 to analyze it. And he's going to talk about stress and heart rate variability. The app I believe is available for download. Is it Android and iOS? Yeah. And so I'm going to download it after the talk. And anyway, here's Jason. Morning. Is that good? Okay, so stress and heart rate variability. As we dive deeper into this ancestral health and ancestral living group society, we start to look at all different things like nutrition, environment, and physical activity, sleep, and all roads eventually kind of lead to stress and adaptation, right? Because as humans, we're basically a combination of our genetic makeup and then our adaptations to the cumulative stress throughout our life. That's who we are, right? And so this applies to everything from food sensitivities to, like I said, physical activity and recovery and movement, social connections, and all this stuff. So if we can identify sources of our stress and measure them and then we can start to improve them. Let me see if I got the right clicker here. First, I wanted to start off real quick. I have like 40 minutes worth of slides in 20 minutes of time, so I'm going to be maybe skipping through some of them. When I told people I was going to be giving a talk on stress, I often get, oh, less is better, right? And so in some cases, that's true, but in some cases, that's not really the case. Stress is not actually the enemy. It's essential for growth. It's essential for survival. If you saw, like Keith Norris's talk, for example, when astronauts go up into outer space, they don't experience enough physical stress on their body, their muscles and bones start deteriorating. That's a great example of how lack of stress is bad. And stress will never go away. So what we need to do is learn to manipulate or even dominate stress and make it work for us rather than against us. So where does stress come from? I'm going to kind of fly through this because if you've watched the other presentations at this symposium, you'll see that I'm not the first person to realize stress is pretty relevant to all these topics. And this is not an exhaustive list, but what I want to emphasize here is that all of these situations, environmental stressors, societal, digestive stressors, structural, emotional, physical, social, all of these things are related and they're all kind of drawing from the same tank in a certain way. And what one could look at this and say, wow, this is kind of depressing. There's so many things that are stressing us at all times. But I look at this as an opportunity to improve. And that's also what we've all, I think, kind of share in this ancestral living community, is an opportunity to improve a lot of our lifestyle things and overall give us a better capacity to handle stress. There's some more to that, but I'll just get through that real quick on stress, rat reactions and adaptations. So there's a few words that stress kind of triggers that I just want to make sure are clear to everybody. Homeostasis is kind of like your body's reaction that keeps you alive in reaction to what's going on around you. It helps regulate blood glucose, temperature, heart rate, etc. And allostasis, the next one down, some people consider that to just be kind of an advanced form of homeostasis. But that's when your body starts altering other areas of the body to kind of maintain that homeostasis and react to various situations. That's a real rudimentary definition, but you can Google it for sure. The main point is those two things in and of themselves are not really adaptation. And so as I mentioned early on, stress leads to adaptation. And so what we want to look at is how our bodies are adapting to stress. And so down here I've got two examples of positive adaptations because we kind of understand negative adaptations of like sitting and you know, depression and overwork and all these other different stress things. But there's also positive adaptations to stress, particularly hormesis. Hormesis is pretty good examples of hormesis or like an exercise that minimum effective dose of exercise to cause a positive adaptation in the body. Or even in I think where this term was coined was ingesting enough of a toxin to build your immune tolerance to that toxin. How about that? And then anti-fragility is kind of a topic I'm very interested in. I just thought I'd throw it in there. It brings a whole new light beyond hormesis to experience a positive adaptation in almost any amount of a stressor depending. And this is this is really easier to understand in mental stress because stressful situations that we perceive mentally, we can if we treat them in a positive manner, we can actually gain from them instead of lose from them. So that was just real quick overview of some of the reactions to stress that people talk about. So measuring stress by measuring our physiological reactions to stress and creating trends over time. This is kind of that biofeedback thing that's growing quite a bit. We're able to make better decisions about our exercise, our rest, our diet, our prioritize, our lifestyle choices. And that's what a lot of folks, sorry, I got away from this talk about in the ancestral living community. The adrenal stress index is it's a good measurement of your overall cortisol load and cortisol folks think of as the stress hormone. It measures a few other things. It's a saliva test like DHEA insulin and some immune immune function. If you saw Nora Gadgiatis's talk, she went into this a lot more. So I'm not going to go into this too much here. Another good one is tightness in the body. So for example, I've been battling for my whole life this kind of hunched over shoulders rolled forward position. And part of it may be for me specifically that I spend a lot of time sitting on a computer so physically. And I used to do a lot of push ups and never work my back. So those physical combinations caused a lot of tightness in my body. But at the same time, on the other side of that coin, lack of self confidence or emotional trauma in childhood could cause the same type of tightness, similar tightness of this kind of rolled forward position, right? So there's other ways that you can look at it. Breathing test is another one. If you're resting, but you have real shallow kind of chesty, like shoulder breathing like this, that could be an indication that you have some stress issues going on, whether physical, emotional, mental, etc. And then there's heart rate variability, which I'm going to talk more about today. I guess before I jump into this, a lot of those ways of measuring stress are kind of either subjective or you have to go in to get them measured. And heart rate variability is kind of a step towards putting this into your own hands with some objective data. And how it works in a nutshell, and you can actually just Google this since I'm short on time already, is heart rate variability is a snapshot of your autonomic nervous system. And your autonomic nervous system controls everything that happens automatically in your body. Over the 24 hour period, heart rate variability is actually primarily affected by like circadian rhythm and metabolism and core body temperature. But in a short period, it's primarily affected by the stressors and things that you're experiencing, right? And so we can take advantage of this. I guess real quick on this, more variability means basically you're in a restful recovery mode, and less variability is in your more of in a stressed or fight or flight situation. And so I already got my 10 minute warning. So I'll get I'll talk more about that in a second. But if you think about HRV heart rate variability as a snapshot of your stress load or capacity, it's kind of like showing you what your stress bank account looks like, right? And so if your stress account is full, you're fully recovered, fully rested, then maybe you'll be able to go get a good workout in or tackle some really stressful situations that day. Whereas if you're completely drained already, at the beginning of the day, you, you know that you may not benefit from some intense exercise, or eating some food that you may not should should be eating. So the biofeedback portion, heart rate variability used to be this really expensive measurement that required you to go into a place where they had a $20 or $30,000 machine to hook you up to with ECGs and measure your heart rate variability. And over time, the cost has drastically dropped to get this type of measurement. And even today, you can hook up to a smartphone with an app, and a consumer heart rate monitor that's like 50 or $60. And while those aren't perfect, there's a lot of room for growth in that technology. They are a really good step in the right direction. And it's a really, in my experience, an effective way of getting started on measuring your stress load and capacity and reaction to a lot of things. So these apps, if you allow you to start measuring your heart rate variability on a daily basis, which allows you to kind of become aware of what things in your lifestyle, what are what of these ancestral health topics actually are causing your stress to go up and down over time, right? It's and it's it's based on you, which is kind of neat, because every person's perception of stress is different. One thing that stresses me out may not stress another person out. And an example that I was talking with Keith Norris about was that power cleans stress a lot of people out, but it's almost like meditation for him. So, you know, it may affect him in a different way. So this is measured each morning. In the morning, your circadian rhythm and your metabolism and all these things are pretty similar from a day to day basis. So you're kind of eliminating that that 24 hour rise and fall of cortisol. And you're getting a snapshot of what your autonomic nervous system activity is like, based on your heart rate variability. And let's see. So we can I got some time to talk about this. So essentially, this screen line here, see if I get the screen line here is a rolling average of your heart rate variability each morning. And then each day, these bars represent your daily heart rate variability that morning. So you can see that basically, each day, you're comparing yourself to a rolling average of the previous days. And so this is all based off of you. And the power of this is that your individual reactions to stress are different than everyone else's. So you can see this is actually my data. And I'm measuring right now you can see afterwards how nervous I am. For the past two weeks, this is my data. And my average didn't change very much. But there were days when I was above average and able to handle more stress. And then there were days when I had a pretty drastic drop for a couple of days because either I worked out really hard or maybe my sleep wasn't as good. And those those data points are actually tracked and correlated with this, so that you can see what it is is a most often causing dips in your heart rate variability. Green means you're able to handle more stress that day. Yellow and red means you might consider doing some active recovery type exercises or some breathing exercises, which I'll try to get to in the presentation. And you can also see that my heart rate, which is not heart rate variability is just resting heart rate fluctuates quite a lot each morning. There's some where I get up close to 60 somewhere I'm down below 50 or and just FYI I'm measuring these in the bottom of a squat position, which is a personal preference. But you can see that heart rate is actually not always tracking with heart rate variability. So on this day right here, my heart rate was higher, but my heart rate variability was lower. Whereas this day, which was August 4 five days ago, my heart rate was higher, but my HRV was still pretty high. So I was stressed, but not in a way that required elevated heart rate apparently at that time. So that's why heart rate in and of itself can't always give us the picture of what we're looking for with our stress. So HRV in life. There's a lot of things that affect heart rate variability, breathing your Barrow reflex, which is like the essentially the flexing of your blood vessels and stiffness of them. But heart rate variability when tracked on a daily basis can show us a lot about our sleep quality, our postprandial postprandial, which is after your meal trends. And it allows you to start doing this stuff and gathering data about yourself, but really also helping you just become aware of the lifestyle choices that you're making through this ancestral community, and how they're affecting your body on a on a systemic in a systemic way. So I have some examples of those, which I'm going to get to. I just got the five minute warning. Let's just get to some case studies. When I was in Austin, Texas, I had the opportunity of meeting with Dr. Dennis Romig. And he actually is plugged into this community through Dr. Lane Sebring. Dr. Romig treats psychological issues. And he's also done a lot of corporate type team building type wellness things. But he got into using bio feedback through neuro feedback and EEG readings for depression and psychological issues. And then he found heart rate variability. And he started hooking folks up to a heart rate variability machine and measuring the effects of their stress and then having doing having them do breathing exercises while he was talking to them. And he said when I met with him, he was just really kind of launching into that. He had had 70 suicidally depressed patients come through since he started using heart rate variability. And he was able to completely reverse 69 out of the 70 people. They reversed all signs of depression and all he had them do was breathing exercises guided by heart rate variability. And so that just shows you kind of the power of what you're looking at on the mental and emotional side. Similarly, Dr. Kurt Perkins in Colorado Springs, he he promotes more health with less health care. He's a chiropractor by trade. But he like many chiropractors saw that lifestyle and an ancestral lifestyle and paleo lifestyle really promotes the recovery and improvement of his patients. So he got into that. And then he started using heart rate variability to kind of measure the progress of his patients improvement over time. And so he started getting such good results measuring the heart rate variability over time. And this was only once every six weeks that he was measuring for five minutes. So once every six weeks for five minutes, you wouldn't think is a very lot of data. But it was enough for him to actually stop using x rays to guide his manual adjustments, except in, of course, acute situations or situations where that's required time limit. So anyways, he started using heart rate variability to guide those manual adjustments and you know, create a better physical structure and also guide the nutrition and lifestyle choices towards improvement. And so he's experienced a lot of good improvement. Everybody from CrossFit athletes all the way through to, to folks that have been in car accidents and things like that. Let's see. Let's just get to the breathing portion because, okay, so heart rate variability. A lot of folks are familiar with it helps a lot with tracking your exercise. So if exercise is one of the main variables that you're adjusting on a daily basis, taking that daily heart rate variability reading is a great way to know when you're recovered from your exercise and how intense or, you know, adjust the duration, intensity, frequency, volume, or variety and complexity of that exercise on a daily basis. So that's, there's a lot of information about that on the internet. Breathing is one thing that I want to talk about real quick in my last 30 seconds is basically this is a shot of me standing and looking outside of a window just doing nothing. I'm just looking outside of a window and I measured my heart rate variability over the course of one minute, right? And so you can see that it's kind of a little bit all over the place. My heart rate's just kind of erratic and, which is the red line and the purple line is my heart rate variability over heart rate variability is an, is an average measurement. So of course it jumps up at the beginning and then it kind of smooths out over time to where it was around. What was that 63? And then I did right after that. I just started doing some guided breathing with seven breaths per minute in the same position doing the same thing immediately after. And you can see my heart rate right here all of a sudden looks like really smooth up and down. And there's seven of these one, two, three, four, five, six, seven exactly correlating with my breath. And my heart rate variability jumped up from what it was at 63 before to 76. So that's like 13 point improvement in my heart rate variability just from breathing. And so my point here is that little things like breath that you do and you may have heard of coherence training and things like that are very dependent on breath can actually activate your recovery systems and using heart rate variability. You can see that happen objectively and you can actually boost your capacity to handle other stressors and recover better from the stressors that you've already experienced and, you know, generally improve your whole situation. So that was the thing that was guiding me breathing, but it's much smoother. I'm done. I have to be done. So Thank you, Jason. Unfortunately, don't have time for questions. But before you leave, what's the name of your app and how do we find it? Sure. I guess I could show it. It's Elite HRV. You can email me at Jason at elitehrv.com. I'll be here for questions too, and I have cards and things like that. But all right, thanks everybody. And we're going to resume in about 10 minutes. Dr. Josh Turknet is going to talk about migraine headaches in its relationship to the hypothalamus.