A Guide To Monitoring Human Stress (& How To Use HRV, Breathwork, Stress Resiliency & Biofeedback) With Jay Wiles Of HANU Health.

My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Ben Greenfield Life.

Podcast, like, we can, when someone is very still get very good data, but once artifact or movement is introduced, then heart rate variability goes out the window.

Like, I'll start to read emails and I'll. And I'll hold my breath. I know that dips my hrv. I can get a cue on my phone when that happens.

Right back when I was doing training, like, wearables weren't a big thing and the ones that were out there, like Fitbit and stuff, were really geared towards soccer moms, and so they weren't really utilizing more advanced biometrics.

Faith, family, fitness, health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and a whole lot more. Welcome to the show.

All right, folks, so I'm recording a podcast right now with a chest strap on, like a Bluetooth enabled heart rate monitoring strap. Frankly, I really have not been immersed in wearing these type of things ever since I kind of hung up the hat with Ironman triathlon racing and quit monitoring my heart rate in real time 24 7. But I recently received a special package in the mail, and it was this newfangled heart rate monitor that ties to this app called Hanu Hanu. And Hannu is essentially like a heart rate variability, like a stress monitoring or HRV monitoring app and tool, which sounds kind of boring, but it actually goes way beyond that. Now here's a cool thing. If you ever listen to any of my Q and A episodes, you might know that my co host on those episodes, Dr. J.T. wiles, is basically one of the world's leading experts in HRV monitor. And he's actually the guy who has pioneered the development of this thing that basically gives you real time biofeedback about everything that's going on in your body and then trains you in terms of learning things like stress, resilience, breathwork tactics, et cetera. So I'm actually wearing it right now, Jay, just so you know, I'm a good student. I've got it on.

You are.

I'm learning.

I appreciate it.

Yeah. And so I'm looking at it and I've got like heart rate variability. I got heart rate, I got respiration rate, I have life events, I have assessment data, I've exercised data. When I click the little train button, it says resonance breathing, box breathing, custom breathing. There's like assessments on there, like resonance frequency assessment, bolt score. I probably have a lot of questions for you about this thing, but what do you think? Should we. Should we dive in and talk about all things Hanu.

Yeah, you got the questions, and I hope and I think I do have the answers, so let's do it.

All right, well, the first question is. Easy, dude, Total softball. What. What the heck does hanu mean?

See, that question is asked a lot. And initially my wife, because her name is Hannah, and we were talking before we were recording on this, she's like. Is like, are people gonna get this confused? Like, you named a company after me? And I'm like, no, actually, like, we searched far and deep for a really good, just catchy name. We wanted to keep it short. And like any good, like, business entrepreneur, you start to look at other languages and say, okay, what is something that is kind of congruent or associated that, like, sounds better than just, like, breathing or whatever else we might call it? HRV and I Honu is actually Hawaiian for breath. And what's kind of cool about that is that, yeah, we're based out of North County. San Diego is one of our hubs. I'm not, obviously, I'm in the east coast, as many people may know, and. But it has very much a Hawaii vibe in San Diego, especially, like, Northern County San Diego with surf city and surf towns. And. And so we were like, yeah, this is fitting for us. Hanu. Hawaiian breath.

I dig it. I dig it. Okay, well, I've. I'm going to add that to my vernacular now. Hanu. Honey, didn't you say your. Your wife's name is Hannah, right?

Yeah, my wife's name is Hannah.

So does she actually think that. That your new app is named after her?

At first we had this discussion where she was like, are people going to get confused by this? If it was me, I would nod.

And say, yes, babe. I just developed my. My new business after you. I love you so much.

So that's exactly what I did. But, I mean, I'm hoping that she just doesn't come across this podcast and she'll never know. So no harm, no foul.

I would just. I would just nod and smile if I were you. So. So what. What. What makes you the expert in this, man? I mean, like, like, you know, you and I have talked a lot on the podcast before, but we haven't really talked about, like, your specific history in terms of what got you interested in HRV and. And how you came to be such an expert in. Because, like, you. You have a podcast, and, you know, I've listened to it before, and it's pretty much just like deep, deep dives into stuff that goes way be. Oh, here's how to get a higher HRV or a low hrv. Like you get into parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system balance and the different smoothing algorithms. There's, you know, all these different things that, that I know you've built into the Hanu app. But how'd you, how did you kind of get to be interested in this stuff in the first place?

Yeah, I'll try to truncate it because it's a little bit of a lengthy story, but I'm a clinical psychologist by trade, but my specialization was in a field called health psychology. And if people aren't familiar with what health psychology is as a discipline, it's really like the intersection or it's like the bi directional relationship between physical mental ailment. So a lot of my training was geared towards that. And when I was doing my doctoral program, I wrote a dissertation kind of in this area looking at demoralization and how it relates to people who have physical ailment and diagnoses and the interplay between that and mental health.

Wait, demoralization?

You want me to unpack that?

Yeah, unpack that a little bit.

Yeah. So demoralization is more or less like a stronger clinical term for this idea of helplessness. It's like a more. It's a more pervasive level of helplessness and hopelessness. And so we know that as people. And again, read my dissertation, go find it. So to all the audience out there, I'm totally kidding. It's like an actual dissertation and probably very boring for most people. But the thing that we found is that most people who experience chronic ailments, so physiological ailment, whether it's cardiovascular disease, diabetes, especially chronic pain, cancer, these individuals experience a fair amount of hopelessness and helplessness. And that significantly relates to overall treatment outcomes, both physiologically and psychologically. So that's what my dissertation was on.

Okay, got it. Well, I'm looking at the app right now and it says my stress resilience is fair. So hopefully I'm not too demoralized today. We can jump into, into the app later on. So, so you did this dissertation, you got into hrv, and did you just start measuring it on yourself initially, or was this something you started using with your patients? Or how exactly did it flesh out in terms of your business and your, your day to day existence?

Yeah, so what's, what's interesting about it is that I had never really dove into the field of HRV when I was in study. I had heard of the term and I've heard Biofeedback, that's much more of kind of a clinical utilization of hrv, which is really what HANU is based on. Again, just heard a little bit about it. I was more interested in like the integrative holistic health strategies like nutritional psychology, mindfulness meditation, like the role of exercise. And it wasn't until I became a resident, I worked at a VA hospital in Richmond, Virginia and one of my rotations or rounds was I worked in an integrative pain center. It was actually called vip, Veterans Integrative Pain Clinic. Is that vip? No, I can't remember the acronym. But anyway, the role of this clinic was we were taking veterans who are basically just sick and tired of being on opioid based medications. They were ready to titrate themselves off medication because it was causing so much dysfunction and so much difficulty and they weren't getting kind of the pain relief that they wanted. So they came here for a more holistic approach. And I initially came there, I was developed, I was responsible for developing a nutritional psychology clinic because that was really kind of what I was becoming known for. It was my specialization. But it wasn't until I spent some just hardcore time there, a lot of time there, that I was exposed to some different therapeutics like acupuncture and guide, imagery, meditation, and then this little thing called biofeedback. And again, I had heard that term, but I had never really, I didn't know what it was. So I started shadowing somebody who was doing biofeedback with these chronic pain patients. And you have to remember veterans, they're a very interesting group of individuals. But also these are veterans with long standing pain who are really trying to get off medication. And so, so a lot of times can. They can be a little bit rough and gruff. And I love that it's, it was very challenging, but I love that interaction. And you know, when you hook somebody up to a biofeedback machine, initially they think the strategies that you're giving me is that these are breathing techniques and we're just kind of quantifying the effects. And at first like, they're like, I don't know if I buy into this. But then when they start to see this objective data change and then more, more importantly, they subjectively start to feel less and less pain. And we published on this on multiple occasions within this clinic while I was there. Then my eyes started to become more open to, oh goodness, this is a very interesting field. So that's when I like took a deep dive and specializing in the field of Biofeedback, but also heart rate variability. And really, because I went into the weeds, both from a clinical and research perspective, I just became so passionate about it that I kind of forgot everything else. And I slightly kid on that. But this is really where I've spent the bulk amount of my time as a. As a clinician, as a researchers in the field of heart rate variability and developing the best possible therapeutics that I could. And you have to remember too, Ben, like, back when I was doing training, like, wearables weren't a big thing. There was no such thing as aura. There was no such thing as whoop. And the ones that were out there, like Fitbit and stuff, were really geared towards, like, you know, walking soccer moms. And so they weren't really utilizing more advanced biometrics like hrv. So when wearable started.

Thanks. Thanks for insulting all of our soccer mom listeners just now, by the way. They just pulled over in their minivans cursing at you. Right? I know.

Maybe I can sell them on Honu, because it's. It's made for the soccer mom, actually. It's made for the biohacker and the soccer mom, which is kind of cool.

The biohacking soccer mom.

That's right. That's right. Hannah Wiles. She's out there. So anyway, you know, I think that when the advent of these wearable technologies really brought HRV to the forefront, and I think that's where I started to really go deep, because I'm like, oh, now we're like consumer fac. This isn't just clinical, which is where my interest in field of practice was. I'm like, now we're in the consumer phase. And so I think that for me, it was the. I mean, the light bulb went off and I said, there's some huge opportunities here in terms of specialization so that I can help more people. But also too, like, in the wearable space, which is kind of why we created Hanu.

Yeah, yeah, but. But there's like, okay, so my. My aura will measure hrv. Like my aura ring, the one I use for. For sleep tracking and activity tracking and stuff like that. There's obviously, like, a ton of different devices out there. Gosh, like.

I could name a billion of them. If you were to just go to, like, the App Store and type in HRV, or go to Google or DuckDuckGo, and if you're independent, libertarian or something like that, and you know, DuckDuckGo, HRV. And you're gonna find a ton. Right. Elite HRV and the bio Strap and again, like the aura and the whoop. So how is this strap that I'm wearing literally right now, as I'm talking to you, any different than the stuff that I already have?

Yeah, it's a great question. Like, kind of going back to what I was mentioning earlier. HRV is extremely pervasive. It's basically built into all wearables. And the way that it is assessed in all wearables is for the most part nowadays has become fairly uniform. So for most individuals who are tracking hrv, they're either doing it one of two different ways. They're either getting it overnight as a running average while you're asleep, or you're getting it like the first thing in the morning. So those are the two common protocols. And those protocols are really looking at nervous system recovery. How well did you recover over the nighttime? And then again, that's a good proxy for, you know, informing future training, but also informing changes in the human stress response. But the one thing that's really missing in the market that, that we saw a huge gap at HONU is that there's nothing out there other than one other, on one other device. There was only that one other device that was really tracking heart rate variability continuously and then providing for us. We wanted to provide these tailored and personalized feedbacks and training. So again, what we do that is very differently is that we're actively looking at heart rate variability. It's continuous, it's all day long. And then when we see you shift in and out of your baseline range, so we have an upper ceiling and a lower shelf, well then we're gonna alert you, we're gonna say it looks like something's a little bit off within your nervous system. Now one thing to clarify is that's not an inherently bad thing. I think sometimes people think that these dips in HRV are like a kind of like having an increase in blood glucose is a bad thing. And it's like, not necessarily. It's actually can be quite a good thing. And it provides us with a level of information, but everything is contextualized, which is why in Hanu we actually will ask people like, what's going on? Number one, what's your subjective mood like right now? And then also two, like, what's the thing that's happening in the current moment? So that's what we referred to and you mentioned earlier, it's called life events. And that mechanism is for us to be able to look at trends over time because the best way to self regulate is to become more Self aware of what's impacting our nervous system at any given time.

And by the way, that's a good point that you made about the fact that you don't necessarily want your HRV continuously high. Some of the clients who I work with, and especially the athletes who I work with, I monitor their hrv. And a lot of times when they're wanting to build fitness remarkably, or if I'm training like an actor to prepare for a movie or a triathlete to prepare for a race, I will oftentimes have certain periods of the week or the month where as I'm tracking their HRV because I have access to all their data, I will purposefully get them to a state where their HRV is consistently low for a couple of days and then give them a deload week or a deload day, a recovery day or a rest week or a higher carb day. Or there's other methods that you can use to allow the body to bounce back more quickly. But what happens is you almost get this effect known in the, in exercise science or periodization literature as a super compensation, meaning that their fitness increases even more than it would have if they just kept their HRV high or consistent. So, you know, similar to blood glucose, like you said, like, you know, my blood glucose spikes in the sauna, it spikes when I exercise. You know, it spikes briefly, acutely in response to cold thermogenesis, but then it dips, it stabilizes. And those brief forays are actually training my body to, to be more sensitive to glucose. In the same way that brief forays into a dip in HRV can actually be a way to build stress resilience. You know, probably a perfect example of that would be like if I, if I were to wear a real time HRV monitor in the gym. It's like the back squat is the one exercise that I've found that just dumps HRV dramatically. And a lot of people will be like, well, you should quit squatting bro, because you're, it's lowering your hrv. Well, no, it means that that's like one of the most stressful things I can do in the gym. And if that's one of the most stressful things I can do in the gym, well, that means that's one of the things that's gonna give me the most bang for my buck. From a fitness standpoint.

Yeah, no, 100%. And there are physiolo, we have physiological expectations of when we should see heart rate go up and subsequently heart rate variability go down and exercise is one of them. I actually had somebody reach out to me. This was a few years ago now, actually. I think when I did the last podcast on this with you, Ben, someone reached out to me and they're like, every time I get in the gym and I get on the treadmill, I see my heart rate variability go from like 60 milliseconds down to like 5 or 6 milliseconds. Like, is there something wrong here? And I would see, and I can see why people can become quite confused with that because there's a kind of this myth that's being passed around and I'm sure we'll talk about common myths around hrv, that you should be comparing yourself to others and you should have this level of expectation that HRV should kind of just stay somewhat stagnant. And that's a good thing. And not necessarily like context really is key. Key. And what we know from the literature is that even with exercise, because it is an immensive physiological stressor, you should expect to see HRV go in that direction. But the rebounding effect afterwards is the really intriguing thing that you see with honu. So after an exercise, the rebound effect that automatically occurs, or at least I should say should occur, is really fascinating to watch. But also if you're using down regulating techniques or parasites parasympathetically downregulating techniques like breath work, the in between sets or after a session, kind of like your post workout stretch, but with your breathing you will see immensive rebound effects from heart rate variability and heart rate. And it's really motivating from a recovery standpoint because what you're, what you're actually seeing there, by seeing those data change, you're seeing your nervous system repair faster and more frequently than you would if you're not practicing these down regulating techniques. And that's not to say you need technology in order to do that, but it's really helpful in the conditioning response and then also the accountability response when you can indeed watch it live.

Yeah, yeah. And so speaking of watching it live, so I'm actually looking at mine right now and for ms, which stands for millisecond, right?

Yeah, that's right.

Okay. Okay. So mine says right now 19. Actually no, it says 20, just changed. Oh wow. It went up a little bit while I was talking to you. So it must be very stress relieving for me to talk to Jay. So okay. As soon as I started talking, it's at about like it's range, like 22, 23, 24. You know, kind of moving around in real time. Now, if I go. I'm literally just like, holding my phone right now and doing this. If I go to my Aura app, right, and I click on my readiness score, it shows my heart rate variability. Like, last night was ranging between like, 80 and 89. And so is that accurate? Like, does that mean that when I'm asleep, my. My Ms. Heart rate variability score is that much freaking higher than when I'm awake? Or is it because Hanu uses a different type of algorithm than, say, like, Aura? Because it seems like a pretty big spread from like, 20, 23 up to, like, 85.

Yeah, no, and it. And it is. So, yeah, Let me first mention that we are indeed utilizing the exact same algorithm. So when you look at Aura, when you look at Whoop. When you look at other wearables, they utilize a primary time domain domain indices of heart rate variability called rmssd. It's the root mean squared of successive differences, and it's actually looking at the amount of variability that occurs in between heartbeats and the difference that occurs in between heartbeats. So what this is actually telling us.

Is that again, by the way, I'm going to interrupt. For people who don't have their rocket scientist helmet strapped on, all Jay was referring to is HRV is just measuring the tiny, tiny beat to beat variation in milliseconds from heartbeat to heartbeat. Higher HRV means that you have a little bit better nervous system response because there's more variation. Lower HRV means there's less variation. Like, there'd be like, whatever your heart beats, there's 0.5 milliseconds. Your heartbeats, again, there's 0.5 milliseconds, and again 0.5. That'd be like a low HRV, whereas a high HRV would be, it's 0.3, it's 0.6, it's 0.7, is 0.1, and your nervous system is really responding well in real time. Right?

Yeah, you got. Got it. You got it. You don't want. The heart is not a metronome, so you don't want to see it starting to pace itself because that means there's significant taxation on the nervous system and there's potential complications. So. Yeah. And again, like, not to. Not to sound like I'm, you know, beating the same drum over and over again. I think I've only said it once. Actually, though, is the. If you want to get into. Take a deep dive into, like, HRV physiology. Well, yeah, you can tune in the HONU health Podcast, but also, like, I did like a. A two, two and a half hour, I think podcast for you, Ben, that I'm sure is probably still available. That is like the deep, deep dive.

I'll link to it in the show. And by the way, the show notes for today's show, for anybody listening in, it's@bengreenfieldlife.com hanupodcast Hanu is spelled H A N U. Much to the chagrin of Jay's wife. It's not spelled H A N N A. That's okay. So. BenGreenfieldLife.com Hanu podcast. You guys are using the same smoothie. Uncle's room. So why, why is my HRV so much lower? Because I'm not that stressed out talking to you. I mean, you're nice and peaceful, bro. Like, why is my HRV so much lower than it was last night?

Yeah. So there's a couple of things physiologically that are occurring when we're in a tonic or asleep state. So that more resting phase than what you're doing right now. So one thing that you'll notice, Ben, like, if you stop talking, for the most part, unless your nervous system is significantly revved up, if you stop talking, talking and you stay still, and if you especially start to manipulate your breathing or slow your breathing down, you'll see heart rate variability go up. So talking is actually one that can significantly suppress hrv. Again, not a bad thing. But you have to think of what, what is happening when you're talking? Well, you're utilizing energy. So when you're utilizing energy, you need your parasympathetic nervous system to retract a little bit. Not excessively, but a little bit. And for your sympathetic nervous nervous system to sometimes dial itself up, because, again, you need to mobilize energy, you need to mobilize glucose. Talking isn't something that you know is not a calorie burner. It is. So that's one component. But the other component that we have to remember is that there are when someone is at rest. So when someone is asleep, what's not happening is a few things. Number one is that while you are unconsciously processing information, so cognition is still occurring because it is an unconscious process, which is very different than someone who might have experienced trauma. So let's say someone who has ptsd. When you are not consciously processing information, then we see that the parasympathetic nervous system is able to kick into more high gear and help with recovery and with repair. So we would say that from a recovery state Sleeping at night is typically better and obviously it is, is needed than us going throughout our day. Now obviously we can actively do things to recover our nervous system throughout the day, but it's not likely gonna have the amount of potency from a nervous system change than will be sleep. So that's why it's so incredibly valuable and important for sleep.

Yeah, the other thing that makes sense, well, while you're talking, by the way, like I just started kinda breathing and I went up to about 29.

Yeah, yeah, that's exactly what you would expect to see. And that level and that, and you seeing that objective data change is, is a testament to, at that period of time between you were last talking and now you are having better resilience and fortitude in your nervous system through repair and recovery. And, and we'll get into strategies, I'm sure in a little bit and we'll talk about why breathing is so incredibly important. But being able to see that data provides a lot of value and then it keeps bringing us back and back again to condition that response because we see the pause positive effects that active rest and that breath work and biofeedback can have in it. One more thing that I'll clarify to kind of wrap this part of the, the, the conversation up. Well, I guess we don't have to wrap it up, but just to kind of like put the icing on the cake is that there are significant hormonal responses that are going to affect your stress response regardless of whether or not you're actually stressed. When you're asleep, you're not nearly, you're not secreting nearly as much crf. You're not secret, sorry, crh. You're not secreting nearly as much glucocorticoids and cortisol that especially throughout the day. And so these are going to help to tame the nervous system. Again, this is really good for repair. And when you wake up first thing in the morning, well, now we're starting to have more spikes in cortisol now that we're having more spikes in norepinephrine and epinephrine and other glucocorticoids. And so we see heart rate go up, up. It's very different throughout the day than it is at night and therefore we see heart rate variability suppressed. So one thing to clarify here is that it is not inevitably bad that HRV is much lower throughout your day than it is at night. Because we would expect that from a physiological perspective that is absolutely what you would expect. What is more interesting is actually how, how well you can stay within your baseline window. So that's how well you can stay above your upper, your lower shelf and within the range of your, of your upper ceiling. So I, I think that, does that help to clarify, Ben? I just want to make sure I was, I was being clear.

Yeah, it does actually. Well, while you were talking, I actually got up to go up another 8 Ms. Points by clicking the train button and then I wasn't ignoring you, but while I was listening to you, I pressed the, there's two different breathing options on here. Resonance breathing and box breathing. I pressed the box breathing one and it started me into a minute of four count in, four count hold, four count out and four count hold. And it let me choose my exercise position. So I chose standing because it says you can choose sitting, standing or lying down. And it went up another 10 points just from doing that alone. So obviously there's some built in features in here that help you if you look at it. And it's low. And I actually want to ask you about resonance breathing here in a second and why one would choose that versus box breathing. But before I do, I have a couple more kind of logistical questions for you. This whole idea of wearing a heart rate strap, right, like.

Is this something that you think is going to be like the end all for the Honu app or do you guys envision like branching out into some kind of, of a wearable or why. Why is it a heart rate strap right now?

Yeah, it's a great question. So when you look at what do wearables, all wearables, what do they base their comparison against when they're looking at the efficacy of their data output? And in the end it is a Polar H10ECG chest strap, which is what you have on, which is what we are going to market with. I'll tell you a little bit about the roadmap, but I'll tell you why we chose that. The reason being is because when you're doing something as complex as capturing continuous heart rate variability, and again, this is continuous, it never stops. Capturing heart rate variability. When you're doing something like this, you need the most precise instrument that you possibly can. And the reason that you need that is because when we look at heart rate variability, it is calculated and it is measured very differently than heart rate, heart rate typically will average out, whereas heart rate variability has to to be extremely specific and extremely accurate. This is one of the reasons why you don't see a lot of the more common wearables doing continuous heart rate Variability monitoring. Now here's kind of the hint, hint for where we're going with this is that while we're going to market with the most accurate device that is possibly available, which is again an ECG chest strap, which for all intents and purposes, like you don't have to deal with electrodes, like it snaps on, snaps off, like you can go on around your day and you know, put it on when you want to wear it, you know, take it off when you don't, has a 400 hour battery life which is like insane that it'll actually Capture data for 400 hours of use. The we, we really wanted to go out and, and highlight kind of the efficacy of our algorithms and our protocol with those who demanded accuracy with their, with their wearable. And so with the Health Optimizer, with the Biohacker, the peak performer, like we can guarantee you that you are always going to have 100% accurate data or at least 99.9% accurate data because that's what Polar speaks to their level of efficacy. Now what we see kind of down the road is that there is an opportunity for us to market and work with other wearable companies to integrate our software and our platform with the, these wearables. Now it will look very different. I think that the Health optimizer or the person who wants that continuous like hardcore data is probably going to always benefit from wearing an ECG chest strap. However, if someone's not as concerned with kind of continuous accurate hrv, then there are mechanisms to where we could use PPG technology, which is photoplesmography. It's basically those little shining, you know, green lights or infrared red lights that are unwearables. Like we can, when someone is very still, get very good data, which is why aura and Whoop and other companies do this at night. But once artifact or movement is introduced, then heart rate variability goes out the window. That's because you need something that is extremely accurate.

Now from what I understand though, like if I'm wearing this strap and my heart rate variability drops into a stressful range, it will actually pull up a notification and bring me straight into a breathing exercise to bring it back up, right? Like if I've got like, let's say I know this is one thing that I personally do, like I'll get email apnea, like I'll start to read emails and I'll, and I'll hold my breath and I know that dips my hrv. I can get a cue on my phone when that happens, right?

Yeah, that's Correct. So what's really cool about it is that when, when you first put on Hanukkah, we will look and assess your data. Because HRV and stress resiliency metrics that we use, heart rate and respiration rate are very personalized. So we need to know what's your baseline range. And the more and more you wear it, the better and better we have in terms of accuracy of identifying that upper window and that lower window when you fall below that window for a set period of time. Because throughout the day you're going to go through dips. But we know that certain periods of time outside of that window, we're actually going to alert you by pushing a notification to your phone and you'll have two things that you can do. One is log it. And by log it, we asked for a couple of things. Number one, like, tell us what was going on. So for you, Ben, you could say, oh, man, I was emailing somebody and I was holding my breath. So we actually have that as an option. So you can click email and email apnea as an option in the life events. The second thing you can do is rate your subjective experience and you rate that on a Likert scale from I'm, you know, at that point in time I was either moderately stressed or maybe I was extremely stressed, or you can go the opposite direction. I was actually pretty good at that moment in time, not sure what was going on with my hrv. Or maybe I was, you know, walking and that impacted hrv and so I was actually feeling pretty good on my leisurely stroll. So you can log it there. And again, the point of that is to be able to look back over the past week and say, what were those things that were affecting my hrv? What was the. My commute? We put that one in there because that happens to a lot of people. Commute can be really, really stressful. Or maybe it was family relationships, or maybe it was a co worker or a boss, or maybe it was email apnea. There's a lot of things that we put in there and that's kind of the self awareness piece. But then we always provide a tailored opportunity for you to train self regulation or resiliency. And we do that predominantly, predominantly through something called resonance breathing. And I know you wanted to talk about that so we can unpack that one. Yeah, but resonance.

Yeah. Well, I actually, I did want to ask you about resonance breathing, but in terms of this assessment, like, I did it, I did it sitting in bed when I, when I first got this package a few Weeks ago, it was called a, what was it called? A resonance frequency assessment. It was like 12 minutes of me breathing with this cue that was on the phone that told me when to start breathing, when it was like a breathing pacer to inhale and exhale with the on screen instructions. And so was that what the, was that the assessment that's actually determining what my ideal breathing rate will be that the app will then use when I am stressed to tell me, okay, breathe in, breathe out. But it tells me the frequency based on that initial assessment?

Yeah, you got it. So what we do initially is that we set resonance breathing at a rate of six breaths per minute. So that's either a five second inhale, five second exhale, or a four, four second inhale, six seconds exhale, which most people prefer that longer exhalation, that's just what it's set at naturally, though technically that is not resonance breathing. So we are the only app that I know that is hardware integrated thus far that does true resonance breathing off of a true resonance breathing assessment. So in the biofeedback literature, the most studied and what has been found to be the most efficacious biofeedback treatment and therapeutic is a resonance breathing. The way that we come across and let me explain what resonance means. So when we talk about resonance, we're talking about cardiovascular resonance. So if we think about like what resonance means in music per se, is that I might sing a note in a building that has great acoustics, but if my notes a little bit off, it may not resonate with those acoustics. But if I hit the note perfect, that may resonate really, really well within that room and sound great. Well, we actually know that our heart responds to different rates of breathing, very similar to what I just mentioned in that analogy. What we can do in order to find that is go through what's called a resonance breathing or resonance breathing assessment. And this was developed and coined by Dr. Paul Lehrer. He actually sits as an advisor on our board at honu and we brought him on to give us the true efficacious evidence based protocol that he develops on resonance breathing. So what you did, Ben, and what anybody who has HonU will do is that we ask that one of the first things that you do is run through this resonance breathing assessment, because the intention behind it is to find what is the most optimal breathing rate for stimulating vagal tone, for stimulating the autonomic nervous system, and helping you to better engage in a relaxation or parasite parasympathetic response. And so with that this assessment also looks at where increases the, what breathing rate increases HRV the most. What breathing increases a process called respiratory sinus arrhythmia, which is the distinctive changes in heart rate across the respiratory cycle the most. So we call that heart rate amplitude or respiratory sinus arrhythmia amplitude. And then when we are breathing, what is the best match of of breath to heart rate? So what I mean by that is when you breathe in and you breathe out, how closely does heart rate follow? So as you're in inhaling, is it a one to one? Heart rate is increasing as you inhale and as you exhale, is it one to one? We look to see what breathing rate gets you the closest there. So we take you through a system of assessments which it's a last about 12 minutes long, so it's a little bit lengthier, but once you get it, you're done. And resonance frequency rate does not change change across the lifespan. They've actually seen.

That's what I was going to ask you, like if you had to retest a bunch. But it'll just stay the same, huh?

No, it just stays the same. And actually there's been a lot of research about this indicating that if it does change that the most it will ever change would be half a breath per minute. And so a lot of times it's not worth doing it, but you can take this thing as many times as you want, it just might be a little bit of a waste of time because you're going to likely get the same answer over and over again.

There's bound to be one person out there who measures the amount of cacao news nibs that they put in their smoothie who are gonna really hold that half breath per minute. Deer.

That's right. No, it's, it's so true. But what we do is we take you through a series of breathing trials and you start off at six and a half breaths per minute and then we take you down to as low as four and a half breaths per minute. And you test each trial at a, at lowering a half breath per minute. So six and a half. Six, five and a half. Five, four and a half. Do it for two minutes for each round and at the end you're presented with, with your resonant frequency rate. So for. What was yours? Ben, I'm curious, do you remember?

No, I'm going back to see if I could find it in the app.

Yeah, like if you click.

I can't see it in here. Oh wait.

It says six but I Don't know if that's correct.

Yeah, yeah, that's probably correct. Yeah, if it says six, it's. It's probably correct. Yeah. And so what we then do is we will populate your resonance breathing training. Like you don't have to change it. It'll automatically populate to whatever your resonance breathing is. And then when you do receive a notification or alert and we say, hey, are you ready to train? That's our go to. Because when we look at the evidence base of biofeedback, nothing is as strong in terms of autonomic nervous system change as resonance breathing. So we think that's kind of our hallmark training is that you get the true 100 evidence based assessment that comes from the mouth of the guy who created it, Dr. Paul Lair. But you also get, get the training built in as kind of like our go to unique personalized training for you.

Yeah, I've got the resonance breathing pulled up right now and it's cueing me with this breath pacer to do the inhale and then the exhale. Although I think that eventually you guys should totally work in some kind of haptic sensation so I don't have to actually look at the screen to do it. I think that would be pretty cool because then, because then you can just be like checking. Okay, good, it is coming. I was going to say I could be checking email and just get that automatic cue because I actually read this book. I forget the name of the book, but it was basically a book about resonance breathing. And in the book there was a downloadable MP3 that you could play in the background. Gosh, I wish I could find it. I could play it for people to hear. But essentially what I did for like a month was I'd play it when I was checking emails and it sounds kind of like this ding, click, click, click, click, ding, click, click. And so it's like an audible cue for me to know when to inhale and when to exhale. But I could totally see, especially for people who are in an office where there's other people working, they don't want that kind of noise, like some kind of haptic sensation for the resonance breathing, which would be pretty cool. I'm glad you're working that in. But what I was going to ask you was obviously the resonance breathing, because I have it pulled up right now. It's doing. It is for me, for example, the six count in and the six count out. But unlike the box breathing, there's not a hold.

Because you have both options in there. Which one's better for hrv. The box breathing or the resonance breathing?

Yeah, yeah, great question. So obviously, like, I should mention this to users as well, sorry to listeners, hopefully users that you been, you're under the, like the alpha testing group, so you're actually like the one of the first people to ever have this. So consider yourself lucky, my friend, but you're one of the first people to have it. And so we've only built in a few of the training trainings in thus far and I'll explain a little bit of those here and the differences between those. But kind of as we progress actually even the next week, Ben, like in the app, you'll see about 12 new biofeedback and breath work practices added in. But we have, we, we've parsed them out into kind of like different categories. So our first one that we're really focusing on, we kind of term it, it's like our relaxing, calming, like vagal stimulating practice, which includes of course, resonance breathing. We have box breathing breathing. We have custom type of breathings in there where you can set the custom inhales, exhales and hold times to however long you want to. We're creating one in there that was something coined by Dr. Andrew Huberman called the physiological sigh, which is a really interesting strategy. But all of these are intended with relaxing and calming the nervous system. So what we will see, and this is something to really clarify too, is that most people are likely going to see either some sort of change, if not a significant change in heart rate variability when they're engaging in resonance breathing. And it's very common for people the first time they try doing it, to see heart rate variability significantly increase. And the great thing about our application too is that while you're training, you see one heart rate variability metric. You also see your stress resiliency score, which I'll talk about that here in a bit. You see heart rate and then you see a timer, obviously, because we like to put that in there. But at the end of your session you see very advanced HRV biometrics. And you can really look to see how in all different areas, HRV has changed the time domain indices, which there's about five or six of them, and then the frequency domain indices, which there's about five or six of them. And if people don't know what that is, we can talk about that. But also too within the app, you can just click the info button and we're going to have a description of what to look for, um, and how it relates to your personalized data. But back to the question about breath holds. So what we actually know is that when, if you're consciously or unconsciously breath holding is that that actually stimulates a bit of a stress response. So let's go back to email apnea. Right, so when you hold your breath, this results in a bit of CO2 pooling. So CO2 pools up, which is our primary stimulus to breathe. And when that happens, then we, we either catch ourselves or we kind of notice that something seems a little bit off and then our body, naturally, our autonomic nervous system will kick into gear and then we will breathe. Now, from a heart rate variability standpoint, what we actually know is that that can cause a bit of a decrease in hrv, even if you've changed your respiration rate to a pretty slow. We'll even call it a resonance breathing rate. So why would we include that? Like, why are breath holds important? Well, when we practice conscientious breath holds, which is similar, very dissimilar, I should say, in some respect to unconscious breath holds like email apnea, what we found in the literature is that there's an interesting response. Yes, you might initially see some changes or fluctuations in heart rate variability in a downward direction. But the recovery period that occurs afterwards because of the vagal stimulating effects that CO2 and slow paced breath breathing has, we actually see that kind of that post recovery period of HRV going up. So I would say that a good clarification is that if people do see heart rate variability going down during a practice, it doesn't mean that heart rate variability training or biofeedback is ineffective. These are, these practices are causing significant physiological responses in a good way. But a lot of them will come post recovery, especially subjectively and objectively. Objectively you'll see that on the end.

Okay, got it. Now the, the resonance breathing and the box breathing makes sense then. And, and I'll probably just kind of experiment with them and these newer breath work assessments or the breathwork exercise that you have to kind of see what responds best. But in addition to that, under the assessments category, you have that resonance frequency assessment that we talked about, that 12 minute assessment, but then you also have the bolt score on there. I briefly talked about the Bolt score in the podcast where you, where you take a normal bolt breath into your nose and then a normal breath out through your nose. And after you've taken that normal breath out through your nose, you kind of hold your nose with your fingers and hold your breath and you see how long you hold your breath and Like, I think a good score is like, you know, 40 plus seconds or something like that. And people who do a lot of breathwork training can sometimes get longer than a minute. But why do you put the, what's the bolt, the body oxygen level test. Why do you put the BOLT score on there?

Yeah, great question. So one thing to mention actually I had a mentioned yet and I feel a little bit bad is that on our podcast that we do, the Honu Health podcast, it's actually co hosted by Patrick McCune. And so Patrick McCune wrote the book the Oxygen Advantage and he's one of the preeminent experts in in breath work and he loves what we're doing. And so he's a kind of a part of our crew as an advisor and also a co host on the podcast. And he created what was called the body oxygen level test. And basically this is just a test of CO2 tolerance and it's a test of functional breathing. We know that as someone, if they're experiencing dysfunctional breathing and that could be related to health concerns, it could be because of stress and anxiety, or just because they're, they've been conditioned to breathe dysfunctionally throughout their life, then their level of CO tolerance tends to be way down. And we know again that CO2 tolerance is actually the reason why we can deliver oxygen to muscular tissue to be utilized through the Bohr effect. CO2 is actually works as the transporter key to oxygen via hemoglobin. And so this test allows you to kind of see what is your baseline level of CO2 tolerance and are you experiencing functional breathing. So if it's below 10, we have some significant problems. These are people who have like asthma or maybe even like cystic fibro fibrosis or they're really stressed or they're overworked. We'll see that people, you know, below 20 is still not great, but we're working our way up. And like you mentioned, once you get to 40 and above, that's really the target goal. So we built that there. And what you'll see is that across time you can take the test as it was designed by Patrick McCune. You can take the test and you can look to see whether or not the practices that you're engaging in in HONU is affecting kind of that level, especially if you're doing a lot of good quality breath hold practices. One of the things that we're also building into the application, which is going to be very directly linked to this Bolt Score Body Oxygen Level test, is we're going to have actual oxygen oxygen advantage practices. So the ones that were developed by Patrick with the intention of increasing CO2 tolerance and functional breathing and will directly link to Bolt score. And, and so you'll be able to see like if I practice, you know, one of his practices called Breathe Light to breathe. Right. Which is a buteco type breathing pattern is that we'll see like how does this actually affect my nervous system response. So we're looking at obviously heart rate variability and heart rate and respiration rate. But then also how does this affect my Bolt score? And what most people will see is that the more and more they practice it, that Bolt score will go up and up and up.

Yeah. I think what's interesting, a lot of people don't realize because sometimes we learn that like, like carbon dioxide is acidotic and you want to be in a state of metabolic alkalosis, you should avoid CO2 at all costs. I think a lot of people don't realize how calming CO2 can be. I mean, what's his face. Was it, was it. James Nestor talked about this in Breathe, how there's some clinics that will literally do like what's called carbogen therapy, where you'll breathe CO2 as a way to build stress resilience. And I think a lot of people listen to the podcast know that a lot of times I'll go on walks and I'll use this one thing developed by another breathwork practitioner named Anders Olson called a relaxator. And I put it in my mouth and it restricts the amount of air that I can exhale, thus causing me to retain CO2. Kind of similar to like that, that elevation training mask that some people will wear when they're exercising. Or similar to the recommendation to breathe through your nose when you're doing hard exercising. And there's a significant improvement in stress resilience. Resilience when you do that. I mean very, very similar also to when you're doing like a breath practice. Like I'll use the, the other Ship app, for example, sometimes do breath work and a lot of times, some of the sessions you're building up massive amounts of CO2 in your system. And almost like what we were talking about, where you should purposefully lower your HRV with specific exercises or purposefully cause blood glucose fluctuations through cold thermogenesis or heat or exercise. In a similar way, you should probably purposefully actually have periods of time during the day where you're amping up your CO2 levels because the, the bounce back effect of that is increased stress resilience?

Yeah, yeah, 100%. I mean we say that just like exercise is a stressor on the body and we know the physiological effects both kind of immediately and afterwards. A lot of these breath work practices, especially more oxygen advantage related practices that we built into the app and then some of our other more customers type of breathing practices that we, that, that, that we've included especially like among the performance breathing and focus breathing domains, which are really our practices that we built to excite the nervous system. Like you're gonna see that response. And yes, initially when you're doing it, you might see these changes in a downward direction that might not feel very great because you're like, oh man, my heart rate's going up, my HRV is going down. Like this obviously can't be good for me. But then what you start to see, see is this compounding effect. Oh man. Now throughout the day, my baseline HRV is increasing. Like it's actually getting better. I feel more resilient because I'm doing these things that do yes, cause a transient or an acute stress effect, but in the long term build way more fortitude and resiliency within the nervous system and that's, it's invaluable.

Yeah, yeah. Well, it's interesting too because there's. I know a few cases where you may actually not want to necessarily have a high hrv. And I talked about how before when you're an athlete or someone who's training and you go through a hard week. Yeah. You actually want your HRV to drop. And often that drop is associated with a slight reduction in your resting heart rate. And that can be a sign you're getting super close to an overtrained state. You don't want to stay there for long at all. Like just a couple of days. And then you program in a deload day or a deload week and you super compensate and you get way more fit. But then there's also like this in between zone that I'm aware of that I wanted to ask you about where when you're training really hard and heavy, and I see this especially in endurance athletes, you'll see an increase in hrv. But the increase in hrv, rather than it being a good increase with kind of like a slight drop in resting heart rate, it'll increase and then the resting heart rate will go up. And from what I understand, and correct me if I'm wrong, that's like a sign that you're accumulating fatigue. And that would be a sign that the High HRV may not be a good thing. Might be increased parasympathetic load. Meaning, like, if your HRV is high, but then you also notice your resting heart rate is going up, that might not be a good high hrv. Right?

Yeah. Then, no, you're absolutely correct on that. And again, like, it's. It just makes sense to ensure that you're looking at patterns on different metrics. And this is why, again, with. When someone does biofeedback or they do what's called a snapshot. And I'd really love to talk about the snapshot feature, Ben, because I know that you haven't gotten that yet, but you're getting it soon. But when someone does a snapshot or they do biofeedback, they're gonna get these advanced biometrics and they're gonna see.

Just talk about it right now, by the way, fill us on the snapshot thing as you're talking.

So one of the things that they're gonna look for is, like, what are the changes in all data biometric points? So we're looking to say not just like, hrv, but what has happened to heart rate? What has happened to all the domain indices that come along with hrv? And we know a couple of things from research. And then I'll talk about snapshot. So a couple of things from research is that indeed, if someone has a significant spike or a sign, significant drop in heart rate variability, so kind of either one of two ways, and that also corresponds with an increase in heart rate. So that's the. The key variable is that heart rate goes up.

Specifically resting heart rate.

You got it? Yeah, yeah. Resting heart rate. Then we know that can be signs of fatigue. And so we've seen this on multiple occasions in the research. And then I've worked with a lot of athletes just as you have been, who I've seen this. This case. So what's going on here is that when people have overtaxed their nervous system, and let's say we're gonna go to the high hrv, high heart rate, when they've overtaxed their nervous system, what ends up happening is, is, is that heart rate goes up because it need. We need to continue to mobilize more energy because the body is still trying to. Even though it's trying to repair, it's still out of whack. And so basically, the only way that the cardiovascular system can keep up is to pump out more blood and to shunt as much of the energy as we can into cells to repair. But the. The Problem here, though, is that when heart rate variability starts to go up or it starts to skyrocket, it. It's the parasympathetic nervous system really fighting hard and saying there is something wrong here in terms of repair. Like, you look like you're overreaching. You look like you are over training. And so it does this compensatory mechanism where you see it goes up, but the body feels absolutely like garbage, like fatigued. We know that these people have a lot of CRH floating around, so corticotropin releasing hormone. We know that cortisol is typically high with these individuals. And we also see the opposite effect of when hrv. Sorry, when HRV goes really, really low, but heart rate goes up, then that's another sign. That's kind of the more common one that happens. But really, yeah, the high hrv, high heart rate is definitely a sign of burnout and an overtaxation of the autonomic nervous system. And when we start to see that, and we see this with people with depression as well. So people who are just really have a lot of malaise. They have a lot of cognitive rumination. It's like they don't want to get up and do anything because the body just wants to park itself because it says we've got to recover. But the sympathetic nervous system's like, but you're stressed. So it's like this weird dichotomy and fighting which represents itself in high HRV and high heart rate. So that's definitely not a good thing. Now to speak real quickly about the snapshot feature, which is what you would use to measure something like. Like this because you want to have some consistency. So a lot of applications. Yeah, you can take it overnight or you can take it first thing in the morning. I'm a huge fan of first thing in the morning. And the reason being, even though I do look at my aura and my whoop and my garment, everything I wear, I wear probably too much, but I'm testing a product. So I'm trying to build a company. So I need to make sure that we're on par. Even though I don't wear my Hanu at night, I don't recommend people sleep with a chest strap on. It's. This is more of a daytime device, but I take it in the morning. And a lot of this comes from. From Marco Altini's research. He's an advisor to us. He's also an advisor to. To aura, but he's just kind of the preeminent data scientist in Heart rate variability. And what we found is that when you take your snapshot in the morning, which could just be a one to two, maybe five minute max, we really just say two minutes is pretty good. Even one minute is pretty good. What we're doing here is that we're getting kind of this consistent type of reading that's within comp context. So first thing in the morning, before you've had coffee, before you've really gotten out of bed. I just lay in bed. And I take it what I'm looking for here is I'm looking to say, okay, after I've gotten my rest and recovery and sleep, which should be the most optimal time to repair my autonomic nervous system from a human stress response basis, but also from a performance basis, like where is my heart rate variability compared to all the other days? I think it's the best basis of comparison. So Snapshot allows you to do that and it tracks that. But also too, I utilize Snapshot as a mechanism for testing and tracking. So, you know, there's a lot of companies that will claim like, you know, we can increase HRV by X percent or we do this and we do that. And what's great about this one is that you can throw on your hanu and you can start a timer and you can look to see where your data was initially. You can look to see what happens while you're using like said product or maybe you're in, in the sauna or maybe you're doing a cold plunge or you're free diving, whatever you're doing. And you can look to see the, the effects over time kind of within this snapshot and start to log them and start to compare them. So I utilize that one a lot. I think that's going to be a fan favorite for many of the biohackers and health optimizers who are self quantifiers and experimenters.

That's super cool. I, I can't wait for that feature to come out. So I'm, I'm looking forward to the. What's it called on my, on my phone, the test flight app for the insider VIP testers. Hey, I actually had a couple things I was wondering about too. Just random questions that probably aren't like, you know, life changing for most people. But I'm just kind of curious, why do guys seem to have slightly higher heart rate variability than the ladies doctor?

Yeah, and that's well defined in research. Just in case people are like, Ben, why are you trying to give the advantage to the guys here even no, it's true. Like I've seen really is. So there's a couple of theories and then I'll give probably more of a broad answer to it. So what we actually know is that HRV is highly variable and very bio individual. What we see is that gender makes a difference. Males typically have a higher HRV than females. We know that taller people typically have higher hrv. So I'm like I'm, I'm in the zone man. I'm 6 foot 5, I'm male, I'm good to go. But and then we also know, know that they're just genetic variables. So we know that if you have a parent who has a naturally lower hrv, again not a bad thing. I think we really need to highlight that a low quote unquote low HRV and low is only when we start comparing ourselves to others. It can be compared to ourselves. And I should explain that. But, but for the sake of this discussion right now there are variables that are going to impact where your baseline HRV is. So when we go go when we speak to males, a lot of the times males are typically taller and we actually know that taller individuals will just typically have a higher heart rate variability. Now there's the theory here is is due to the length of signaling when it comes to post ganglion and pre ganglion neurons. And so that's a fancy schmancy way of saying that when we think about our nervous system and the way it connects to different, different organs, well, males are typically taller and have typically longer nerves. And so signals typically don't shoot as fast or they don't oscillate as fast. And so therefore heart rate variability stays a little bit higher and again it's not substantially higher, but it is higher. The other answer to this is that when you ask people who are within the domain of heart rate variability research and cardiovascular research, it's is that we don't fully know. It could be because that males will typically not secrete nearly as much cortisol and norepinephrine and epinephrine throughout the day. And that could be a feature that's causing less activity in the sinoatrial node or the pacemaker of the heart. But the end answer is that we don't know specifically. We just have these theories that we can throw out there.

Hmm, interesting. So the other thing that I know is that just like, like generally people who are cardiovascular well trained have a higher HRV score. But do you think it differs whether you are fit from a strength training standpoint versus a cardiovascular standpoint. Like if you're an endurance athlete versus a strength athlete.

Yeah. What I come across in the literature is that the single greatest influencer to heart rate variability is exercise, but more specifically it's overall cardiorespiratory fitness. So when we look at VO2 max, which is going to for the most part favor the endurance athlete over the strength training resistance athlete, is that these individuals who have higher VO2 maxes have higher cardiorespiratory fitness typically will have higher HRV. The exception to this is that a lot of endurance athletes are over training or they're overreaching. Especially if we think about ironman athletes or those who are doing ultra endurance races, their HRV can be more suppressed sometimes because of the amount of over training. But what we find is, is that when they do take time to recover, it rebounds like crazy and heart rate variability is much higher. What we do see, and this is great, interesting research, is that even those who are not paying particular emphasis to endurance training or aerobic training will still have much higher heart rate variability reading readings. And I should preface this with those who are doing more like weightlifting, who are doing strength training, we still see them having higher heart rate variabilities than those individuals who are either doing limited amounts of aerobic exercise or the ones who are especially stagnant and doing no strength training. So it would only make sense. I, I should also say one last thing about this, and again, this might kind of turn us to also discussion on myth myths is that a lot of people think that, oh, does that mean then that the endurance athlete who has higher cardiorespiratory fitness because their HRV is higher, does that then mean that they are healthier or they have a longer lifespan than individuals who are just like saying doing resistance training and not focusing as much on aerobic output? And the answer to that is that we're comparing apples and oranges here. So there's their, their increased HRV is much more of a reflection of their cardiorespiratory fitness status and may not and may not tell us anything within that context about their psychological or emotional well being, which could be significantly impacting their overall health and lifespan. So I think there's just a lot of nuances there that need to be addressed because sometimes people just think, oh, higher is better and I need to get that up as high as possible. Well, it's not going to necessarily hurt, but it's also maybe kind of the, the intention may be incorrect. And I think the intention here really Matters.

Okay, all right, that makes sense. Well, gosh, we've, we've covered a ton related to this app and measuring hrv. I guess probably one important thing is even though I'll put all the details@bengreenfieldlife.com Hanu podcast you mentioned a few times, as did I, that I'm kind of like doing, doing some insider beta testing of this thing and I believe that this recording we're doing right now is going to come out pretty soon after we record it. So is this actually like available yet for people to get or where, where are we at in terms of it being available?

Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, you're a part of the alpha testing group and we were going to originally release to market in October, so on October 1st, but we're crashing that, my friend, and hopefully that's a happy thing for everybody. Body we're actually going to market on August 1, so we moved it up a couple months, which we're very excited about but also very nervous about. You can go on to honuhealth.com Ben and I know we have a coupon code for you. I believe it's been 40 and you can pre order the device now and we'll start shipping on August 1st. The retail device is, it's $300 and that gives you 12 months access to our software and IP platform. And then you also get the device in and of itself. So we just include the chest strap with it and it's 300, but that 40% brings it down to 180 bucks. And the one thing that we're trying to do to like throw the icing on the cake here is that anybody who pre orders, like if they listen to this podcast and they pre order for that crazy, you know, 40% off price, we're actually going to throw in weekly webinars and Q&As with me. They're live weekly webinars with me where you can come on, listen to kind of all the things that we're adding into the app, all the things to expect, get a little bit of like didactic education on how to use it and kind of what to look for, how to personalize it, but also too ask me any questions that you may have about your data and your experience. So we see this as a good opportunity to really kind of engage with our customer base and give them a little bit, you know, extra for, you know, being the first in.

Sweet. I dig it. It's, it's super simple to use. Not, not too many bells and whistles. But enough to where you can really control your HRV and learn a lot about your real time biofeedback. So I dig it, Jay and I appreciate you coming on the show to share all this with us. And it's kind of fun for me to have you on the podcast and have you do most of the talking instead of me because usually it's the Q and A episodes where I'm supposed to, you know, talk and, you know, I get to shut my app or and just listen to you on this episode. So thanks for coming on, man.

Yeah, man, you always steal my thunder on the Q and A. So I wasn't gonna let. I wasn't gonna let you do it here. I hear you.

All right, well, all the shown, it's going to be at BenGreenfieldLife.com Hanu podcast H A N U Podcast. And I'm going to go play around with all these new breathing tactics I've learned. Jay and I appreciate you and everything you're doing for helping people out with their stress, man.

Yeah, thanks, man. Really appreciate you having me on.

All right, folks, I'm Ben Greenfield along with J.T. wiles from BenGreenfieldLife.com have an amazing week.

More than ever these days, people like you and me need a fresh, entertaining, well informed, and often outside the box approach to discovering the health and happiness and hope that we all crave. So I hope I've been able to do that for you on this episode today. If you liked it or if you love what I'm up to, then please leave me a review on your preferred podcast listening channel, wherever that might be, and just find the Ben Greenfield life episode episode. Say something nice. Thanks so much. Means a lot.