Lessons

Lesson Info

Identify Stress

I used to do high intensity training the ten to twelve minutes being once once a week uh is it was very intense and high stress was just wondering if there is a difference aboutthe load of stress compared to frequency. So would it be far worse in terms of stress to do one of these super intense workouts once a week versus you know something that's moderate three times a week? That question of how do I feel is going to be the most important one if you can get a little bit more sleep on one night selectively, I would suggest doing the heavy exercise once a week and getting more sleep that night and maybe the next night but then the rest of the week it's not like you should just sit in a chair, you can move, but I wouldn't necessarily do major workouts. It may be different for you and maybe different for someone else it's going to be very much even probably controlled in some part by what kind of muscle fiber you have, what kind of conditioner and what other kinds of stress. I think this ...

is one of those things where jeffs message there was, how do you feel like the color of your urine? Really? Well, yeah, the color urine will tell you an awful lot about how your systems doing. In fact, when you drink bad coffee you'll have clear here in because the sooner you drink bad coffee your body says dilute that stuff get it out of here and it'll pull moisture out of your blood will get water out of the blood to keep the talks and level in your kidneys as deluded as possible which is why if you drink bad coffee half our later you have to run to the bathroom but if you drink good coffee it doesn't have that effect weird things like that who would have thought to correlate those things he's looking at when people are stressed what does it do? I'm guessing when you're stressed I don't know their algorithm but I'm guessing when you're stressed you're probably gonna have more frequent urination so you have a lighter color sort of thing so there's all kinds of strange variables there but they may change from person to person so for you three moderate intensity workouts might make you feel best but for someone else who's maybe more in the muscle side of things they want to do that one intense because that's what nobody wants dr terry walls said you know how do you feel jeff said how do you feel? And the biggest problem that I had when I started doing this fifteen years ago is I had conditioned myself to not believe how I felt I was actually afraid that if I listen to how I felt that I would probably be wrong and of course, we all know that if you're wrong, then that means you're bad person, right? So you get stuck in this weird cycle where it's hard to actually know that what you're perceiving in your body maps back to a behaviour or something, and because there's, that uncertainty there, it makes us maybe discount that more so than we should, and this provides a bit of a rational basis for you to think about how you trust your instinct, how you trust your gut feel, and there is value in doing that, I have found that there's also value in getting data, whether it's a structured survey like rest wise, or whether it's getting, you know, data from a heart rate monitor like the one I'm wearing right now, either one of those things is useful by itself, but when you put them together, you have I felt this the data supported it. I have pretty good assuredness that this is the case if you just go one or the other, okay, maybe I just I'm sort of telling myself I should be happy now or I shouldn't feel that, and you get in this weird loop where the automated systems and the body will do something, and then they don't notice it's happening and you get the placebo effect if you just do the data the data says everything's good but your going I really feel like crap today but the data says they're good I'm going to work out well either the data collection is wrong we're getting the wrong data or there's a variable you didn't consider so you've got have both actually that's not true you could do one or the other but if you have both you'll just kick more ass which would be the goal? This is a forty dollars heart rate monitor I bought at fries electron ix it gets pulse oxygen and it tells your heart rate relatively quickly so you can get one of these things and I've even used it on an airplane when someone had a heart attack and give it to the doctor on the plane because it'll graph out your heart beat on one of its many little settings. If you want to know your heart rate very quickly, this is probably the fastest way to do it and there's a talk online I have about using oxygenation on airplanes and you can actually track how quickly your oxygen levels drop as the airplane goes up and how quickly they rise. What I discovered in my research there was that I'm one of the people has a delayed response to low oxygen so as their planes taking off my oxygen levels, my blood don't correct as quickly as I would like, which may mean that I'm stressed, or that I basically didn't get enough sleep, but it tends to be an ongoing thing. But then, as the airplane starts to descend, my response comes on. So as the airplane starting tow land, and for the first hour after I land, I have hyper oxygenated blood, so I get all these amazing ideas right where I'm supposed to be turning off my laptop when the airplanes landing, which is terribly annoying. That's what papers for, I guess, but most people are not going to know that about themselves unless they're running a little experiment, but if you fly frequently, it's actually not a bad idea to have one of these and see how far down your oxygen levels go. Some people drop into like the low nineties, and if you think you're going to get that presentation done and you're at ninety percent oxygen saturation in your blood, as opposed to ninety eight or ninety nine where you ought to be, the odds that you're going to perform very well on an airplane are pretty low, which is why vegging out might be the right decision to make on that flight. This device is made by a company called meridian it's s p o to monitor, you can buy these on amazon, you can buy these walgreens or somewhere it's ah, very common thing, of course, they used to cost hundreds of dollars in the hospital. It's talks more about the way the heart talks to the brain because the heart is a really tight end nicely with that automated meet protection system that we have there's, an electric connection with the heart, and we've all seen heart rate monitors ekgs, things like the polar monitor that I'm wearing right now there's a hormonal communication between the heart and the brain. The brain makes hormones that the heart listens to the heart makes hormones that the brain listens to yes, your heart doesn't make hormones there's a mechanical communication between the two it's called a pulse wave. And so when the heart beats there's, a physical thing that happens in the brain and there's a study from two thousand three from my friend roland mccready, who spoke at the bio hacking conference I put on earlier this year about there being an electromagnetic signal between the brain and the heart, which is relatively controversial and not widely known, even in cardiologists circles. But if you take a very sensitive magnetic field detector, there is a field of the shape of a doughnut around your heart and is tipped at eight degrees to the left if memory serves. Because that's, the way your heart is mounted in your rib cage so you can actually mapped the direction of the of the magnetic fields literally it looks just like a donut from dunkin donuts and we know which direction the field flows and everything magnetic fields continue on indefinitely. They just get weaker and weaker in power over distance so we know the brain is definitely affected by magnetic signals because we can take a ten ton magnet and put it on your brain and give you strange, altered states. This has been done over the past twenty or so years in neuroscience research facilities and there's an article written about some guy who had a spiritual experience and they can turn on amazing art skills. If you don't know how to draw, you get a big enough magnet in the right place over your head. You, khun suddenly draw like savant level drawing pretty amazing stuff, so we know that you can't affect this with that signal. We know there is a signal here and the research that atkinson mccreedy did shows that there's four levels of communication between here and here and that's why changing what the heart does khun change what the brain does and here's the kind of weird thing we can count the nerves that run from the heart to the brain and you can tell if a nerve is basically sending in one way or another or basically whether it's ascending nerve or receiving nerve to put it in really, really simple terms and what they found was that eighty percent of the nerves are sending information from here to here not vice versa which means that there is at least an argument to be made I wouldn't say it's conclusive but an argument that the heart is one of your sensing organs but when an emotion gets into your brain there's two ways that can go into the brain the thalamus part of your brain is like a router a routers job is like that thing you have in your living room that gets a signal from the cable company in order for you to have internet access so all the internet comes into that box and then it gets sent to your ipad or get sent to your computer or wherever else it goes in your house so that box makes a decision about where to send things the cortex part of your brain is the logic so when the signal from the internet comes into your house goes to that box that box then has to when it sees a signal say should I send it to the ipad or should I send it to the computer so receiver then there's a decision and in our brain we have this other thing that isn't present in your cable system at home and it's called the amygdala this is one of the more interesting parts of the brain this is the heart of the meat protection system e I don't know make nervous system the amygdala is job is to look around all the time to find a threat and it matches threats really really really fast so what this means is that if a guy in orange glasses beat you up in second grade your magdala took a snapshot of that and the first time you walked in this room and you saw me your mig glow would have said threat emergency kill or run and your rational brain and it would have said that under a third of a second and then after a third of a second irrational brain would've said oh that must be dave how cool I get to see dave but if we had a bio sensor or an array of them on your body literally we would have seen changes in the dilation of your eyes the amount of co two and oxygen in your blood your body temperature the spacing between each of your heartbeats the electrical conductivity of your skin all of that would have changed before you noticed and that change would have cost you because all of that prime ing to fight or kill didn't go towards having a better day it didn't go towards having a hot date tonight it didn't go towards anything it just got wasted if you khun do that, les you unleash a huge amount of extra potential for you to do something useful even if it's just play cards it doesn't really matter what you do with it it's free and you're wasting it right now and it's the middle is fault why would you have in magdala? Because it keeps your meat alive you can see the amygdala in action you ever accidentally leaned against the hot stove or touch a hot pan or something you pull your hand away and then you really so hot it wass right what moved that hand before you thought about how hot it was like I smelled burning hand that's not how we do it well, it was the pattern matching heat danger move and it happened so fast that you didn't get a serious burn you were not paying attention team came too close to the edge of a cliff magically you pulled yourself back from the cliff same thing fall down dai get eaten by tigers that's danger pattern match danger move away all automated don't even have to think about it very convenient and it works for dogs it works for dear it works for fish anything with a vertebra basically so that's kind of cool actually I'm not sure of fish hasn't magdala I'm pretty sure if they have a vertebra they do they have spine, they do but don't quote me on that please on twitter there's someone right now who studies fish very upset right looking we've already got all the cat lovers out this and now we got the fish people so what this means is that there's a slow track for processing your heart let's say picks up something like an emotional field that one of these electromagnetic things we're talking about and it since some data to the thalamus to the cortex to the magdala. So you went through the logic here and that's what you want to be able to do when you're dealing with an emotion whether it's fear or love there's a heart component that's why we talk about people dying of a broken heart like throughout history we know that there's a gut feeling and there's a hard feeling there's books written about your gut brain there's books written about your heart brain there are neural transmitters made in both of those those things and those air part of the operating system and the complex system that is our body. So if you assume that those have anything to do with the brain that we talk about all the time are conscious brain in our head, the model that I use is that you have different layers of consciousness in the brain but that they're heavily influenced by and they receive signals from the gut and the heart in this case a signal from the heart goes to this part of the brain this is what I do with the signal and it says ah let's think about what to do with the signal and then let's do something with it let's think about it but we have this fi last track as well the fast track is kind of interesting because here if it might be an emergency situation it goes from the heart to the router directly to the emotional pattern matching without any logic and this is why when someone says something that pushes your buttons you tell him to go screw themselves you know very well that the right response was to pat them on the shoulder even if they're a total jerk and say is everything all right at home in the most condescending tone you know, because that's going to make him even more mad, right? Well, what's going on here what's going on here is this problem they push your buttons and when they push your buttons you bypass the logic and you're rather since it directly to the emotional pattern matching which says basically killer run away with her to a very common emotions I'm afraid I'm angry what if changing the way your heartbeat could influence whether signals from the people around you signals from the environment went through the slow track or the fast track because your job as a human being is to use this logic thing that we have in order to modulate your behavior yet if you allow things from the environment to go through the fast track things that shouldn't go through it you will behave in a way that you're not proud of and a way that doesn't help your performance and doesn't help the people around you. This is a graph of what the heart math software does and now we'll get into the questions that were coming in about heart rate variability a stressed animal one who just saw a tiger or one that's about to die of a heart attack including a person has a very even heartbeat and even heartbeat evenly spaced heartbeat I should say which means it's unlike this too dumb to dum dum too dumb the space between each heart beats the same an animal that is less stressed that is parasympathetic dominant in the zone is going to sound more like this to dum da dum da dum da dum too dumb you can hear same number of heart beats but spaced out very differently this's why heart rate isn't that useful of a measure for the kind of things we're doing here because you could have sixty heartbeats in ten seconds and no heartbeats the rest of the minute that sixty beats a minute or you could have one beat exactly every second neither of those would be a very healthy pattern but one beat exactly every second with no spacing would be a sign that something's wrong that you're highly highly stressed no one has heartbeats that air sixty in ten seconds and then none at all because that would be called flatlining but what that illustrates is that there is data in that signal about the spacing between them I want to say the space between heartbeats literally when heartbeats it's here and the next time the heartbeats is here you measure was it a half a second was at one second between these and then you go to the next heart beat and you say how long was it before the next one happened? And when you grab that out you get a graph that looks like this at least it looks like this if you're training yourself tohave a highly variable heartbeat heart rate so what this here is this is how many beats per minute so this heartbeat was at ninety five beats per minute this heartbeat was at sixty one beats per minute so this beat was very fast this pete was very slow this pete was fast and the speed was slow that's an ideal pattern for someone who's parasympathetic dominic it would be really cool to say so all you have to do is just sit here real quick and just change the spacing of your heartbeats it's really everyone try there's no switch for that in your body it's just not gonna happen you could spend years meditating but there's a better way and when you do this right you feel it very very noticeably and I'll show you on another graph here what it looks like when you do something different here is when I'm focusing on making my heart beat coherence what we call that when not only is the spacing variable but it's rhythmically variable what that means is that this was say exactly a slow heartbeat a fast heartbeat this was a slow heartbeat this was a fast heartbeat this was a slow heartbeat I gotta go fast fast slow slow, fast, fast slow fast slow fast so what I did here that was pretty good as most of the peaks were about the same most of the trucks were about the same and then someone distracted me or or something happened when I was recording this I don't remember what and I stopped paying attention to it and you can see a huge difference between paying attention versus not paying attention this is what a harvey looks like without a lot of variability here I think I was actually stress because usually my heartbeat doesn't quite look like that or use my heart rate variability doesn't look like that this is not my heart beat you can also do something like this in this case when they added the electrical current going back and forth across my brain at to put my brand to an alfa state there was a noticeable change in my heart rate variability. In this case, it actually went down a little bit. It was still highly variable, but the way it's horn is big, this is an interesting thing that says what you do to your brain changes your heart. What you do to your heart changes your brain.