The Anti-Aging Chamber That Rewinds Your Biological Clock|Dr. Jason Sonners : 1281

There are short term and long term effects of hyperbaric. And one of the most significant short term effects is as you drive more oxygen into a cell, you start making more energy. Almost immediately, you wake up breathing.

You think you're alive. You think it's enough. But your cells are gasping, your energy is flickering. You feel too much pressure. But there's one pressure that could save you. For decades, hyperbaric therapy was misunderstood. A safety net for scuba divers, a last resort for burn victims. A tool for survival, not performance. Today, the science is un undeniable. Oxygen under pressure isn't just a rescue protocol. It's a trigger for regeneration, a weapon for resilience, and a gateway to living younger, longer and stronger. It triggers your stem cells, it rewrites your epigenome, it rebuilds your mitochondria and slows your biological aging at the source, but only if you use it right.

It's a systemic therapy. It's not a targeted therapy. And when you're dealing with systemic therapies, there's so many different avenues to go down to understand the pathways that people change and improvement.

Dr. Jason Sonners is leading the charge. A pioneer in regenerative medicine, a world authority in hyperbaric therapy, and one of the few pushing hyperbaric from recovery to an engineering tool for performance and longevity. Because hyperbaric isn't a backup plan. It's a first move. Not after you break before you do.

If you're already doing some fasting, which is going to maximize your autophagy, and you're doing hyperbaric, which is going to magnify that effect, and the hyperbaric is now stimulating stem cells, you're going to create an environment. Once you go through a certain protocol, you've now cleaned up a lot of the garbage cells. You've upregulated your own healing response.

If you're perfectly healthy and you decide you're going to try hyperbarics for the first time, what's the first thing that you're going to notice? Pressure breaks most. It builds the few. You're listening to the human upgrade with Dave Asprey. I definitely feel it when I do my oxy health chamber. I have downstairs that you feel it in your brain. And if there's an injury or something. Yeah, you'll. You'll feel like a. A change. Do you know what that change is now that you've gotten into the biology more?

Yeah, I mean, to your point. I mean, I used it for that injury originally, but I still have a chamber in my house. I use it pretty often. I do a lot of my creating. So a lot of my, you know, brainstorming and a lot of my writing I do inside the chamber because I also, I feel like a sense of clarity. Essentially. What I would say is there's short term and long term effects of hyperbaric. And one of the most significant short term effects is as you drive more oxygen into a cell, you start making more energy almost immediately. And so particularly once you've been using it for a while, like I have, or like you have your, your mitochondria, you've already, your mitochondria already growing in size, you're, you're growing in number. And so as you dump more, you know, fuel essentially into that cell and you start cranking out more cellular energy, and then you direct that energy into an activity, whether that's exercise or, you know, let's say brain games or like I said, creating inside the chamber, you immediately start to see the effect of increased productivity or increased performance of whatever that, you know, cell type is or tissue type is.

What new stuff did you learn over four years of going really deep in a PhD? So what is the new set of knowledge about hyperbaric that's come into your mind?

I wouldn't say it's completely earth shattering, brand new. In other words, I think you and I would both agree, whether you're looking at chronic illness and you're trying to create solutions for chronic illness, or you're trying to avoid chronic illness, you know, so you're, you're moderately or relatively healthy, but looking for this, you know, optimization as we get older, you know, continue maintaining our quality of life for the long haul. We've all now known for many years that if we can basically tap into improving mitochondrial function or essentially energy production in many ways control oxidative stress as best as we can, and ultimately control inflammation, you know, cellular inflammation, those are really, I'd say, two of the biggest keys that anyone could really dive into if they're trying to optimize their health, optimize their biology, or work themselves away from whatever disease or issue they might be having. What I'd say that I learned is just the deepest level possible of what does that mean at that mitochondrial level? What does it mean to really, you know, you and I, we talk about epigenetics and how lifestyle affects our biology essentially. But now getting into, you know, the actual markers of epigenetics and seeing, you know, what effect does hyperbaric have on these epigenome, what effect does diet and you know, gratitude and, you know, I know you're talking, you know, a lot about sort of, you know, even mindset and, you know, meditation. So like all of these are having a very specific effect, you know, at a cellular level. And part of that is going to be on energy production, part of that's going to be on the immune system's ability to modulate inflammation. But a lot of that is going to be on our epigenetics. Which genes are we suppressing and which genes are we expressing and what influence do we have over that whole process? Which is actually, you know, I knew it was a lot, but now I can actually see which genes are being affected. It's, it's really an incredible journey to watch and, and see somebody shifting in this way and then knowing really what's happening, you know, at that level inside their body.

What are the biggest longevity genes that hyperbaric turns on or off?

The research that I did for, for finishing this PhD was comparing hyperbarics, which most people would assume is really like the soft chamber that you would see, let's say at shows or in people's houses, versus so that's 1.3 atmospheres, just to give it a number. And then a lot of the research in hyperbarics is done at higher pressure, so about around 2.0. Okay, so 1.3 is about 30% more of the atmospheric pressure than what you and I are getting right now. And two atmospheres would be literally doubling the atmospheric pressure that what, what you and I are getting right now. And, and we basically looked at, you know, inflammation markers, we looked at cognitive performance and then an A genome wide epigenetic marker test. And so what was really interesting and we could, I don't know how much you want to talk about this on, on this particular show. I will be talking a lot about this actually in, at your conference in a couple of weeks.

So guys, that's biohacking conference.com May 28th through 30th in Austin. And Jason is going to, is going to give a really deep dive on hyperbarics, literally.

So, and I'm going to share a lot of my findings comparing these two, you know, because that's kind of the, that's the question so many people have, you know, is a soft chamber off? Can I actually move the needle or not? Does it have to be higher pressure? Like these are, you know, these are the conversations in the industry and have been for many years. The frustrating thing for me has been people have had opinions about that for the 20 years I've been in the industry, but nobody's been willing to actually take a stance and actually look at it. And so this study, as far as I know, is the first head to head study looking at the exact same markers, the exact same protocol, but head to head 1.3 versus 2.0. And what could we find?

What did they find out? Or is it not done yet?

Well, I, I actually, I mean, the research is done and for the most part, you know, I've already defended the dissertation and, and submitted it. There's still a lot more detail that I'm going to be pulling from it for publishing purposes. And I don't want to tell you all the secrets today because we want.

Well, just tell me a couple secrets. Like is it a big difference or is it a little different?

So here's the interesting thing. What most people would have said in the industry is soft chambers probably do very similar things that hard chambers do, but maybe it takes longer to get to that place. So maybe we can use time as a metric to really influence the changes. So, you know, hard chambers would have a stronger impact, faster.

But that sounds wrong.

Well, so there, there's, there's two pieces of it. In some cases that was true. So in certain cases there was similar impact, but, you know, an order of magnitude different. But in most of the cases what we found was that hard chambers were doing things that soft chambers just couldn't do, which I think a lot of people would have expected. But at the same time, the lower pressure, I shouldn't say soft chambers, just the lower pressures also had an impact that the higher pressures did not have. And so at the end of the day, whether we're talking about inflammatory markers, there were some overlap, but soft chamber had a much stronger impact on certain cytokines. Hard chambers had a different impact on different cytokines.

That is groundbreaking. Are you going to share some of this at the biohacking conference?

Essentially, during my, my breakout, I'm going to, I'm going to show most of my research findings.

That's incredible, guys. Biohackingconference.com it's going to be incredible. Also, Oxy health will have a bunch of chambers there, so you can go and you can try it. The hard chamber that I have downstairs lets me go from 1.3 up to 2.4. And that's usually more of a clinical grade thing. Well, let me ask you this. If you have a soft sided oxy health chamber, and I had one for like 15 years before I upgraded to the hard one, it's Possible to go to Amazon and buy new valves that will go up to 1.5 atmospheres. It's just there's a FDA limitation that says you can only sell 1.3s. But the. As far as I can tell, any of the soft chambers can handle a little bit more pressure. They have to be able to. So you can, for about 100 bucks, upgrade a chamber to 1.5. Is there a difference between 1.3 and 1.5?

So there's two pieces to that. One is there are chamber. All chambers in the US have to be sold at 1.3. That is what you said.

There's just rules because the FDA hates health. I got, I got that.

But at the same time, not every chamber just want to. I want to clarify this. There are some chambers that are overbuilt and could very well, even though they're sold one way could handle that. There are also a lot of chambers that are sold at that and really cannot handle that. So you'd want to make sure that, you know the difference if somebody was going to do that, make that decision and try that on their own. Because to over pressure a soft chamber and to have a failure in that way wouldn't be, you know, could be dangerous, obviously. And so it could be.

It could be dangerous. It could also just hurt if it. Especially if it popped versus just sprung a leak. Although most of them I think would spring a leak more likely than if they're designed properly.

They would leak before they popped. Yeah.

And you avoid a warranty and you're taking your own risks and it's not approved and all those sorts of things. I guess I've stopped seeking government approval for my health decisions. But I like working with technology that's safe.

Totally. Exactly. So, you know, making sure that the chambers are built in a way that they're going to tolerate that that's, you know, that's obviously important. Now, is there a difference between, you know, it seems like when we talk about atmospheres like 1.3, 1.5. 1 point. It seems like. How much of a difference can there be? There seems like that's such A. It's 0.3 or 0.5. How much of a real difference is that? Well, if you look at it, big difference. Yeah. If you look at it in psi, it usually makes more sense to people. A soft chamber at 1.3 goes to a PSI of about 4. A little over 4 and a 1.5 in PSI is like 7 and a half. So it's not quite. But it's Almost double the pressure. And so for sure there is considerable benefits of maybe that, that higher exposure if it's, if it's appropriate. But again, it was really interesting as an example, TNF alpha, which is a very common inflammatory cytokine that shows up in a lot of different diseases, 1.3 moved the needle on TNF alpha far more than 2.0 did. And so in that case is 1. If, if your biggest issue was that particular cytokine is 1.5 even necessary, 1.3 could have easily solved that problem and potentially higher pressure would, would not get you where you needed to go. So I do think there conversation here, you know, obviously more research necessary, but there's a conversation here about what can we do to evaluate somebody and understand what their goals are or what their health concerns are and actually start not just saying hyperbaric is good and maybe more is better, but saying what actual protocol and including in that what pressure is most appropriate to, you know, to try to get whatever response we're trying to get.

That's perfect because you may find that you should have 20 minutes of 1.3, 12 minutes of 1.5 and 40 minutes of 2. And the isn't done yet, but you just took out a big piece of that with your PhD. I cannot wait to hear your talk at the biohacking conference. It's going to be fascinating because this is new information in the world of biohacking.

Just are you going to come to my breakout session?

I'm going to see a video of it. I'm probably going to be, I'll do my best, but I know, I know.

It'S a busy weekend, 100%.

I understand a lot of people, they'll complain, they're like, but there's too much content. Like I want to go see all the hundred plus vendors and then I want to hear all these things. I don't know what to do or. This breakout was full. It's all recorded. It's okay, you'll get to see it all.

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Here's a question for you. There's the recent Yale study talking about how hyperbaric reduced inflammation. And I want you to compare hyperbaric to things that we all do for longevity, like calorie restriction, working out, or pharmaceuticals.

So very, this was like a surprise during the, during the PhD process, but essentially we use the company, I guess I could probably say we use true diagnostics for our epigenetic research. Right. And they're, they're terrific. And, and the, the content that they're collecting is incredible from a, let's say from a researcher standpoint especially what, what I have access to doing research using their, their testing is, is a lot more than what like a consumer would typically get because they're really like opening behind the scenes to understand, you know, all these different genes that they're essentially, you know, looking at. And so other companies obviously are utilizing their technology. And so what Yale did is as Opposed to doing their own research, direct study. What they did was a meta analysis. So they took 51 of the most common strategies you can think of, from caloric restriction to obviously exercise, strength versus cardio, combining certain, you know, Mediterranean diet with exercise. So some combinations of diet and exercise separately, different diets and different types of exercise. And then other strategies like anti senolytics, rapamycin, hyperbaric. So all, you know, 51 different longevity strategies. Essentially what they also did was they, they had a disease process and a healthy. So they, they were comparing longevity strategies even if you were sick. And then they also looked at it if you had no diagnosis, where is this all falling? So to summarize it, the, the most powerful longevity secrets, which are not hope, you know, necessarily helpful for you and I, were if you had HIV and you took antiretroviral medication, that had the largest impact by far on longevity. The third most powerful was if you were a diabetic and you took metformin, that had the third most impact.

But right after that, diabetes. Diabetes is one of the four killers, so it drives all the other diseases of aging and death. So of course fixing that. Okay, so that would be strong. Okay, what was after that?

But once you remove that, even, even with disease processes, high pressure and mild hyperbarics were both the, the next two most powerful strategies against.

Wow.

Everything else you and I would do, including the anti synolytics, the rapamycin diet, exercise, all the things that are obviously foundational. So and then if you remove disease processes, essentially, hyperbaric was literally either the first or second most powerful in the longevity space as it relates to, you know, to really moving the biological aging needles.

That's incredible.

Yeah, so that was, that's that paper. I don't think that paper has been fully released yet. I saw a pre publication version of it about a month ago, but that should be out by the time this conference comes up, your conference or shortly thereafter.

Well, guys, you should come to the conference and try one of the oxy health chambers. They'll have a bunch of them there so you can actually get in and feel it. And it's funny, Brian Johnson, who's been on the show and has been on stage at the conference, does a ton of hyperbarics. And he and I, both of us have done like all the longevity things you can think of that includes regular hyperbaric use. So if you want to get full results on living for a very, very long time, I think this is something you want to do. The problem with hyperbarics is that it takes a lot of time and you're sort of locked in a chamber when you do it. What is the minimum length of time of a session that's going to be useful? So I can save some time?

Yeah, you know, there's a, there's a Jason answer and then there's a research answer. So the research answer says we don't know almost. I've never seen a real significant study that's ever looked at less than 60 minute sessions over a period of time. So I'd say the standard is, the standard is really, it's been 60 to 90 minutes. Continues to be 60 to 90 minutes. I would say one of the things that I did in the research was to look at three days a week versus five days a week. Because you know, as you're to your point, whether it's the duration of the session or the frequency of sessions, both are, are essentially time consuming. And so all of the research that we did and all the results that obviously I'll share, you know, along the way, whether us talking or at your conference, all of that was done at three times a week. And so as opposed to shortening the duration, I really just tried to, you know, shave off days during the week to see if we could still have an impact, which we did. Do I think 30 minute sess have an impact? I do, but it's all about loading and unloading. I mean that's really the way I view this. The only real most of the benefits that you're interested in, that I'm interested in from a longevity standpoint, from the epigenetics to the, you know, mitochondrial effect, to the neuroplasticity effect, like all that real, you know, let's say tissue regeneration effect that comes not from how much you can get in, but really from the period of time that you're off gassing the oxygen, whether that's through air brakes that I'm you're probably familiar with, I'm sure you are during your session, like taking the oxygen off or it's just from getting in and out of this session, you know, repetitively over weeks and months. And so you do need to have at least a significant amount of loading of oxygen inside the chamber in order to really have that off gassing effect. I do think 30 minutes would be beneficial. I wouldn't make that your the only way you do it, but so essentially I wouldn't go in for less than 30, but anytime that you could do longer, 45 to 60, I think it's worthwhile.

When I look at biological patterns, we all frame reality saying more is better, more intensity, more time gets more results. And we don't really have a lot of evidence for that. But this is why people over train all the time. Right. Or they over fast or like we just overdo lots of things because we think, well, I'm going to do a good job, so I'll do even more.

All right.

What I've learned is that the more you can change things rapidly, the more the body listens. So the body wants up, down, up, down. So maybe during a one hour session, you could have a technician, you know, flip you from 1.3 back to 2.4 and back down to 1.8 or something. So you kind of have a little bit of an interval training with your oxygen. Is that likely to work better?

Definitely. Or let's just say somebody was like, hey, you know, I really only have 30 minutes, but I have 30 minutes two or three times a day. I think you'd get more out of the 30 minute three times a day than you might only get, let's say 90 minutes at one clip for that same. Oh, you know, that same.

Because of the going up and going down.

Yeah, exactly. So, you know. Right. I think the other thing too is, and you, you've probably seen this more than anybody else in this industry is, you know, not only is more, not better, but more stuff at the same time. It's like, how many hours in a day do we have to dedicate? So, you know, at, at some point you have to give and take. So, you know, hyperbaric could be a very pronounced component of a protocol for let's say three or four months. And then you can back it down and just do sort of maintenance doses of hyperbaric while you're now focusing on, you know, light therapy or, or, or more neurofeedbackers or. Right. Or biofeed. Right, exactly. You know, so it's, there's got to be a way of, you know, bringing some of these strategies in and out of our life as well as, you know, creating, I think, you know, meaningful protocols that people could follow over time but make it sustainable. Right. That's the key.

What do you think about the Israeli study that showed, I think it was like three months doing hyperbaric every day was lengthening telomeres.

Yeah. So and this, this actually came up recently when I was defending the, my, my research. But first of all. So that was, that was essentially, I think it was five days a week, 90 minutes at a time for three months. Right. So five 90 minute sessions a week for, for, for 60 sessions, essentially. And. Right. They showed basically roughly 12 to 14% reduction in cellular senescence and roughly, let's say about a 20% increase in telomere length. The assumption at first to me was are we, are we activating the molecule? It's a reverse transcriptase, but are we activating the molecule that builds telomeres? That was my initial assumption is what was happening. We're driving energy. A lot of the ATP that our cells make go into DNA repair, DNA recovery, you know, the whole rep, you know, cellular replication process. And so, you know, that requires a ton of ATP. If we're getting so much more, are we building telomeres as a result? And then what actually came up, which was interesting thought, and we don't have an answer yet, but maybe if we're reducing cellular senescence, which we know that we are, and as a result of that, activating stem cells to mobilize into this new area to basically clean up and create younger tissues through the use of newer cells. Are we growing a telomere inside of an existing cell or are we just average, you know, measuring the average size of a telomere? And now that we get this major stem cell upgrade, we're having longer telomeres on average as a result to newer cells. I'm not sure is the answer, but one way or another, you know, I think that was a great study and I think it shows a lot of the potential from a regenerative and longevity standpoint. As far as hyperbaric is concerned.

Is there such a thing as oxygen stacking? Maybe you take stem regen to activate more stem cells or do some red light before or after, or breath work while you're in the chamber.

Yeah, I mean, I love all of those IDE think, you know, I, I probably have about maybe 12 to 15 outlined programs in our clinics that we run for, you know, what's the goal? And once I understand the goal or which are the right tools that would actually help you to get to that place. Stem cell is a great example. You know, people are utilizing stem cells and exosomes all the time now, and they clearly have a huge regenerative capacity. At the same time, we know that hyperbaric actually stimulates your body's own endogenous stem cells to increase mobilization into areas and stimulates autophagy. So as an example, if you're already doing some fasting, which is going to, you know, maximize your autophagy and you're doing hyperbaric which is going to magnify that effect. And the hyperbaric is now stimulating stem cells. You're going to create an environment that once you go through a certain protocol, you've now cleaned up a lot of the garbage cells. You've upregulated your own healing response. You started mobilizing stem cells and now you could add, you know, exogenous stem cells or an exogenous exosome or stem cell therapy into a, into a body that's prepared for that therapy versus, let's say going into a shoulder joint that's, you know, been obliterated. It's inflamed, it's destroyed. You know, we stick a bunch of stem cells. It's almost like a surprise. The body wasn't really ready or in a pathway of healing and recovery yet. It still works when we do that, I just think it works incredibly faster and more effectively if we actually prime the system first. So, you know, we've come up with quite a few. I love the red light hyperbaric. You know, red light is going to vasodilate, it's going to activate cytochrome C inside the mitochondria. So that's also going to prime the body, get it ready for, for hyperbaric. Hyperbaric is a vasoconstrictor, so, or oxygen in general, the vasoconstrictor. So allowing the red light to vasodilate before going into the hyperbaric kind of opens up some of those pathways, allowing for better oxygen flow, you know. And then cytochrome C is one part of the rate limiting step to energy production. Oxygen is another rate limiting step to energy production. So now you're stacking really two very powerful mechanisms to remove any interference with mitochondria being able to produce as much ATP as possible.

Some hyperbaric chambers, you have to put on only cotton clothes and the whole atmosphere is pressurized oxygen. In other chambers, you're just breathing oxygen. But it's normal atmospheric pressure. What's the difference?

Essentially, let's just say we're delivering definitively 100 just to keep it consistent. We're delivering 100% oxygen, let's say through a hood or a mask system in the air, pressurized chamber. And then we have this 100% pressurized oxygen chamber. The therapeutic difference would be zero. The way that difference it's right. It's not about swimming in the oxygen. You're getting very little, if any, probably almost no oxygen delivery through the skin. It all has to be respired. So whatever Gas you're using to pressurize really doesn't matter, so long as you're actually delivering the right gas to the person's respiratory system. That's what matters. The biggest difference between those two environments, I would say in to some degree, is safety. An air pressurized chamber is certainly a safer environment than an oxygen pressurized environment.

You can use your phone inside an air pressurized chamber while you're breathing oxygen, but then you have to have an oxygen mask on. And if you're in the other chambers, you have to be wearing no metal. You have to be wearing only cotton. And it can blow up if there's a spark. So from a convenience perspective, I don't like having to get naked and then change clothes before I get into a chamber. So I'd rather just breathe through a mask when I'm doing it. And that's what my oxy health chamber downstairs does. Okay, that, that's a really important difference. It's also more expensive if you're running a facility to get those chambers where people have to go in and change and all that. It just, it seems like it's unnecessary. If you live at high altitude or you travel to high altitude, do you need to do hyperbarics more?

Good question. You know, one of the things that's come up is, so if you live in Colorado, you're at 5,000ft. I live in Miami, I'm at sea level. And so if you went to the exact same. Let's say we both went into a soft chamber. Well, my chamber in Miami is going to bring me 10ft underwater equivalent. And in Colorado, you're not even going to get back to sea level yet with 1.3. So the question is, does hyperbaric even work at elevation? Because you're starting at a higher point. And what I would say is, what it seems to be is that it doesn't really matter. What matters is what altitude are you accustomed to or acclimated to. Because once you acclimate in Colorado, you're still going to carry the same amount of additional oxygen whether you're starting in Miami or starting in Colorado. You're still going to have that same off gassing effect whether you're in Colorado or in Miami. Essentially, the only difference is going to be how are you carrying the oxygen inside your body. That's the difference between Colorado and Miami as an example.

That doesn't make a lot of sense because if it. If the valves are at 1.3 atmospheres, they're at 1.3 sea level atmospheres. So it's just going to take longer to pressurize in Colorado. But you should be at the same psi in both. Right?

You'll, you'll be at the same relative psi, but because you started in Colorado from so much higher, it's not going to bring you down to sea level. And then below, it's only going to bring you, you know, four psi more than wherever you started from.

Are the valves relative or are the valves absolute? I mean, because there's less pressure on the outside of the chamber at high altitude. So the inner, the inner pressure should be higher. Unless I'm doing my math wrong or I'm not understanding something.

So the, the gauge is set for how much pressure you can create inside the chamber. Right. And it's an.

Because there's less atmosphere pressing on the chamber. I get it. It makes sense. Okay, so you, you couldn't put as much in otherwise the chamber would blow up. Okay, now I see it.

But essentially the effect is identical. So that, that's really, I think the important part is you don't have to go to higher pressure because you started higher. The, the, the relative effect should be the same regardless of, of where you started. So, you know, essentially you could, you can get any benefit from, you know, from, you know, from any elevation as, as, as far as that part goes. You know, one of the things we do, let's say whether Miami or my clinics are actually in the Northeast, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, when I have patients who are going to be flying out to altitude and they're concerned about altitude sickness, we might pre, like preload them. Right. So we'll have them do, you know, three to five sessions a few days before they leave, just as an attempt to hyper oxygenate them, to give them a little bit of like, wiggle room for when they get there. But if you were at high altitude, if you went skiing in Colorado and you were having altitude issues, literally the solution would be hyperbaric. You jumped in a soft chamber. At that point, it would take you almost back to sea level immediately and it would reset your system. So that's actually, that would be the solution in that case.

When I did my high altitude mountaineering stuff in the Andes and Himalayas, the Himalayan Rescue association has an emergency hyperbaric for a reason.

Right, right. I mean, that's originally the soft chambers were, they were designed specifically for that. They were designed for high altitude pulmonary edema and high altitude cerebral edema. And that was their main function. It just happens that we could take that same tool and now optimize it, you know, in so many other ways.

If you're perfectly healthy and you decide you're going to try hyperbarics for the first time, what's the first thing that you're going to notice?

1:1 is just to be aware of this is a pressurized device. And so the thing you're really going to first notice is your ears are going to be popping. And you do need to be able to manage that. Right? So some people don't recognize that that's happening. That's, that's probably the most important thing to know is true and to be aware of and ready for because, you know, you could do some damage to the middle ear if you're not paying attention to that and equalizing along the way. So that's, that's number one, that's most important. But once you get past that and you're looking for, what kind of benefits might I expect for people? And I know a lot of your audience does do this for people that, that track their biology, you know, whether it's, you know, HRV or their sleep, you know, Oura Ring or Garmin, whatever they're using for, you know, for fitness tracking. The few things that we see almost immediately are increased amounts of rem, increased amounts of deep sleep, and increased hrv. Those three things happen consistently almost for everybody and quickly within a session or two. One of the things I want to mention, just since I'm on that topic, if you use one of those devices, it also gives you like a sleep, you know, or like a sleep score or like a readiness score for your day. They also usually weight resting heart rate pretty heavily. And what, what happens is even though HRV goes up, REM goes up and deep sleep go up, oftentimes for the first three or four weeks, resting heart rate also goes up. And I think that the reason for that is because you heal and you repair tissue while you're sleeping, you now have this influx of excess oxygen that your body's going to use for healing. And I think that that keeps your body in a bit more of an active state while you're sleeping. And as a result, even though you're getting great scores in rem, DEEP and hrv, your readiness score or your sleep scores could not be amazing because resting heart rate might go up a beat or two. So just be aware of, you might get worse total scores, even though you're seeing parameters are improving. After about a month, heart rate starts to come back down again. But hrv, REM and deep stay really pretty strong. And so People start getting incredible scores from that point on.

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All of the sleep scores or morning readiness scores in the industry have a bias built into them and one of them is they care more about resting heart rate than they should because actually adequate blood pressure into your brain is more Important than resting heart rate, because if you don't have enough circulation, there's going to be an issue there. So if you're a little bit dehydrated, you want your resting heart rate to go up so that you have adequate brain circulation. So they just, they ignore that, and it kind of drives me crazy. And then they always say, oh, I'm going to reward you for getting eight or nine or just more is better. Which is dumb because people who are really healthy, who live the longest are getting six and a half hours of sleep per night, but they're getting 90 plus minutes of REM and deep.

Right?

So if I was to do it, I'd say, well, you know, let's look at our heart rate relative to our other things like REM and deep. And if those are good and our heart rate was a little bit higher, that's totally fine.

And then you'd all be right. It's not like it's eight to 10 beats. It's like one or two, you know, per minute. But meanwhile, you. You went from 42 minutes of deep to, like, you know, 90 minutes of deep sleep. Like, that's far more of an impact than, you know, than a few beats per minute on. On your. Right. So, yeah, I see that bias all the time. And, you know, I agree. You could do 60, you know, or 90 minutes to two hours of REM and deep sleep. You know, if you got five hours, six hours of REM and deep combined, and then a couple hours of light sleep in between, you're. You're doing amazing. If you got nine hours of sleep, 10 hours of sleep, but you only got, you know, 45 to 60 minutes of REM and deep, that's not going to get you anywhere.

They'll still reward that, though, because you got lots of sleep and, like, it's like saying I reward you for eating lots of french fries because they were food, you're like, well, it kind of matters what food you're eating, right? So for me, if I could get four hours of sleep and it was two hours of REM and two hours of deep, that would probably be really amazing. It's just hard to do that. So I have gotten those numbers on five hours of sleep, but I cheat with electrical current to do it, so it doesn't really count.

It still counts.

What are the three top supplements that work with hyperbaric?

I say one of my favorites would be, again, depends on the. The goal or what outcome I'm trying to accomplish. Right? But from a, let's say From a performance standpoint, methylene blue would be really high on my list. You know, again, looking at controlling infection, improving immune system, improving ATP production at the mitochondrial level. So, you know, hyperbaric is doing all three of those things. Methylene blue is doing all three of those things. And so that combination is incredibly powerful from a mitochondrial standpoint. And the timing for that I don't think is critical other than to say it just needs to be in your system. So, you know, taking that in the morning, giving it 30 to 45 minutes and then jumping in the chamber is, is more than sufficient. I would also use in, in certain times I'll use hydrogen in combination.

So whether it's before or after.

So. Good question. So what I would say is we know that hyperbaric increases reactive oxygen species, but not in a bad way. And that's like a whole lecture unto itself. And one of the reasons I wanted to go back to school, but in a safe way. It increases reactive oxygen species in a way that you want it to, from a regenerative and stimulating the right healing pathways and, and ultimately you don't want to buffer that. You don't want to blunt that. So some people do glutathione before every session, or hydrogen before every session because they're trying to downregulate the ros. I don't think that's a great strategy. Right. Like if you're healthy, if you're sick. Yes. If you're sick and you need to blunt that because they're already over oxidized, there's a reason to do that for some people. But if you're healthy and you're optimizing. I use hydrogen, but I purposefully use it, you know, hours after the session to, you know, clean up some of the mess. But I don't really want it to interfere with the session itself. So, you know, antioxidants, which glutathione would be, and hydrogen is sort of a selective antioxidant in some capacity, I would usually separate them in a, in a healthy person. But I still, I. There's still a lot of great interplay between hydrogen and oxygen, you know, biologically. So those would probably be the three most common combined. NAD would be pretty high or, you know, whatever version you might be using, whether it's, you know, NAD precursors or NAD pushes or iv. But you know, NAD is also going to obviously work at the mitochondrial level. So there's a. There's a lot of good synergy there too.

I'm not sure that I would worry about, about hydrogen suppressing free radicals because it only suppresses peroxy nitrite, which is a free radical that doesn' have a beneficial effect that we're aware of. But glutathione suppresses way too many or vitamin C or something. So you wouldn't want to do that before. I wouldn't sweat the hydrogen, but I, I see your point. Who knows, maybe peroxy nitride spikes are good. We just don't know it. And then I also would look at having enough sodium and electrolyte so that you have the right hydration in your cells seems really important. And creatine would be high on my list as well. Just because having enough volume in the tissues of water is going to make a big difference when you're, you're doing hyperbarics, right?

Yep. Definitely.

Can pressure alone, even without oxygen do something to reprogram your biology?

Definitely. I mean, but even when we say pressure. So let's just say we're using air to pressurize that chamber and we're not adding any additional, let's say oxygen to the mask, you're still going to get increased oxygenation because the pressure is driving even the oxygen that's in the air. A good study from like two, about almost two years ago was an air only. They actually used soft chambers. In fact they actually, it was a University of Wisconsin study. They actually used the, the oxy health viteris for that study. And they did 1.3 air only. And they mimicked a study that looked at higher pressures effect on stem cells. And so they mimicked the entire methodology of the study. And the, the 2.0 on 100 oxygen mobilized about eight times or an eight fold increase in both mesenchymal stem cells and central nervous system stem cells of.

Just pressure or that was.

No, that was at 2.0 on 100.

Okay.

Oxygen there. The mimicking study that they did from Wisconsin was at 1.3 air only, but they still found about a 2 1/2 to 3 times increase. So.

Wow.

Certainly not as much. But you know, again, if you're using this over years of time and you're getting close to a 3x increase in stem cell mobilization, it's incredible what you can do, you know, over months and years.

And by contrast, the hard Chambers run 80 to $120,000 and you got to have big bottles of oxygen for them. And if you have a soft chamber like the oxy healths are, they're slightly above 10,000 and you can use it over and over and over and share with your family and neighbors. Right. So it's within reach as an investment for, you know, 10 plus year timeframe on a per session cost, it becomes reasonable, but it's still big deal. So given that you get a 3x benefit from soft, even if you don't have an oxygen concentrator which you can use on the soft, that you can't use on the hard, at least not easily. So bringing in big bottles of welding oxygen is, is what I do. Let me ask you this. If someone, a biohacker, was to use welding oxygen and bring it into their chamber versus medical oxygen, even though they come from the same tank at the supplier, what are the differences?

The reality is welding oxygen and medical oxygen are made in the exact same facility. They are carried in the exact. Initially in the exact same bottles. The only real difference would be essentially that the medical grade bottles are supposed to be more well regulated and changed out and inspected from a, you know, toxicity standpoint internally. I don't know this to be true, but I think as bottle, as medical bottles go bad, so to speak, they become welding bottles. So there could be different.

They're different bottles. They don't look the same on the outside. I've never seen a welding style bottle in a medical facility. Have you? I mean, you say more than I do.

Yeah, no, I've seen the same size tanks and essentially so the ingredient, all the different, the ingredients identical. The only real difference would be that there could be. Is there likely. No, but there could be contamination in a welding that shouldn't ever show up in a medical grade tank. That being said, in 20 years of operating hyperbaric clinics, we've had about three skunked tanks, even on the medical grade side. And so, you know, that's with a skunked tank.

I mean, there's a leak in it or something or.

No, like, I don't know what chemical was inside that tank, but there was some other chemical mixture that became almost like a, like a sulfur exposure.

So there was a filling problem then because like there should be no way it would get in there unless it was on the, on the valve.

Correct. Or like some sort of oxidation inside the tank, you know, inside the steel. Yeah, I'm not sure.

But so I, I used to, in a, in a former life, I used to weld Toyota truck frames as a job. And I was just. If you ever bought a Toyota truck in the mid-90s, I apologize because I wasn't a good welder. But that if there were impurities in welding oxygen we wouldn't be able to use it because it would create oxidation in the welds. And since you see them fill the medical tank and the other tank using.

All the same stuff, exact same equipment.

Unless there's like an issue with the hose. So I have zero issues using welding oxygen. And if you're listening to this going, I want to get some oxygen. Do not ever tell the welding place that your plan to use it for anything other than welding or for art or something because there's this incredible hostility because the medical regulator people who love to charge you hundreds of dollars for the same thing that costs 25 bucks, they get really aggressive on the businesses. So you protect the welding business by saying, I need some welding oxygen for my art project and then everything's all good. But if you say I'm going to breathe it, then they're just going to completely shut down on you.

True story.

And I know you can't say anything about that because you're like medically licensed. I'm an unlicensed biohacker, so I'm just going to call it like it is. And, and you know, people are going to make their own decisions. Like grownups. Who would have thought, like we live in a country full of grownups.

Are you that still?

I am because I'm unlicensed. I was an unlicensed biohacker. There is no biohacker license, nor will there ever be. But I might certify some biohackers because, well, we want to know how to do this. If you guys think I should run a biohacker certification, hit me up on social media. I've trained about 1200 coaches years ago and I'm thinking maybe I should do that again, especially when it comes to this longevity and consciousness stuff. So I'm thinking about it. Minimum effective dose of hyperbaric if you want cognitive function or longevity.

So I mean definitely there would have been, I mean there still will be arguments in the industry for what that ought to be. But I would tell you that we saw pretty significant changes at 1.3 in the research that I did on cognitive performance in memory in short term, long term memory. We also saw it in a reflex testing, like speed of reflex testing. We saw it in a tent in attendance, you know, the ability to maintain attention. So we use like a computerized cognitive assessment that's pretty well known in the research. And you know, we saw different, again different changes in mild pressure than and high pressure. Both affected memory significantly but, but attention, processing speed and attention were, were also affected significantly. Through the mild pressure exposures.

That's helpful to know. We got time for maybe two more questions.

Sure.

One of them is from the upgrade collective. Should you take binders like zeolite or activated charcoal before or after hyperbaric? What do we know?

So in research wise, I'd say we know nothing clinically. What I would tell you is if you have reason to believe that you have some. I mean, most people do have some sort of toxicity issue, but yeah, you know, done some testing to, you know, to quantify that. You know, hyperbaric does upregulate all cellular function. So you're going to get an upregulation of liver function, you're going to get an up regulation of, you know, toxin processing and essentially elimination. And so taking binders. In those cases, most of the people we have with mold toxicity, heavy metal toxicity, Subacute bacterial infections, and we're essentially running some type of detoxification along with hyperbaric. They're all taking binders and usually after the sessions more so than before. But yeah, I think that's a great idea, Especially if you know that that's an issue you're working on.

When I first got my hyperbaric chamber many years ago, I was worried about oxygen poisoning or sleeping in the chamber the way Michael Jackson used to. What is oxygen poisoning? How much hyperbaric is too much?

So there's. There's really two types of oxygen toxicity. They're called central nervous system oxygen toxicity, and then a thing called pulmonary oxygen toxicity. In order to get pulmonary oxygen toxicity, you need to. It's a long, complicated, not that complicated, but how much pressure were you exposed to? What percentage of oxygen were you breathing, and how long were you in the chamber? So for oxygen, pulmonary oxygen toxicity, you need 1440 units of oxygen, which is essentially breathing 100 oxygen, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Okay, that would deliver.

Okay, that's hard to do.

That's a lot. Right. So in hyperbarics, because we. Because we only do 60 minutes, 90 minutes, essentially, most hyperbaric sessions are around 100 to 200 units of oxygen, nowhere near 1440. So it's completely safe. And then on the central nervous system side, usually once you start to get around 2 atmospheres on 100% oxygen, it becomes possible. So if you're doing anything less than that, you know, 1.3, 1.5, 1.7, it's almost. I can't say it's impossible. It's almost impossible to get central nervous system oxygen toxicity below 2 atmospheres and if you're doing anything from a metabolic fitness standpoint, like doing some fasting, some diet, you know, variation, you become more metabolically fit, which means you're utilizing oxygen far more effectively than, let's say, the average wound care patient. And so it's then likely that you'll tolerate higher pressures of oxygen, even without CNSO2 toxicity. But below that, it would almost be impossible.

So lower pressures are generally safe no matter what you do. But there still could be some edge cases where it's not correct. And I once got to spend a few hours biohacking with Stevie Wonder, which just an incredible human being from a consciousness perspective. He's blind because he was in an incubator when he was young and was exposed to too much oxygen, which can damage the ocular nerve via that central nervous system thing. So there definitely are cases where it happens, but those were in babies who are metabolically distressed.

Correct.

So there are risks, but I think it's generally safe. So if I had a soft chamber or I really wanted to go to sleep in my hard chamber at 1.3 atmospheres, with or without oxygen, I'm unlikely to damage myself.

Yeah, you would not be you. The numbers wouldn't ever allow you to really get to oxygen toxicity. I don't think it's that valuable because of the up and down that we were talking about. Right. Like, I'd rather you do one hour a day, eight different times, than eight hours in a row. But I don't think it's dangerous either.

But I could get one of those home robots and program it to come and change.

Turn it on, turn it off, turn it off.

And then I'm asleep.

Exactly. You stay in the chamber and it's automated. Yeah, that's perfect.

On that lovely futuristic note, thank you, Jason, and thank you for supporting Oxy Health at the biohacking conference. And what are the names of your clinics so people who are near you in the Northeast can come and visit?

Yeah, so HBOT USA is my. Is the. Is our company. We own two of our own companies, but we train a lot of people. So we have a. A location map on our website that actually points to, I don't know, 50 or 60 clinics all over the country that. Those. Those are people. Not all the people that we've trained, but a lot of the people that we've trained and work with closely. So, you know, they're trusted as far as places to go if. If you're interested and there's someone nearby.

Thanks for your new PhD. I cannot wait to learn about it at the biohacking conference. I'm truly excited because this is going to be breakthrough knowledge. So now, instead of just hoping it works, we're going to get the data and personalize it. And that's what we're doing at Upgrade Labs for all of the stuff we're doing in what order, at what settings for your biology today. And this is the future of biohacking is let's measure and let's do what works and let's quit doing stupid stuff that takes money and time and energy. So you're on that so hard and I love it.

That's a great. I love that. I love how you just said that. That's a. That's a. That's the perfect plan.

If you liked today's episode, you know what to do. Come to the biohacking conference or leave a review or go do some hyperbaric. Whatever's going to make you perform better, feel better, be more conscious, live longer, or whatever your goal is. Do that. See you next time on the Human Upgrade Podcast.

The Human Upgrade, formerly Bulletproof Radio, was created and is hosted by Dave Asprey. The information contained in this podcast is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended for the purposes of diagnosing, treating, curing, or preventing any disease. Before using any products referenced on the podcast, consult with your healthcare provider carefully read all labels and heed all directions and cautions that accompany the products. Information found or received through the podcast should not be used in place of a consultation or advice from a healthcare provider. If you suspect you have a medical problem or should you have any healthcare questions, please promptly call or see your healthcare provider. This podcast, including Dave Asprey and the producers, disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the the use of information contained herein. Opinions of guests are their own and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. This podcast may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products or services. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. This podcast is owned by Bulletproof Media.

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