For most people, it is something that derails us from a psychological and a physiological perspective.
Welcome to the high performance health podcast with your host, Angela Foster. The show where we talk about everything you need to break through limits and achieve a high performance, mind, body and lifestyle.
Hi, Friends this week on bite size bio hacks, we're going to be diving again into insights insights that you can track easily at home with simple wearables like the whoop or the aura ring, or even a new device that's launching next month called Hanu that I've been experimenting with in terms of tracking my own HRV. You're going to hear from Dr. Jay Wiles in this short clip about what heart rate variability is and how we can really utilise it as a tool for understanding our own levels of stress. Because the key things as Dr. Jay says, are a to develop self awareness and then be to learn to self regulate. So often people kind of hit a health problem, and they weren't aware that it was on that horizon, it wasn't coming along or they reach burnout. And they didn't realise the steps that were happening along the way in terms of their own physiology and their psychology, that actually could have been tracked with something as simple as heart rate variability, because it's such a great metric in terms of recovery. Now, you can also listen to a full episode that I did with Dr. Jay, some time ago, it was episode 61 of the podcast. But he's also coming back on the show. And really, so this is a clip from a new episode that's coming out with him. But if you're not tracking HRV already, I would definitely encourage you to do so I've been experimenting a little bit recently with the whoop. As you know, I'm a big fan of aura, we have updated their metrics to really take account of menstrual cycle tracking. And so I've been enjoying that and actually seeing the strain across the month and how it actually really does assess my psychological level of strain in addition to things like my workouts, but also it gives real time advice on how you can accommodate your strain and your training across the menstrual cycle. And so you're actually telling me my luteal phase that I've hit while I'm doing a workout, you've hit your desired level of strain for that, that time of the month. So kind of experimenting with it. As I say I've only been using it again now for about three weeks. But it's looking good so far. And as you know, over these bite sized bio hacks episodes, what I'm really doing is taking you through elements of my shift protocol, and that is sleep hormones, insights, fuel, which is I right down into flow, so food, light, oxygen and water in terms of the way you feel your body. And then the T is training the body and mind. And we've been working our way through those over the last few weeks with starting out with sleep and then hormone optimization. And now last week, and this week, we're looking at insights. If you'd like to get a check on how you're doing on these elements of shift, you can do so completely complimentary, all you need to do is head over to your total health check.com and take a simple questionnaire and we will send you a free personalised report. With your scores on each area. You can do this as many times as you want. So you can track this over time. But we will show you your overall health percentage score, and also the individual percentages for each element of shift with personalised recommendations on how you can improve each area. So just head over to your total health check.com. And you can access it all over there. But now let me introduce you to this short clip from Dr. Jay wiles.
One of the single greatest detriments to the human body, the thing that has the most deleterious effects on wellbeing and on longevity, is when we experience a stressor, which is inevitable, something that could be utilised for good, depending on how we kind of take that stressor and take that experience, and then shift our focus. But the problem is, is that for most people, it is something that derails us from a psychological and a physiological perspective. So many people that I see experience a stressor, and that, for the most part should be benign to the body, but becomes quite malignant. And the reason it becomes quite malignant to the body is because it has compounded over time, whether it's work stressors, whether it's relational stressors, you know, whatever it whatever it is even an overtaxing of the body due to physiological stress, working out overexposure to zone five training or sun or cold exposure, a lot of things that the biohacking community are really into right now. These things can work for us. But if they're unaddressed or if we don't see how they're significantly affecting our physiology, well then we might be missing something pretty big. We might be walking around completely draining our adrenals completely draining our HPA axis and completely draining our resources from the nervous system perspective. So you know, I kind of like Because the old adage of like, what gets what gets measured gets what's, what's the what's the old adage? I was gonna say it's what gets measured.
Anybody can't change. Yeah. Oh, the other way. You can't change. You can't change what you don't measure. Yeah.
And I think that and I think that does hold true to the nervous system, a lot of people don't realise the effects of stress until they finally just burn out. And they're like, Well, I didn't see that coming. Well, you could have seen it coming if you were measuring it? Or if you were more self aware, which is really what honno? Does it trains to different things. How do we become more self aware of how stress physiological and psychological and manifests in the same way? How do we become more self aware of what is affecting us and how it's affecting us. And then how do we better self regulate, those are the two primary key components that we really must address. And the reason that we must address those is because again, we don't want to eventually get down the road, and we completely burn out. And now we're talking about like Mount Everest is in front of us, in order for us to get back to just feeling normal or baseline, we want to catch it when it happens, and then regulate it when it happens. Because if we condition, a response that is different than our normal response, maybe our normal response to stress is avoidance. Or maybe it's getting overly kind of like indulging in work, or overly indulging in food or overly indulging in whatever it is, that's maybe not so great or adaptive to us. We create these B habits, these habits and behaviours that allow us from a cognitive perspective, to just avoid doing any of the real self regulation work because we have other things that are quote, unquote, effective in helping us to regulate our nervous system, when in fact, they're actually quite bad for us, they're quite maladaptive for us. So if we take the approach that when our nervous system takes a hit, and we use that stress for good, so this is a mindset thing, or we transition to self regulating through biofeedback or exercises, or meditation, or whatever type of approach really is effective for us, then we're conditioning the ability for our bodies and our physiology to respond that way, when it occurs again, and again, and again, as it inevitably will. One thing that I want to point out, because I think it is something that's not mentioned very frequently, is that stress inherently is a good thing. Stress is not bad. Stress, at its core is actually there to serve as a warning sign, it is a warning sign to say, Hey, this is something that is potentially threatening to you. This is something that could potentially harm you. Do you want to use this? Do you want to flee away from it? Or do you want to fight it? These are kind of like our ways of dealing with a stressor that's in front of us. And we have to make the decision on how we encounter that stress. Do we allow it? Do we make the decision to allow it just to consume us and really affect us negatively? Or do we say, yeah, I get it, it sucks. Like this thing is really tough. It's really difficult. But the only way for me to continue to make myself tougher is to develop the self regulation skills. Because we know that if we do this over and over and over again, this is going to increase our overall emotional regulation, it's gonna increase our self control. And we know that these those two components, emotional regulation and self control are very much intertwined with where our heart rate variability is, but also longevity. So longevity is the one thing that I think a lot of the health and wellness and biohacking community has really focused on. But they don't focus on this component of self regulation and self control. And they don't focus on this component of emotional regulation and how important that is, some are, but I think other people are really focusing on Oh, nutrition or exercise or whatever else is kind of more sexy, then putting in the work of breathwork and biofeedback and emotional regulation. Yep, says Charles, a long winded answer, not that.
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