(upbeat music) - Welcome to the Confidence Through Health podcast. My name is Jerry Snyder as a health wellness and sports performance coach. My goal each week is to bring you experts to help you take control of your health and build your self-confidence. Thanks for including me today on your journey to better health. As an elite level runner and coach, I'm excited to introduce you to the All-In Running Club. The All-In Running Club exists to help you become a better runner. Whether you're a beginner, an elite runner, or anywhere in between, the mission of the All-In Running Club is to give you the tools you need to find your success in running. Join today to take advantage of the 75% off yearly membership rate offer. Click the link below in the show notes to learn more. So wanna thank you, Torco, for being a guest on the Confidence Through Health podcast. - Thank you so much for having me, Jerry. So interesting to, I've been listening to like three or four of your episodes. So it's really interesting podcast, yeah. - Well, thank you. So yeah, as you know that I try and bring people information that's gonna help them take control of their life and take control of their health so that they can have a better life and have that confidence through being healthier. And the heart rate variability stuff that you have dove into and with your book, The Pulse Cure, like that information is, in my mind is vital and huge. And I knew this 30 years ago when I was in college, like this is the stuff that I studied and you've taken it to a whole nother level than where I was at, but it's stuff that I understand and I wanna make sure we bring to my listeners. And so give us a little bit about like your background. You've been a doctor forever and then like what led you to looking specifically at the heart rate as the cure and the thing that's gonna help us get out of this chronic disease issue that we've been in. - Yeah, so I've been a doctor, I'm a Norwegian, doctor, I've been a general practitioner for 25 years, working all over Norway. And I'm sorry, I have a good picture of what makes people sick and what makes people healthy. And as you know, it's the chronic low grade inflammation making diseases in all our organs, including the brain and making all this trouble. And by a lot of a row of kind of accidents or seven serendipity, I came across devices that could measure heart rate variability. So the first couple of years I used ECG type device. And then after a couple of years measuring for myself with no guide and only having the curves from the readouts to interpret myself, I understood that Garmin had the same system in their watches. And then I started using it for my own health because I wanted to improve my own health to live longer and be capable for the rest of my life. And then my publisher understood that I was doing this, measuring the pulse, a very weird thing to do for a doctor, actually, incredibly enough. And then they asked me if I wanted to write a book about this. And this is actually the world's first book that is a guide book on how to use wearables to guide the lifestyle changes. And it's actually, today is actually out in the US. It's the first day that it was released in the States. So yeah, and in Norway it has been on the bestseller list for 70 weeks now. So it has just been an incredible journey the last year and a half. So in Norway now there's like a wave of people using watches and or rings and tracking their heart rate variability, which is a totally new concept also to a lot of doctors. I myself did not know about heart rate variability until five years ago. When I read it in Bessel Funder Coke's excellent book, the body keeps the score. I read about heart rate variability for the first time. So I'm not sure why doctors don't know about the concept because it's so vital, as you say. I mean, it's the key to keep ourselves healthy and that we have the metric on our own hands and we have our control of it and not the doctor or the healthcare system. It's just an amazing opportunity to take charge of your own health as you've ever seen. - Well, and so one of the things that you sent me a YouTube presentation that I reviewed and one of the things in there that you talked about that and to help explain heart rate variability to people is not just that your pulse goes up and down as far as the rate of your pulse, but it's that your pulse is not necessarily a consistent always exactly the same metronomic distance between each beat. And the interesting thing is my wife and I both have the same degree and cardiac rehabilitation. And we've sort of gotten into this argument a couple of times and I just let her, okay, well, I've experienced different and just leave it at that and it's not worth fighting over, but that she'll look at it like our kids, for instance, and she'll be taking their pulse if they're sick or something they're anxious or whatever. And she's like, oh, it's erratic. It's not, and I'm like, it's supposed to be, they're breathing heavily there. Because it is, it's a reflector. Our heart rate reflects our breathing and vice versa. And so if you hold your breath, your pulse is going to slow down and that time between each beat is going to, and so it makes sense that as you're sitting there breathing in and out, your pulse is not going to be always a 100%. - Yeah, and particularly in children, I think they have a good connection to their vagus nerve. And that will make for, we call it sinus arrhythmia, you know, which arrhythmia is like a bad rhythm, but it's a good rhythm. It's a sign that you have a good contact with your vagus nerve that we know more and more now the latest years that is essential to our health and our immune system and our recovery. So what is happening, yeah, maybe I need to explain what heart rate variability is. Heart rate variability is that if you breathe in in a relaxed state, then your pulse raises a little bit, measured in milliseconds. And when you breathe out and there's less oxygen in the lungs, the heart rate will slow down just a little bit, tiny bit, but it's measurable by the, by the wearables, by the smartwatches and so on. And we can also feel it ourselves. And the ancient Greeks, you know, and Indian doctors and Chinese doctors, they knew very well that the way that the pulse were pulsing, you know, was a sign of the health of the patient. Because if we are in a stress state, if our body's in a stress state, regardless of mental stress or physical stress or gymnos exercise, the wrong food and alcohol and what have you, then the body will be stressed and it will be very, very steadily, every heartbeat. - Yeah, so this is how that the smartwatches can measure your stress balance to see if you're stressed and distressed and the balance between this. And this balance is making us sick these days in the modern world. We are not made for all this strain on our bodies and minds and makes us sick. - Because it's almost like it's putting the cruise control on and just saying, I want you to run this, no matter what happens, you just have to keep hitting this beat. Whereas it really wants to just go, oh, I'm going to slow down and then I'll speed up a little bit and then I'll slow down again. And it wants to have this variability to it. But having that constant stress, even though it may not be stress that we feel because it could be hidden stress, right? It could be the, you know, anything from infertility issues that you're dealing with that's always on your mind to, you know, job stress that, you know, maybe it's not a reports do, but it's just, you've got so many things on you and it's just that hidden layer that's just constantly driving that heart rate so that never gets a chance to go into its own like just like relaxation mode. - Yeah, and you get used to the high speed. You know, if it's like you're driving on the interstate and you're speeding and then you're slowing down to go into the gas station and you feel it's very, very slow even if you may be driving, you know, 40 miles an hour or so it feels very slow. So it's kind of, we get normally we call it speed blindness. So, and this is what's happening. So only when you can really relax, you see that there's another level of relaxation than at least what I thought. So now I have a lot more, you know, I'm able to relax more than I used to do and I know the difference now. And of course it's so much easier when you have the kind of speedometer on your wrist and you can see your physiological speed, you know, in some sense. So the heart rate reveals the stress on your body and then that we as doctor and the healthcare system has not detected this before now is just incredible. - Yeah. Well, 'cause it's really, it's the true marker that's gonna tell you, as you just described, like it's gonna tell you, are you resting enough to be able to come back and perform at a higher level or just be completely stressed? And so you may increase your level of performance or productivity or whatever your measurement is slowly over time, but to have those bigger jumps, you need to have the bigger jumps in rest time as well or the bigger drops to a solid rest time. - Yeah, and you need to find out that if you eat a bag of crisps or chips late at night, your sleep is ruined. - Right. - And as you never thought about it, it didn't occur to you in the morning if you feel a bit sluggish, that this was the reason. But when you have these devices, then you can detect that, okay, this is the reason. Every time I eat the bag of chips, then my sleep is bad, you know? Then you discover this, that you were, and earlier, I was not looking for it, so I didn't find it. - Right. - But when you see it, then a lot of people then change their lifestyle, you know, regarding sleep and alcohol and food, you know, because there's so much food now, ultra-processed food that really makes us sick, that we are not, we're not constructed to eat this. - Right. - Well, so with those wearables, like whether it's a watch or a ring or, you know, the information that gives us, like, how much of a baseline would you suggest we get? Like, do we need to try and live a perfect life for like two weeks, and then, you know, we have a baseline of what's going on in our body, or like, how quickly does that tell us the information? - Yeah, I think two weeks would give you a lot of information. - Yeah. So what I normally recommend people is that the first, maybe month or so, using the wearables, they don't change anything, so that you have the baseline, so that you know, okay, this is where I'm going from. - Right. - And then after that, then check out, okay, what if I drink no alcohol for two weeks, what if I make sure I get good sleep, that I avoid food that I can tolerate, and yeah. And then see what happens. And then you will see big changes, and particularly if you have been doing the wrong things, you will see big changes, and yeah. - And then it's, it gives us that insight that like, a lot of times we can't really tell necessarily, like we know something either went wrong, or went really well, like, you know, if you sleep really, really well for a night, because you don't have anything to do the next day, and so you're just like turning your alarm off and just sleep until you wake up, which I know is uncommon for a lot of people in today's world. Like, but when you have that, you're like, oh, you know, this gives us though, the internal data of what's actually going on to match like, maybe the theoretical side of like, we can, we can say, oh, well, it was because I did this, or because I did that, but like you're saying, we can now look at it internally and go, this is what's actually happening. It's helping us either recover or hurting us in a negative way. - Yeah, and you discover things often by accident that you see that, okay, you had a little bit cooler night in the bedroom, oh, and then you see, wow, my recovery was a lot better. And then you may have a very warm night, and maybe, you know, five degrees more, and then you see my recovery was a lot worse. And suddenly you discover these patterns that you would not have thought about earlier. So yeah, it's been a, it's like a journey into your own nervous system, into your own physiology, and it's also kind of a gamification. As you get numbers for sleep, suddenly you get interested in, oh, let me try to get a better sleep, you know? Let me try to get 85 points, you know, or whatever your wearable will show. Instead of cutting down on sleep, you know, to watch Netflix or whatever. So people actually think it's a lot of fun, too. It's a fun way to get an improved lifestyle. - Yeah. And so when you look at, one of the things you talk about is there's this budget to your body, right? You've got to, like, you've got, you know, the good things, the income, the bad things, the expenses, like how easy is it to balance that once you start looking at, you know, what the data from the wearables is telling you. Like, is it hard to figure out on your own? Do you need to go to a doctor to figure this out and have help with it? Or, you know, are the wearables giving us enough information that we can, we get all on our own? - At the wearables, the wearables will tell you that something is stressing you. It's like a fever, you know? That if you come to me as a doctor and you have a fever, I only know that something is wrong, that there is some infection in your body and then have to find out, is it from your assign us? Is it from your kidneys or from your lungs or whatever? - Yeah. - And this is the same that the wearable will tell you, okay, you're under some stress now and you have to figure out what it was. And of course, you can listen to podcasts, you know, like the heart rate variability podcast or the whoop podcast, you know, that are only talking about heart rate variability and pick up some information about that. But you're a bit on your own, you have to figure this out yourself. Some of the factors are very easy to find, you know, you will immediately find that three glasses of alcohol just ruins your recovery and some of the things as well. And you may find that cold showers or cold plunges will make you recover a lot better. So some of the factors are very easy to see, have a big impact. And then after you have kind of gotten that in order, then there are lots of small, you know, variations between what you eat or when you eat and so on. And one thing also that is very important for women is a menstrual cycle, that the week before menstruation that the heart rate variability will go down quite a lot as a symptom of a heavy load on their system so that they should not exercise as hard or work as hard or put as much strain on themselves in that week before the menstruation starts. And this will also be very individual. So, and it seems like stress will make it worse. So if you have stress from a lot of sources, the week before menstruation will be even worse. So if you get less stress in your life, this curve will even out quite a bit, actually. - Okay. - So there's many, many things that people see that they may have allergies. Now, at least in Norway is the allergy season from several trees and they will see it immediately that it affects the heart rate variability. So it's kind of everything that stresses the body will be, it's like the heart is kind of the central monitoring station, from signals from all over the body and will react to any stress. - And if it's, so like you're talking about allergies, 'cause that's going on here in Texas right now too, it's at that time of the year. And anytime your body's on alert, so you're in the sympathetic and you're not getting that chance to relax, you're just, you're on alert the whole time and you're in that constant threat state. Like you don't have the moments to really check out what else is going on in your body. 'Cause you're, whether it's, I'm on higher alert 'cause I'm fighting the allergies or whatever this infection is. And a lot of times that's when other things can creep in and start to take hold of your life in, depending on how long you have to deal with that issue. And it causes issues with sleep, right? Like, you know, 'cause if you've got allergies and you're up sneezing all night and you're not sleeping well and then that just sort of, that snowball starts rolling downhill. - Exactly. - So that's again where, you know, when it comes to combating these things, like I think so many people forget that like sleep is really the biggest thing you can do to help get your body back because of what it does, not just for your body, it's for chance to recover, but what it does for your heart rate, right? - Yeah. So for example, if you then get some allergy and the strain on your body, then a certain amount of your disposable available forces will be spent on dealing with the allergies. And so there will be less energy available for, you know, responding to training or working overtime and all this thing. So, because then you would just get worse, just as you say that your sleep will get worse and then you'll be more stressed by minor things in the day and so on. So, and what you then have to do is you may have to put in a power nap, you know, or half an hour. Maybe you have to go and do a cold plunge or do cold showers more consistently in an allergy season and so on. So you will have to balance it with this body budget as I call it. So when there's more strain on your body, you have to find out how to lessen strains on other sides of your existence. - And so that's like a big piece of the puzzle when it comes to like, if you're doing anything athletic or doing any kind of exercise or training, whether it's just to stay in shape or as an athlete, you know, one of the things, 'cause I actually had this happen Saturday with one of the athletes that I train as a high school athlete and he came out and he did his workout. And I could tell halfway through it, he's frustrated. He's not hitting the times he wants to hit. And it was late in the day Saturday and I knew he had spent the whole day working on his truck. His truck, his gas fuel lines had to be replaced and he and his dad replaced the whole thing. So I know his day was a lot different than normal. And I said, dude, you were stressed all, you were trying to figure this out. You're trying to get it done. You needed to get it done today. So you knew you were on a time crunch 'cause you needed to do a lot of stuff. You know, the next day. And I said, you've used a lot of energy to do that. And so it's not some matter of, I was trying to reassure him like, I don't care about the times that you're hitting on these workouts. It's just get the work in whatever your body's gonna allow. It's gonna be okay. You're still gonna reap some rewards from it later on. It may just not be the perfect workout today because your body's not responding. And of course then afterwards, I texted his mom and said, hey, heads up. He may be really upset when he gets home. The workout didn't go like he wanted. And she wrote back and she goes, oh, well, I figured it might not because he was up till two o'clock in the morning with friends. - All right. - And I was like, okay. You were up till two o'clock. Then you got up at eight o'clock. You worked all day on a strenuous activity. And you come, and of course your workout's not gonna be where you want it to be 'cause your body's just not able to respond. - And if you had a beer or two with his friends, you know, and this is where the wearables would show you very clearly that your kind of body battery is very low. You don't have the energy for this training. And then you can't discuss with the wearables because they know some things about your physiology that you have a hard time listening to yourself because we are not equipped to listen to the body in this way. And this is the reason why it's so easy to get over stress because all our senses, our eyesight, our sense of smell of sense of touch and hearing and everything is developed through millions of years and the only enemies came from the outside. You know, it was, you know, lions, of course, and snakes and fire and then food that was, you know, not good or with bacteria's in it. So, but now in our day, the threat comes from our insight from the imbalance in the system and we don't have a good sense of that. I'm quite sure that at least I cannot feel the difference like just when I'm sitting here now. I don't know if I have 65 or 85 impulse, but that would represent a quite significant difference in stress level and we will not feel it. And if we had felt that, you know, through evolution, it would just be in the way of our other senses. - Yeah. - So this is how the variables is kind of a substitute for a sense that we never needed to develop and that knows something about our physiology that we cannot feel ourselves. - Well, and it's not to say that it's made up because, you know, it's definitely forces that we feel on ourselves, but it's our mind determining that stress is there, right? Which is why some people can, like you can have two different people go through the same situation and they're gonna react differently because one person interprets the stress one way and another one does a different way. And I would imagine if you had two people going through that, one's heart rate variability is gonna be off the charts and the other one's gonna be, I mean, it still may show some stress through it, but it won't be, you know, as much, which then goes to how quickly you can recover and get back to that parasympathetic, right? - Yeah, yeah, right. And also there would be a big difference between how good they are at feeling this themselves. So the ones that are in most danger are getting into a burnout and the fatigue situation, that's the same persons that are worse at feeling their own stress level than others. Others maybe feel immediately that I should not do this training today, but other people would say that, okay, it's Thursday, I'm going to train no matter what, you know? And they may even feel guilty if they didn't do it. - Yeah. - And then often people say to me that when they see the results on the watch, that the watch telling them to rest, it's a relief because it's like another person here or a thing telling them that you should relax. And that's a relief that this kind of responsibility is coming from another source because they would feel guilty and go through the exercise, you know, no matter what. - Right, so, yeah. - Well, and that's a part of that is 'cause we're so driven on achieving a goal, right? Or like, you know, we hear that, it's like, okay, we have to be productive, we have to set goals, we have to set big, huge goals, right? And go after and achieve them. But a lot of times the time constraint that's put on that is our own. You know, we come up with the timeframe that we have to hit that goal in. And so, you know, why can't we relax that timeframe and just say, oh, it's not going to happen today. You know, maybe tomorrow I can come after it because, you know, my wearable's giving me this data that says it's not worth trying it today. - Yeah, every day you will not get the payback from the hard strain that you put on your body. And I used to be on the national team in kayaking. - Oh, cool. - So we were, and at that time, you know, in 1984 to 1989, you know, like ages ago, we were just thinking, okay, the harder I trained, the better. So we were training the maximum effort every day, like the only way to get better. And now I see that a lot of people have, when they use heart rate variability, that they do a lot more zone two training at the lower exertion level, and they get better. So they train easier and get better. And maybe 80% of the training is in zone two, and then they may have 20% in like zone four or five. I'm not sure about your experiences on this. - No, I would say it's the same, but I think a lot of people, especially in the older generation, where it was just, nope, you're gonna get better by just putting the hammer down and keep going, keep going, keep going. And now we're seeing that if you watch your body and understand what's going on internally and target the quality training for specific time periods, then you can back off and have, you know, easier training. You still have to train, you can't just, you can't expect to train three days a week and get the same results that somebody that's training six or seven days a week. But understanding that quality and intensity of the training, and if you understand that and match that to where your body is, then your results leapfrog everybody else is what I've seen. - Yeah, yeah, and also probably I've seen that if you have other stresses in your life, you have to take that into your thoughts. But if you have a problem in your relationship or if you're trouble at work or anything, that you may not train as hard as you could when there was no trouble in the rest of your life. So I think the variables helps you to see the totality of your situation and it's easier to decide when to push yourself and when to hold back. And it seems like the holding back part is where the best athletes now are getting better, you know, using cold, you know, cold water immersions and cryotherapy and rest and sleep to get better. - Well, and do you think that the cold water therapy, and it's something that I do, I love the time of the year that we have a above ground pool in our backyard. And I love the time of the year that it's cold because I can jump in after an exercise and it's cold, like it's cold, you know, and stay in there as long as I can. Usually it winds up being about 20 minutes and then I'm out. And the feeling I get afterwards is euphoric. Do you think that that works because simple physiology or do you think it works because we've put the rest of our life in this very homeostatic? We want to be at this one baseline degree all the time. You know, our houses are set at this temperature, our cars are set at this temperature, our businesses are set at this temperature. - Always at room temperature. - Always at, you know, whatever room temperature is for you, it's always there and we run from our car to inside the grocery store or the restaurant when it's hot or cold because we don't want to be exposed to that temperature. Do you think that's why that cold plunge like is seen that rise in like just popularity? - And yeah, and because you can feel it and you feel euphoria and you feel the calmness because I can see and that was one of the big surprises that I saw that if you go into the cold, you get into the parasympathetic mode immediately so that your pulse may be low and your heart rate will have variability better for like hours and so you feel calm and sharp because it triggers both adrenaline and it calms down the nervous system and it calms down the cytokines that are released from inflammation. So after you have been running, there will be inflammation in your body and then when you go into the cold punch, you put down that inflammation and that makes it easier also to train the next day. And that is particularly important for athletes doing a technical sport, if you're a football player, a soccer player, a soccer player where you need a lot of time on the pitch to learn the practice of it and then it's very useful to go into the cold because then you can tolerate more time on the pitch because you lower down the inflammation part. But if you are doing strength exercise, then the cold may make for so that you will not get a strong, at least according to Andrew Huberman. He has a very good podcast as you probably know. So if you want to get stronger after a strength training, then it's actually good with inflammation. It helps building the muscle. But it will also take more recovery time until you can train again. - Yeah, which is why a lot of people that are doing a lot of weightlifting, a lot of weight training is they take that longer time period before they come back to that same muscle group to train it again because it's letting the inflammation work to build the muscle before you go and damage it again. Otherwise you just stay in this chronic state of broken, which is basically what we've been talking about with the heart. We're staying in this chronic state of broken without giving you the chance to slow down and come back. And one of the things that I remember hearing years ago and I don't know if it's still, I'm sure it's something you'd come across if it's still something that people believe or if it's been, but that each heart has a certain number of feet to it and then you're just, you've used them all up and you're done. - Yeah, I've heard that, I've heard that. And I've also heard that whether it's true, I'm not sure, but I've certainly heard it. And I also know that one of the biggest experts in heart rate variability says that if you're good at getting into the parasympathetic state, over a lifetime, you save 350 million beats. I think his name is Richard Gervitz, I think his name. So there's a lot to be saved, you know? So I see that people with a poor foot fitness level, they will have to struggle for daily activities. So if you put my patients, the ones who come to me from all kinds of diseases and I ask them to walk fast for a hundred meters, they would be short of breath. And I can see that their bodies is always working in overdrive, just for normal activities. And if you had done some exercise, it would manage that load easily. - Yeah. - So it's so important to exercise. And that is, in a region study actually now showed that if you exercise moderately for 20 minutes a day, you get 11 more healthy years. You don't live 11 years longer, maybe you live 80 years longer is what I think, but you also are healthier for a longer time, even longer time. So that is just 20 minutes a day. - Yeah. - That will pay off and you will feel better you know, the rest of your life. So if you don't take the discomfort of exercise, you will be uncomfortable, you will struggle, your body will be sick. - Yeah. And that's like the data would show you if you were doing that, if you changed, if you went for your month baseline and you're not exercising normally and you're not doing all these things. And then you started to walk and get yourself up to 20 minutes a day, it may not show it instantly, but like I would think a year later, if you went and looked at the data, you would see that that increase as you walked in the heart rate variability and then a bigger decrease in a longer decrease afterwards than you were experiencing in your baseline time period, correct? - Yeah. Yeah, I would think so, definitely. And you would also, but it's also important because at least some of the watches will give you the VO2 max, and if you're in the poor fitness level, that will be very low, it may be even 25 or 28. And if you have such a low fitness level, then like any exercise will give you a lactic acid and you need a lot of time for recovery. And it will be a very slow, so VO2 max improving the VO2 max, that is a number for how well are your mitochondria is working, how good are your muscles working? - That's a very slow number to increase. It takes a long time to get better. So you may think that, okay, now exercise for three months, I must be in a really good shape. No, it takes a lot longer time. But it also stays longer, so it's a slow process, but the fitness level will stay longer. So actually I've heard, I think it was Andy Galpin, he's like a physiology expert. He said that if you run for four minutes every other weeks, 30 minutes on and 30 minutes off, four minutes every other week, you will maintain your fitness level. - Yeah. - So it will not take much to maintain a level. So that's a good part about it. - Right, well, and that's one of the things that I tell my athletes, and they get a little worried when I tell them, okay, now you have to take time off, like complete time off from the sport that you're doing. You can still do it like a pickup game or something. If you wanna play with friends, you don't have to just sit on your couch. But if you're a runner and you're used to running, you know, five or six miles a day, no running for a week or two weeks, depending on where we are in the scheduled. And in one of the things, and I know this from experience, 'cause I go through it myself, it's just, they go, but what about, I built my fitness all the way up to here. Like, if I take time off, what's gonna, I'm gonna have to start over. I'm like, no, you're not starting over. Your body just needs that time to just completely relax, completely reset. And then we start building again. And you don't, while you mentally might think I've worked so hard to get to this point, what happens when I stop? But you allow your body to get that reset, and then you start from a, you may not start from the same spot you stopped at, but you start from higher up the chain, then you know, your previous starting session. - Yeah, absolutely. So it's almost like a, an oil tanker, you know, it's going very, it takes a slow time to get the speed up. And once you have the speed up it will stay there, to have a momentum. - Right. - And just like you said, you know, just four minutes of 30 seconds on and off, you know, it will, will keep the level. So, so that's a good news, you know, and, and, so that is what we did not know as athletes, because I had to quit after five years, I had to quit because I had over, over strained my arms. - Yeah. - And I didn't have the, the intelligence to, to stop this training, you know. - Right. - No. - Well, and it's, and the two things that I think that, that you've talked about that are, are things that most people don't, either they don't know enough about to know that it's the important thing as far as their body is concerned, is, you know, is your heart rate in your, your VO2 max and they work together because that is what gets, what, what gets what is needed to the mitochondria. And if you're, if your mitochondria aren't happy, you're not happy. I mean, it's plain and simple, you know, research has shown that, I think we all know that in, in based on how we eat, what we eat, what we drink, when we eat well, when we don't, like we see it happen. And that's all at the mitochondria level is, is what's happening. And so if we take care of those things, which really comes down to, okay, how do we, how do we take care of stress? How do we, it, which a lot of times is, how do we breathe better? How do we maintain that? How do we, how do we get ourselves into the parasympathetic? And then if we do those two things, a lot of times it doesn't matter the other things that we do, then those are just like icing on the cake that, that adds more and more life to us. If we do those two things, that's, that's a strong enough baseline to take care of most, most issues, right? - Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, and, and the good part is that it will show in the heart rate. When you do it, right? You have this objective number that you can see that you are, you are on the right track, you know? So, so that's a, you know, the beauty of it, the simplicity of it, you know, the heart rate, you know, in, in compared to your breath. - Yep. - The very basic vital science tells us doctors and as people, you know, now that it's accessible. So, so much information that is available at the, at the cheap price. And it also, it's so important also that it gives the power back to you and not to the doctor and not to me. - Yeah. - So, yeah, you can take charge of your own health in a, in a whole new way. And it's also nice that because big pharma, you know, has, there's so much money in sick people. So, so follow the money and to wait until people get sick, you know, and maybe 30, 20, 30 years of medications, you know, there's so much money. And now in the, in the wearable industry, there's now money into keeping you healthy. So I'm very optimistic about this at least so that the people who want to take charge of their own health and do it with these wearables and avoid getting sick. - Well, and I remember researching several years ago, the numbers may be different, but if you can, if you can live to 50, and it doesn't really matter what you did before, if I remember quickly, it doesn't really matter if you've had issues before, but if you can hit 50 with zero chronic disease around that like 48 to 52 timeframe of your life, if you can go through those three or four or five years with zero chronic disease going on, you know, your information, then your chances of making it to 90 are exponentially larger than somebody with one chronic disease or two. And if I remember quickly, if it was, if you've got three chronic diseases at 50, like your chances of making it to 65 are almost zero. - Yeah, and I can see that and we see it as doctors, you know, all the way from there are 45, I start picking up one inflammation-based disease after another, just keep loading on. And these are diseases that we don't need to have, you know, they're avoidable. So if you did these changes that I'm talking about in the postcard in the book, then you would fix this, you know, you would get good cells, good mitochondria, a good nervous system, good recovery. So because our immune system needs to work properly. And if you are too much in the stress state, we are keeping down the immune system all the time. It will not repair cancer cells, you know, cancer comes in our body every day, you know? And our immune system is working all the time, finding the cancer cells and taking them out. And if you are living in a way that compromises your immune system, they will at some point not discover the cancer cells and it will multiply and develop into a cancer. So, and this is possible to fix that also. And heart rate variability is at the core of this. So you can Google, you know, cancer and heart rate variability and you will see lots of findings. So it will affect the risk of getting cancer, if you get cancer, it will affect the prognosis. And if you get rid of the cancer in the first place, it will tell you something about the chance of getting the cancer back after some time. So because, and that is because heart rate variability is a number of the strain on your whole system. So, and then it's connected to dementia and Parkinson and stroke and actually nine out of the 10 deadliest diseases in America. And then probably of course, the rest of the Western world is connected in some way to heart rate variability. - Right. So it's, if you're wearing one of these wearables and you're tracking it, it's almost like, if you see a sign, it's like the engine light going off in your car that most of us nowadays, because the way that technology is with our vehicles and the engines is like, the engine light goes off and we're like, well, it's all computerized. We can't tell. We don't know what's going off. We have to take it somewhere and they can plug in their computer and it'll tell them what's going on. And so the heart rate, if you're wearing a wearable and you see a difference in it, you may not know immediately what that causes, but you know, something's going on and you need to address it. You need to look back and go, what did I do wrong? - Yeah, just like you see this oil lamp, you know, coming on, you know, that just tells you, okay, you need to fix this and then if you ignore that after some time, you know, you get a more serious oil lamp coming on, you know, that now you stop immediately, you know, if you continue driving, you're destroying your engine. And the wearables are kind of like that, because I'm sure that you would not get into a fatigue or burnout situation with a wearable without them warning you for weeks and months ahead. - Yeah, it would tell you a long time before that you're, this is not sustainable, your lifestyle now, it's... So, and that is also why a lot of people that are in the fatigue situation has been so happy with the wearables because it makes it so much easier to maneuver or navigate out of the fatigue situation because it's a lot harder. If you are, if you are in the fatigue situation, that's usually after years of too much stress and your whole, you know, HPA axis, your, you know, your adrenal glands is really worn out and it takes a long time to get better. - Yeah. - And that, and beat the wearables is easier. So they are particularly happy about using, you know, the wearables and the strategies of the pulse cure. - Right. And that's like one of the things you just, the immediate thing that came to my mind is that so many people, we don't take enough vacation, especially in the U.S., and when we do take vacation, we just have to pack it with so many things. Like we have to go somewhere to a destination, which is that stressful in itself to travel and getting somewhere, but then we pack it with, oh, this day has to be packed with, whether it's an amusement park or excursions from a cruise or all these things that we get back and we often say we need a vacation from our vacation because we never really let our bodies just go to nothing and just sit and be calm and, you know, when we get away from work, we need to, those things are great to go and have those experiences, but we need to do them in the right way in the right manner to also have the relaxation time to where we actually let ourselves relax and recoup and regenerate. - Yeah, and our brains is like predicting machines. So if you go on a holiday and you just think that a holiday is relaxing and then you just think that way, then the variables will tell you different. It will tell you that it's too much heat, you know, too much alcohol in the evening, heavy meals, lots of activities, but since your mind is so made up that a holiday is a relaxing thing, then you come back and you think, okay, I must be relaxed, I can work hard and train and the variable would tell you that this is not true. - Right. - So what do we think, you know, colors so much are, I would say, what do we think is happening, our beliefs? - Yep. So how can people, since the book is out in the US, but anywhere, like I'm assuming it's available on Amazon? - Yeah, and I was on bars and noble and everywhere. It's also an audible audio book and also an e-book, but now today's the first day actually getting out on a paperback. - Awesome, awesome. So the pulse cure and then how can people connect with you? Do you have a social media that you tend to put more information out on so they can stay up to date or what's going on? - Yeah, well, I'm on Instagram. I'm a doc_torkel on Instagram. I also have a social website called thepolicure.com where you can see the video that you were referring to and there's a social network there of other people. It's almost like Facebook, very similar to Facebook. You can put out images from your curves that you see on your phone or your watch and ask questions and there's a blog there. So webinars, there are a lot of information because there are not so many places informing you about these things and to where you can learn about it. - Right. Well, as an athlete, I've understood how important the heart rate is to training, to making sure your body's gonna respond properly. And just like with so many things from athletics, the same thing, it happens with the normal population that's not quote-unquote an athlete. Our bodies are still made for movement. They're still made for activity and we get joy from that. Right? It's a different activity, but. - Yeah, and that's the end. I see that if you're in a poor shape, you should think that you should feel refreshed up to the activity. You shouldn't train as far as that you feel worn out and take days to recover. You should start at the level that is very, very, very easy and then go from there slowly, slowly. - Yep. Well, I wanna thank you so much to Oracle for being a guest on Conference Your Health podcast. It's been great, I love the conversation. - Yeah, thank you so much. And it's so good to be talking about to somebody who knows so much about it so we can have like an equal conversation, you know. So often I have to explain everything, you know, and that's been a real joy, so thanks a lot. - Thanks for checking out the Conference Through Health podcast. Please subscribe, post a review, share this episode with those you love who need a little extra help with their health journey. Visit AllInHealthInWellness.com to learn more about the coaching programs that I provide. 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Our heart rate is a basic vital sign that every medical professional checks. Dr. Torkil Færø explains how looking deeper into heart rate variability can provide a blueprint for a healthier, longer life. Many of today's wearable technologies can provide an HRV reading, we simply need to learn how to interpret the information and use it properly.
