Brian Johnson explains how he uses heart-rate variability and resting heart rate to catch when his energy is dropping. When his resting heart rate climbs above his HRV, he knows he's "wobbly" and shifts into recovery mode: less food, more meditation, a PEMF device, and extra sleep to rebuild before getting sick.
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Hey guys, what's up? This is Bry, happiest of Thursdays to you. Today we're going to talk about what to do if your resting heart rate is greater than your heart rate variability. If that happens to me, I train my recovery. We'll talk about how I did that and the results that I saw in the aura report this morning. But first, as always, let's recommit. Today's the day to move from theory to practice to mastery. From the abstract. Yeah, it'd be nice to operate. Optimize my life to the concrete. Let's go. Today is the day. You want a great life? Well, a great life. A masterpiece life has created one masterpiece day after another. Which is why we're doing these now. Let's show up again. Today is the day. It's always day. One optimized coach declaration is what I just signed, coach. Class three started last week. There are, I think four more days to sign up. We have a two week extended registration period. You can still join us. Over 2000 optimized coaches from over 70 countries around the world. Optimize me, coach. So fired up about everybody in the program and excited to share the aura goodness. So as always, hammered the daily carpe diem, journaling, spiritual windshield wipers. We've got the wisdom, self mastery, courage, love, virtue, compass. Pretty soon I'll be able to show you a real compass, by the way, that is being shipped to me as we speak. A bronze compass with our cardinal virtues and our sub virtues that science says are most highly correlated to our well being. We're in production on that version One is arriving soon. We've got the identity, virtues and behaviors by our big three athlete, philosopher, soulmate, discipline, prolific, connected. Have you heard that before? Yeah. Then what am I going to do today? To be in integrity with those identities and those virtues. Boom. Aura, how we doing this morning? We're doing great. 87. Readiness. Fantastic. Yesterday the readiness was actually pretty good. It was 85. But as we discussed, my heart rate variability plummeted. My resting heart rate was 45, which is high for me. My heart rate variability was 42, which is low for me. Anytime my resting heart rate is greater than my heart rate variability. I pause. I think of Mark Twain who said anytime I find myself on the side of the majority, I pause and reflect. We don't typically want to do what everyone else is doing. As we say all the time, it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. Separate conversation. So when my resting heart rate is greater than my heart rate variability, then, seriously, my number one thing is, get that back up, train it, because that shows that something's a little wobbly. I'm not at 100%. My temperature is only up slightly, but that's a low heart rate variability for me. And again, all of us have different idiosyncratic rhythms, heart rate and heart rate variability. But if you see it go down, then what I do is I literally write the algorithm such that if that goes down, then I train my recovery again. If we want energized tranquility, you got to be on, then you got to be off. You got to be on, you got to be off. And your heart rate variability is, again, a measure of the balance between your sympathetic nervous system and your parasympathetic nervous system. So when it's off, what that means is you're going too hard. You're spending too much time up here at the sympathetic level and not enough off in the parasympathetic. Therefore, if you want to balance it, you'd be wise. Eleanor's being nice and loud in there. Let me see what's going on. Hey, guys. Good morning. On the video. Too fun. All right, so if you want to get that HRV balance, then you need to actively train your recovery. Literally train your recovery. Make deep waves is how the power of full engagement guys put it. Tony Schwartz, Jim Lohr, Check out our notes on the powerful engagement. We talk so much about training our recovery. So I, again, HRV is down. Then my number one is get it back up. So yesterday, as I said I would, I ate a little less, and I ate a little earlier. Had my last meal at 2:30. Give myself a time to really recover. I meditated three times yesterday. About 20 minutes, 22 minutes in the morning, every morning. Then another, like, about that, 15, 20. Actually, I meditated more like four times yesterday. Just oscillating, working oscillating, et cetera. Put in over five hours of deep work, which was great. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. What else did I do? Oh, I reduced inputs. I got my penf machine back. Excited. Might have hammered that. I read more yesterday, which is a deep way for me to recover. Yeah. And then I rarely get sick. And one of the reasons is because this algorithm, if my heart rate variability gets wobbly, then my number one is get it back up. It's a lot easier to prevent sickness, whether it's a minor cold or flu or getting knocked down or a major thing like cancer. It's a lot easier to prevent than reverse. So if you feel yourself getting a little wobbly, then train your recovery, get yourself better so you don't fall down into sickness. And of course, if we aren't paying attention to that over an extended period of time, we run the risk of having the ultimate vulnerability and getting one of those chronic diseases, most of which are preventable with better lifestyle choices. Eating, moving, sleeping, breathing, focusing, etc. That's all I got. Today's number one prepping for my conversation with James Piwelski and author of the great book Happy Together and Larry King today. Excited about it. Actually, we're going to have a link to that. You can check us out live. Check out the comment or whatever you call it, the information box for more on that. We'll put up the link to the replay as well. And then just to say it one more time, this book Happy Together. It is my new number one rec for relationships. I've always wanted a book that integrates ancient wisdom, modern science, practical tools for relationships, right. So it's now the number one recommendation for you and your significant other, your partner, et cetera. But it's also one of the best books on the science of virtue. So it's actually, it's hit the top 10. I'm actually putting it in the top three books all time because any book that helps us flourish together to become the best in relationship has to be a top 10. The best book in that domain has to be top 10. Energy, work and Love. This is the love book I'm now pointing people to. And it also happens to be probably the best overview of the science of flourishing and again, putting our virtues in action that I've ever read. So you put those two together and it's now a top three book. I've got the Tools by my coach, Phil Stutz and Barry Michaels as number one. It's been there forever. It's going to stay there probably forever. And then I've got deep work. Cal Newport I think we've got in the number two slot right now, right? High level boom. This is how you show up in the tools. Then work and then love. Got a ton of other energy books that are great, but there you go. What's the number one thing you can do today to make today awesome? Get on that sign, your little declaration of whatever you do if today is going to be the day that you operationalize the best version of you energy, work and love wise. Let's do this. See ya.
