Improve Your HRV Scores With This ONE Trick for INSTANT Stress Relief!

In our first study, we rigged people up with every sensor we could. We had a full 32 channel EEG cap, we had all their hands wired up with all these sensors. Galvanic skin response is a pretty popular one for stress levels in terms of brain activity. Most consistently we would see an increase in what's called coherence, which doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be more relaxed or less, but your brain's working more efficiently. I would say the most consistent ones were heart rate dropped a little bit and HRV went up. And it tends to be most noticeable or you see the biggest jumps in people that have more severe stress states. So ptsd, panic disorder. And in the active group, we saw a 31% increase in the RMSSD component of HRV, which is your parasympathetic side. And we saw zero change in the placebo group. So that was like a crystal clear impact on hrv.

Got a PhD in biomedical engineering. No, I don't. I have a PhD in biomedical engineering. Joining me on today's podcast, his name is Nicholas Houle, AKA Nick. Nick created a drug free stress recovery tool based on triggering your vagus nerve. We're going to get into this whole idea, what's called neuromodulation today because I've talked about the vagus nerve on the podcast before, but I haven't talked in detail about how you kind of biohack it in terms of actually getting a lot more out of your recovery and your nervous system. So, Nick, been looking forward to this, man.

What's up? Yeah, thanks for having me. It's super exciting to just kind of chat with you. I know you've been in the biomacking space forever and I've followed you for a while, so it's just really awesome to be here with you.

Oh, sweet man. I don't get to Talk to many PhDs in biomedical engineering much. So is that something that you, that you got and then you got interested in stress and recovery or.

Did you get interested in that after you did all your studies?

Yeah, it's an interesting story. I never really cared much for greater academics. It wasn't something I desired to go get a PhD in anything. But the reason I got it really just comes from my background with dealing with stress and anxiety and performance issues. So, you know, when I was growing up, I was a competitive golfer and golf is a sport where you have to have very fine control over your nerves.

I know this Nick, because I, I frisbee golf so very, very accustomed to those fine Motor movements.

Yeah, totally. And, you know, if you don't have good control over your nerves, it makes performance very difficult. If you have a lot of tension in your body, it makes, you know, fine motor control movements very difficult to execute, especially when there's a lot of pressure. And, you know, when I was 14 years old, that's really when I started playing really well. I won a local tournament, you know, with all the best golfers in my state. And that's when I decided I'm like, look, I seem to be pretty good at this sport. I really like doing it. Let's make this my thing. I would love to go pro one day. Right? Every kid wants to go pro and whatever they're doing. And for a couple years, you know, I was pretty good when I was 16, won another pretty big tournament and placed pretty high in most of the tournaments I was playing in. And then no idea, like, why it started happening. Probably because I started overthinking about my future, but started getting performance anxiety. You know, I'm thinking about, you know, I got to perform in this next tournament if I want to get in front of the college coaches. Right. I know they're all watching me and just started getting in my own head about it. And that kind of manifested as, you know, difficulties sleeping the night before tournaments, a lot of stress and tension. The mornings of a tournament, that just felt horrible. And the worst was usually on the first tee. Everybody gets jitters right before, but for me, it happened, like, every single time. And there were moments where I don't want to say I blacked out, but I would catch myself, and I'm like, I feel like I've been on this tee for five minutes. I need to just hurry up and swing and hit it. And so just experiencing those feelings was so painful for me, especially when you have these big dreams and especially knowing you have the potential to take it to the next step, but I wasn't achieving that. That really motivated me to want to go understand what's really going on here. And I think a typical athlete, everybody deals with that. Some people deal with it more severely than others.

Not just athletes. You've got, for example, hunters, right? Like, I shoot the bow target. Panic is totally a thing.

Yeah, yeah. And it's just painful because you know deep down how good you are. But that experience inhibits you from maintaining that peak level of performance. And so instead of going down the, like, psychology route and let's go study the mental side of, you know, positive thinking in meditation and all that. Those are great. And I did all those things, and they're excellent practices, but I was more. I wanted to go deeper. Like, I want to know what's physically happening in my body, in my nervous system, and are there ways we can hack the nervous system to shut that response off? I didn't want to go study, like, what's the optimal psychology, you know, mental visualization process to calm down.

Stuart Smalley already got that nailed in Saturday Night Live. You know, I'm good. I'm great. I'm wonderful. Gosh darn it, people like me.

Yeah, no, there's definitely a role for, like, that positive affirmation, but, you know, when your body goes into that fight or flight, I mean, that's not going to really do anything for you. So I went to school, studied biomedical engineering again. From day one, the goal was I wanted to solve this problem. First four years of schooling is just all the basics. I'm learning about everything in the body, all these different devices and modalities, and I was exposed to a lot of really cool technologies and healthcare tools when I got into my PhD. The reason I joined the PhD program was it gave me space to try things. I had ideas, I had projects I wanted to work on, and if I were to just go get a job somewhere else, I wouldn't be able to work on those things. Whereas the PhD program, they give you funding to do research.

And where was this, by the way? Where was the PhD program?

This is at Arizona State University.

Cool story. The reason I ended up there, I went to ASU for my undergrad, and when I graduated, I got into Duke University, which at the time was the top biomedical engineering program in the country. Went out there, pitched all my ideas. I was like, I want to work on neuromodulation for human performance. And everyone's like, oh, that's a cool idea, but we're not doing that here. And so on paper, it seemed to make more sense to go to Duke, but they just didn't give me the freedom. I wanted to work on this project, and the timing was insane. My idol in the neuromodulation space just so happened to leave this university he was at, and he came to asu. I have no idea why that happened. Like, it's crazy. I called him and was like, hey, here's my project idea. And he was like, that's exactly the type of project that I'm looking to do at asu. So it just made sense. I got to stay at the school. I love the state. I love, and I work on the project. I wanted to.

What was the project?

The project in the beginning was high level. It was create a new technology or modality that could reduce performance anxiety in. At first it started out with golfers, and then it was athletes as a whole. And then it was just anybody dealing with those kind of stressors.

So really fun. I looked into a lot of tools. I learned about transcranial magnetic stimulation using these giant coils you put up to your head, and it sends in these magnetic energy waves. And I can activate or deactivate parts of my brain to trigger a neurological response. To me, I was like, that is so cool. But they're these huge machines. You have to get an MRI to know where you're hitting it. And I'm like, that's not practical for a golfer or most people, by the.

Way, with transcranial magnetic stimulation. Are they still that big? Because I know there's some studies being done now successfully on things like ptsd, and I think they've shrunk the devices a little bit, haven't they?

Oh, yeah. I mean, it's definitely getting better. They're getting smaller. PEMF technology is pretty much the same thing as tms, but at a much lower power. But now you've got PEMF machines that are in a little travel case, and you can get pretty high levels of power that are into that TMS range. So it's getting a lot better, it's getting more portable. The challenge with TMS is because it is so strong, you have to be very careful. You typically have to go get an MRI so that the person applying it can see where they're targeting the brain. PEMF's not as precise because it's not as powerful, but still can have similar effects.

And when you say pemf, you mean a lot of people have these mats, coils for knees and elbows and things like that. Are you talking about the same thing but applied closer to the head or the brain?

Same technology, but TMS is like, it's very similar to pemf, but it's like ultra high power. I mean, thousands of gauss. The mats are typically like under a hundred gauss. So you're not going to really feel much when you're laying on a mat. And if you put, you know, at least in my experience, if you want to feel something, you typically have to get above 500 gauss. If you want to target brain structures, usually you need, you know, over a 500 gauss output of a PEMF.

Yeah, well, I have the one. One of my PEMF. I have a few devices scattered around my house. One's pretty high power. It's the Pulse Centers Pro. But I mean, I couldn't imagine jacking that thing up to high power and putting it by my head. It's like a pom pom, pom, pom pom. Like a sledgehammer. Is that what TMS feels like?

That's what TMS can feel like, yes. And that's why it's so important to have a trained physician applying it. You got to get an MRI so they know exactly where they're applying it. If you just put that up to your head, you know, it can knock you out. You know, we've, we've done that before. We have. You know, being a team of engineers, we've built our own PEMF machines. And we have one that's 16,000 gauss just for the heck of it. We're like, let's just make one. That's insane. And literally, you know, I can pull it three feet away from my head and I can feel like little pulsing in my head. I'm like, that's, that's dangerous. But to some degree, that level of power is kind of what a TMS machine is putting out. But anyway, interesting technology, a lot of cool applications when applied correctly. I would never recommend applying high intensity PEMF to your head without some sort of trained person helping you.

Yeah. And there are some companies, like Dr. William Pollock. I've interviewed him. He's kind of a PMF document who develops devices. He has one called the Flex Pulse that I think when I interviewed him, he talked about putting it behind the occipital bone, the hard bone in the back of the head, and putting it on a frequency that's kind of like a delta theta relaxation frequency and sleeping with that behind the head. And it's subtle, it's nearly subconscious. The feeling is just very slight ticking sensation. It probably does something. But this is. This sounds a lot different than what you're talking about.

Yeah. The PMFs that I was looking into were the high strength stuff because again, being mission driven, I wanted to find something that could quickly calm me down. And so the low strength stuff didn't really have that fast effect I was looking for. You know, these are things, you have to use them for 20 minutes to an hour, do it every day for several weeks. And it's like, that's cool. But it's not the. It's not the, you know, solution that I'm looking for.

You're almost thinking about like something where if you're golfing and you walk up to whatever, you know, hole five with the, with the water hazard, you want to be able to do something right away before you drive.

Yeah, like, just like a switch. Right. I want to flip the switch to turn it off, get that instant effect. I didn't know if that existed. I. That was the idea. That's why I went into the program and I'm like, show me everything that's out there. So TMS was really cool, but not practical. The other one that was really cool is called focused ultrasonic stimulation. So this is using ultrasound in a certain way where it focuses the ultrasound beam. This is super cool because with the ultrasound beam it stimulates at the point where the sound waves converge. So it's like a tiny little couple millimeters long. And I can target any region of depth in the brain and stimulate any region in the brain, including deeper brain structures in the brain stem. And that's cool because it's a little safer than tms. You're not just bombarding it with these massive energy waves. It's very precise. And so the theory is that could replace deep brain stimulation implants. You would still have to go to a clinic and you'd have to get an mri and it's MRI guided, but you don't feel anything, so you don't get that pulse on your head. But it's hyper precise.

And with ultrasound, there's no issue with heating of the tissue or anything like that?

There is because it is a mechanical stimulation. So there's going to be some heating involved, but.

It'S a little bit beyond my understanding. It wasn't my focus. But my PhD advisor, he's the one that sort of pioneered focused ultrasonic stimulation. He created one of the first, you know, focused ultrasound machines for stimulation and he has all the patents on it. So his technical papers are crazy. But part of the way it works is pressure and thermal stimulation. You can trigger neurons to fire with mechanical energy, with thermal energy. I don't know the exact numbers, but you know, when you dial it in, you can trigger a neurological response, which is really cool.

Wow. And then by the way, is that only used in like a clinical or research setting? I'm assuming there aren't direct to consumer focused ultrasound devices.

Yeah, right now it's still early. You know, 10 years ago when I just started my PhD, this was almost a brand new technology. All the patents and the safety testing had been done, but there was limited research. You know, if you look today, the research is growing but it's still primarily used in research centers, a lot of clinical trials. So, you know, if you're somebody that wants to try it, there's a lot of open trials you could kind of search for. But to my knowledge, I don't think they're really out there in clinics just yet. I'm sure there's some out there that are using it, but nonetheless, really promising for being very precise, for modulating the brain, especially at deeper levels where traditionally you'd have to get an implant.

And when you say modulating the brain, I'm assuming you mean shifting the brain from one undesired state to a desired state, such as thought rumination or add, like tendencies or stress or trauma or something like that.

Yeah, modulating the brain just means you're shifting brain activity. You're triggering some kind of response. You're either strengthening neural connections in that area, you're reducing brain activity, you're increasing brain activity. It depends on what you want to do. But you're just using various modalities to change how your brain is functioning at any given time.

Okay, got it.

So focused ultrasound was really cool, but again, way too early, too impractical.

And again, I just kept looking. I'm like, what's out there? Learned about the vagus nerve, and at the time, I didn't really know much about it until I got into my PhD program. And what interested me about it was there was a study that came out where they apply electrical stimulation inside the ear canal. There's a small branch called the auricular branch of the vagus nerve. And when you electrically stimulate it, there's an immediate drop in heart rate. It's not huge, but it's very noticeable. And heart rate comes down, and HRV goes up, which is just an indicator of your nervous system shifting into that parasympathetic state. And it happens in 15 seconds. And that piqued my curiosity. I'm like, if I could have that benefit on the golf course, that would probably give me what I needed. I started looking into vagal nerve stimulation. There were a limited number of consumer products out there on the market, Right.

And then the random biohackers holding toasters up to their ears.

Yeah, a lot of funky biohack stuff. And so I tried everything out there. We built our own. Let's just make stuff up and see what works. And the first ones I used were the earbud devices. So these were kind of earbuds that were modified to have electrical stimulation. You put them in your ears and it activates the auricular branch of the vagus nerve. And I took it out on the golf course, did it, and I could tell. I was like, all right, there's a level of calm there that's noticeable, but it wasn't that, like, overwhelming wave of calm that I was. I needed. It was subtle.

So started looking more into the vagus nerve and, like, are there ways to, like, crank up that effect? The first thing I thought was, what if you crank the power on this thing? What's going to happen? Cranked the power, and it shocked the heck out of me. Like, it was not comfortable.

Through your ears?

Yeah, through your ears.

That must have been uncomfortable.

Yeah, it was very uncomfortable. But you know scientists, you gotta try stuff. And I was like, okay, well, that's not comfortable. Started looking into the research for auricular, looking at what are the intensities people are using, what are the frequencies, the pulse widths? And there's some research out there that is showing that typically higher frequencies, higher pulse widths, and higher intensities do trigger the fastest results. So if you're using a 1 milliamp of intensity, your heart rate might come down a little. If you're using three, it'll come down more. And I'm like, okay, well, high intensity must work. But it's not comfortable.

Yeah. Gives a whole new meaning to the term smoke coming out your ears.

Yeah. Yeah. Two reasons why it was interesting, but it just wasn't quite there. It shocked the heck out of you when you crank it up. And if you wanted to reduce that shock factor, you have to soak those electrodes in, like, a wet saline or a gel paste, and then you got to clean your ear out, clean the device. And it's like, that's a. That's really annoying.

So that was interesting. I kind of put that on the side. Kept looking. Learned about the cervical branch of the vagus nerve, which is on the front side of the neck. At the time, there was only one product out there, but they had tons of research, so got to really dive into that. I learned that there's a difference between the auricular and the cervical in terms of how they travel throughout the body. The cervical branch is primarily an efferent branch, so it goes towards the body, whereas the auricular branch primarily goes to the brain.

And in the research that I've read for cervical, it tends to have better effects for, like, chronic nervous system conditions. So gut health, migraine, long Covid, things like that. Whereas auricular is a little better for brain health. So stress, anxiety, cognitive performance applications, a lot of cool things there. So cervical. I tried it. The thing about cervical is it's about anywhere from 1 to 3 centimeters below the surface of the neck. It's behind the carotid artery. So there's a lot of stuff kind of in the way between the skin and the nerve.

Well, the cervical, and correct me if I'm mistaken, but if you go to a doctor, it's a pretty fringe procedure. But if you get like a stellate ganglion nerve block or a vagal nerve block, which is literally like using ultrasound guided imaging to drive a needle back behind the carotid and inject with some kind of prolotherapy, that's. I think that's the area that they're targeting with that procedure.

Yeah, that's pretty much the same spot. You know, the stellate ganglion is sort of the. A bundle of nerves that trigger the fight or flight response. So when you block those nerves, you're preventing a fight or flight response from happening.

Yeah. Slight rabbit hole, by the way. Have you ever had that, done that procedure done?

I've never done it. I've considered it just to try it. I'm like, what does that feel like?

I had it done. Well, you got to do both sides and there's some swelling in the throat and very large amount of difficulty swallowing afterwards. So usually do one side on one day and one side the next day or a couple days later so you don't completely lose your throat function. So that's a little bit uncomfortable. But you sit up from one of those things. I tell people you feel. I felt like I've had it done twice. You feel like you've had a glass of wine and smoked a joint, both at the same time in a matter of five minutes.

My HRV on average was eight to nine points higher for the next two weeks after I had that thing done. And of course, it's the big guns, right? People would do this for PTSD or extreme trauma or stress that you can't get past. You're not going to get this on the golf course, but it's a very interesting procedure.

Yeah, it's super fascinating.

To my understanding. I kind of mentally categorize that as maybe just below an implant. There's the procedure involved, but you're going to have maybe lasting effects. You do it one time, it might last several weeks, it might last several months. In some cases it doesn't work and you need multiple attempts to get the benefits. But definitely a cool concept. And what you just said about feeling like you just had a glass of wine or smoked a joint. I mean, I don't do drugs, I've never smoked. I drink occasionally. But like, that feeling, that's kind of what I was hoping to feel in using some of these neuromodulation therapies.

Right. Without affecting motor nerve function, by the way, you don't want to be on the golf course feeling like you're high or drunk.

Yeah. Oh, totally. And so actually for about a month, I did take benzodiazepines when I was in high school for that kind of performance anxiety. And it was magical. When I was on that first tea, I felt nothing and I was like, oh, relief. Problem was, it stayed in my system for four hours and I, I felt like I didn't have any motivation when I was out there. I was so dull.

And not, not to mention the severe constipation with long term use with that stuff.

Yeah, I, I got off it pretty quick because I read about all these long term side effects and I'm like, I don't want to do this. Like this. It's not. That's not the solution. Right. And so that was what I was looking for. I was like, I want to feel something with this. I don't want these subtle like, oh, maybe it's working. Okay, cool. I want to be like, oh my gosh, that's crazy. And so.

That kind of drove me to keep trying all these different modalities. The cervical branch of the vagus nerve, stimulating it externally, you need a lot of power if you're going to get that deep into the nerve. Because it is deeper. You tend to need anywhere from like 30 milliamps to 55 milliamps of current. Now you can apply like a tens unit to your neck and maybe use, you know, 2 to 10 milliamps of current. You're going to feel the stimulation at 2 milliamps. The problem is, just because you feel it doesn't mean it's actually hitting the vagus nerve. And then if you apply electrodes to the front side of your neck, there's so many muscle fibers here that if you don't place it just right, you're going to choke yourself out.

Yeah. For anybody who's used electrical muscle stimulation or even the transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation, the TENS that you talked about.

Yeah. If you want to go super deep with the tens, the surface discomfort often overrides your ability to be able to go deep. And then with the ems. Yeah. I mean, if anybody's ever Used it for muscle training. If you don't put it on correctly, the entire muscle goes into an uncontrollable cramp like sensation.

Yeah. Then you have this, like, you know, just soreness when you're done using it. And just. I mean, really, the experience of cranking up a TENS unit on your neck, it's just. It's not fun.

I've had them on my quads and my back. I've never considered putting it on my neck for those reasons.

Yeah. It's funny because I get the question all the time. They're like, why should I, you know, use a vagal nerve simulator when I can just use a $20 tens unit? And I'm like, have you ever tried using a TENS unit on your neck? It's. It's extremely hard to use it the right way. And it can be potentially dangerous. Right. If you apply it over the carotid, you know, and you're. Even if you're using, like a direct current stimulator, I mean, that could. That could constrict your carotid artery like that. There's some potential danger there.

Yeah. You cut off blood flow to the brain.

Yeah. You could pass out, which, you know, it's not going to kill you, but, you know, you might pass out and you'll. You'll come back. However, if you pass out while it's on, who knows what could happen? I don't know if that's ever happened.

But I'm sure there's one Fringe biohacker or something. Same guy that was holding the toaster. A puzer.

Yeah. Trying stuff. So cervical was interesting. Really cool applications there for nervous system conditions, but again, not quite the experience that I was trying to get. And so I've learned about the vagus nerve. I've got the auricular, I got cervical. And I'm like, okay, it's got potential, but it's not quite the experience I'm looking for. So I kept kind of studying the vagus nerve, and there was a cadaveric study that I found in the early 90s where they dissected the neck and the ear, and they tracked the vagus nerve around the face. And what I found was the auricular vagus nerve. It's mostly in the inner side of the ear, but all the branches converge into a tree trunk. And that trunk of the tree comes down just a little bit, and then it goes straight to the brainstem. So I'm like, can you hit it right under the ear? And applied some electrodes there and When I turned it up, my entire ear just lit up. And I was like, whoa. Like, that's. That's a very strong sensation. And I did that for a few minutes, and when I turned it off, my head felt like it was floating away, and my. My shoulders felt heavy. And I was like, I think I just found the application. I'm like, that's the spot right there. And started looking into that spot. I'm like, is anyone doing it right here? Am I the first one that came up with that?

Yeah. You found the equivalent of the G spot for stress?

Yeah, pretty much. And it was comfortable, too. I could crank up the power, and there was no stinging. It was just like, that is like a really strong ear massage from the inside out. And it was just like, that's super nice. Looked into the studies, I'm like, is there anything out there that's been done right here already? And there are these products called cranial electrotherapy stimulators, CES devices. These are been out since, like, the 70s. I mean, honestly, probably earlier than that.

Yeah, I've got one of the old ones. I got one of them back here on my desk shelf. The Circadia Wallace or the Fisher Wallace Circadia stimulator. Yeah, it's a CDS unit.

And so the CES unit, these were FDA cleared long time ago to treat anxiety. And the way they work is they use what's called microcurrent. So very low levels of electrical stimulation. And you can apply it to your forehead, apply it to your earlobes, or right here in the same spot that I found. And when I applied it using microcurrent, I'm like, I don't feel anything. Like, maybe there's a subtle tingle in my earlobe, but I'm like, that's not it. I'm like, I don't feel less anxious after using that. Typically, the way it works for those protocols is you have to do it every day, 20 minutes a day for like, two to four weeks before you start to feel a little better. But again, I wanted something now. Like, give me that feeling now. And the mechanism behind it is it's triggering all the auricular nerves in your ear at once. So great auricular on the outside, auricular vagus on the inside. And you're just activating sort of that parasympathetic branch. And what I. I guess my kind of unique contribution to this industry was this location. But crank the thing up. Like, we were the first ones that really cranked up the stimulation. You know, we're putting out over 8 milliamps of current, which is 8 times higher than a CES device. So it's very strong.

Wait, that's what you were doing in a lab, or this vagal nerve stimulator that you're now producing has that high of a power?

Both. Yeah, we started in the lab with that. The idea was what happens when you crank up the intensity.

Typically in the ear, the vagus nerve, because it's right under the skin and your ear is very sensitive. On average, they use about 2 milliamps of current.

But the stronger effects are usually, you know, upwards of like 8 to 10 milliamps of current. But the problem with higher currents is it's uncomfortable, whereas right here there was no discomfort. And I could actually crank the thing up to like 20 milliamps of current. You know, we, we tried some pretty high stuff, but I, I would say about 8 milliamps is the sweet spot for high strength, but it's also comfortable. And you get that fast effect. Like, you know, you just had a glass of wine and your face is kind of like floating a little bit. And so we were really the first ones to target this region at such a high power. First thing we did, we had to test the safety of it. Right. We did a big study. We had 150 young college students from around, they came in, cranked up the power, and there were no side effects. Right. We had the active and the placebo groups and compared the differences in side effects and safety with placebo versus active, and there were no differences.

And when you say side effects, what were you hypothesizing could have been the side effects of electrical vagal nerve stimulation.

At that intensity, like dizziness, pain, discomfort, irritation, Nothing like neurological. We looked at all the auricular vagal nerve stem studies and just looked at what were the side effects, if any, that were in these studies. And that's what we were like. You know, if there's going to be side effects, it's probably going to be something that's already been reported, but maybe exacerbated a little bit. Some people report headache. You know, I would say most of them were like pain or discomfort at the stimulation spot or skin irritation, but the frequencies are very low. I mean, it's. It's way less than I wanted to say. Like 0.1% of people experienced side effects in the research I was looking at. And so we did a placebo controlled study, cranked it up. No differences compared to placebo. So it's like, great, this is safe. It's not harming anybody. And then we did another study with golfers with performance anxiety. We did another study with people with PTSD and panic disorder. We did a real world clinical trial at three different clinics. Every single study, no differences in safety. And every single study we had people subjectively reporting, you know, greater drops in their state anxiety compared to the placebo.

And was the, was a placebo just basically holding a similar device against the neck that wasn't producing an electrical current?

Yeah, the way we did the placebo was we had people hold it and we had like a kind of a custom device that we could control ourselves, but we would turn it up to where they could feel their ear tingling a little bit. And we'd say, we're going to give you a certain frequency that is sub sensory, so you're not going to feel the frequency. And in reality, we would just turn it off.

That's a pretty good placebo. So they even felt it beforehand, thought they were still getting the effect, but they weren't.

Yeah, exactly. So they were like, oh, this is working. And the device put out a really faint, like, buzzing sound. So it was like, oh, I hear it. It's working. And it's hilarious, man. Placebo is pretty powerful in mental health applications.

Yeah. And it's good when someone running a study like this has a PhD in Biomedical Engineering because you have some companies running placebos and they're just ridiculous placebos that in no way simulate the real thing. So you guys did a good job on these studies.

Yeah. Oh, we did it the right way. I mean, to get the PhD, I had to present my studies to a panel of other PhDs and they would rigorously question everything I'm doing. So, I mean, the only way forward was to do it the right way. But nonetheless, you know, I didn't have any grand plans of. I didn't know what I was going to do with this. I just wanted to find that feeling. And so the research is solid. And again, it's so funny in the placebo, like people, people report to you, they're like, oh, I feel it. I can feel this, like, tingly sensation. And I would look, I'm like, no, there's nothing coming out of that device. Like you're, you're not feeling anything.

And more, more importantly, if they thought they were feeling something, you didn't see the same drop in stress or ptsd, like symptoms or anything like that in the people that were placebo.

Oh, there, there's definitely a drop in placebo, but it's not nearly as pronounced as the active stimulation. And that's kind of the thing about mental health related placebos. Like literally the power of positive thinking is, is so effective for people with anxiety and stress and mental health issues.

Just because when you're thinking positively, your brain has to change how it's functioning in order to produce a positive thought. And when you think positively over and over and over and over and over again, your brain is shifting a little bit and so you see some improved symptoms in mood or your stress goes down, your anxiety goes down. So it's been known for decades that placebo does work a lot of the times for people with stress and anxiety. It's just a question of how effective really is it compared to something that's real. So in some of our studies we would see like an 18% drop in their state anxiety, but the active group would see a 36% drop. So that's twice as effective. And specifically, you know, 36% may not sound like a lot, but the survey we were using to quantify state anxiety levels, it's called the State Anxiety Inventory, it's a questionnaire of 20 questions that asks you about 20 different.

Symptoms of your stress. So it's not a simple are you stressed or not? Or how stressed are you? We're getting very precise with all the symptoms of your stress, as many as we can. So we're getting a really accurate picture of their current stress state. When you look at studies that use the same scale for like benzodiazepines or yogic breathwork benzos, it's kind of all over the place. But in one of the studies I found they looked at people with panic disorder and when you take a Benzo.

Within a 10 minute period, they would measure the effect and it was about a 34% drop in your state anxiety. So stimulating the vagus nerve is almost on the same level, if not a little more than a benzo.

Wow. Vagal nerve stimulator beats out Valium.

Geez, you know, I don't want to directly compare and say it's going to have the same effect because benzos are meant to take a little longer to kick in and they're meant to last a while. But again, if you're looking at that instant effect, vagus nerve is more effective and then yogic breathwork. There was a study I looked at where they took all these healthy people who had never tried yogic breathing before. So this is like almost like Wim Hof breathing, just very intentional, huge inhales, huge exhales. You do that for 10 minutes. And most people don't do yogic breathing. So I thought it was a really good study because it's like that's the type of people that I'm trying to help, people that aren't familiar with this stuff. And after 10 minutes, they saw a 25% decrease in their state anxiety. And so, you know, I'm just looking at numbers, like how does our stack up with other stuff out there? We know placebo is going to work, just sitting still in a quiet room, breathing, you're going to calm down a little bit. And so what we found was our research, we're showing 36% drop, which is a little more effective than a benzo, a little more effective than a yogic breathing protocol, which is traditionally known as the stronger breathwork protocols, and then twice as effective as a placebo.

Yeah. And I'm curious, in those studies or subsequent studies, did you look at quantifying anything either directly related to nerve tone, like HRV to vagal nerve tone, or sleep parameters, such as people using something like this before sleep and seeing the impact on deep or REM or sleep latency or something like that?

Yeah. So in our first study, we rigged people up with every sensor we could. We had a full 32 channel EEG cap. We had all their hands wired up with all these sensors. Galvanic skin response is a pretty popular one for stress levels. Skin temperature measured at the fingertips. When you go into a fight or flight state, typically your blood travels more towards the core of your body. So you would expect to see a drop in blood temperature in your fingertips. Or if you go into rest and digest, it might increase temperature in your fingertips. We looked at heart rate, hrv. We looked at pupil, pupillometry, like measuring the pupil response, which was interesting. We had a thermal camera, so we're monitoring skin temperature throughout their whole body. This was exploratory. We didn't know what the effect would be. We were just like, let's measure everything we can and see what happens. And you know, as much as I want to say, like, it changed everything, everything is better. It's pretty inconsistent for most physiological variables. Like there was no consistent change in eeg. Sometimes you'd see increases in alpha power, sometimes you wouldn't. I would say in terms of brain activity, most consistently, we would see an increase in what's called coherence. So it just means more like the total part of your brain is more in sync with itself. So what that means is like all of my brain in theory, like a 100% coherence means my entire brain is firing at the same rate. Which doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be more relaxed or less, but your brain's working more efficiently. You can process emotions cognitively, process thoughts better. And that's what we saw with vagal nerve stim was coherence went up most of the time. The galvanic skin response usually came down, but wasn't very consistent. Skin temperature at the fingertips was hard just because there's like an effect where if you put a sensor over the fingertip, there's a natural heating effect. So that was kind of a tough one to measure. We did see.

Facial temperature increase a little bit, which is just indicative of being in a more relaxed state. But I would say the most consistent ones were heart rate dropped a little bit and HRV went up.

Yeah, I was going to ask you about hrv. So you did see a rise in hrv?

Yeah, those are the most. In almost every study, we see a big jump in hrv.

And it tends to be most noticeable or you see the biggest jumps in people that have more severe stress states. So ptsd, panic disorder, that's where we saw the biggest jump in hrv. In that particular study, they did five minutes on one side of the neck, five on the other. And then we would measure their baseline and post stimulation. And in the active group, we saw a 31% increase in the RMSSD component of HRV, which is your parasympathetic side. And we saw zero change in the placebo group. So that was like a crystal clear impact on hrv.

Yeah. And is that how long you're supposed to use it? 5 minutes on either side. It's called the. The who list. This vagal nerve stimulator that you make, is it five minutes with the who list on both sides?

Yeah. Who list is kind of the name of the company. The product is called Verileaf.

Like Ve. Like Ve Relief.

Yeah. Vrelief. Verileaf V Relief. Just the idea was, gives you relief really fast. And the protocol, you know, if we're just citing like the research, then we did 10 minutes, we would do five minutes on each side. At the time, we didn't have any real justification for that. It was just, let's do five minutes on each side because we think that's going to give people the most noticeable effects. And it definitely does. But since then, we've found that there are other ways you can use it where you can get that same impact in 60 seconds. Or less. And so what's really cool about this design is if the idea is fast relief, like in 60 seconds. We designed this to be as easy to use as possible and as fast to use as possible. I didn't want to have something that would require a long setup time. I didn't want to have a larger machine. I'd have to take out of a bag. I'd have to Bluetooth connect it to my phone. I'd have to put wires in.

Oh, it's like a quarter of the size of a cell phone. It's tiny. I've got one up by my bedside now.

Yeah, yeah, it's really small. And so when you crank the thing up, we found that, you know, and there's other independent studies that have tested what we're doing. We. We haven't done nearly as many IRB approved studies since I graduated, but we're still doing the same stuff that's being done in the research. But the higher you crank it up, you get these really deep, you know, effects on reducing the physical symptoms of stress within about 15 seconds. You can see that impact. Um, but I. In just anecdotal experience and working with a lot of people, I typically say, like, do it for at least 60 seconds on one side, but the goal is you really want to crank the thing up. Like, first, you start by feeling it. You'll feel your ear buzzing a little bit. And from there the idea is to turn it up as high as you can comfortably tolerate if you want that, like, very noticeable wave of calm to come over you once you. You're done with it.

Yeah. Well, I've been maxing it out two minutes each side. And again, I don't know if you guys have done studies on sleep or sleep latency, but I swear I fall asleep faster.

And it makes sense because stress keeps people awake. If you're someone who's always on the go, you got a million things to do. Especially nowadays when everyone's on their phone 24 7, it's really hard to fall asleep. And mostly it's because your nervous system is fired up. It's. And if you want to calm down and fall asleep, typically you got to do some meditation, put on some calm music, get into a dark room, unplug for 30 minutes. And it's a subtle effect that can help nudge you to sleep. They have the sleep apps with these sleep stories, and I think those are great. I like listening to those.

So boring. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, I've got one of those apps that's and he walked along the beach.

And along and along and along and.

Stopped at a cafe for tea and sipped and sipped. And.

The main thing I don't like is just fall asleep with the headphones on. But those things do put you to sleep. Oh my gosh.

Yeah, they're pretty cool. And we haven't done any sleep studies with our device. Haven't really felt like we need to right now. It's tough, I mean, to do it the right way. Right. It's a huge effort. And we work with a lot of sleep clinics, we have a lot of sleep doctors. And so at this point, it's very early. We're getting that feasibility data, we're getting the testimonials so we know it works. At some point it'd be awesome to do like a really specific study and truly understand and quantify. Right. Like, what is the exact time it takes to fall asleep with this?

Yeah. Well, you could theoretically crowdsource data if you could have people be wearing a wearable and you've got some kind of an, you know, an app where they use it for a couple of minutes and then it ties into their Apple health data or something like that. You know, you could at least get some big user data. It's not a clinically controlled trial, but there, there, there's ways you can do it.

Yeah, totally. You know, do a. Like we have a couple sleep clinics. They use the OURA ring or some of them use the bio strap. You know, there's a lot of sleep monitors out there and that's one way to collect data. And that's kind of what we did to, to some degree was when we were collecting our HRV data, we would do both like the clinical grade EKG monitors where you'd strap it to your chest. And we did the consumer grade polar chest strap. And the data was, was the polar chest strap is the most accurate for like clinical monitoring compared to all the other ones. Yeah.

What about using it by using it in practice? Like not just laying in bed? Like, like, do you have any athletes who have tried it prior to competition for performance? Or maybe people who struggle with. There's so many examples like erectile dysfunction. Right. A lot of times that's performance anxiety. Have you ever had any insight or user feedback in these type of situations?

Yeah.

One for athletes. So we have a handful of athletes in every sports arena using it and the athlete angle was interesting. Something I didn't really consider when I first got into this, but athletes are very superstitious because they have their routine and they're so scared that if they try something new, it's going to knock them off their routine and their performance comes down. We found it was very hard to convince some athletes to start using this, at least for pregame performance. Post game, they don't care. They're like, I don't care. I'll do whatever post game. So when we first got started, because I'm in Arizona, we were actually. I don't know how exactly this came about, but somehow ESPN heard about the research we were doing for athletics and they came out to our lab and they did a 30 for 30 episode. And 10 minutes of that episode was my work on using auricular vagal nerve stim for performance anxiety. So that was a really fun experience. And we got a lot of pro teams that hit us up after that. At the time, we didn't have anything. We were just building prototypes. But we worked with the Arizona Diamondbacks for a few months, got them some prototypes. Just saying, how are they going to use it? And they're all using it for that post game recovery. And I was like, that's really interesting. They don't get nervous before. And at least for baseball, you're playing six games a week, you're traveling. These guys don't have a problem like calming down before a game. They have a problem getting hyped for a game. Like, they're doing it so frequently, they're on every stimulant that you can legally take before a game and that creates a problem of after a game. They can't chill out, they're fired up and they can't sleep. I never thought of that before. I'm like, that's so interesting. And I've learned that's prevalent in a lot of high performing industries, sales industries, like business owners. Like, they're fired up, but then when it's parenting, they can't. Yeah, parenting. It's crazy. So they were using. They were the first ones to use it for that kind of stress recovery for sleep. When you're on a plane, you know, they're flying all the time. We have, you know, a baseball player who just gets really anxious on plane rides and he uses it and he loves it.

Yeah, well, actually, that's it. You sent me the new version. I haven't traveled yet since I got it. I'm on a plane to Nashville on Thursday and I'm packing on the plane just to see. I don't get flight anxiety, but, you know, it's just difficult to take a nap on a long Plane flight if you want to. And I'm definitely going to be experimenting with it.

Yeah, I hate long flights. I don't get anxious on flights. But I can't sleep and I'll use it and.

Nothing really puts me to sleep on a plane but it does chill you out and it's just like a nice calming experience which I found helpful.

Yeah, yeah. You can't smoke weed on the plane anyways and the wine sucks. So you got this.

Yeah, you just take a hit of Verileaf. That's your dose.

Yeah, yeah. So this thing, I'm sure people are interested and oh by the way, the shownotes are going to be@BenGreenfieldLife.com HoolPodcast Nick's last name H O O L so BenGreenfieldLife.com HouolPodcast I'm sure people are wondering so we might as well get this out there. How much does something like this cost?

Yeah, we have two different models that we sell actually I Guess we have three but we have a 300 unit and we have a 200 unit. The 300 version is called the Verileaf Prime. This has five different modes programmed into it. We put five different waveforms taken from our research and other research that are geared for really the top five mental health related conditions. So you have your state anxiety, you have sleep, you have stress, you have performance and then you have panic. So we have five waveforms geared for each of those applications. Really cool way to use it for different use cases. Another thing that's cool about it is you can use it sort of as a multipurpose nerve stimulator. Kind of an off label use is you can stimulate the trigeminal nerve in your forehead for tension headache. So people that are high stress often have a lot of headaches, especially in the PTSD community. And for me I get headaches. I used to get headaches a lot when I was younger. I still get them once in a while. But if I have a headache in my forehead I can use this device and I can stimulate the trigeminal nerve.

Above either eyeball and is that around the temporal lobe?

The one we're targeting is called the supraorbital branch right in the forehead and you have trigeminal that can come down in the face. But at least for me, I find the most relief right here on the forehead and it's really cool. If I'm having a throbbing headache in my head, the second I hit that nerve, it's gone. It's just like, boom, gone. Because you're disrupting the pain signal that the nerve is bringing to your brain, and your brain doesn't process the pain. And so it's like sweet relief if you're having a throbbing headache now, it's not a treatment. It's not going to make the headache go away. In some cases it does. People are like, oh, my headache went away. But generally it's more for, like, instant relief in the moment. You may still need to rely on other techniques to make it go away. And then ultimately, you know, reduce the frequency of getting headaches. But it's really cool. I mean, you can target it for headache. There's a mode where you can stimulate your median nerve. You know, oftentimes people get a sense of nausea when they're stressed and anxious. Median nerve stimulation is a validated technique to reduce that sense of nausea. You can use this for that. And then we have a lot of chiropractors and physical therapists who might use it, like, on the lower parts of the neck or other parts of the body for, like, localized pain.

You could use it almost like electrical acupuncture if you knew the different points that you'd want to target.

Exactly. Yeah. And I realized I made this for me because I'm just a geek and I love trying things, and I stimulate all kinds of nerves. So if you're a biohacker and you do have some understanding of the nervous system and nerves throughout the body, this is such an awesome tool. And for 300.

I was going to say, for nausea, you often pinch right there. Right. For nausea. And you could try using it something like right there between the thumb and the index finger.

Yeah. I mean, that at least is pressure stimulation. I've done that for headache. That helps to some degree. For me, nothing works as well as this. I mean, it's crazy. Literally, it's just like pain gone, when you take it off, comes back a little bit, but it's not as severe. Put it on. It's just like, oh, that feels so good.

So that's the prime. And the prime has multiple hertz frequencies based on the level that you choose with the button on the side of it. Right?

Yeah. So we have a low frequency mode at 8 Hz. We have a 25 Hz mode. That one's good for trigeminal. And we have a 100 hertz, which is the best for stress. And then we have two slow breathing modes we programmed into it. These aren't meant to be like, the ultimate breathwork. I Guess breathing pace, I guess. But the goal is the stimulation goes up and down at a certain rate and you want to synchronize your breathing with the ups and downs of the stimulation. One of the modes guides you to six breaths per minute, which is called coherent breathing. That one is an optimal breathing pattern to maximize your HRV in the moment. And we call that the performance protocol. So you'd want to do that 30 seconds to a minute right before you take stage and do something.

Oh, man. Well, I'm going to be speaking on this trip too, so this is incredible. I'm learning all sorts of new. I thought I was just under the ear and highest intensity possible, but this is interesting. I had no clue. It had so many different features.

We over engineered it for sure. We put so much stuff in here. One of our challenges early on was communicating all that value to people because it's such a new concept. Stimulating the vagus nerve. No one's really doing that. No one's done that before. And so to say, hey, here's this new technology in seven different ways you can use it. People are like, what? That's crazy. So the prime is the coolest product. It's got all the cool modes in it. It's like having five different tools in one in the palm of your hand for 300. You know, it's a really cool deal. But we also have the basic mode for the people that don't need all those crazy features. We have a single mode version where it just has the one stress relief protocol. It's 100 hertz and it actually ramps up and down in a way where if you want to sync your breathing with it, you can. And it guides you to a three breath per minute protocol. So it's five second inhale, 15 second exhale. It's a long exhale. The long exhales are another way of activating the lower parts of your vagus nerve. So when you combine the upper auricular with a long exhale, you're stacking two things and getting a slightly elevated experience.

Long exhales are challenging if you're not used to breathing that slow.

And we chose a 15 second exhale just because there was a guy at New York University who teaches that breathing protocol. And I tried it and I was like, that's awesome.

Wait, is the exhale. Are you getting an audio cue for how long you're supposed to exhale?

No, it's all sensory.

It's all sensory. So this is an electrical cue.

Electrical, yeah. So you sync it with the sensation you're feeling. And what's cool about when you stack it with breathing is you accelerate the effects. So you really can get that deep, overwhelming wave of calm in 60 seconds or less. Especially if you sync your slow breathing with it. And you don't have to sync your breathing with our waveform. The idea is just slow your exhale down, like just do that with it anyway and you're gonna feel even greater of an effect than just one or two by themselves. You know, slow breathing has been known to kind of calm the nervous system, but it's by itself. It doesn't give you that overwhelming wave of like calm. And you don't see big drops in muscle tension and nervous system shifts. But with the stem you do get those things and so the combination is really powerful.

Yeah. Wow, Nick, I'm so excited to start. I've been underutilizing this thing. I gotta, after we've talked. Now sometimes I learn about technologies I already own on a podcast and how many features they have I haven't been using. So dude, I'm going to play around even more with this thing. And by the way, if you're listening, I think we've got discounts and everything, but I'll hunt down those codes. Just go to BenGreenfieldLife.com HoolPodcast H O O L podcast and I'll just put everything in there so you can learn about this Vrelief and Nick's company, Hulas Technologies or Wholess Performance Technologies. Nick, this has been amazing, man. I'm super stoked that we were able to have this chat.

Yeah, this is great. I love talking to other biohackers where I can geek out a little bit and kind of dive into the science behind it.

Yeah, well, if I fall asleep this afternoon or later this morning trying out that thing during my important work hours, I'll blame you.

Yeah, totally. One quick thing too, just to let your viewers know what we're doing. So we're a team of engineers. We love building stuff and we always will be improving products. And we have a new model coming out. We've tested it for about six months now. But one of the things we want to look at is having a wearable vagal nerve simulator.

Oh, like hands free?

Yeah, like a hands free version. We, you know, the, the handheld fit our design criteria of fast results. When you're out there portable, keep it in your pocket. But there's times when you might want longer sessions because it just keeps you calm for longer and you might get longer lasting effects. If you use it for longer. So instead of making like a wonky wearable that looked like a crazy biohacking tool, we wanted to make it as invisible as possible, as familiar as possible, and we wanted to make it as effective as possible. So what we did was we put our electrodes into a pair of headphones and on the bottom here you can see that's where those gel tips are. And this is awesome. You just put the headphones on like a normal pair of headphones. It automatically puts it right on the spot. I'm getting both sides at the same time, hands free and I can listen to music.

So you could do like a pal. You could, let's say you had like new calm or a meditation session. You could listen to that just like laying on your back if you want to take a nap. Started off with the electrical stimulation. It's all in that one pair of headphones.

Yeah, it's all here.

Dude, this is incredible.

Yeah, it's so fun. This is the most fun experience we have. And it's the strongest when you get both sides going. Like that feeling. I talk about where your face is floating away is more pronounced. And we did a placebo controlled study with this where we saw a huge drop in shoulder tension, muscle tension right here in the neck. And that's where stress is kept. Right. So it's like we're really having a profound effect on the body when you do bilateral at the same time.

Dude, that is brilliant. I've been wondering if there could be a hands free version. You just answered my question. Wow. So cool. I will be a customer as soon as that thing's ready.

Yeah, I'll definitely follow up with you about these. We're in the early phase. We're hand making them right now. Working with a lot of clinics, wellness spas. It's an awesome. It's such a simple no brainer thing to stack with red light therapy, with PEMF breath work. I mean, the one thing about red light rooms is if you go in there, you're in there for 10, 20 minutes and you're just bored. You're like, well, I'm just standing here.

Yeah. This you can use while you're doing other things. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Dude, this is so cool. Wow. Do it. Incredible. Me plus electricity. What could go wrong? All right, well, I'm going to link to all your stuff, folks. Go to BenGreenfieldLife.com.

H O O L Nick, thank you so much, man. This has been an incredible discussion.

Yeah, thanks for having me. Appreciate the time. And looking forward to continuing to innovate and keep you posted on what we're doing.

Cool. Well, folks, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Dr. Nick Houle signing out from BenGreenfieldLife.com podcast. Have an incredible week. Do you want free access to comprehensive show notes, My week weekly roundup newsletter, cutting edge research and articles, top recommendations from me for everything that you need to hack your life and a whole lot more. Check out BenGreenfieldLife.com it's all there. BenGreenfieldLife.com See you over there. Most of you who listen don't subscribe, like or rate this show. If you're one of those people who do, then huge thank you. But here's one why it's important to subscribe, like and or rate this show. If you do that, that means we get more eyeballs, we get higher rankings. And the bigger the Ben Greenfield Life show gets, the bigger and better the guests get and the better the content I'm able to deliver to you. So hit subscribe, leave a ranking, leave a review. If you got a little extra time, it means way more than you might think. Thank you so.

Much, Sam.