Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: There's a problem with meditation.
It takes a long time and it's hard.
[00:00:05] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:00:05] Speaker A: And that was part of the awareness that had come into my mind that started on this trip to Tibet in 2004. And we're upgrading ourselves. We're hacking ourselves. Because I was a computer hacker and I looked at heart math, I looked at my brainwave work, and I'm like, there's another level we can get to. And it's gonna. It's gonna happen through tech. When you're doing this kind of coherence training where you're measuring what's happening right now and getting warmer, colder, warmer, colder. It just makes meditation deeper, faster, and more effective. So they go together. Anyone knows how to meditate, you measure their heart rate coherence, it's probably going to improve.
But if you teach them how to improve it, the meditation gets better. And someone who can meditate, who learns heart coherence, suddenly finds they can. And then you start learning the different types of feelings that can come from the heart and the different types of feelings that can happen in the heart and in the gut at the same time. And are they aligned? Are they not aligned? And you just realize, wow, there's this whole set of knowledge in the body that isn't in the thoughts.
[00:01:06] Speaker B: Hi, I'm Deborah Rosman, and welcome to the AD Heart Podcast. I have the privilege each month of interviewing people who are bringing more heart to this world. And this month, I am so honored to be interviewing Dave Asprey.
You've probably heard of him. He's the founder of Bulletproof and widely recognized as the creator of the biohacking movement.
He's also been a leading voice in advocating heart coherence and heart rate variability, synchronization and training as essential tools for extending longevity and for meditating and for enhancing your performance in your life.
Dave is a four times New York Times bestselling author, and his new book just hit the bestseller list. Listen to this title. Heavily meditated the fast path to remove your triggers, dissolve stress, and activate inner peace. Who wouldn't want that?
Welcome, Dave. Thank you for coming on our podcast.
[00:02:09] Speaker A: Thanks, Deborah. It's really, really nice to get a chance to reconnect with you. I think we've known each other. We were just trying to do the math. Something like 18 years.
[00:02:18] Speaker B: Yeah. @ least we go way back to when Dave helped introduce HeartMath to Silicon Valley's quantified self movement, which I think was a precursor to biohacking and all that going on. Transformational technology.
And then he was involved in our startup Quantum intake, and the advisory board and really launching this whole transformational technology movement of which HeartMath has been called the founder of for years. And Dave really, really helped with that. So thank you.
[00:02:51] Speaker A: You're. You're very welcome, Deborah.
One of the things about the old quantified self movement that just drove me crazy. This is a movement in the early aughts where a bunch of nerds like me were saying, oh, we've gathered this data about the human condition, and no one did it really before then. So they had spreadsheets, and I go to these meetings and they're like, I have all the data. And I'm like, great. What are you gonna do with it? Like, I don't know. I have the data. It's cool. It's like a stamp collector that collects stamps so it never sends any letters.
And meanwhile, I'm already working with neurofeedback at measuring my brain waves in real time and training myself, and I'm working with heart math on measuring my heart rate coherence.
And I learned about that while running the first longevity nonprofit group in the. In the Bay area where Roland McCready came to speak. So I'm like, I'm training myself. So I kind of got frustrated with quantified self and. And my guys. It's not just about measuring. It's about changing. It's about upgrading yourself. And that was part of the awareness that had come into my mind that started on this trip to Tibet in 2004. And we're upgrading ourselves. We're hacking ourselves. Because I was a computer hacker and I looked at heart math, I looked at my brainwave work, and I'm like, there's another level we can get to. And it's going to. It's going to happen through tech people, because doing it with meditation in caves is just too much time, and there aren't enough caves.
[00:04:17] Speaker B: You know, that's really interesting because even now we get this.
Like, the different trackers, whether it's Oura Ring or Whoop or Fitbit or the Apple Watch, you're just tracking. And isn't all the sleep trackers interesting information that can be of benefit? But HeartMath's technology, as you're suggesting, like the heart coherence is training a delta between a baseline and where you want to go for optimal health and performance.
And that is the distinction of tracking plus training that you're talking about.
[00:04:53] Speaker A: What happens is when you get feedback on what's happening in under a third of a Second, your body, your nervous system, your mind, it'll self regulate.
But if you wait so long that you have to think about it, we have this very slow feedback loop. Oh, something happened and then I thought about it, then I knew about it, and then I have to decide that the next time it happens, I'll do something different.
Problem is, we've all tried this. If someone jumps up and says you're going to jump, and then if you're in middle school, your friends go, ha ha, you flinched. But they flinched too. Because we don't know how to turn off the flinch response, even though we know it's going to happen.
And this is funny, it turns out kombucha moms who meditate can outperform military snipers on really, really long distance target shooting because of their meditation practice.
And it's because the same thing, we all know it's going to make a noise, but our body is still going to flinch when we do that. And this is, this is this weird thing where we want our mind to be in charge of our body, but our body happens before our mind. Only real time feedback allows you to train the body to behave itself. The nervous system, the subconscious.
And so this real time feedback, this is, it's the basis of Heavily Meditated my new book and it's allowed me to change my mind. And I've spent hundreds of hours doing heart math and learning the sensation of, oh, what does it feel like inside my body when my sympathetic nervous system goes off?
And I like to imagine if you've ever peeked into the cockpit on an, on a big jet, it looks crazy. There's just switches and knobs and dials in every direction.
Your body is the same way. But no one ever told you to look in the cockpit. And if you did, you wouldn't know what button did what. You don't know what dial means anything in the role of meditation, self awareness or this heart rate variability training with heartmath. This knob, this dial, this lever, this is what that means.
So this meter is going up into the red zone. Oh, so push this button to turn it down. But since you can't see the lever, you don't know what it feels like to be in the red zone. And you don't know where the button is or how to push it.
It's totally alien, invisible.
But suddenly when you use the tech, it just opens up this awareness. And what I found after about six weeks of really doing careful heartmath training is that I would walk around and go, oh my gosh, My nervous system just went into sympathetic activation without my knowledge or permission. And I don't even know why, but at least I know it happened. And then I did some more training like oh, I can put it back.
So pretty soon, even if I'm not using the heartmath device all day long I would feel myself go sympathetic and I would like whack it on the head with some parasympathetic. And I was able to better regulate my system.
No amount of knowing at the end of the day or the end of the week that that had happened would have changed any outcome. It was only the ability to feel it and change it in real time that mattered.
[00:08:15] Speaker B: Absolutely. I love the way you're saying this because everything is building this reference of self. Self awareness.
[00:08:22] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:08:22] Speaker B: What you're feeling and being able to have the tools then to self empower to change that, to shift that which shifts your physiology. And again, the autonomic nervous system you're referring to parasympathetic and sympathetic governs 90% of the body's involuntary functions from sleep and digestion to our higher cognitive performance as the nervous system communicates to through the vagal nerve and other pathways to the frontal lobes. So that self regulation is key to not only longevity and performance but fulfillment wellbeing in life.
And I just love the way you're talking about it. Once we knew how to recognize feelings as frequencies as what they are indicating what they're doing, then we have so much more power from the heart. Heart power. His willpower doesn't do it to really make this shift.
[00:09:21] Speaker A: Can we talk about heart power versus willpower for a minute? From the mindset and heavily meditated.
What I learned over the years from all of this neurofeedback from the heart rate variability training is that there's a pre processing system on reality that happens. And the thing that I Learned back probably 2010 when I was doing all this intense heart math training, it was that, oh, my body's doing that. And then I notice, yeah, and we've all leaned on a hot stove and then gone, oh my gosh, that really is hot. I guess I should move my hand that. We decided to move our hand and then we pulled it. Right. I don't think anyone's ever done that. What happens is you pull your hand away and then you take credit for what the body did before you could think.
Right.
So huh.
That means that there's another intelligence inside your body controlling your behavior at least some of the time.
And when you unpack the neuroscience you unpack all the math and you realize that there's a marker of this called P300D. That's very nerdy. What it means is there's a lag time between when something happens and when your consciousness knows about it.
And it's about a third of a second.
That means if I clap my hands, that it takes a little while for the sound to get to you because of the speed of sound, but then you think you heard it, but you didn't. Your, your nervous system, your mitochondria, held on to that signal for one third of a second and decided whether to give you a sympathetic response because it was a scary clap, or even whether it was worth your attention. And only after that did it hand it to your auditory processing system. And then we would measure that with neuroscience to see that the ear actually got the sound a third of a second after it was there. And then it takes you the rest of the second to think about what the sound was. So one second later, a sound just happened, but it really happened a second ago.
So there's a third of a second censorship window where your distributed system of your body is filtering out reality, which is a good thing, because if you had to pay attention to every little thing in the world around you, you would be unable to function.
So that means if you're looking at how much energy you have for willpower, this willpower versus heart power. Yeah, it's limited by how much electricity your mitochondria can make.
And the thesis in heavily meditated in the book is that if you can make more energy, you'll have more willpower. And there are studies that, that show that to be true.
Really good ones. And if you can waste less energy, you'll have more willpower. And how do we waste less energy? Well, let's look at where the energy goes all the time as you're processing reality. This is the operating system not just of human cells or subcellular components. It's the operating system of anything alive.
I don't care if it's even like a politician or a tree or, you know, a slime mold or a zebra, it doesn't matter.
They're all alive. And they all do this without any conscious thinking necessary.
And by definition, these have to be very simple because single celled organisms can do them like a bacteria. So number one is fear. If something is scary, immediately run away from, kill or hide.
Okay? And in humans, we put about nine times more emphasis on this than anything else. And if we meditate, only six times more.
So and this is the first thing, and this is great, because if it really is a tiger about to jump out, we should know that and we should react. And it's the most important thing ever. This is why you remember negative things better than positive things, because that has the most emphasis.
So, all right, your body's. Now, your brain hasn't gotten engaged yet, but your body goes, well, I guess it wasn't scary.
Can I eat it? So food is the next one. So fear, then food, right? Because famine's a big deal, and you need enough energy every single day.
And, okay, don't have to kill it, can't eat it.
What is the other thing that life has to do? That's also an F word. These are F words to stay around for multiple generations.
I mean, Deborah, you're on the Santa Cruz Mountains. You know this one?
Fertility is what I was looking for, but yeah. So all life on Earth before anything else is, is it scary? Can I eat it? Can I reproduce with it?
And then. And so this is kind of dark, but then the next one is actually. And then its friend is the next F word is, can I support my ecosystem and my community and my family better?
And then the final F word is in humans, forgiveness.
Right? How do I evolve and become better at processing the system?
And what forgiveness really is is becoming less fearful of things that aren't really scary. That's all it is. It's not saying something's okay. It's not forgiving, telling someone you forgive them. It's literally reprogramming your heart and the mitochondria that underlie the function of the heart so that they are no longer fearful when they don't have a reason to be. And the reason this is so important to becoming just a better human being is that if you do what most people do, which is, I noticed that that got under my skin and I got triggered, but I'm an adult, so I smiled and I acted like I was okay. It costs you enormously because it creates a lack of congruence where your inner and outer state don't match and everyone picks it up anyway. So our job is using whatever means are necessary to learn how to go in there and not be afraid of things that aren't actually dangerous. And one of the easiest ways to do it is to notice, oh, look, my nervous system just reacted fearfully, even though there's nothing here. That's scary.
But now that I noticed this, because I was measuring it in real time with my heart math device, maybe I can turn it off.
Otherwise you're going to be in that state all day long until I guess you run out of energy. Right. So this was one of the ways I started.
[00:15:47] Speaker B: Yeah. When you know, we. You want to talk about willpower and heart power, forgiveness.
And I love talking about forgiveness because it's an opening of the heart. You can't forgive without the heart forgiving.
And that opening of the heart releases energy, releases power that allows the completion of what you intend, the will. So getting the heart and mind, heart and brain in sync aligned enables us to manifest much more of our intentions, our ability to make the shifts of what you're talking about. So heart power is really key because willpower alone often just poofs out because you don't have the heart behind it.
So it's super important to have that alignment. And I love again, as I said, forgiveness because that implies the opening of the heart to embrace, to add security to the situation.
[00:16:45] Speaker A: You are totally right. You're not going to be able to do a full forgiveness process if your heart's closed. It just doesn't work. And I, at this point, in order to write heavily meditated, I've run a company called 40 Years of Zen.
For the last decade we've had more than a thousand high level CEOs and entrepreneurs and just influential people in the world. Pro athletes come through and spend five days measuring brainwaves and measuring what works for forgiveness. And people spend $20,000 for a team of neuroscientists working on your head.
But I am giving that away and heavily meditated. The core recipe is called the reset process.
And the reset process is eight specific steps in order that let you go in there and do it. And if you were to plug a heart math device in while you're doing it, of course you're going to see the heart opening, you're going to see the coherence form. It has to.
And you will not step into this reset mode that allows you to say, hey, a nervous system, that thing you thought was a threat, that's actually not a threat anymore.
It requires gratitude, it requires awe and it requires this forgiveness energy. And it's all heart based, somatic felt sense. It has nothing to do with thinking about anything.
[00:18:11] Speaker B: That's right. You know, you reminded me of something that I want to talk about too. And intuition. What we found in our intuition research, Roland McCready. This was published in two back to back issues of Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine many years ago. But it is so important to bring it to light now.
When you Are in heart coherence, the heart is actually signaling the brain and then the brain is signaling the body. So when you have an intuitive insight or even you're not conscious of it, but you just kind of know something's happening, but you don't know how you know the heart is actually picking it up first before the brain. The heart picks it up, sends a signal to the brain, the brain spawns before the rest of the body, and then it sends it down to the gut and the body. And you have a gut feeling and you say, oh, I'm following my gut. But really it's the heart that was the source sending it to the brain and then the body. And the heart's actually signaling and picking it up seconds before the body even registers it. Of course, the heart's part of the body, but obviously it's connected.
The implication is to a field of information beyond time and space.
And so intuition can come in and we can develop that intuition as we develop more heart coherence and open our hearts more, because then there's more of that flow from heart to brain to body. It's fascinating research and it's been replicated.
It's something I know. I will send you the paper. Because intuition is really the next level, the heart's intuitive guidance, we call it, for people to really be following their highest, best choices and blueprint. And how do you see that, the role of intuition and what you've been researching?
[00:20:15] Speaker A: Intuition is something that, that I became aware of first in, in Silicon Valley working for venture capital companies.
The interesting thing there is the VCs who just look at spreadsheets. They look at numbers, they surprisingly don't do very well. So these are, we'll call them new VCs. And it takes, according to the old VCs, about between 10 and $50 million to train a venture capitalist to be a good one. They're going to lose that by making bad decisions that are not based on intuition.
[00:20:51] Speaker B: Interesting.
[00:20:53] Speaker A: So the VCs that are really good, if the spreadsheet says yes and the intuition says yes, they're going to make money.
If the spreadsheet says no in the intuition says yes, they make a ton of money.
But if the spreadsheet says yes and intuition says no and they invest, they're going to lose money.
So most of business school, and I went to Wharton, is to teach you to take away intuition and just use logic.
The world is simultaneously rational and irrational at the same time.
We like to think we're logical beings, but quite often we Are not we just make up stories to pretend like we are.
So then how do we recognize what the signal of intuition looks like?
And this is a major focus at 40 years of Zen.
And here's how I teach it, how I write about it in heavily meditated, is that if you pay really careful attention to how your body feels and you come across a new piece of information or you meet a new person, the very, very first thing that you feel, it'll be first and it'll be small.
That's intuition.
And right after intuition, sometimes five or ten times bigger will be an emotion designed from the time you were a little kid to suppress your intuition, followed by a thought to justify the suppression.
So your job is to do more heart rate variability training, more breath work, more of all the different technologies and techniques that I talk about in heavily meditated so that you can develop awareness of that. And then you go, aha. I saw that little thought or that little sense of discomfort or that little aha. And then right away I was like, no, that can't be. No, don't do that. And anytime you catch her saying no, don't. Anytime you catch yourself saying no, don't do that, you're suppressing your intuition. We all have intuition, but most of us are not paying attention to it because it's quiet and fast and there's a lot going on in the world. So present in your body. And you already know the answer to this. What's a very easy way to be not present in your body.
[00:23:09] Speaker B: To be stuck in your mind, in your head?
[00:23:11] Speaker A: Yeah, get, get sympathetic, go into fight or flight mode, get stuck in your mind. And what it really comes down to is the more logical you think you are, the more trauma you have and the less in your heart you are. And when you do the work with a capital W, well, you end up realizing that you can simultaneously be in your head and in your heart. It's not one or the other, that's just, that's the hard work. But when you do that, you have the ability to feel it, to have intuition, to know it, and then to consider it. And there are different skills. What most of us do is we avoid the heart stuff. We go straight into considering, but we don't have all the information because we never felt it.
[00:23:51] Speaker B: Right. And of course, the heartmath techniques, not just the technology which measures and reflects the effectiveness of the techniques, they're all designed for you to go to your heart first, because that's the driver, and then activate the synchronization of Your respiration, your heart rate variability and rhythm. And then that entrains your brain waves, your blood pressure waves, and entrains a system which then allows a conduit of intuition, a free flow of intuition from the heart feeling.
And you know, I call it like a stop and go light when I teach this, yeah, red means no, yellow means pause and ponder.
There may be more information you need. Green is, yes, go. And you can develop those feeling sensitivities and test them like you're your own self scientist in real life. And then you can use the heart coherence technology to help refine that. But it's really about what we call freeze frame, freezing the frame for the decision, taking it to your heart, getting coherent, which is heart brain synchronization, the two working as one. And then the intuition can come in as a download, as a subtle feeling, as something that you have, that inner ping or inner confirmation. Yes, go. And that's really a lot of the heartmath purpose and training. So people that align with their larger self and who they really are and follow a higher map, a higher blueprint to become more of what they're really meant to be, their potential.
So I love what you're saying. It's so complimentary, our research and our findings and what we teach and what you discovered, and it's all the same because it's all trying to give people the tools and the understanding they need, develop this self awareness, the somatic awareness, to become better human beings.
[00:25:55] Speaker A: I, I like the way you described as self or somatic awareness.
A lot of people don't really know the word somatic. And when you get into meditation or yoga or like healing or neuroscience, you realize there's these, these two complementary words called interoception and enteroception.
[00:26:17] Speaker B: Right.
[00:26:17] Speaker A: Basically, this is your innate ability to tune in and feel what's happening inside your body. Like a gut feeling is not a thought, it is a feeling.
And then you go, well, is it really a gut feeling or is it a pancreas feeling or is it a heart feeling?
[00:26:34] Speaker B: It could be a heart feeling.
[00:26:37] Speaker A: It could be a heart feeling. It could also be a toe feeling. Right. It's like how present in your body are you? And can you differentiate between a gut feeling, a heart feeling and a throat feeling?
Right, right. And each of those are signals.
Right. And they could be signals of different things. But you, when you start realizing there's value in those signals and there's information in them, the most powerful signal comes from the heart.
Right. So you can Start learning that. And then you start learning the different types of feelings that can come from the heart and the different types of feelings that can happen in the heart and in the gut at the same time. And are they aligned, are they not aligned?
[00:27:15] Speaker B: And.
[00:27:16] Speaker A: And you just realize, wow, there's this whole set of knowledge in the body that isn't in the thoughts. And we don't teach that to our kids.
It's not common knowledge in the world, but it ought to be, because this is how the body actually works. And the weird thing is the feelings happen first, then our thoughts catch up.
[00:27:34] Speaker B: That's exactly right. And you know what's exciting? What I find is the qualities of spirit that ancient wisdom and ancient texts and ancient teachers in every culture have said.
Love, care, compassion, kindness, appreciation, gratitude, forgiveness. These aren't just churchy things. These are feelings that open this cascade of heart, brain, intuition, and nervous system health.
And so what we find is when people learn to activate a feeling of gratitude, for example, because one of the easiest of those feelings to something you're grateful or for appreciate in your life, I don't care what it is your pet.
You know, children, we teach this. It's chocolate chip cookies. It opens the heart, you appreciate it. That starts activating this whole process that allows you to have more self awareness, somatic awareness, more empowerment. It all gets back to what's my power to shift, to change.
[00:28:42] Speaker A: Wow.
I couldn't agree more.
And it's funny that you can look at it from a heart perspective and you can also look at it from a neuroscience perspective, and you see some very similar, very similar results. And that's as I learned way back, I think in 2008, when I started studying the work of HeartMath is, oh, there's 80% more nerves going from the heart to the brain than from the brain to the heart.
So it would make sense that we would see these heart feelings in our neuroscience changes. Right?
[00:29:17] Speaker B: And so many people are cut off. They live from here up. And that's what you're doing. What we're doing, what we're doing together is helping people realize there's so much information that we're not accessing. Talk about data, the data from within. And I know that's a lot of what your mission is.
So let's, let's now do a heart meditation together.
[00:29:41] Speaker A: All right?
[00:29:42] Speaker B: We'll close, and let's get our own heart and brain in sync and connect with our own intuitive intelligence.
[00:29:49] Speaker A: Okay, let's do it.
[00:29:50] Speaker B: All right. Let's focus our attention in the area of the heart and let's pretend our breath is flowing in and out of the heart or chest area. Breathing a little slower, a little deeper than normal is. Find an easy rhythm that's comfortable.
Now as we continue this heart focused breathing, recall or activate a genuine feeling of gratitude or appreciation for someone or something in your life.
Just breathe that heart quality in through your heart, out through your heart.
Now radiate that appreciation to all the cells of your body and out to everybody listening to this podcast.
Feel that heart energy exp and see your heart, mind, body and spirit aligning in harmony and coherence as you do this.
Doing this creates an energetic conduit for your heart's intuitive guidance and love to move through your day to day interactions.
It only takes a minute or two.
Now with feeling, see yourself practicing appreciation, forgiveness, heart qualities, kindness, compassion, patience, they all activate this heart brain synchronization to increase your capacity to love and connect with your heart's intuitive promptings and guidance.
And now let's radiate our collective heart energy. All who are practicing this heart meditation together as collective compassion.
To all people and nations suffering from separation, wars, trauma, natural disasters, famine and the other major stressors that draw your heart's care, just radiate that collective heart energy.
[00:33:30] Speaker A: It.
[00:34:06] Speaker B: Art energy is powerful. It's tangible, it's real. So let's close by co creating a reservoir of compassionate, caring, hard energy that each of us can tap into over the next month. Whenever we need a lift in spirit or support in following our hearts intuitive promptings and guidance. Let's create that reservoir together.
Thank you so much Dave. Is there anything else you'd like to share with our listeners?
[00:35:07] Speaker A: I would invite you to check out Heavily Meditated, it became the best selling meditation book ever and the top selling philosophy book in the United States.
And Buddhist scholars are now looking at some of the techniques and some of the knowledge in the book as potentially explaining egoic behaviors with a scientific basis that ties in with evolutionary biology, like why we are here.
But it's very accessible and there's a ton of things and including heart rate variability, heart math training.
When you read it, use the intuition you just learned and one of the techniques or two of them are going to stand out. Go. They're sparkly. Those are the ones. Go. Try that. Don't do everything in the book, but it is a masterclass in how to drive your consciousness to where you want it to go and I would invite you to read it.
[00:36:01] Speaker B: Oh thank you so much. I'm really excited to read the whole thing. I obviously in preparation for this interview I read portions, but it's a wonderful title and a wonderful promise in the subtitle and everybody needs whatever tools can work for them to learn to self regulate what to do with the triggers. Because otherwise we see what the consequences are in society and it's up to each of us to take that responsibility for ourselves. And it goes out in waves from our system and and affects others.
So we're powerful generators of hard energy or incoherent energy and we have a choice.
[00:36:45] Speaker A: Does indeed.
Thank you Deborah.
[00:36:48] Speaker B: You know, as a free gift to our listeners, I want to remind you you can watch the interactive HeartMath experience video based program online at the HeartMath websites. You can download the HeartMath app on your smartphone with a camera sensor to measure your HRV at the App Store at the Google Play Store and increase your heart coherence baseline. And I also want to remind you that on the third Tuesday of every month we have a new Ad Heart podcast. So be sure you subscribe and not miss the next one. And again, thank you so much Dave and thank you to all our listeners.
[00:37:27] Speaker C: Thank you for listening to the Ad Heart Podcast. Be sure to subscribe so you can catch the latest episodes.
If you're wanting even more heart inspired content, find us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn.
Look for HeartMath and also the HeartMath Institute. Both organizations are committed to helping activate the heart of Humanity.
