And welcome back to the Wellness Paradox podcast . I'm so grateful that you can join us on this journey towards greater human flourishing . As always , I'm your host , michael Stack , an exercise physiologist by training and a health entrepreneur and a health educator by trade , and I'm fascinated by a phenomena I call the Wellness Paradox .
This paradox , as I view it , is the trust , interaction and communication gap that exists between fitness professionals and our medical community . This podcast is all about closing off that gap by disseminating the latest , most evidence-based and most engaging information in the health sciences . And to do that , in episode 114 , we're joined again by Dr Matthew Letterman .
Dr Letterman joined us again in episode 104 to talk about his book Wellness to Wonderful and this conversation is a bit of an extension of that discussion . We talk broadly about wellness in the conversation in the book Wellness to Wonderful in episode 104 .
Here we're going to get much more specific around the role of regulating the parasympathetic nervous system and its role in rest , recovery , connection and overall health .
And while that may seem like an overly technical subject to get into and we certainly are going to talk about some of the technical nuances of the parasympathetic nervous system this is very much a practical skill-building endeavor to provide more calm during our day , and Dr Letterman and his colleagues have actually developed a device that they call WeBeCalm .
That's W-E-B-E-K-A-L-M . Webecalm . That is a structured way to develop the skill of calming through breath work , and so that's really what this conversation is around .
It's about how we regulate our breath and how we regulate our state through a simple tool to drive a certain level of restorative calm during our day , which can lead to better health and better connection . This episode is chock full of a lot of great information on the topic that probably a lot of us haven't been very acquainted with at all .
Maybe we think back to our undergraduate physiology classes to think about the parasympathetic nervous system . So I think this is going to be a really insightful discussion that you're going to learn quite a bit from . I know I did .
Any information we'd like to share with you from today's episode can be found on the show notes page that's been going to wellnessparadoxpodcom forward slash , episode one , one four . Please enjoy this conversation with Dr Matthew Letterman . Today . We're delighted to be joined again by Dr Matthew Letterman . Matthew , thank you so much for joining us .
Oh , thank you for having me . We're excited to have you back . You are on an episode 104 with Alona to talk about your book Wellness to Wonderful , and we were just talking before we got on the air . It sounds like that's going well and you guys are just looking to expand what you can do in the wellness space .
So we're going to talk about a different topic today and , as I was just saying to you , this is actually a topic I don't know a lot about .
I'm not really excited to have the conversation but before we get into it , just in case people missed episode 104 , why don't you give us a little bit of an idea of your background before we launch into this conversation ?
Yes , I'm an internal medicine trained physician . Then I went on to specialize in nutrition and lifestyle medicine to really learn and then eventually apply with patients how diet pretty aggressive , I would call it almost diet change affects the outcomes of disease and your physical health .
And then from there went on to get certified in nonviolent communication , so certified trainer there , that's another four year training and that allowed me to then to bring in connection and look at connection and the impact on health . And I saw that and that's part of what we do is teach about the impact of connection on health and actual physical outcomes .
How you connect to the people affects your physical health . And then nonviolent communication is how we is the tool we use to teach people . So connection is not just about going to the movies with somebody . It's about that compassionate , authentic sharing , that scary honesty .
It's the removal , the elimination of artificial harmony where you're suppressing your truth to try and maintain harmony , and then from there , so that's really added to our healing paradigm .
And then , most recently , bringing in regulation of the nervous system and how regulating the nervous system , getting out of fight or flight , getting the sympathetic and parasympathetic tone more in balance or appropriately triggered right instead of over triggering sympathetics and how that affects your health , and then that affects your ability to connect , which affects your
ability to all the healthy lifestyle habits and we want are impacted . So it's sort of like a downstream one hit domino effect . And anyway , that's where we are today and talking to you . I love how you're so open to all these different ways of helping people get healthier and optimize life .
Yeah , absolutely . It's such a it's such a fascinating path that you've traveled , as you've tried to help people lead healthier , more well lifestyles and and you hit the nail on the head we are going to have this conversation around the role the nervous system plays . We're going to talk a little bit about an app you developed called we be calm .
We'll get to that towards the end , but just to level set this discussion . You know we were a bunch of exercise physiologist and exercise professionals listening to this podcast . I think we all know very well what the sympathetic nervous system does , because that's the thing that you know amps up when we exercise .
We don't , we don't an exercise physiology and an exercise . We don't tend to think as much about the parasympathetic nervous system . So can you just give us , like a high level Physiology 101 sympathetic , parasympathetic and , specifically , you know why you're focusing on the parasympathetic nervous system with regard to the work you're doing ?
I guess I think of them as a balance a year and a half . There are two sides of a coin that you want to be able to turn on and off as needed . So you want to be able to turn on the sympathetic , sympathetic nervous system for activity and performance . Then you want to be able to turn that off most effectively to recover and heal and grow .
I need the parasympathetics to come on and the sympathetic to go off right . So that to me is from a from an exercise performance perspective , right , if that's all you care about . You know , a chronically mobilized or sympathetic , like over over sympathetic drive , right , that is an exhausted body . It functions suboptimally , eventually shutting down into immobilization .
If , if the chronic mobilization is not addressed , so you'll actually shut down and you just will feel you just won't have energy , do anything , you know and that , and the body can't stay mobilized forever . So what you really want to do is be able to turn on sympathetic when you need them and then have the parasympathetics come on .
Put us back into a calm , safe , healing , growth , reproduce , right , that type of places where we want to live most of the time . And that's a it's think of it like a muscle that you have to train Right . You can't just turn it on , everybody doesn't just turn it on the same , but the same effectiveness , right ?
Yeah . So , as I've often said , it's , you know , sympathetic and this is an oversimplification is kind of your fight or flight , and your parasympathetic is kind of your rest in digest .
Now it seems like we're in a world where we're kind of just even set exercise aside , we're just kind of always going and always on almost sympathetic overdrive just with the way our life's or structures .
Is that , you see that , with the other people you work with , the patients you work with , and is that , is that part of the genesis behind some of the work you're doing here ?
Yes , so that is a problem everybody is dealing with is over stimulation ? Yeah Right , they .
And this is the only thing that's important to understand is that when I talk about sympathetic , those go on in response to perceived threat , and that threat can be an actual tiger in the room you could cut yourself with a knife , but it can also be emotional or thought , and your body , physiologically speaking , responds to physical threat and mental or emotional
threats exactly the same way . It looks the same physiologically speaking . So when people are worried and there are all these needs and there's emotional needs that are not being met , their body is going to mobilize into a threat , physiology the same as if they were about to be attacked by a tiger in the room .
So that is the problem , though , is the tiger you can run away from , but you can't run away from your thoughts .
Yeah , well said , and I think it is important to really distinguish that this is a real or perceived threaten and that our world is so threatening in general nowadays . It seems that this is a really important topic to talk about . So let's pull this into the realm of our audience of fitness and exercise professionals .
On some level , it's obvious why we need to be thinking about this , but it's also a nuanced conversation . So , for the exercise professionals that are listening to this , for starters , why is this something important for them to be considering ?
So why would an exercise physiologist have to worry about this , or why should they concern themselves with this ?
Yes , because I think we think as exercise professionals sometimes simplistically like hey , we work with the body , we make sure people can exercise and be fit . Yeah , this kind of seems like an emotional thing . How does this really affect what I'm doing with somebody ? I think would be the oversimplified way to look at this .
So , from your perspective , as someone who is a physician and works with people to lead healthier , more well lives , how would you frame this up as something important for the exercise profession ?
Yeah . So I would say that science is getting very clear that you can't separate the two anymore . Your emotional , your mental states affect your body and your physical health . So it affects inflammation . When you are in a state of threat physiology , you increase inflammation .
Inflation is a good thing if you're trying to heal tissue damage or prepare for tissue damage you're about to be attacked or infected , but it's not good to stay in that chronically . So when you're trying to optimize growth and restore muscle after breakdown , let's say that sympathetic drive is not where you want to be .
You want to be in a state of perceived safety and the physiology that goes along with perceived safety is going to optimize your ability to repair , grow and heal .
So if people are trying to build muscle , or people are trying to repair after a long run , or people are trying to prevent injury , like even muscle tightness and at the spindle level , there's some impact of being in threat physiology versus safety physiology and it's very much beneficial to be living in safety physiology as much as possible , except in those moments
where you need the sympathetic burst , a hard workout , that's sympathetic , but then you want to very quickly be able to turn on the parasympathetics and that is a learned and optimized function . It's something that you can improve .
Yeah , and that's the exciting part of this conversation , because I think sometimes , particularly with the nervous system , we kind of think it is just this automated series of things that happen in our body , but there is the ability to control and regulate it . So let's get into that . And I don't know the best way to dive into this topic .
If we want to start with , kind of , we be calm and what your thoughts were around how you develop that , and then pull this into a more general discussion , or if you want to go the other way , start general and work your way to that , so we be calm .
So we become . We created we become , which is there's a device and it's a brand and there's other tools .
But the we become device which would , I guess , read like that , is it's a tube and then it has an attachment at the end here , which is the indicator , and you can attach it on and then you blow and what happens is you breathe in through your nose and you blow out through the tube , and the tube restricts airflow in a way that is , to blow out comfortably
, you've got to blow out slowly and then when you blow out , you see the ball . It holds the ball up . So what we did was we created this for children and adults and you want to try and hold the ball up for a count of 10 children . We tell them , based on your age , hold it up for that number of seconds . Do that .
So , for example , I would hold it out for 10 , try and do an exhale for 10 seconds and then repeat that five times and then check back in , see how I'm feeling and then maybe do another round of five . If I would , if I would find myself enjoying it .
And then I tell people to do this when they wake up , before meals and when they go to bed or whenever they feel like they need it . I have one in my car when I'm driving , I have one by my desk and I just use it in between meetings . I'll do five breaths through the WeBeCom device and it's really helpful to just say I'm going to regulate that .
Slow exhale is one of the most powerful exercises to strengthen the parasympathetic nervous system . It's one of the ways that we can trigger the calm and turn on the calm , turn on the parasympathetic nervous system . So I'm going to stop there and see if you have any questions or I can elaborate a little bit more .
I'd like to take a quick break from today's episode to tell you a little bit more about one of our strategic partners as a podcast .
As many of you know , the Wellness Paradox is all about closing off the trust , interaction and communication gap between fitness professionals and the medical community , and no organization does that better than the Medical Fitness Association . They are the professional member association for the medical fitness industry .
This is the industry that integrates directly with healthcare in many facilities throughout the entire country . The MFA is your go-to source for all things medical fitness . They provide newsletters , webinars . They even have standards and guidelines for medical fitness facilities .
They do events around the entire country and , most importantly , they are one of the more engaging networks in the entire fitness industry . They personally have benefited from the network that I've developed through the Medical Fitness Association , and I highly recommend that all of you that are interested in solving the Wellness Paradox engage with the MFA .
To find out more about the Medical Fitness Association , you can go to their website , medicalfitnessorg . That's medicalfitnessorg . Now back to today's episode . Yeah , I'm definitely going to want you to elaborate , but a couple of things here For those of you that are listening on the podcast and not watching .
We're going to make sure we link up to the device that Matt was just talking about , so you can see it . I also will say it's Michigan , it's the winter , and driving here right now causes me to realize I definitely should have one of these in my car . So I feel like there's multiple times where I need to be a little bit more calm driving in the snow .
But yeah , let's dive in further . I mean , essentially , this is a structured breath work device , which I find fascinating . You often hear the talk about the importance of breath work and meditation and things like that , but essentially , you've developed a device that makes the process a little bit more structured .
So dive a little bit further into how this works and what's happening , because the device is simple in and of itself , so let's maybe understand a deeper level .
So that's very good . So there's three parts of calming that the device addresses . One is the slow exhale . Two is its focused attention on keeping the ball aloft . Focused attention is another way to stimulate turn on the parasympathetics .
The third is out of the back , out of the hole , when you have the indicator on , you hear a white noise and there's auditory regulation that happens as a result of that sound . So you put all three together and it's a very powerful way to stimulate calm and turn on the parasympathetics .
With children , we add in a fourth piece there's a bracelet that comes and it says we be in this together . And there's a fourth pathway of calm which is co-regulation .
We have a large one for the parent and a small one for the child and the idea is to put that on and I see that during the day and if I look at it , I might take a couple of breaths on the weebee calm . Or my kids if they see that I'm getting tense and they notice that I'm getting a little worked up .
That's my sympathetic coming on , likely unnecessarily . It's probably a mental or emotional threat that I could handle actually more effectively if I was calm , that peaceful and alert , versus the way I sometimes am when I'm not in that peaceful state . So the kids will hold up the bracelet and say , hey , dad , you think you would enjoy the weebee calm .
Or vice versa , I'll hold it up for them and I'll say , hey , you think you'd enjoy the weebee calm ? So it's not a punishment , it's actually a say hey , let's use that tool to help us calm and regulate . And that's the idea , is that it's there and that it's top of mind .
We all can breathe anytime we want , but a lot of us are taking shallow , quick breaths . So this is one . Sometimes kids will say I am calm and I'll say , hey , can you do the weebee calm ? And if you're not calm , it'll be hard to hold the ball up for 10 seconds . It's hard to have that slow exhale when you're dysregulated or sympathetically driven .
You're breathing fast and hard . So it's helpful . Of course you can breathe slowly on your own , you can focus your attention on your own , you can find white noise on your own , but this puts it together and just makes it a little bit easier . And it's right there . So it's a symbol .
So when you see it at your desk , you see it in your car or you see it with you , give it to your kids or you're using in front of your kids and they see you using it , Everybody starts working together and think of calm and training the parasympathetic nervous system like nutrients in your diet . You got to get a slew of nutrients throughout the day .
It's not a one time you get one nutrient , you're done for the day . The more nutrients you get , the better . Same thing with calm . Think of it as calming nutrients . So it's not about doing a meditation once a day .
It'd be better to do a couple of breaths on the weebee calm many times during the day than just a single 30 minute meditation and then the rest of your day is in sympathetic drive and mobilize state all day . Did that make sense ? I really would like to be able to pepper this in throughout the day , and this device really helps people do that .
Yeah , that makes all the sense of the world . I'll use an analogy that a lot of our audience will be familiar with . From a protein synthesis standpoint , you need protein spaced out throughout the day to optimize protein synthesis .
If you had 200 grams all at once , that's not going to do much to optimize your protein synthesis , but space out 50 grams four times and you have something that's going to optimize protein synthesis . This is very much the same thing , just judging by how my day goes .
Sometimes I need to interspersed calm more frequently in my day than I need to interspersed protein , so that does make a lot of sense .
Yeah , I like that analogy and the more people can do it , just like I said , even if it's just a couple of breaths , if you're doing that between every meeting right , so let's say you have a Zoom meeting , one hour meetings you are going to feel noticeably different at the end of the day , let alone after a week of doing it .
So I tell people to experiment . I put one by my bed , I have one by my desk , I have one in my car .
They're not very expensive and that was one of our goals was to make it very affordable , because some of the devices are more , are much more expensive or they are geared towards problems , and ours is really you can address problems , but we really want it just like we talk about in the book wellness to wonderful .
We want to focus on what we want , not just what we don't want . Right , when do we want to be ? What does success look like ? What does optimal health look like ? Life is wonderful , Not , oh . How do we get rid of this problem ? Although most people start problem focused , they want to get rid of a pain point , but my hope is that people see this .
Using it every hour , a couple of breaths , super helpful .
The couple of things I really like about this is that when people talk about meditation , I meditate myself and I tell other people about how I benefit from it , and the first thing they will tell me is I don't have time to meditate or , oh my God , I don't know if I wanna sit there for 20 minutes and just try to be present .
This shrinks the change to a great extent . This , as you said , this is not sitting there listening to the birds for 20 minutes . This is something that you do in a short interval . The other thing I like is you've kind of gamified breath work to a certain degree .
Hold the ball at the top of the tube is a little bit of a way to , as you said , allow that focused attention , but it's also a little bit of gamification and it's a tangible way to do breath work .
So I really think it's a neat way to go about doing something that I think a lot of people know is beneficial , but don't have a structured way to do it .
Yeah , I like that , and that's part of the goal is to make it fun , not a weight , not heavy , all right , really gamify it , make it accessible , make it easy Meditation .
Let me give you an idea around meditation that I found really helpful is that ask somebody when you're dysregulate , when you're mobilized to fight a threat , right , you're preparing to fight a tiger in the room , even if it's a mental threat . It's the same physiology . So imagine if I put a tiger in the room and then I said can you sit and meditate ?
You're gonna say what are you kidding me ? There's a tiger to fight . So what I tell people is you've got to regulate and then it'll be easier to meditate . Right , so get yourself .
So I find that people , if they do the wee be calm , they'll say okay , now I can actually sit for a few minutes , right , people that say they can't meditate are usually people that are really mobilized . They have too much or excessive amounts of sympathetic tone and they don't have enough parasympathetic tone in their autonomic nervous system .
So that's a good sign . If you say I can't meditate , I just can't sit , there's usually some excess sympathetic drive that will actually be addressed or at least supported by the wee be calm .
Yeah , you make such a great point , you have to be in the appropriate state to even wanna start thinking about engaging in that .
Right and meditation . I'm not saying that meditation can't help you calm , like if you practice meditating when you are dysregulated . If you have an experienced meditator , they can get back to that calm state because they've practiced it .
I'm talking about people that won't even sit down to practice it because they wanna jump out of their skin if you ask them to be still . Those are the people that are so dysregulated that doing some of this helping them feel safe they're shifting into safety physiology is beneficial , so then they can actually meditate and get all the benefits for meditation .
I love meditation , I meditate regularly , but this is I find this a helpful path .
Yeah , absolutely . We're only scratching the surface in this discussion and I definitely , in a second , wanna talk about where people can go to find the wee , be calm .
But before we get to that , if people are listening to this conversation and it's the first time they've engaged with some of the things that you're talking about regulating the parasympathetic nervous system is there any good places you can point people to go to learn about this ?
Because , again , this is not something that's typically coming up in an exercise science or an exercise physiology curriculum , except for that one or two classes in physiology 101 . So do you have any suggestions of places to go ?
Yeah , so we write about this in our book Wellness to Wonderful a little bit . Again , we do it at a higher level If people wanna really dive in , sort of . One of the fathers of this is Stephen Porges' work on polyvagal theory . So if they look up polyvagal theory they'll get a ton of information around this . And you really .
The goal is to think about it like a guitar that was tuned too tight , and that's how people are . Your sympathetic drive is way tightened and you want to retune the guitar so that it's not so tight and that the music is a little calmer and not that high-pitched sound .
So your body , think of your on-on-on nervous system as if you have excess sympathetic drive . That it's just a guitar we need to retune , and one of the best ways to retune it is through the pathways we put together in the Weebecom .
But reading about it might help people feel more comfortable and trust that this is something that's worth investing their time and energy .
Absolutely , and I want to point out we've been talking about this for the fitness professional to use with their patient or their client . But I'm not in this stage of my career anymore , but at one point I was from client to client to client or patient to patient to patient I'm sure like you were when you were a practicing physician in an office every day .
I also see this as a great tool to be able to regulate yourself during a day where you're flying from one person to the next and you really have to truly be present with each individual patient or client you're with . Sometimes that's hard to do when you're not stopping during your day .
So I think not only is this a great tool for clients and patients , but for the professional as well , and in fact it may even be a more important tool for the professional themselves , so they can be in the right state to help their client or their patient .
Right , and that's what I like about the we Become is you don't have to use it and bring it everywhere , right , but it's really helpful to have , like I said , on your desk , by your bed , in your car . You can use it out at the gym , let's say .
But if you're embarrassed because , yeah , you don't want to pull out a device in front of everybody , one the back end pulls off so you can just keep this in your pocket and it's just and it's quiet .
There's no noise when you pull off the indicator , but you also , by doing it all day , every day , it's very easy to then build that muscle so that when you're at the gym you can do the same type of we Become breaths , but you take off sort of the training tool and then when you go home you see it so it reminds you to do it , it trains you know you
do it through the device , so you make sure you're getting it done correctly .
But we've had kids where my partner tells a story and my partner we Become tells a story about his daughter who used it and she was going up to a water slide that was really high and she was looking and very quiet and he asked what she was doing and she said I'm doing my we Be breaths Right , so she was preparing .
She was gonna be scared and normally the dad said he would have said come on , just do it , you can do it .
But instead she now has a tool that she learned the breathing and , even though she never did the device because she had done it regularly at home , she was able to use it and notice in her body which is another piece being able to notice when your body is dysregulated and be able to say , okay , if I do this , these breaths , my body's gonna feel differently
and I'm gonna be able to do something that I wanna do without just fighting through it and forcing myself . You actually shipped her physiology and she was able to do that , which was pretty cool , so that type of learning can happen relatively quickly .
Yeah , and that's the important thing I think to emphasize here is that this is a skill . I think that people tend to think there are just calm people in the world and there are not calm people in the world , but this many , many things is a skill that can actually be learned , and the Weebecom is the tool to help build the skill .
Yeah , I challenge . It's similar to diet and lifestyle . If you change , it's like the food always works . If you eat a healthier diet , right , numbers are gonna get better , weight's gonna get better , health is gonna get better , right , it's not a question . If you do the work with the breathing right , your auto-nurse nervous system is going to heal right .
That tuning of the guitar will happen right . It's not a question of , oh , does it gonna work for me ? Maybe I'm not a calm person . No , there's some people that naturally may have a calmer fizzy out . You know sort of way they see the world , or they're less likely to perceive threat , right .
But in general , especially in the Western society , we're going to be very good at mobilizing our nervous systems and we're not going to have a lot of experience of turning on that safety physiology .
But if you do the breathwork and to me it's about doing it throughout the day it's not exercising once for four hours every two weeks , it's about doing a little bit of exercise every single day would be much better . It's the same way with the breathwork , and that's the point of this .
Yeah , that's great . Where can people go to find out more about this , the work you're doing ? Where can they actually find the WeBeCom device itself ? We'll link up to this on the show notes page .
Yeah , so if they go to webecomcom and we spell WeBe , it's W-E-B-E-K-A-L-Mcom you can get all sorts of information . You can buy it there comes with , like I said , it comes with the bracelets .
We also have a column there where we help parents with their children around connection , because the idea is to introduce this with children is not a punishment or something wrong with you , but hey , we all could use help finding calm and right now the only tool parents have is to yell at their kids to calm down . At least that's the tool my parents had .
So is there another tool to help people with that as well ? That is the goal . So on the website we also have ways of connecting , because a connection is a big part of what we do with your children . We coach parents and families around something we call collaborative , non permissive parenting style .
So there's all sorts of other information to support people parents with children . But I think for your audience , just to help people have a tool that helps them keep , maintain their accountability and awareness around . Let's do this a little bit throughout the day and see how we feel , and I would love to hear from people if they experiment .
It's almost like I talk to people about when we get them to stop smoking , we just say chew the knicker at gum . And I feel bad for the patients because you're taking away some really great pieces that the act of smoking , despite how unhealthy it is , provides . For example , you go out every hour and take 20 deep inhales .
I'm unfortunate you're doing it on a cigarette , but imagine doing every going outside every hour to take 20 deep breaths and then to do that with a couple other friends . Yeah , let's go out and get a cigarette . Right , they go out with friends . They had a little bit of community . They take a break from their work .
They take 20 deep inhales and they go back upstairs Right . So to me , if we could just get rid of the cigarette and you go outside every hour with some friends and take 20 deep inhales and 20 , sorry , 20 slow exhales , right , they go a quick inhale and they blow out the smoke slowly . Right , that's how they tend to smoke .
It's super effective for helping your body . But I want to be very clear . I'm not saying people should smoke People . If you cut this the wrong way , it could sound like I'm recommending smoking . So be careful . But the point is slow , regular , deep exhalations fantastic for your health .
Yeah , absolutely yeah . I don't think anyone thinks you're advocating for smoking , but that's a confidence . But again , you do make a good point . There are those other elements to it , that the social component certainly being one of them that makes a strong difference .
That's my thought . Imagine if everybody said , hey , I wanted to create a campaign for this , where we said , hey , let's have everybody go out and do ebcom breaks , where they go out together , they do 10 exhales and they go back in . They do that every hour for a day . I mean I can only imagine how great people would feel . And I don't think people realize .
I used to say this with nutrition too . If you're eating the American diet , the standard American diet , you don't realize how bad you're feeling because you don't know any different . But when you start to switch over to the healthy diet , you're like , wow , do I feel good ?
Right , and that's the same thing with people that have sympathetic drive and they're used to it their whole lives and it's sort of overdrive . You don't realize how great it feels to be experienced calm , in that parasympathetic tone , until you start to try it .
Yeah , I couldn't agree more I've said this many times is you don't know how bad you were feeling until you started to feel better , and it just it is that it is really profound that I think again , a lot of a lot of my audience in this podcast , you know , thinks about this in terms of you know , physical things , and they would agree with the statement that
we just said wholeheartedly with exercise , I think the exciting thing with anything that is a Psychological and emotional benefit is that that is much more , you know , cute and proximal to you doing the activity .
When we work with people to improve their Hypertension or their high cholesterol , you're working for a long period of time Before you're starting to see those improvements in the actual metrics .
The the mental health and well-being benefits of something like this are Much more immediate , and so I think that that's the exciting part about this is that if you do it , you're gonna see the dividends you know very close to when you're doing it , which makes it a reinforcing process right , it happens quickly Pro-inflammatory cytokines and anti-inflammatory cytokines .
They're sort of in balance with each other . Based on knee , those are released quickly , within minutes . Right , based on what's going on in your environment . So when you breathe , you're going and you do these slugs elation , but you're gonna shift from more pro-inflammatory to more anti-inflammatory cytokines , right ?
So what we want , what I would love for people to they don't realize I how much this is going to affect their ability to Make healthier diet choices , to exercise , to recover after exercise . And I would love for people To do an experiment where they have this around and they're taking breath , they're doing breath work . It's five breaths , let's say .
You know , between meetings , when you wake up , when you go to bed , before meals , people , when they before they , if they do more meals , we found that they are more aligning with their behaviors and their intentions . Their behaviors are more congruent with their intentions .
So , if they want to eat healthier , taking five breaths on the we be , we become before you eat , sort of gets you centered , gets you focused towards care for your self care and hey , how do I want to show up in this meal ? And and when I eat .
So it has so many ways that , even though it seems like it's not a big deal Well , it's just breathing right it actually is a huge deal , and if people try this , I would love to hear them Tell us hey , I did this for a week where I used it this you know this often , regularly , and after a week I noticed some of these differences .
I think they're gonna be impressed .
Yeah , absolutely . Well , we will link up to the website on the show notes page with that encouragement for people to reach out . You know , matt , last time we talked , we talked about a book . This time we talked , we talked about this device . I'm , I'm excited for you know what's gonna come next .
It just seems like you keep , you know , iterating in the wellness space . So I'm really appreciate you taking the time to chat with us today on the wellness paradox , and we look forward to chatting with you again soon about something else exciting .
Hey , thanks so much , Michael . I really appreciate your help and your support .
Thank , you Well . I hope you enjoyed that conversation with dr Letterman as much as I did . If you found it insightful and informative , please share with your friends and colleagues . Those shares make a big difference for us . Any information we'd like to share with you from today's episode can be found on the show notes page .
It's by going to wellness paradox pod com forward slash episode 114 . On the show notes page You'll also notice an email address that's calm , calm at . We be calm with a K Dot com . As dr Letterman mentioned in the episode , if you do try the device for a couple of weeks and you do notice some difference , these email him .
This is a great informal study that we can all take part in to actually see how this device Better regulate your physiology , your calm and your recovery throughout the day . So I'm really excited for you and our audience to be able to participate in that little informal experiment .
We look forward to chatting again in a couple of weeks when our next episode drops . Please don't forget to subscribe through your favorite podcast platform . Until we chat again next , please be well .