodies to make our bones strong. We need a certain degree of stress. They call it eres, right? You have a very unique perspective. I think a lot of people think about stress and they don't. It's just this nebulous concept, oh, stress, I'm stressed, I have too much stress, I need to de-stress. And you know, people tell them to meditate and there's really not a lot of objective data on am I meditating properly? So then people don't do it because they don't get immediate feedback. And you really kind of took a tool that is near and dear to my heart and positioned it in a way and educate people in a way that helps them monitor their stress. So talk about the technology that you use and how it can help people quantify and monitor and manage their stress better.

 

(07:06): So you're right in the fact that a lot of people are able to tap in to understanding their stress subjectively if they actually take the time to check in subjectively. But unfortunately, not a lot of people do that. And so what we see in the psychological literature is that a lot of people just simply kind of move along throughout their day, kind of compressing and compartmentalizing stress until finally they either do one of two things, they explode or externalize or they implode and internalize. And this happens to just about everybody. So one of the things that we are trying to do that has been kind of in the works for many, many decades now, is how can we help people to increase their awareness to the effects of stress and also those things that are triggering stress objectively? Well, there are are invasive ways of doing it, right?

 

(07:55): We can look at cortisol, we can look at neurotransmitter production, we can do those things, but it's debatable on number one, like can we give an accurate interpretation of that data for stress in terms of psychological stress? We can in some sense, but in other sense it's a little bit difficult to determine what came first, the chicken or the egg. But also too there are non-invasive ways of doing it. And the single greatest way of doing that, single greatest non-invasive way of tracking changes that are occurring in the human stress response or changes in the nervous system would be looking at something called heart rate variability. So heart rate variability isn't a new biometric, it's one that's been around for quite some time. But what we're learning is more and more how to not just use it as a mechanism for measurement, but also how do we use it to improve outcomes both acutely and then in the long run.

 

(08:47): So heart rate variability kind of at its most simple form is looking at what are the dynamic changes that are occurring in the nervous system at any given moment. In other words, it is a metric that we can use to determine changes in people's stress response as people experience stress, we see changes in in heart rate variability as people experience relaxation. We see people's changes in heart rate variability. When I explain heart rate variability, it's kind of like you mentioned earlier, it is something that sometimes people, it will just kind of, people will gloss over, like it kind of goes over their head. Like it's, it's a very in-depth type of metric, right? So I like to break it down in its most simple kind of form. A lot of people intuitively understand heart rate, right? So if you, like almost every watch now where people are just used to heart rate monitoring, if you see that my heart rate was beating at a rate of 60 beats per minute, well that means that in a span of 67 seconds, on average, it was beating every single second.

 

(09:47): So there was one min, one second in between every successive heartbeat. Well, for heart rate, that would be true. That would be an average of one second in between heartbeats, which would make 60 beats per minute. Now is that what's actually occurring? And the answer is no. That would not be what is actually occurring. The heart is pacing itself every single one Second, if it were, then if we go back to this metric that is heart rate variability, that person would have zero variants. So zero variability between the difference in time between successive heartbeats. That means that the heart is pacing itself like a metronome, which is not a good thing. It's actually what we see happen actually prior and during when people are having heart attacks is their heart rate variability reduces to basically zero because the heart is pacing itself. That's a sign of a lack of adaptability.

 

(10:38): The nervous system is, is unable to adapt. But what heart rate variability is, is it's looking at the changes in time that are occurring between your heartbeats, between the space of tumble. We call time in between heartbeats. One of the best ways to explain this is that a healthy nervous system, one that is able to adapt to stress is one that is going to be highly variable. And that may sound weird because a lot of people may think, shouldn't my heart be stable? Well, heart rate stability is very different than heart rate variability stability, which is a bit of a mouthful, but let me explain. When a natural healthy individual who is, who is, let's say more or less free of stress or quite relaxed, we see this natural event occurring in their breathing patterns and how it relates to heart rate. So we know that there's a natural phenomenon, a, an arrhythmia that occurs when people are breathing as they inhale, heart rate speeds up and as they exhale heart rate significantly slows down.

 

(11:38): We call that respiratory sinus arrhythmia or rsa. And what we know is that when someone has a huge increase in heart rate when they inhale and a huge decrease in heart rate as they exhale, that increases heart rate variability and creates more of what we call a resonance within the cardiovascular system. A process of what we call increasing the sensitivity of something called the barrow reflex mechanism, which is our body's maintenance of a blood pressure. It's a system when those two are acting in resonance with one another or in accordance with one another, the person that's going to feel that sense of relief, that sense of relaxation. But as someone experiences more stress, we see those two things go out of phase with one another. The blood pressure regulating mechanism in somebody's breathing rate and the way that they're breathing as well, which can cause heart rate to go up and heart cause heart rate variability to go down.

 

(12:32): So heart rate variability again is something that we can look at as a number and help us to determine like what is going on within the state of that person's nervous system. Because as that number goes up, we know that their parasympathetic or relaxation break is engaging. And as that number goes down, we know that something is causing a withdrawal within the nervous system and there's natural occurrences, the up and down that happen throughout the day. And then there are things that can trigger it and can cause more of a significant result in our decrease in heart rate variability indicating that someone is experiencing stress. So that's a long-winded way of kind of explaining what heart rate variability is, but that's the primary metric we're using in the technology that my company hanu, H A N U, what we created, which is a way to measure that at all times, which is very different than what most wearables are doing now, which are really just kind of looking at it either overnight or it's a spot check like let's say in the morning or some other time during the day. We're looking at what are those subtle changes in heart rate variability throughout the day that would indicate that person may be experiencing something that is triggering a stress response and their nervous system is having to kick in the high gear to respond. And the whole goal is to be able to catch it early so that we can intervene with different types of therapeutics to teach people how to better self-regulate that response.

 

(13:49): Yeah, I think H R V is such tremendous technology. I know that they've done some studies on covid infection looking at the H R V or heart rate variability profiles of those people who have a higher fatality rate, more severe disease compared to those who don't. And it's, it's really striking. So I love H R V not only for looking at stress resiliency, but looking at overall state of health. I used to have this rather expensive machine in when I had a brick and mortar office where we would get H R V profile every which way but loose That would really give us data on the overall health of a human. So I, I think it's valuable. So if, if people listening, you're concerned about covid or getting any type of illness and you really wanna know how fit is my system to handle it, H R V is is also useful for that. And the better your H R V V, the better you're fair if you do get a viral infection or any other illness. So I think it's super important. How do you counsel people that they can use H R V for more than just checking their stress resiliency

 

(15:03): Mm-Hmm. ? Yeah, so the one big one would be with athletes who are looking to increase performance in recovery. So what we know, again, if we're looking at heart rate variability, it's a proxy for changes that are occurring in the nervous system. And so one thing that we know is that if someone is either overreaching or over-training as an athlete or if someone within the performance space we know that we can actually use it as a mechanism to determine how well are they recovering? Is their nervous system adapting to their training or are they overdoing it? There's too much taxation on the nervous system and therefore that's represented in a decrease in heart rate variability. And when we see that, especially when we see a trend of a downward or of downward heart rate variability, we can then intervene and say, okay, we need to either kind of pump the brakes here.

 

(15:48): We need to pull back maybe today's a little bit of a lighter day or maybe we should kind of recenter or refocus your training because you're overtaxing the nervous system. And for an athlete that can obviously lead to things like injury, it's gonna decrease overall performance because these individuals are gonna be kind of operating on a kind of a lower playing field if you will, because their nervous system isn't able to handle the amount of load. And so that's one way that we use it a fair amount is kind of looking at recovery for athletes. The other thing is just really kind of understanding what are those internal or external things that are causing changes in the nervous system overall. These can be things like looking at like what are the effects of eating and nutrition and what you're putting in your body and how does that impact the nervous system?

 

(16:35): We've seen really interesting manifestations within the context of those we worked with at Hanu when people were eating highly o like overly processed highly sugar-laden foods or they're eating highly inflammatory oils, fried foods and the effects of that has on the nervous system. So we can see kind of after they eat these foods, how long do we see a suppression and heart rate variability that is indicative of somebody who has basically inflamed themselves with the type of food that they're eating. So we've actually worked in conjunction with many functional medicine practitioners who are kind of utilizing more or less like a elimination diet and reintegration mm-hmm diet and kind of determining kind of the effects of certain foods even on these individuals nervous systems. So it can be a really great proxy. And then we also use it too to determine the effects of other things that people may be integrating into their health and wellness routine.

 

(17:26): So one big one right now is sauna use and there are some individuals who will respond really well from a nervous system recovery perspective to sauna. And there are some people who quite frankly are just overdoing it. And we'll see a kind of just this really tax nervous system that is elongated because they're either spending way too much time in the sauna, they're doing it too frequently. And the same thing with like cold plunging. So you can really use it to kind of test the efficacy of different things, but also look to see how much of an impact is that having on your nervous system. We've done it with supplementation, we've done it with a lot of other things and especially in conjunction with other biometrics, other blood work biometrics. This is one that's readily available to a lot of people and is non-invasive, especially when we think about not having to do blood work.

 

(18:13): And just kind of looking at kind of these things in conjunction. One more that we we've done, which is really interesting and we're looking at publishing studies in this domain is looking at the fluctuation of blood glucose and how that affects heart rate variability and nervous system taxation. And as you might expect though, there's not a lot of published literature. There is some but not a lot. As people have more glycemic variability, they have more suppression of autonomic nervous system functioning or a heightened stress response. So the glycemic rollercoaster leads to suppressed H R V and increases someone's stress, experience and stress in and of itself can cause the glycemic variability rollercoaster. And then in is manifested in a reduction in heart rate variability,

 

(18:54): Right? So translation, everybody glycemic just means your blood sugar. So he's just talking about the blood sugar rollercoaster that I always talk about that you're on when you're eating the SAD diet, the standard American diet with you know, bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, soda, all those things, your blood sugar's going up and down. And I'd love to tell people, everybody thinks when you first tell 'em about heart rate variability, that it's a measure of your heart function. And what I tell them is no, it's measuring your nervous system function. Mm-Hmm . So that's how you have to think about it. So what does stress effect your nervous system? It's me. H R V measures your nervous system function. And so it's really, I love it cuz it's a way to get at the really core part of what determines your overall health, your sympathetic nervous system, parasympathetic.

 

(19:46): I think it's so important. I wanna just offer this quote that you shared with me before we started because I think it really gets to something that we're talking about related to stress. We suffer more in imagination than in reality. It's so true. Right? Right. Now how many people, you know, everybody listening, what are you worrying about right now? What's preoccupying your mind that you're obsessing about rolling over in your head 10 different ways, 10 different times? And how many of the things you've ever worried about like that have ever happened, right? Most of them don't ever happen. But what you don't realize is that what you're worrying about and suffering about in your imagination is affecting your health. So Dr. Jay, can you talk a little bit about that? Cuz I know there's somebody listening right now who's worrying and imagining negative outcomes. What is she doing to her heart rate variability and her overall health? That

 

(20:44): Quote is a great quote that comes from one of the stoic philosophers, Epictetus. And it's resonated because it's actually kind of one of the core foundational statements of C B T or cognitive behavioral therapy, which is a predominant therapy or psychotherapy modality. And one that I was heavily trained in kind of back in my my student days and and utilized quite frequently. And we build a lot, we're building a lot of the things into the application or platform that I teach or or am making. One of the things that I always come back to here is that we are really good about not being present. We're really good about focusing on those things that occurred to us in the past or trying to predict or forecast the things that are going to occur in the future. And what we know from hardcore research is that our predictive ability of what's gonna happen in the future is very, very poor.

 

(21:39): We're not very good at it. Well why is that? Well, we catastrophize, we concoct worse case scenarios. We generalize, we see things in black and white. A lot of those are the cognitive distortions that we can have in our head that cause us to have this narrative, this high level storytelling of what we believe what could happen. But it never comes to fruition or barely does. Or if the thing that we are predicting happens does happen, it's almost never as severe as what we anticipated. So in other words, we elongated our suffering. So even if we do suffer, we elongated it by worrying and causing all this immense amount of stress to build up. What does that do to the mind and body? Well it has extremely negative effects. First and foremost, we see that it causes significant disruption in hormonal functioning. I know that's a huge component obviously of this podcast, but we see huge dysregulation of what's called the H P A axis, the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis.

 

(22:41): So huge dysregulation in our secretion of cortisol, huge secretion of adrenaline and neuro adrenaline or epinephrine and nor epinephrine. And when these things happen acutely or kind of just in real time, short term, they can be quite effective. They will save your life. But when they happen over and over and over again, or it's this constant kind of low state of stress or medium state of stress, not like the real height one that can be, or I should say is worse than kind of these just kind of acute stresses where we dump cortisol, we dump adrenaline, and then all of a sudden we clear it. The problem here is that more and more this happens, the more and more we see increased heart rate in which we know is really bad for our overall cardiovascular health. The high resting heart rate due to stress and the secretion of these hormones and neurotransmitters is not great on the body.

 

(23:30): Our heart only has a finite amount of times that it's gonna tick and we don't know how long that's gonna be. So any way that we can preserve those ticks of the heart the better. The other thing too is kind of the immense amount of dysregulation that can happen with things like blood pressure. We do know in fact that these things can significantly impact people who have hypertension or lead to hypertension certainly will exacerbate people who have, again, high blood pressure or hypertension. And we see this also too in just dysregulation of the autonomic nervous system. And this will manifest by dysregulation and heart rate variability. So low heart rate variability because someone is stuck in their head and level of thinking. And what I always say is this is outside of anything that you're putting into your body. So outside of, you know, any caloric intake or exercise or these other things that we know are going to influence the autonomic nervous system, this is simply just the brain just being stuck in our own thoughts and catastrophizing and concocting worst case scenarios.

 

(24:31): So we know that our imagination can be quite helpful, but it also can be to our detriment and can lead us down a very destructive path. Which is why I say like there's so many tools and techniques and great therapies that I recommend that kind of utilize this objective data and really is more about kind of turning in and changing your physiology. But another way of changing our physiology is changing our pattern of thinking. It's identifying what are kind of those distorted ways of thinking that really lead us down and spiral down into a really bad path. And how do we kind of modify those and work through those because we know that those can spiral down into anxiety, depression, other mental health related concerns, but can actually be caught early through things like monitoring, self-monitoring. So kind of monitoring thoughts and being aware of them, but also objective monitoring and looking at kind of the impact on the nervous system by looking at data. That was probably more of a long-winded way of answering that question, but, but thoughts matter. Inherently they matter.

 

(25:36): They do, they're so important. You know, what you think is affecting your health. I talk about that a lot. I know some people are probably wondering right now. Okay, we know Dr. Jay, you've got a company, we're certainly gonna talk about that. But what are all the different ways, we touched on it earlier of measuring H R V cuz some people listening probably are thinking, oh, I wanna do that. I hear how valuable it is. What are the different methods that we can use and how might somebody start to integrate this into their life?

 

(26:08): It's a a great question. You know what I, the wearable space or wearables have become ubiquitous. So I mean you can look on me right now. I have a Garmin, I have an Aura, I have a whoop and then my hanu is is on right now . So I have so many like different types of wearables and you know, one of it is because I'm just very interested in data and I don't expect people to be nearly as interested in data as I am. But I also use them and monitor them for, for different reasons depending on kind of like my goals and what I want to get out of them. The great thing about wearables being ubiquitous is that also heart rate variability being a metric that they collect that is also readily available in a lot of these different wearables. So, so all of these Garmin, you know, got or I got whoop and then obviously hannu, they all track heart rate variability.

 

(26:52): They do it very differently both in how they're measuring but also when they're measuring, which is really important And there's plenty of really amazing apps out there, you know, even outside of Annu as a platform, like we're a mental health platform. But you can also look at, you know, companies like Elite HR V and H R V for training which do H R V monitoring a little bit differently, but again, readily available and accessible to a bulk majority of people. So I always tell people know kind of why you're measuring and know what you're measuring. So the why can be a, a wider array of things that we just mentioned. Nervous system recovery for athletics and and performance. It can be for stress monitoring. So just kind of know your why and there's different platforms for kind of different reasons. And then also know kind of how it's measuring and what it's measuring.

 

(27:37): So for instance, at Hanu we use a continuous wearable E C G that's gonna give us high quality, accurate data under just about every single condition. And that is actually looking at the electrical output of the heart. So it's looking at the direct signal of the heart as opposed to some of the other wearables are using light sensing based technology, which is an indirect way of looking at the heart. So it's not picking up the electrical pulse, it's looking at a waveform that is basically a light that's shining through the skin, picking up, kind of changes in in blood flow kind of with within the capillaries. And then it's saying that must be a pulse so therefore there's a heartbeat. What makes that really great is that it's non-invasive and it's kind of just readily like you're able to put it on and go.

 

(28:22): Ours you're able to put it on and go as well, but you know, it's around kind of the, the, the chest or the sternum. So therefore it's a little bit more invasive than, you know, getting it on the wrist or the finger. The reason though that the wrist and the finger can be problematic is that when you're moving that provides a lot of what we call artifacts. So a lot of noise and it's hard sometimes to pull the signal. We can approximate heart rate pretty well, but heart rate variability can be very difficult. That's why most of these devices require you to be a very still when you're taking heart rate variability or it takes your heart rate variability when you are asleep, which is something like Aura does or a whoop does. They're looking at HR V when you're asleep, not when you're awake because when you're moving it's very hard to get that signal.

 

(29:02): Whereas with an EC G you can get that all the time. So these platforms are great because you know, you can look at recovery of the nervous system. You can look at kind of you know, is there kind of a downward trend of heart rate variability and that's kinda the information that you're gonna get. But if you're looking at kind of a mental health perspective throughout the day, then it might be great for you to have something that is continuously looking at changes in heart rate variability so that it can tell you kind of in the moment to provide that kind of trigger to you and say I see something kind of going on right now. It might be time for you to either take a break and we can either do some meditation, some biofeedback, some breath work, you know, whatever it may be. Like that's kind of more the intention of wearing something that is continuously monitoring those metrics. So it really just kind of depends on, you know, your goal. Like are you looking more just to kind of spot check for recovery, kind of check in with the nervous system or do you want to have something that's monitoring continuously so that you can adapt and make changes throughout the day or kinda learn to become more self-aware and learn how to better self-regulate.

 

(30:07): So as you're talking, I'm kind of getting that because I'm familiar with all these other devices. I haven't been thrilled with the utility, clinical utility for people of certain wearables. Like the Ring, I basically have people use something that they do an intensive evaluation, you know, periodically throughout the day in the morning and evening. But you know, as you're talking it's, it's sounding kind of like continuous glucose monitoring, which when I first heard about it I said, well that's great for diabetics. But then some of my colleagues started using it for their coaching clients who are more in the wellness space. And I thought wow that's, and this is kind of my reaction to a lot of the things that I've learned over my past 12 years into becoming fellowship trained in functional medicine. At first, like when I heard about IV therapy I s VI micronutrient therapy, I said, that's so extreme and so unnecessary.

 

(31:00): And then when I learned about it I was like, that is so necessary and so valuable. And I find that this is the journey that a lot of lay people have to go through as well. When they first hear about these things, they first hear about all the types of testing and evaluation and treatment that I use, their first thought is, that's so radical. I don't need that. You know, it's not offered at my H M O doctor's office. I don't need to pay for that. And then when they learn more, they listen to the podcast, they learn more, they say, oh my gosh, I have to have that. So as you're talking, cuz I know when I first heard about what your company offered, I thought I don't need to know that much about my H R V, but as you're talking I'm thinking it's just like continuous glucose monitoring.

 

(31:45): Yeah, it's continuous H R V monitoring and how valuable that could be. Like if I'm sitting here doing work like I've been doing for a few hours, I might not cognitively or consciously realize that my body might be going distress mode. It might take me much longer and it usually does cuz I'll work like crazy and then hours later I'll go like, oh my gosh, I'm so exhausted. Mm-Hmm . So anyway, I know I'm kind of on a monologue, but I love for my audience to really be taken through my thought process journey cuz I think it helps them become more educated about how to think about their own health. Right. So what are your thoughts?

 

(32:24): We make the comparison to continuous glucose monitoring all the time. What we know is that the rollercoaster that people can experience in terms of blood sugar fluctuation can cause a lot of deleterious effects. So the idea would be is to instill as much stability as possible without, you know, with the knowledge that like when you eat certain foods, like you're gonna have an increase in blood glucose, but it's the ups and downs and ups and downs and ups and downs and ups and downs all day long that happen. You know, the first thing you wake up and you eat that sugary pastry or donut that kind of kicks start the day that can cause those problems. Heart rate variability is very similar. So like within our application what we do is that when you first put it on, we're monitoring to figure out what is this person's baseline range, which in Layman's peak is kind of like what's their high average, what's their low average and then what's kind of right in the middle?

 

(33:17): Like where do they normally hang out in terms of their heart rate variability? And over time we're able to kind of refine that window, you know, based on context, situation, a lot of other things. And what we're really looking to do is say, okay, how often is their heart rate variability significantly changing and one way or another how much are were they dropping outside of their baseline range? Which is significant, which means that their nervous system is experiencing enough taxation for us to be alerted to it. Okay, interesting. What's going on here? And then also in the other direction, when are things kind of going up above their baseline, which may mean that they're really primed, they're in a very relaxed state, maybe they're meditating, maybe they're doing biofeedback. So we're able to kind of look at that throughout the day. So for our goal, just like what you mentioned earlier, is to be able to provide a signal, a level of awareness to people when it makes sense for us to provide that and say we see something going on right now and maybe you're writing those emails or whatever it may be.

 

(34:16): This is a huge one for me. I always like to tell this story. And a lot of people don't realize they're doing this until they realize they're, they're doing this mm-hmm. , which is something called email apnea. It's the holding of your breath when you're typing in email. And a lot of people do it and especially if you're writing a lot of emails, like you'll see your nervous system like it really taxed like your hurry very belly will drop because I mean, it's a stress response. You're holding your breath without being consciously aware of what's going on. And so a lot of people are like, oh my goodness, I didn't realize I was doing that until I started seeing, yeah, my heart rate variability was dropping. And then now that I'm kind of pacing my breathing and getting back into more of this relaxed parasympathetic state, like now I'm regulating myself better and I'm not seeing kind of these huge drops that we know that more and more that we have of them and the more and more severe they become, the worse it is for our overall psychological and physiological health.

 

(35:10): So our intention is to work very similar to a blood glucose monitor continuously saying I am monitoring kind of with my, you know, microscope what's going on within your nervous system. And when we see a significant event in your nervous system occur that we feel like, yep, that's enough to alert them, the user will get an alert and they will and will say, okay, it's time to check in. Number one, we want you to say what's going on here and is it affecting you subjectively mm-hmm . Because when you look back in retrospect, we want to be able to say, oh yeah, over the last week or last month, you know, the thing that was really getting me was my commute. Like I was out riding, you know, in the middle of New York City. I have to commute in the middle of that for an hour and my nervous system was wrecked for that entire hour every single day.

 

(35:54): Now there's the opportunity to do something about it, you're aware of it. Now let's learn how to self-regulate within that in that moment. Identifying the triggers is always important because it leads to us becoming more self-aware. But the kicker is learning how to regulate yourself in that moment and in time because we can have all this great data and information and, and it's most basic form. It's just data, it's just information. It's what about the step that comes after it? How are we gonna condition a new behavior that's different than what you might normally do because maybe your normal commute behavior is, you know, spurting out curse words, shooting the bird, like, you know, being aggressive. Don't do that. Yeah, don't do that. Maybe the new behavior is learning how to self-regulate in the moment so that you aren't feeling all that tension, all that emotional dysregulation that may manifest itself in you yelling at your family when you get home after your commute. Or you know, writing a nasty email when you get home because you're already pint up and frustrated and you're like, now time to release the anger. All of these things are connected to one another. And while we talk a lot about the data and the science, it all comes down to learning how to better regulate yourself. Learning how to better emotionally regulate yourself mm-hmm. so that it doesn't negatively impact all of these areas of life that maybe it is impacting now.

 

(37:06): Right. That's a great thing. Topic to touch on before we wrap up is what are some things that people can start to do just even today if they notice that they're in the stress state, where they certainly, if you're listening, you need to start checking your H R V for sure. But what are some things that people can do?

 

(37:26): Yeah, the great thing about this is that the most, the most efficacious or effective tools that we have that we've seen in the literature and the research literature are ones that are readily available and easily accessible to everybody at any given time. Regardless of whether or not you have a monitor or any ti or you're, you're looking at any different biometrics, which is a phenomenal thing that we have been built and designed to be able to regulate utilizing what's readily available. So I know that sounds cryptic, so let me just explain what I mean. , what I mean is, is in

 

(38:01): English, in

 

(38:02): English, right, in English breathing, breathing is the single greatest way to send a different signal to the nervous system. If you want to relax in the moment and train your nervous system to relax in the moment, learning how to change the mechanics of your breathing change and then changing the cadence or the speed of breathing are the two greatest things that you can do. A lot of times when people are stressed, we breathe what's called thoracically or in other words from the chest. It's a shallow, inefficient way of breathing, but we do so. And if we do it fast enough, we call that hyperventilation, which happens if somebody's having a panic attack. And what we see is people who have a panic attack, heart rate flies up the roof, the heart rate variability sinks like a rock. So what we can do in the moment though, is just simply change two things.

 

(38:52): One is the mechanics, moving it from the chest down to the belly, engaging what's called your diaphragm, which means pushing the diaphragm towards the pelvic floor, allowing the stomach almost to balloon of the lungs to expand breathing what we call low, slow and deep, not taking in as much air as you can that can be problematic, but breathing low, slow and then deep into the lungs. That can excite our vagus nerve increase what I'd mentioned earlier, what was called respiratory sinus arrhythmia, which is the speeding and the slowing of the heart and then work on exhaling slowly and then also doing it nasally from the nose. A lot of people when they get stressed, they breathe from their mouth. So breathing from the nose and changing the mechanics. And then the second component, what I mentioned was cadence. The simple way to do this is just inhale to account of four and exhale to count of six.

 

(39:43): If you do that, that will put you at a pace of six breaths per minute, which we know is a pretty good sweet spot for a lot of people. And you can make it also too, just an even breath, five seconds in, five seconds out. But breathing is single-handedly the best way of doing this. And again, readily available to you at any given moment in time. No one has to know you're doing it, which is the beauty of it. , you know, we just add the data component in terms of are are my company hanu? Because it helps to condition the behavior. When you can see your nervous system making significant change, you want to come back to it cuz you're like, oh, it's not just subjectively I feel better, which is good. That's the key. We want you to feel better like that is number one.

 

(40:21): But if you want to condition a behavior, seeing those data change, well that just reinforces that this right here is working. Like I see change in my nervous system, it's responding, it's adapting as we think it should. So breathing as key point number one. Number two thing that I, that I recommend, which is also readily available to us, would be kind of the mental battle aspect. And the biggest tool that I use is a tool in C B T called cognitive distancing. A lot of times when we're in the moment and we're feeling stressed, it is very easy to get wrapped up into the mind. I think that the first thing you should do is try to send a different signal physiologically. But the next thing is also to take a different approach psychologically or what we call cognitively. The one thing that we can so easily do is get wrapped up in that cognitive spiral that we were talking about earlier.

 

(41:13): However, a great tool that a lot of people have been have found to be effective is to remove yourself from your cognition with something called cognitive distancing. And what this strategy looks like is basically taking like an outsider view of what is going on that is purely objective, viewing things as neither good nor bad, almost just like you're a scientist and analyzing things just as what they are. So it's taking yourself away from kind of all of the impact and emotional thinking that happens and saying, I'm just gonna take an outside's view at what I'm thinking and just kind of look at it, be mindful of it. What that distancing does is it beautifully allows us to not be so wrapped up in all of the emotional characteristics that are involved and simply just see it for what it is. And so many people say that when they impact their physiology and when when they engage in this cognitive distancing strategy, people just feel more relaxed because they feel more in control.

 

(42:14): The thing that can so dysregulate people is when they feel like they are out of control or they have no impact on their emotional regulation or experience and when that occurs then we see the emotions start to ramp up and they lead to more negative behaviors. But if we can change the physiology with the body, so change the body with the body and then move to cha helping to rework our thinking, those two combinations of therapeutics have just been identified to be extremely effective in helping people to just calm down in the moment which is needed for everybody. Yes.

 

(42:50): Okay, great. Those are some great tips. I love breath work, talk about it all the time. And also changing your thoughts cuz that really does program your body's health. And if you haven't heard me talk about that, you need to listen to more of my podcasts cuz I talk about it all the time. Dr. Jay, this has been some great information. I love the conversation about one of my favorite tools, heart rate variability, where can people find out more about you? And I know that you have a special offer if they do wanna check out Hanu for them. So tell them about that and we'll have the information in the show note.

 

(43:26): Yeah, thanks for allowing me to do that. So if you just go head on over to hanu Health, h A N U and Hawaiian Hanu is Hawaiian for breath, which is our main strategy that we use for self-regulation. So hanu health.com if you use the code hbh 20, that's Hbh 20, that'll get you 20% off the platform. You know, feel free to kind of look at over, we have a lot of education and articles and videos and our own podcasts, the H new Health podcast. So we try to provide as much information out there as we can. Like, you know, the one thing that we realize is that it's dense, like heart rate variability, you know, psychophysiology, it's dense and people already probably listen to this podcast and they're like, yeah, that, that sounds like it's a in-depth thing. The great thing though is that it's utility. Once you kind of understand just the basic platform, it's utility is just so incredibly vast and wide and something that again, I mean I might sound like the fox guarding the hidden house, but something that everybody should be checking. And they will find such improvements in overall health outcomes if they understand what they're looking at and then understand kind of how to utilize that metric in these, in these training therapeutics.

 

(44:33): Mm-Hmm. . Yeah, and I just want everyone to know, I always try and tie things back to hormones cuz it is the Hormone Prescription podcast that improving your H R V will improve your hormone profile. Mm-Hmm. . So they are intimately an intricately related and you improve one, you improve the other vice versa. So I wanna leave you guys with another quote that Dr. Jay shared with me before we started because I think it's really sobering and hopefully will help you focus your mind for the rest of the day and get out away from all that extraneous stuff, the things you're imagining in the future that could be negative, that could impact you negatively and the things you're ruminating on from the past that you have no power over. And here's his quote, you could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do, what you say, and what you think. Dr. Jay, anything you'd like to share about that?

 

(45:31): Yeah, if anybody has heard the, the two quotes that I mentioned there, they'll know that these are both stoic quotes. Epictetus first and that was Marcus Aurelius. And I love that one because it hones in on the shortness of life. Not something that we should fear death, but something that we should use as a motivator is that the time here is very short. And so if we are going to spend so much of that time allowing anxiety to rule us, allowing it to kind of dictate the things that we do in life, how we act, who we associate with, then we're gonna leave life unfortunately with some regrets and nobody wants that. And so knowing that life is short, we should actually use that as a motivation to go out there and just live life and enjoy it and be happy and be healthy and just follow that path. And I think it's really great wisdom.

 

(46:20): Yes, go live your life, be happy, joyous free. Thanks so much for joining me for another episode of the Hormone Prescription Podcast. Thank you Dr. Jay for joining us. Hopefully you've learned something today that you can put into practice. Don't just be entertained and educated, but take action. Maybe just do some deep different breathing like Dr. Jay talked about. That's something simple that you can do right now. Thanks so much for joining me and I'll see you next week on another episode of The Hormone Prescription with Dr. Kirin. Until then, peace, love, and hormones y'all.

 

(46:57): Thank you so much for listening. I know that incredible vitality occurs for women over 40 when we learn to speak hormone and balance these vital regulators to create the health and the life that we deserve. If you're enjoying this podcast, I'd love it if you give me a review and subscribe. It really does help this podcast out so much. You can visit the hormone prescription.com where we have some free gifts for you, and you can sign up to have a hormone evaluation with me on the podcast to gain clarity into your personal situation. Until next time, remember, take small steps each day to balance your hormones and watch the wonderful changes in your health that begin to unfold for you. Talk to you soon.

 

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