Heart Rate Variability | Why Your Nervous System Needs This.

23:03Through our senses, through our touch, through our taste, through our smell, through our eyes, three years, but most of all, through our thoughts, through our relationship to our environment. And if you are relating to you thinking you have a low HRV score and Salim has a high HRV score, what are you telling your nervous system? You're not good enough. You need to be better. And so what's going to happen? It's going to stay in this quote unquote lower thing. So yes, a higher HRV is a healthier nervous system, but higher for me is totally different than higher for you is totally different for higher than whoever is listening.

23:36So that's why I like to look at your HRV baseline. And I define your HRV baseline as your average HRV score over the last 30 days. That is a good snapshot of the overall health of your nervous system and whatever you've been putting it through. And so if you're wearing a wearable and you wake up and you see your morning HRV score, let's say it's 40, right? And your baseline is 60. That's not a bad thing. Yes, it's a lower than your baseline, but that's not bad. That's simply a language of your body saying whatever you did the day before is more of load than your nervous system has been used to the last 30 days, the best thing you can do, listen to it, honor it, do something that nourishes your body, that gets you in a more parasympathetic state versus what we're all so conditioned to do in this modern society, push harder, workout harder, stay up late, doing the same thing that you're doing.

24:23Listening is the key to seeing over time the baseline maintain and go up. However, we know it has been proven as you age, your HRV is going to decline because of all the stresses that you're putting it through, right? So ideally you want to see your baseline maintain and if possible, start to go up as you age, because in general, it will go down.

24:41Dr. Mark Hyman:Yeah. I noticed when I, during COVID, I went to Maui and I just stayed put and didn't travel and had a clear routine and went to bed at the same time, woke up every day at the same time. And my HRV actually doubled. And doubling at a lower level, that's massive, right? Going from whatever it was, 16, 20 to 40 is as good as going from like 100 to 250, right? It's not like, that's how you need to think of it. But you said the score isn't the point. You say it's sort of like a different way of thinking about a biomarker, not like that it should be like this perfect number. Totally. And that's what I find the biggest thing in clients and talking and seeing is that there's this like score, shame or judgment because you think you hear someone have 100, 170, you think you need to be there or you're not healthy.

25:23And that's not how it works. It really is a unique language and listening to your own body, because you notice better than anyone, the body is the temple. The body knows how to heal itself if you just give it the tools and technology and nutrition to do so, right? And HRV is just a compass guiding you to what is resonant with your body.

25:43Dr. Mark Hyman:Yeah. Amazing. So, so you work with clients and you help them coach them on HRV and we'll, we'll put a link into your, your website. What's your website? Thathrvguy.com. that hrvguy.com okay and you can learn more about salim's work there but um what do you do with your clients to help them improve their stress resilience because it's not about the number like you said it's just really about understanding how to work with stress in their nervous system so it's not so much of a chronic problem totally so what do you do with your clients around this yeah so this is the question of okay how do you increase your hrv what is what is what is the thing to do so and to to answer that question i think i want to just give a little background on like how I got to being so passionate about HRV, right?

26:25So I grew up in upstate New York, and I'm the oldest of three in a first-generation Lebanese family. And I lost my father from cancer at a young age of seven, which very much, that was formative years, right? So that was shaping all of my programming and conditioning around how I go about. And it led to, you know, my caregiving, my belief I can't let people down, the sacrifice, which were all beautiful gifts that supported my journey, right? You're a people pleaser too. Yeah. Oh yeah. That's why we, that's, that's why we're such good friends, brother. And so I went to school for engineering and I graduated and I worked at a nuclear power plant that powered most of New York city.

26:59And it was during that time. Wait, was that Three Mile Island? Indian Point. No. Three Mile. Yeah. Indian Point. I was like, oh, are you, are you radioactive? No. It was during that time that my grandmother, who was up with my second mom, got diagnosed with breast cancer. And I was like, what is going on in the world in this thing called cancer? And that's when I went down the rabbit hole of health. I started listening and learning about you and all these incredible people who were sharing a different perspective on health and nutrition. And it was the first time that I realized, wow, we see what people want us to see.

27:27And there's so much more out there. Right. So bring curiosity to it. And so I started with diet, with food, with exercise. Right. And I came across ketosis about 18 years ago and fell in love with the energy and the clarity from cutting out sugar. And so I would just drink water and unsweetened tea for like three, four years. And a colleague at the power plant of mine loved bubbles. And we drink our yerba mate every day together. And one day we decided to brew the mate, cool it, put it in a soda stream. And we made the first unsweetened sparkling tea, Sound, my last company, which you know all about.

27:59And so we quit the nuclear engineering job and went all in to launch a beverage. Rather challenging industry.

28:04Dr. Mark Hyman:Wow, from nuclear power to a beverage company. Yeah, yeah. And it was at the time that the beverage company launched that the biohacking movement emerged with the legs of Dave Asprey, Ben Greenfield, all these people. So my engineering mind went down every rabbit hole obsessed with biohacking, wanting to optimize to the point where I was showing off. I was hacking my way to five hours of sleep a night, running 10 miles every other day, listening to three audio books a week, raising money from 170 people in New York City, thinking I'm winning this game of life, right? I did that for five years until my body broke down and my knee gave out.

28:37And that was the beginning of my inward journey. And that's when I read Dr. Joe Dispenza's book, Becoming Supernatural. And it was the first time in literature that I saw this biomarker HRV described relating to stress. And the second I read that, the light bulb went off from my research around knowing what science has proven, that chronic stress is the number one lead cause of cellular inflammation, which is the root cause of aging disease and death. And so the past six years of my life have been a journey on understanding this biomarker HRV. And that led me to creating this framework that I call the art of the heart.

29:12And art stands for awareness, regulation, transformation. And this is a three act arc that isn't a ladder you climb once and you made it to the top and you're regulated forever and your nervous system set and you don't need to do anything. But it's one and done. No, that's not how real life works. Yeah, it's rather a daily act of devotion towards listening to your nervous system, towards utilizing HRV as a biomarker to support understanding what your body needs. So this is the framework that I bring to clients that I go talking about. And within this framework, there are five pathways to HRV growth to support nervous system sovereignty that I talk about.

29:54So the first pathway is sleep as the foundation, which I know you know all too well. You talk about it on the podcast all the time and has everything to do with actually what you shared in the beginning of the podcast, really honoring your circadian rhythm from a nervous system perspective standpoint, right? And if you are jipping that deepest parasympathetic state, that delta state of sleep, it's going to be very hard to see your HRV go up and to have sovereignty over your nervous system. So this kind of all relates to my story over the last six years. rewind to me showing off I was hacking my way to five hours of sleep.

30:25It was really not honoring my nervous system. It wasn't until I started honoring my sleep, revering my sleep, that I started seeing my HRV baseline, which when I started was 30, begin to go up step by step. And so outside of honoring your circadian rhythm, so many other things I know you talk about in terms of blue light exposure and eating, you know, how long to eat before bed. So, so many different tools that you can utilize to support your sleep. And if you weave the art framework, that awareness regulation transformation to how you sleep, you could see what works for your body. So that's sleep the foundation.

30:59Second pathway is hormetic stress, the catalyst. And you talked about hormesis. And for those unfamiliar with it, hormetic stress is the philosophy of intentionally eliciting a stress on the body and then consciously getting your body out of it. Training, right? The best analogy I give for that is weight training. When you go to gym to lift your biceps, right? You're lifting more weight than the muscle can actually handle tearing the fibers in your muscle bicep. What do you do the next day? Right. Yeah. So that the following day you can go lift more weight. Yeah. Same thing with your nervous system.

31:30Put it in a conscious stressful state, contrast therapy, all these different things, hot, cold, then consciously get it out of it. And the thing is most people don't complete the equation until you go to sleep. Right. And so back to my story, I decided to continue running the beverage company, putting myself in arguably one of the most challenging industries, continuing to raise money. But throughout the day, multiple times, I would consciously drop my body into parasympathetic states using all of the biohacking technologies with the intention to bring a parasympathetic state to my body, whether it was contrast therapy, whether it was PMF, whether it was binaural beats.

32:06I mean, my house had all the gadgets you could imagine. So I was literally training to be an emotional athlete for about three years. And it was that training that took me from the baseline of 30 to above 170 because I literally was putting myself in arguably for me, the most challenging, stressful situation. So good news for anybody listening. I don't think any human being has a problem putting themselves in a stressful state. We do it all the time. What I was the most guilty of, and most of us are, is not completing that equation and dropping into a parasympathetic side until we go to sleep.

32:38And this is where NSDR, non-sleep deep rest, right, that we talk about in the biohacking field, It's so important to do it throughout the day. To take a little break? To take a little break, to take a pause, to do break. And it could be as simple as just two minutes of box breathing or just a long, slow exhale, right? Or they know, you know, the psychological side. Ah, right? That resets the vagus nerve, calms the body. Breath is the freest tool to support changing your internal state. So that's pathway number two, hormetic stress. Pathway number three, reframing the shift.

33:12Dr. Mark Hyman:Before we jump up the hormetic stress, break down what are the most effective tools in that framework? Anytime anyone asks me, what is the best thing? I always say, for me, because it's so unique to the individual. And that's where HRV is such a powerful compass for you to test what actually resonates with your body. Because cold plunging for me is great. But for some people, especially women, during certain ovulation cycles, it's not necessarily the best thing. So if you bring this art framework and awareness to whatever the thing is that you're doing, seeing if it regulates your body, seeing if your body is resonant for it, and then consistently showing up with that awareness and regulation will lead to the transformation to support your HRV.

33:54And so it's listening. And in a day and age where we are so blessed to be inundated with so much technology, so much information, with AI, helping do this diet, do this exercise, right? It's all amazing. But what works for me or for Brian Johnson or for whoever may have the opposite impact for someone else. So experiment yourself because your body is the guru. Your body knows what is most resonant with it. And if you were like me, I could not, I was not attuned, I couldn't hear, I was too much up in here. and HRV supported getting me to listen to my body. It was a biomarker that was objectively telling me what is resonant with my body.

34:31Or like, what are the most things,

34:32Dr. Mark Hyman:effectively, like is it a cold plunge? Is it a hot sauna? For me, the number one tool that I know I've shared with you, and I think you still do, NuCom, that app. It's an app with a patented technology guaranteed to get your body in a parasympathetic state through binaural beats. So it essentially uses frequencies to guide your brain into a desired theta state. And for me, while I was running the beverage company, it was so hard for me in the middle of the day to sit and meditate, right? When you're in it, it is so challenging. But they have this 20 minute power nap that Tony Robbins says the best power nap you could do.

35:02You listen to this track for 20 minutes and your mind slowly goes from that high beta state through alpha into theta and then gets you right back out of it.

35:11Dr. Mark Hyman:Yeah, I use it. It's fun. It's good. So there's binaural beats. There's contrast therapy. There's breathwork meditation. dancing, swimming, running, whatever is resonant. So many different things out there that I know you talk about so many, there's so many technologies and to use the technology, like I love all the biohacking technologies, but I was guilty the first five years of using it to do more and, and, and have more energy instead of to bring internal stillness, calmness, parasympathetic side to balance the equation. We talk, you talk about this idea of nervous system load and your baseline and the trends over time and now there's all these tools to measure all its wearables and watches and rings and what what what should we be kind of looking at and what should be people paying attention to and tracking great great question because we didn't talk about how to track it and most people nowadays like myself through wearables like aura ring whoop apple watch right the thing to know all of these wearables they're all they're like if you do if you measure multiple ones at the same time you're gonna get different numbers on everyone totally because the aura and the whoop use RMSS ID versus an Apple watch, which uses something else.

36:15So it'll be slightly higher versus athletes who use polar H straps that give you actually like the real time, but no wearable gives you real time HRV. What you're getting in your morning score is actually your average nightly HRV reading, right? And what that's a good indicator of is the overall health and load you put your nervous system through the day before, because it's being taken when there's no external simulation and you're lying down, right? And so that's why listening to it and comparing it to your baseline is the best way to utilize these wearables and to not wake up and say, oh, I have a low score.

36:47That's bad, right? That is where then you stay perpetually in that low state because you are thinking it is bad. It's not bad. It's your body saying, hey, yesterday was more of a load than I'm used to. Why don't you nourish me a little more today?

37:01Dr. Mark Hyman:You know, you can use any of these devices and it's sort of an internally consistent metric. But if you jump between devices, you're going to see different measurements. You're going to see. So what I say, the best device to use is the one that you'll use consistently, right? The one that's the most consistent that you could actually take day to day and understand what your baseline is. All right. I want to go back to your, your art framework and the five pathways. So we talked about sleep as a first regulation and transformation. Those are the three, right? Those are the three that you weave between each pathway, right?

37:30And so pathway one, sleep, we said pathway two, hormetic stress, pathway three, reframing the shift, right? And so if we go back to my story. I, for the next four years, continued running the beverage company, taking my HRV from 30 to a 170 baseline, thinking I'm winning this game of life, right? Good HRV score on the outside. The beverage company was doing great. We were at a number two beverage and Whole Foods on the East Coast, opening up in 3000 retailers outside. Amazing. Internally, to keep up with that demand in the beverage space, you need a lot of capital. And I was struggling raising enough money to keep the beverage going, getting myself in a lot of debt and internal stress.

38:04And it was my birthday about three years ago. And in front of all of our community, I declared and asked, I wanted to step into less doing more being a common statement echoed amongst entrepreneurs approaching burnout. And I got gifted from everybody. Allie pulled together the community to give me a super 73 electronic bike, this Burning Man bike that I wanted so badly. And I take said bike for its first spin on the Venice boardwalk. The sun is setting and I'm like, oh, it's going to work out. Take a deep breath. The money's going to come in. It always happens. And I get in the silliest accident that anteriorly dislocates my right shoulder, tears my labrum and fractures 30 % of my shoulder socket off.

38:40I had to go to the ER for them to dislocate to relocate it. I wake up the next morning still in pain, but more importantly, my mind's like, how can this happen now? How am I going to raise money? Why, why, why, why? And my HRV, which at the time, baseline 170, dropped to 30. My body screaming, it was not happy, right? Thankfully, I had a call with my coach that day and I tell him the story and he breaks out laughing. And I go, what the hell is so funny? And he goes, let's break down the body spiritually. The arms represent the doing. The torso to body represents the being. The shoulder connects the doing to the being.

39:16What did you ask for on your birthday? Less doing, more being. What did you get? Exactly what you asked for from the gift in front of everybody that you asked for it. How can you not laugh at the cosmic joke of what I call the educational simulation? And the second he said that, I broke out laughing. I was like, oh my God, my body is screaming for me to let go of this beverage because I had poured every ounce of my soul into it nine years, but I was running on the story of, I can't let people down. I can't let my investors down. I can't let my family down that I was not letting go of it. I had started talking about HRV, coaching HRV, but I blindfolded not letting go of this business.

39:51And I was like, you know what? Okay, I'm going to listen and I'm going to let go of it. And I shit you not, 24 hours later, same dislocated shoulder, same pain, but my HRV tripled to 97 simply from changing my relationship to the injury happening for me. That is the power of reframing and how much your relationship -

40:12Dr. Mark Hyman:You always said to me, it didn't happen to you, it happened for you. I'm like, yeah, shut up. And I'm going to keep saying that to you, right? And so that's the importance of reframing in that pathway, which is very underestimated and it's the center. It's the center. Well, it goes to sort of a deeper framework of understanding your life, which is often we fight against reality. And Byron Katie talks a lot about this, you know, arguing with reality. And the opposite of that is loving what is. And it's such a simple, obvious framework, but, you know, it's hard for us to do. It's really hard for us to go, not why is this happening to me, but why is this happening for me?

40:52Dr. Mark Hyman:And I'm guilty of that like everybody else. Me too. And I'm like, oh God, you know, things are hard or this happens or that happens. And then they go, oh, this is actually in service of something that I can't quite see yet. It sounds kind of woo-woo and crazy, but I think the more I've lived and I'm kind of old now, so I've had a few turns around the sun. It's truer every year. It's like when I can relax around what's happening and just trust in the unfolding, even if it's a difficult moment and not fight it, but just feel it, uh, it's a, it's a huge life hack, you know, and it, and it, uh, it doesn't mean you don't go through pain or suffering or discomfort.

41:34Dr. Mark Hyman:It just means your relationship to it is different. And it's the relationship that matters. And that's why I intentionally call it an educational simulation for my mind to realize, especially when it's a more challenging thing, like, oh yeah, what is the medicine in this for me to learn? I allow myself to, to be in it, to grieve, to whatever, but then pull back and bring awareness, that art framework, awareness to wait, why is this actually happening for me? That is where the importance of this art framework, especially in the reframing, to bring awareness to what is actually happening and then learning to use different tools to support regulating what is going on in the internal state.

42:10So that's reframing. Next, Pat, so we have sleep as a foundation, hormetic stress, reframing. Before we jump out of the -

42:17Dr. Mark Hyman:Reframe? The reframing. Yeah. I think this is really about perception, right? It's about how we interpret reality and how that affects our nervous system. Like I said, stress is the real or imagined threat to your body or ego. So it could be a real threat to your body or an imagined threat to your ego that you're making up in your head. It has nothing to do with what's actually happening. And so you talk about this idea of metacognition, about kind of awareness of your thought patterns and how to kind of look at your emotions from a different perspective. So, you know, I think it's important for people to understand this because it requires a bit of like this witness consciousness they talk about in meditation where you're sitting like i've you know done 10-day meditation retreats and yeah after a while you're sitting there you're like yeah there's my crazy mind going doing this thing and so you have like the awareness of the awareness and it's like this meta framework of seeing yourself doing your thing and it it kind of takes you out of identifying with the experience and being in it it's more the being of it not in it and that of not in is a really interesting framework and this is kind of what you're talking about, right?

43:14It's a thousand percent what I'm talking about. And metacondition now is proven to be the highest form of intelligence and intellect, right? And metacognition, meaning awareness of your thoughts, awareness of your internal state, right? And by doing so, it totally changes the dynamic of your nervous system. Just looking at it from a nervous system perspective, because all a nervous system ever wants, safety, right? You talked about how we don't need to turn on the sympathetic state. It automatically happens because it's programmed in us for thousands of years to automatically, if we see a tiger, oh, fire that, right?

43:43We know that, right? So it's a pattern that's there and it's an on-off switch, right? I liken the nervous system. I have an analogy to hospitals in Florida. They have this fail safe button where if a tornado or hurricane is coming, right? Metal shades and come down to protect everybody from getting hurt. Brilliant program put in place to save people. What happens if a shooter's in the building and someone hits that button? Not so brilliant of a program, but it was birthed from a brilliant place. That's how our nervous systems want. When that amygdala fires off, no on-off switch, no access to the prefrontal cortex, to all of our knowledge, our intuition, everything we know, we go back here.

44:18So the more we can bring metacognition and awareness and be like, oh, actually, I'm spinning over this email. I'm okay physically. I'm totally fine. Let me take a breath. Let me go respond to the email, but let me respond to it from this place versus the limbic automatic replace place that we're so used to firing.

44:35Dr. Mark Hyman:Whether I'm having a demanding week, pushing myself through a tough workout, or simply trying to keep up with everything on my plate, I know my body is constantly being asked to respond and to recover. And that's why I think resilience is one of the most important markers of long-term health. And one of the best tools I've found for that, both personally and clinically, is infrared sauna use. I think of it the same way I think about exercise. It's a beneficial stressor. You're sending your body to adapt, to recover, to come back stronger. And that's one reason I make time for regular sunlight and sauna sessions.

45:04Dr. Mark Hyman:What sets Sunlighten apart is their Pulse IQ technology. It delivers red light along with near, mid, and far infrared wavelengths independently so you're getting a more personalized infrared experience, not simply blended wavelengths. And whether you're just getting started or looking for a more advanced setup, Sunlighten offers options for different homes, lifestyles, and budgets. And if you're looking for another way to build resilience, sauna therapy may be worth exploring. Visit Sunlighten.com and use the code HYMAN to save up to$2 ,100 plus free shipping. One of the most powerful things you can do for your health is cook more of your meals at home.

45:34Dr. Mark Hyman:When you prepare your own food, you have control over the quality of ingredients, the oils you use, the amount of sugar and processed foods you're eating, even the materials you cook with. And that last part matters more than most people realize. A lot of cookware contains chemical coatings that can break down over time, especially with high heat cooking. And that's one reason I've been using made-in stainless clad cookware. It's completely free of coatings, built with high-quality stainless steel, and designed for even heating and better heat control, whether you're sauteing veggies, cooking fish, or searing protein.

46:06Dr. Mark Hyman:The cookware is used in over 4 ,000 top-rated restaurants, but it's also incredibly practical for everyday cooking at home. If you're looking to upgrade to clean cookware that will actually last, go to maidenware.com and use the code hyman-hive for 10 % off your first order. So it's a helpful, it's helpful, and it takes practice. I think to be aware of your mind and not identified with your mind is a tough thing. You know, Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, talked about this simple idea where he didn't let his Nazi captors in Auschwitz control his thinking in his mind. And he's like, you know, he says, in between stimulus and response, there's a pause, and in that pause lies a choice, and in that choice lies your freedom.

46:49Dr. Mark Hyman:And what he means is, like, you have a pause, and that pause doesn't happen for most of us. It can be a millisecond. between stimulus and response. But what you're talking about is trying to figure out how to sort of exercise the muscle allows you to create more than a millisecond, allows you to create a pause between your stimulus and your response. And the stimulus is the stimulus. That's just going to be what it is. But how you respond to it as opposed to react to it is a very different framework. And it's likened to the space between each heartbeat, which is your HRV, right? And And for me, the biggest practice that has supported my journey that I work with clients, I know I've worked with you on, is a morning practice to get you to remember that, right?

47:35To tether to that. Because I had a mentor once to say so beautifully, as humans, we all came here to remember and forget, remember and forget, remember and forget. The mastery comes from shortening the gap between remembering and forgetting, right? So the more consistent you do that, the more consistent you remind yourself that, oh yeah, it's happening for me. Let me ground into that. Let me go out in the world. I'm going to forget. That's what we're here for, to forget. But let me shorten that gap between forgetting and remembering. That's the third thing. The fourth pathway is intentionality, the alignment.

48:09And so back to my story, I said, okay, I'm going to let go of this beverage, but I wanted to see if there's a way I could still salvage it for myself and the investors. And it took about six months, but we ended up finding a holding company that acquires distressed beverages. We put an APA and asset purchase agreement together. So they purchased our brand and asset. They took our cap table and our 170 investors who own some of the new company. They took the debt to continue from the suppliers to continue producing. But the rest of the debt fell on the company's shoulder, which we dissolved and literally fell on my shoulder.

48:41So I had to go through personal bankruptcy, right? Which was the last attachment of my beautiful mind and ego to its identity. And so I did what most people do. You're going to be a multi-billionaire founder of a beverage, right? Oh, that's what I had my mindset on. Yeah. And then all of that goes away. And so I go to Bali to eat, pray, love, and find myself, right? And every morning in Bali, I contemplate my beautiful wish, less doing, more being. And every morning, my beautiful incessant mind would come on and say, but we love doing,

49:10Dr. Mark Hyman:we're so good at doing, what are we going to do if we're not doing? Until one morning, I have an epiphany. That statement, less doing and more being, is mind-made and dualistic in nature. And it implies that doing and being are mutually exclusive. When the reality is, we're always being, even though we're unaware of it 99 % of the time. And we're always doing, even if we're sitting or sleeping or breathing. So it's actually not about doing less and being more. It's about the intentionality in your doing. The why behind your doing. And the how you're doing it. And the how you're doing it. And the reason it came to me was I was reading the Bhagavad Gita.

49:45And one of my favorite quotes from the Bhagavad Gita is, you have a right to your actions, but never your actions fruit. Act solely for the action's sake and don't be attached to inaction. Meaning we all came here with a right to act, to create, to do. We don't have a right to the outcome of our doing. And we must solely act for our intention, for our why. And what I've come to find with HRV is it is a compass telling you how aligned you are with your body and your highest self and your ultimate purpose. And a compass needs three points to triangulate. So for HRV, point one is what you're perceiving.

50:21Point two is how you're reacting, how you're responding to what you're perceiving. And point three is something to compare it to, your why. And most people, I was so guilty of running on an old why. I can't let people down. I need to sacrifice. I need to support. And I wasn't auditing what was actually resonant with my body in that time. And so to intentionally take the time, which I do in my morning practice to audit your why, to ground into your purpose and then go about doing actions that align with that, your HRV will go up because your nervous system is resonant with the actions that you're taking in life.

50:58So that's the importance of intentionality in your path toward the HRV.

51:02Dr. Mark Hyman:We're really talking about is integrity, like integrity with yourself. With yourself, with your word, with your body. And alignment is sort of how you get into integrity. 1 ,000%. And most of us are somehow living in a world where we're doing things for others. Well, we're listening to our, we're up here. We're in our story. We're in our ego, which again, was birthed from a brilliant place and needed, right? I needed my ego to think I needed to support, I needed to sacrifice so I could build everything I built and be on this journey, right? Your biggest wound is your greatest gift. Always, always.

51:33It's just not allowed. It's about not allowing it to be in the driver's seat 99 % of the time, bringing awareness and sovereignty being like, actually, this is good here, but I'm going to laugh at you the other 99 % because it's not needed anymore. Okay. The fifth. The fifth one. You're going to love this one. Community, the amplifier. And I noticed comes as no surprise, especially to you, every blue zone in the world, a pillar is community. The longest study in human history to 80 year Harvard study, right? That followed 72 youth from Boston, age 18, and every aspect of their lives from medical records to interviews with spouses, colleagues, children, to find out what led to a longer, healthier, happier life, right?

52:12And after 80 years, three generations of scientists, all this research, they came back with one thing and that was relationships. Yeah, community. And not quantity, but quality. And from a nervous system perspective, that has everything again to do with all the nervous system wants is safety. And one of the best ways that we feel most safe is being authentically seen by a mirror, by another human, right? Not needing to wear a mask, just being our most authentic self and resonating with other people who are on that similar frequency. So community is the amplifier. It's huge.

52:46Dr. Mark Hyman:But here's a question, Salim, you know, it's easy to say that. And I obviously say it a lot. And community is medicine. It's as powerful as food is medicine. But creating it and having it is not as easy as saying it. I mean, it's easier to change your diet than to instantly create a community that you belong to and to create a sense of belonging and connection. And this is such a good question. And every time I get asked this question, I go back, my sister, shout out to her. She's a big fan of you, a functional medicine doctor, Christine, and she reached out to me when I moved to LA because I had somehow just got this beautiful community all around.

53:22And she's like, Salim, I miss you. You're not here. Like, I'm so desperately seeking community. Like, what do I need to do? Like, how come? And I responded saying, this didn't just happen overnight. And the reality is, again, I believe this is an educational simulation and I believe in quantum science and physics have proven what we are perceiving, we are creating via the double slit experiment and the observer effect. We are actually turning the electrons from a wave into a particle with our perception. And so essentially everything is a mirror. And if you want community, you need to first and foremost cultivate whatever you're seeking internally.

54:00That is the most important thing. So whatever, if you're saying I'm seeking community first, and I had a mentor tell me this when I went to him asking Erwin, he was like, well, what is it that you seek in a community? What do you want? Have you ever thought about that? And so I journaled about it. And then I would spend time intentionally getting myself into that frequency, into that state. And then I ended up materializing beautiful humans like you in my life. Wow. That's a little big, Salim. I love it. Essentially. Materialize me. Okay. Be the thing that you want in a community. And then you end up putting out this vibration of other people who are matching that resonance.

54:40Dr. Mark Hyman:Rather than come from a needy place, nourish yourself. Constipate your own inner well-being. Yeah. And that will naturally attract people. In the time, if you are authentically doing that. So the first step that I give to someone who asks this question is actually write down what do you want in a community? Because most of you are like, oh, I see Mark with this bread of a computer. Like, I want that. What is it that you actually want, right? journal about that that would be my step one and and you have to be deliberate about it you know we we invest so much time in all sorts of things work and emails and whatever but you know it takes a conscious deliberate consistent set of react responses to your life to actually cultivate and develop friends and community and it to me it's it as i get older is the most important thing in my life you know everything else just sort of like whatever and i think this is such a it's such a key framework so we've got we've got sleep right the foundation hormetic stress like saunas cold plunges um stress training reframing the shift so looking at your your thoughts and being your relationships to your stories yeah being in integrity with your purpose and alignment with who you are and not living somebody else's life and then building community which helps sort of cultivate all the response so this is a good roadmap i love these five pathways they're great On a day-to-day basis, when you're coaching someone, what are you doing with them?

55:56Dr. Mark Hyman:How do you kind of help them go through? Because the point isn't to get your HRV number better. It's to help your nervous system become, as you say, sovereign. How do you coach people to do that? So it's essentially weaving that art framework, awareness, regulation, and transformation into each of these pathways in their unique way. So it's first getting a baseline of kind of where they're at and what the stresses in their life are and really changing their relationship to understand, you know, we talked about, I mentioned the educational simulation, right? And so I want to just break down what is happening in your body when you perceive a stress or a threat, right?

56:33And the reality is when we see a stress or a trigger, beneath what we are perceiving, what we are seeing, there's always an emotion or multiple emotions associated with this challenge, right? And directly connected to that emotion is a physical sensation that's stuck in the body. And if you peel the onion one layer deeper, an emotion, as we talked about on a quantum level, it's just a scalar wave of energy. It's frequency. There is no such thing as a good or bad emotion. And as humans, we're actually meant to feel every emotion on the spectrum. grief, anger, love, joy, feel it, for they say about 90 seconds until the wave moves through us.

57:09Dr. Mark Hyman:Yeah. Instead of staying stuck in it. Instead of staying stuck in it. However, most of us, and especially in that formative years, when the baseline brainwave state is theta, and we don't know how to process the emotion, and we don't have a prefrontal cortex to discern it ourselves, that scalar wave of frequency that's supposed to move through us freezes. And I like to think of it forming a glacier in the fascia in our body, right? And so all the emotion wants is to be felt, but now we have a whole story around it. You mentioned zebras and there's this analogy I give, there's a YouTube video of a deer eating grass on the side of a road and getting clipped, right?

57:43And the video stays on the deer and for about a minute, it looks like it's dead. Then all of a sudden it gets up and it does this kind of like tremor thing and you think it would run for its life. Instead, it goes right back to eating grass like nothing ever happened. Why? Because that tremor was it moving that stuck frozen emotion out and then there's no more story and they just get to be in the present moment and they're eating grass like nothing happened. But we as humans, we love story. So this frozen glacier that's in our fascia, we create a whole world around it, that we project on our friends, on our relationships, on our business, and all it wants is to be felt, right?

58:18And so, you know, the number one fear in humans documented stage fright, public speaking, right? It was a big, big fear of mine. And I used to get on stage or do podcasts and I get this knot in my stomach. And I used to think the knot came because I'm on a stage. The reality is that I co-created this stage and this experience and this podcast to feel what I am calling an uncomfortable knot that really is just a stuck, frozen emotion about my self-worth or whatever the story is. So if you can feel, and you said that earlier, if you can feel into your body, that is what gets the emotion to move.

58:51But it is very challenging to feel when you are triggered in a stressful state, right? That on-off switch. So what I work on is learning to train to be an emotional athlete and feel these stuck, frozen emotions before it actually happens in real life. And that looks like essentially in whatever practice you do sitting and intentionally with your mind, eliciting the stress or the trigger or whatever it is story you're stuck in. And as soon as you feel that emotion, that stuck frozen glacier elicited, you drop out of the story, you drop out of the visual, you drop out of your mind and you drop into a somatic awareness practice where you are just physically describing the sensations in your body.

59:29And by putting your attention on the sensation without the story, you're giving this emotion all it wants. All it wants is to be felt and not judged and put in this box. And if you do that over time, the glacier melts. And then when the thing happens in real life, the on off switch isn't as strong and you have access to your prefrontal cortex. And this is the grown up in the room. That's the grown up in the room, not the little child in the room. And this is why athletes, you know, I got approached by a sports agency because they're like our hall of fame, best athletes. They all have much higher HRVs than regular athletes.

1:00:02Like, why would that be the thing? And I was like, oh, that makes so much sense. Physiologically, Michael Jordan, when he used to approach a game seven free throw, right? He wasn't there thinking what everybody outside is looking at, like, oh my God, this is such a high stakes stressful thing. He was like, this is just another free throw. I'm cool and calm, which means he was using his prefrontal cortex. His amygdala wasn't firing off. So he had access to all of his muscle memory because your muscle memory is in the prefrontal cortex of the thousands of free throws he took versus another athlete who isn't as cool and calm as Michael Jordan approaches that same thing.

1:00:33His amygdala fires, he's back here. Guess what? He could have taken more free throws than Michael Jordan, but he doesn't have access to that muscle memory. So your agility to shift states, your sovereignty over your internal state is so important to how you go about responding to the external world.

1:00:50Dr. Mark Hyman:A lot of us just kind of push through it, right? We don't really stop to reset our system. We just kind of, and I'm guilty of this, you know, just kind of go, go, go, go, go. The most guilty of it. And override my body's sensations, override my body's signals, don't listen to the feeling. And how do you help people sort of unlearn that habit? Asking for a friend. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, and Mark, the reason why I talk about this and I work on this, it's funny. I think the thing, and I've told you this, the thing that we do and we're most passionate about is the thing we need the most. So I need nervous system sovereignty more than anybody else else, hence why I'm so passionate about it.

1:01:25And it is really just discipline and showing up with compassion for yourself when that happens. Because again, people are like, I can't believe I said that again. I can't believe I did that again. when they react automatically in situations, you need to have compassion because that's just the little kid in you running their old program. So if you can train outside of the stressful situation to learn to feel that suck emotion, you will have more sovereignty as the next time that it happens, right?

1:01:54Dr. Mark Hyman:Yeah. So it's really about, it's about developing like a training. Like if you want to lift weights, I mean, I, you know, you can't start with like 50 pushups. You have to do five, right? And so it's really about the training that you're talking about, the daily training. And I've been doing this every morning. I do breath work. I do meditation. I do some Qigong practices. And it really helps me to kind of ground my nervous system every day and easily come back to that throughout the day. You were going to teach me some Tibetan breath thing. I want to learn that too. But like, I think there's all sorts of tools and techniques and practices out there.

1:02:26Dr. Mark Hyman:But it's important that people take this seriously because if you don't learn how to actively relax, It sounds almost like a kind of oxymoron, like to actively do nothing. But it's really hard to activate your parasympathic system unless you're really deliberate about it. So I think different people can be attracted to different practices, but it is something you have to be deliberate about, whether it's breath work, whether it's yoga, whether it's meditation, whether it's Qigong, whether it's simple box breathing. washing, this is whatever. And that's where the art framework, bringing awareness to what works and resonates with you to get your body in that parasympathetic activation.

1:03:03Right. And so there's not one right thing. And I'm not here saying do it. I'm saying just listen to your body and what's resonant with it. And HRV for me has been an objective biomarker that is telling you what is resonant and supporting, guiding you to flex that muscle. And people say, you know,

1:03:19Dr. Mark Hyman:maybe you do the same thing, but how you feel inside is different. Right. So they say, you know, in the Zen Buddha say before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. It's just your relationship to it is totally different. It's totally, totally different. So amazing. So Celine, thank you for diving into this whole field and getting it out there. I think it's important people understand this because people hear stress. They don't really have a framework for understanding what to do or how to navigate it and how to track it. I think, um, people can go to that HRB guy.com to learn more about you, your work, your coaching platform, get help if they need it.

1:03:54Dr. Mark Hyman:Find you on Instagram and what is your? Same thing, that HRV guy, thanks to Allie. T-H-A-T, HRV guy. Yeah. And you can find all social, everything through that. And the one thing I guess I'd leave the audience. Like the cable guy. Like that HRV guy. That HRV guy, yeah. The one thing I think my favorite, you know, philosophy that a mentor teacher taught me that really supported, you know, that reframing pathway and just cultivating a different relationship with life. so intentional with your words and your thoughts, right? Because that's what creates your reality. And instead of saying, I have a good HRV score, a bad HRV score, this person's good or bad or right or wrong or blue versus red, I use dissonant or resonant, right?

1:04:34Because everything's just frequency. And if something is dissonant for me, it could be resonant for you. And if something's dissonant for me today, tomorrow I could wake up and it's actually resonant. But by not labeling it bad today, tomorrow my nervous system won't lock up because I didn't label it bad. I labeled it dissonant and it is open and more malleable to being, seeing how I feel in that moment, right? So anytime I catch myself or someone saying, oh, that was good, that was, I was like dissonant or resonant.

1:05:01Dr. Mark Hyman:Beautiful, beautiful. Well, thank you, Salim. Thanks for your creativity around helping people frame this differently and think about it. And thanks for your work and everybody to check out your stuff. And thanks for being on the podcast. Man, thank you for having me and thank you for all you've done in this world. Such an inspiration. I love you, Mark. If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it You can find me on all social media channels at dr. Mark Hyman. Please reach out I'd love to hear your comments and questions Don't forget to rate review and subscribe to the dr.

1:05:29Dr. Mark Hyman:Hyman show wherever you get your podcasts And don't forget to check out my youtube channel at dr. Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on the dr. Hyman show This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the ultra wellness center my work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health, where I am Chief Medical Officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests' opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional.

1:06:02Dr. Mark Hyman:This podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, please seek out a qualified medical practitioner. And if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, visit my clinic, the Ultra Wellness Center at ultrawellnesscenter.com and request to become a patient. It's important to have someone in your corner who is a trained, licensed healthcare practitioner and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health. This podcast is free as part of my mission to bring practical ways of improving health to the public.

1:06:33Dr. Mark Hyman:So I'd like to express gratitude to sponsors that made today's podcast possible. Thanks so much again for listening.