alright welcome everybody thanks for coming we're very excited to have you
this is our series user manual for humans part 4 and we called it that
because you everybody gets a user manual for the car they get a user manual for
their toaster they get it user manual for their garden gadgets but we have
this very very complicated thing called the human body mind and nobody gave us
the user manual that's what we're trying to provide with a series today we
will talk about something called heart rate variability and first of all why
would we bother why would we be interested in talking about something
like that well every one of you have heard about the mind-body connection
everybody has heard that the mind is very important how you feel is very
important in in in development of health or disease we've heard of the phrase
psychoneuroimmunology if you go on google and search there's hundreds of
millions of hits on psychoneuroimmunology and what it means
is psychology and neurology and immunology they're so tightly so closely
linked that it makes no sense even to separate them so what it means its
systems work together in the bobien and the psyche and the neuron the nervous
system it all effects everything else with her we're supposed to relax we're
supposed to stress less the relaxation state and the meditative state is
supposed to be good for us but but what is it what are these things what do they
look like what is it healing state what entails peak performance what what
happens in the body when you're frustrated versus when your peaceful so
what does that state look like that's the question we're going to try
answer today and as it turns out it's it's we do know must we get good at it
we know how it feels but wouldn't it be nice if we can actually measure it and
understand it and chart the progress so that we we know we have a little gadget
we can we can get a visual on when we are in that state that'd be pretty
useful right so heart rate variability moving to slide number two here it
simply means how much the heart rate varies in a given breath so when people
say that they have a heart rate of seventy that's not actually true that's
an average heart rate so if you have a normal heart rate variability and an
average heart rate of seventy that means your heart rate actually fluctuates from
about 60 to 80 and it does this with every single breath and that's a very
healthy and very normal thing to do so if you look at the graph it indicates
each heartbeat and depending on how long there is between the heartbeats it
determines the heart rate so no two heartbeats occur at the exact same
frequency they battery and this brings us back to what we've been talking about
in the previous sessions about the sympathetic nervous system which is
stress or fight flight and the parasympathetic nervous system which is
peace and healing and feed abri so your heart has a built-in pacemaker it will
beat it will pump blood no matter what but if we want it to be faster we have
to stimulate it that's what the sympathetic nervous
does and if we have to want it to read slower then we have to stimulate it with
parasympathetic stimulation so it's like this hard business machine that just
goes and goes but if we want it to speed up we give it some gas if we wanted to
slow down we put on the brakes and the heart does this with every single breath
that we take and the better it works the healthier we are and we call this
coherence between the heart and the brain and that is the state that we're
talking about so if you look at state number slight number three at the top is
it's labeled frustration that's what the heart rate variability looks like for a
given person is I'm not going to mess up the graph there it is basically very
very disorganized and totally haphazard there's no order to it at all but when
we find the state of appreciation when we find a state of coherence then
there's a very very nice and smooth sine wave and in the harbor eight indicating
that there's a good balance that the sympathetic and the parasympathetic are
taking turns so we're going to do a demo later and watch this also so in the last
20 years there's been a even ten years there's been a lot of new development in
this and there's a lot of nice little gadgets
for people that they can use for home use to measure and train this heart rate
variability we have one now that we're going to start using in this office it's
a brand-new product and the good thing is that it's a combination of a handheld
and a computer use so you can use it in both places you can carry it in your
pocket you can practice as you're driving or sitting in a meeting and then
it saves the session and you can upload it and take a look and see how you
progress over time so it's it's a training program and this particular
products called n way too and it's designed to increase coherence which is
again a state of synchronization between our brain and these two things when
we're talking about this very very prominent researchers and doctors and
authorities have named heart rate variability and coherence the number one
indicator of future health potential that's how big this is you can look at
someone's heart rate variability and their coherence and you can predict how
likely they are to have degenerative diseases in the future it is a very very
good correlation just a little bit of research that they've done on increase
coherence a lot of that has been done by a company called heart math and it's a
wonderful resource for you to go online they offer a lot of information at no
cost you can go in and check it out it has been shown to reduce blood pressure
that's the most commonly prescribed medication and we know that it's only a
stress response people have followed a series know that blood pressure is
nothing more than a stress response but here we have something that we can turn
it around it has been shown to have increased functional capacity in chronic
heart failure chronic heart failure means that the you
have a limited ability to pump blood and debris and by practicing this you can
actually increase your your breath capacity and your function with that
next improve asthma very common problem and we all know that aspect rates
there's more and more kids and more more people getting asthma because we have
more more stress here's another way we can turn it around it can improve
calmness and well-being well that's not a big deal who wants to feel good right
no big deal increase emotional stability
that would be a good thing improve cognitive performance how is that in
school and the workplace anybody want to function better cognitively see so all
of these things were talking about their quality of life they're there how well
do you function as a human being and even improve hormonal balance and we'll
we're going to look at some of these in more detail and then I have included a
cartoon here my favorites cartoonist glass Bergen there's this guy at the
doctor saying I've always been a high achiever always striving for bigger
faster greater and now suddenly I'm expected to settle for lower blood
pressure and less cholesterol and it's funny and we can laugh but it's sort of
it's sort of true also that we will lose perspective oftentimes that there's so
much go getting there's so much measurement of productivity but it
doesn't bring you many kudos if people ask well how many contracts did you land
today none but I felt really good and yet that's what life is about it's the
quality of life depends on we feel so we need to find some balance
and real quick just to get you give you an idea that this is becoming more and
more widespread the next slide who uses this technology we have individuals
corporations executives hospitals physicians mental health care facilities
government agencies police agencies pro athletes families schools pain clinics a
DD clinics ADHD clinics drug rehab clinics and weight loss clinics so this
is catching on people are are the cutting edge people researchers they're
starting to understand that this sort of technology is is a big deal so we're
using