Talking With Experts About Wim Hof Breathing & Hormetic Stress

Good afternoon, and thank you for tuning in today. On behalf of the University of California San Francisco Alumni Association, the UCSF Department of Psychiatry, and the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, and the Mindsight Institute, welcome to the 6th webcast of our series titled Emotional Well-Being During the COVID-19 Crisis for Healthcare Providers. This week's topic is Making Stress Work for You. Restoration Through Hormetic Stressors and Wim Hof Breathing. I will now turn it over to our host, Dr. Elissa Eppel.

Thank you so much, Mario and John and the Alumni Association for sponsoring this. Welcome everyone! We're talking about one of my favorite topics. I'm just so excited we've gotten to this moment together. And I'm going to be introducing Wim Hof to you and Dr. Ashley Mason. But first, I promised a few jokes, and so I'm going to share some slides. I'm also going to present a little bit of background on hormetic stress. This is a word we should all know because we need to harness stress for good. Okay, so my first question is, can you see my screen?

Yes, I do.

Okay. So it's always funny to see a different thing than other people are seeing. I am showing you, uh, first slide here of the phases of disaster. This is a slide from SAMHSA. In a typical disaster, we go through tremendous emotional ups and downs. Now, where are we at collectively? We are depending on our geography, we tend to be somewhere between peak impact and looking toward recovery, over the hump. And some of us, we are getting toward thinking about a honeymoon. Of course, community cohesion means we want to— we need to be together physically. And at that time, we can really kind of— we will be so happy when we are together. But looking ahead, there's rebuilding, there's regeneration, and there is also the possibility of yet another peak disaster of COVID in the fall. So bottom line is still an uncertainty. We cannot control the course of events individually, but we can control our responses. So we're talking today about ways to promote stress resilience physiologically. We have been focusing on psychological strategies for managing acute stress well. Our department has created a video library of shorts on psychological strategies. I suggest you look at that on our Department of Psychiatry webpage. Today we are talking about not how the mind changes the body solely, but how the body changes the mind, how we can use biobehavioral strategies to actually promote stress resistance and stress resilience. So jokes. Thank you for sending me jokes. Some were funny and crude. I couldn't show them. And all of them have this kind of heaviness of they're so funny, and there's such a dark truth behind some of them. So especially for essential workers and medical providers, So here you might see your emotions reflected as, you know, in Michael Scott from The Office. Laughing at coronavirus means letting yourself laugh. That's important. As well as crying, at least inside, at the reality of risk every day of having to show up. Here's an article in the New England Journal of Medicine. I apologize for the grainy version. This is what's on the web. Use of commercial disinfectants to treat novel COVID. Methods: We read the labels on bottles that we found in the janitor's closet. Conclusions: This will kill you. Don't do it. This is funny because at least some of you thought this was real, right? This could be a real study. That's where we're at. Okay. For those of you old enough to have watched those Scooby-Doo cartoons, at the end they always pull up the hood and they find who the villain is, the culprit. It's just the climax. And you're like, ah! It was them. So I just thought this was so funny. Who's behind, who's really behind the coronavirus? It's the Charmin bear. Sorry, it's cheap humor, but it got it. For those of you who watch many Scooby-Dos, it's pretty funny. Okay, just now a few images of art for us reflecting our times. Not another walk. All right. I restrained from indulging myself in showing you our border collie who usually can't get enough walks, is so energetic, and is so tired of walks in this period. You might have had a group chat on Zoom that looked like this. Or maybe it was more like The Brady Bunch. Okay, so it's very easy, and I am done this a lot in my mind, have, you know, said this to young people. This is just a pause. There's a break. We're in a, um, a period of putting life on hold, and it's good to remember that this is real life, that these days count a lot. This is part of our life story. This is part of our collective life story. And what we do really matters. So that's part of the kind of using this time and being fully present intentionally for how we use these days. OK. This last joke is bringing us to our topic of the day, which is how does stress affect us? Does it accelerate aging, or does it promote— or can we turn this to promote hormetic stress to prevent aging? You've probably seen a lot of pictures of the presidents of the United States and how they age over the 4 or 8 years in an accelerated way. And here you see beginning residency and ending residency, a bit of accelerated aging. We need to change that system. Okay, so I have been focusing on trying to understand positive stress, the types of stressors that are good for us, and the ways that we can respond that can promote hormetic stress, which is harnessing our natural ability to actually become stronger. So you've heard the phrase, um, what doesn't kill us makes us stronger. There is a phenomenal array of beautiful basic mechanistic research in model organisms showing that when we apply short-term manageable stressors to organisms like worms, we promote their longevity. I am writing this paper. As you can see, NIA, National Institute of Aging, is very interested in promoting human or translational models of stress. And so I have not turned this paper in. It's late. I'm not one of those people who are productive. I'm one of the many women who are not turning in papers during this period. I know I'm not alone. But I can tell you the bottom line. This is that when we have overexposure to stress, toxic stress, chronic stress every day, we don't have the resources to cope, it accelerates our biological aging like inflammation. It is associated with shorter telomeres. When we have exposure to short-term manageable stressors, our body turns on different responses— the cleanup crew, the housekeeping, the repair mechanisms in our cell. This has been called many things in the immune literature: stress inoculation, preconditioning, biological shields. It's like a vaccination response. So we want to think about How can we promote positive stressors, acute short-term stressors, and respond to them with a healthy acute stress response recovery when all this great action happens, like our parasympathetic nervous system goes up, and to actually slow the rate of aging and not accelerate it? So that's the question of today. This is— there's lots of weird things you can do to cells and organisms like UV. But what can we do for humans? What do we know of that promotes a short-term acute stress response that then promotes this recovery and housecleaning in ourselves. So this is a table that shows different things, different types of hormetic stressors. For exercise, for example, that's the one we all tend to use and know about, but that's— there's more than just exercise. So exercise, especially intermittent short-term exercise, promotes hormetic stress, and we're starting to learn at the cellular level how it cleans up cells. It turns on autophagy. It increases our mitochondrial health. What I am going to focus on for the next rest of the session is temperature stress, intermittent hot and cold versus static temperature that keeps us kind of not exercising our vascular system the whole day, and also breathing stress, intermittent hypoxia. That can actually change our levels of CO2 and oxygen rather than the chronic shallow breathing that we tend to do when we're under stress and we're not paying attention to our breath. Okay, so hello again. That brings us to our current moment. I'm so pleased to introduce to you today Dr. Ashley Mason, UCSF. She's an assistant professor at the Osher Center, and Ashley's going to talk to us about some of her recent studies using hormetic stress, using hyperthermia. Now, I've brought to you frontline medical providers. Ashley's also a frontline researcher. She's also doing a COVID study that she'll tell us about next. But first, Ashley, tell us about your sauna studies. Why sauna? Why depression?

Sure, yes, thanks, Alyssa. Um, so I began down this journey of doing sauna research after reading some of these earlier papers that were published in 2013 and 2016 that found that just a single sauna session, a long sauna session between 70 and 110 minutes, getting people's core body temperatures up quite high to 101.3 degrees, actually exerted an antidepressant effect in depressed populations, and this antidepressant effect lasted out to 6 weeks from one sauna session. That is very exciting and intriguing, particularly in the field of depression, which is really hard to treat. Antidepressants work for many people, but they also don't work for many other people. Psychotherapy works for lots of people, but same deal, not everybody can get to it, and it doesn't work for everyone. So I was particularly interested when I saw this literature coming out on whole-body hyperthermia for the treatment of depression and started to walk down that road myself to see, okay, is this something that we can start to look at further? Because there hasn't been much research on this since for a whole host of reasons. But one of the reasons that I was particularly interested in it is, well, saunas aren't that hard to get to. If this is something that works, maybe this is something that is easy to access for all kinds of folks. So I started looking at, well, can I take a commercially available sauna that I can buy on the internet and actually replicate what these 2013 and 2016 studies did? And so far at the Osher Center at UCSF, we've done one study where we had 25 healthy people come in and do the same kind of sauna session, and we found that lo and behold, our device actually can mimic the medical device that was used in those other studies. And in the next study, which I was getting ready to do when COVID hit, we will be actually recruiting patients with depression.

Yeah, that's— it's extremely innovative and exciting that you're doing this, Ashley. I think it's, it's so interesting when you hear about things that people are using and have these amazing anecdotes, but there's not the, the research to back it. And so as researchers, we're kind of forced to ignore that. But you've been able to find funding and study this. What do you think about some of the mechanisms? How could this be working?

So there's a lot of different ideas out there about how this might be working. But one of the most interesting things to think about with this is that there's literature going back to the 1980s and potentially even earlier documenting that a number of people with depression have dysregulations in their thermoregulatory capacities. In other words, they are not— people with depression sometimes are not as good at regulating their body temperature. This might mean that their body temperature is actually quite warm or hot, and yet they're not able to sweat or do compensatory cooling. By putting these folks in a hyperthermia situation where we're forcing their body to engage in self-cooling, we're turning on potentially some of these mechanisms that haven't been working. And a key question is, well, okay, if you're turning it on once in one sauna session, how long does that last? Do we need more sauna sessions? Are folks with this kind of physiological depression in need of weekly sessions, twice weekly, once monthly? We don't know the answers to these questions. But what we're trying to do, or what I'm going to be trying to do in this next study, is actually measure people's body temperature before and after sauna sessions in an ambulatory fashion. So using a wearable ring that they can wear before the sauna sessions, after the sauna sessions, and we can actually see if we are changing their actual body temperature by putting them in these sauna sessions. And by changing, I mean making cooler. Because what the 2013 paper that I talked about found was that the amount of decreased depression from before the sauna session to after the sauna session actually correlated with the decrease in core body temperature that those folks had from before the sauna session to after the sauna session. So I'd say that that's a really exciting mechanism that I'm very, very focused on in this research.

Well, we can't wait to hear what you find. We certainly need more treatments for depression that work. So tell us about what happened when your study was paused. You've been using these biosensors for hypothermia and mood. And what next? And what has it been like to study COVID, to jump in and study detection? Tell us about your study.

Yeah, so I remember this all too clearly. But, you know, it was around a Monday that I learned that, OK, research is probably going to be put on pause at UCSF, including the studies that I was planning to do. And at the same time, I was thinking, well, hmm, this is interesting. I'm using these rings that measure body temperature. And at the time, there was a lot of focus on the symptom of fever in COVID and elevated body temperature. And so my next thought was thinking, well, hmm, I wonder if these rings are going to actually pick up if someone's getting sick? Is it possible that this could actually be a device that may tell us if people are coming down with COVID I've been wearing one of these rings for quite a while because I'm a researcher and research is me-search, right? You have to know the tools that you're working with. And I'd noticed oscillations in my body temperature when I had a cold or when I'd been sick, that my ring actually was detecting aberrations in my physiologic metrics. So I thought, well, hmm, who's most likely to be at risk for getting sick? And my first thought was the folks who work in the emergency department. So somehow 48 hours later, the UCSF IRB was working with me. We were getting this approved to actually get these wearable sensors to folks who work in the emergency room, nurses, physicians, phlebotomists, you name it, all the folks who work in high-risk areas in the hospitals. Following from that, we actually not only distributed these rings to healthcare workers, we invited everybody who already had one of these rings in the country and in the world to opt into the study. And so now this study actually has close to 45,000 people in it. It's called TempPredict, and it all happened in just a number of days that this got thrown together. I have never worked this quickly in my life. This kind of study normally would take months to plan and get approvals for and actually do. But somehow this all happened so fast, and UCSF has been incredible in getting all of the approvals and reviews and things done that we need to make this, this research happen.

It's been a very exciting study. We hope that you can predict onset of infection and symptoms. It will be incredibly important in the fall. And thank you for your hard work. I know how hard you're working and for joining us and telling us both about your hermetic study and your COVID study.

Thanks for having me.

It is now my pleasure to introduce to you Wim Hof. Wim, you might have heard of. Wim is an extremely popular teacher an untraditional teacher about, um, the mind and the body. And he has over a million followers. He has many world records demonstrating how mind over body can promote, um, amazing feats. And that's not what attracted me to understand what he's doing and his method. So I want to tell you that I, as you know, I've been searching for hermetic stressors to study, and I was at a conference, and after I spoke, I heard Wim Hof speak. And unlike, you know, it's just like a stiff conference, everyone's wearing suits, but Wim Hof got up and is himself, and he is an outdoor adventurer and explorer and extreme athlete. And he told his story and he led us through his part of his method, which is a breathing method that we will all do together soon today. And it was an extremely interesting mind-body experience. And then I read the literature about it. There have been 7 published studies on the Wim Hof method, and it is a combination of exposure to cold cold, cold showers or ice, and to extreme breathing, which causes very short-term hypoxia that you recover from. And you feel the recovery. You feel, uh, I'll just say my own stress threshold, um, which is pretty low, what was much higher the days that I tried the Wim Hof breathing, so that I felt, um, a type of kind of calmness, placidity, and even some elation. So that was enough to lead me to convince some of my colleagues at UCSF, like Wendy Mendez, Eric Prather, to do a really intense, rigorous study of the Wim Hof Method to see, is this really promoting stress resilience? When we promote stress resilience in one way, such as fitness, we're actually promoting what we call multiplex stress resistance, that we become resistant to other stressors. This has been shown in the, you know, the, the worms and the flies and in people as well. When we're physically fit, we're more resilient to psychological stress. So we are conducting a study at UCSF. We are at the— toward the end of a large clinical trial on the method. The trial's on pause. I won't be talking about that anymore today, but I just want to tell you about the, the real picture of Wim Hof. I just had the pleasure of reading, um, there's been a lot of documentaries on him and books written by other people. He has written his own story, um, that I just had the opportunity to read that's not out yet. And so it's not that Wim Hof is a, um, someone with superhuman capabilities and genetically different. No, Wim Hof is actually brought his method that he's cultivated through his life to people in a very easy-to-understand way, and there's very little mystery about it. And that's why I think it's so exciting. He has described exactly how he has used his mind to, to do these amazing feats. So he's from the Netherlands. He's the dedicated father of 5 children. He is, as I said, an untraditional teacher about nature, the nature of mind-body connection. He goes by the label of— he's been labeled extreme athlete, but I just want to present the fuller picture. He grew up in a typical family where academic performance was highly valued in his family, in his community, and he always felt different. He felt an extreme passion and connection with nature, so that's where he spent a lot of his time. By 13 years old, he became a vegetarian, very unusual in his culture. In his late teen years, in spending a lot of time outside, he explored the ice. And he was drawn to it, and he's been swimming in ice water for decades. So he has gone through a lot of personal adversities, as most people have. He has lost his wife to suicide. And one of the ways he dealt with the psychological pain of loss and becoming a single father was exposure to ice. And I talked about multi-plus stress resistance, how that actually creates also some capacity for more psychological coping. So welcome, Wim. Thank you so much for joining us. I think it would be great for people to first hear if you could give a brief summary of what are these world records and what is a common underlying principle? Why do you have world records in very diverse areas? Thank you.

Yes, uh, thank you for having me. You did a great preparation and very bright. Thank you very, very much. So, um, what I've been doing, uh, I did a lot of records. It is actually through television. Television is crazy when they find out there is a person who is able to do some strange feats within the extreme cold. And that is being carried— the idea of the cold is being carried as very hostile, very dangerous, very out there. And yeah, that is aggressive. And a person like me, I had developed my skills, my physiology to be able to stay in, in the cold where people say he's superhuman, he— this is not possible and he is doing it. Look at that. And then television came in, Discovery Channel, National Geographic, BBC, etc. They began to challenge me. Can you run a full marathon beyond the polar circle in your shorts? Can you climb Mount Everest in your shorts? Can you swim big distances under a big cap of ice in the midwinter? Can you hang by one finger in 2 kilometers or more than 1 mile up there in the, in the, in winter sky? It's just by one finger, showing the dexterity and the superpower you all got. I could do all those challenges, so I got to get 26 world records because television is crazy. They always challenge you for more, more, more. But there is an underlying idea. It was my emotional loss that made me go into the ice water, which is able to still your mind. You are only surviving You are there. That, that made me able to be myself a moment without the pain, the heartbroken pain, this nagging grief inside my head. I had to take care of 4 children alone and with very little money and left behind. Boom, there it was. Deal with it. And society goes as a train, and if you cannot catch on, you're just left behind. So I could not. I always say the cold— my children made me survive, and the cold water healed me. And then after a lot of training therein, I came across television, did a lot of records, and then I caught the attention of science, of scientists. The scientists came in and they saw me doing things physiologically are not possible by humans, but I'm a human and I'm doing it. So they asked me, can you go into a laboratory setting and be subjected to cold physiological experiments? And I said, of course, that's what I want. That's my underlying idea, my, my mission. My mission is to show that we as humans are capable of so much more than what we think. And then I went into this physiological experiment where they— I stood for 80 minutes in ice and they were taking blood all the time for over 1 hour until the blood could not get through anymore because it was too cold. But my skin, or my core body temperature, remained the same. I had absolute control within being exposed to this aggressive impact of ice water upon my skin for 80 minutes. And then they took that blood to an ex vivo— to a laboratory and they exposed it to an endotoxemia in E. coli bacteria, and that normally makes a very aggressive reaction on the immune cells in the blood serum. In my blood serum, there was zero reaction, and that is part of our capacity to have blood within us so enriched So on that, bacteria, and I say virus or inflammatory markers, have no chance. And of course, this is a bold exclamation saying we can beat disease. But later I said to the doctors, listen, I'm not an anomaly. I'm not, I'm not the exception on the rule confirming the rule. I will show you. Give me a group of people and I will take them in 4 days into a training and they will show all— that means 100% score— after thousands who could not. 100% score within 12 people to show that we are able to tap into the autonomic nervous system, into the innate immune system, deeply, effectively being injected with the bacteria and inoculated within a quarter of an hour. And you all are doctors and physicians and nurses, and you understand what I say. That to me is part of my mission, to bring a new perspective for our medical science, and it's most necessary now. And for that, I thank you, Elissa, that you brought me up here.

Thank you so much for telling us, many people who otherwise wouldn't know about this method. So there is a pilot study that Wim just described, published in PNAS, where healthy young men were trained for 4 days And so Wim was injected with endotoxin, and he showed less pro-inflammatory response than other people in the exact same protocol. So then the question was, can you train people to do this? He trained 10 healthy men to do ice exposure and the breathing over 4 days. They also had the same response that Wim did, which was a less pro-inflammatory response to endotoxin. Now, what this method is doing to the immune system is potentially very interesting. And I will just say that, as I said with Ashley, when something is popular and you hear anecdotes, it doesn't mean— doesn't take it anywhere to the mainstream world, to the medical establishment, to treatments where there's reimbursement, et cetera. And so Wim has focused much of his energy on collaborating with researchers to say, what is going on? Please examine this. He has, you know, I'll just say, in the hundreds of thousands of numbers of people practicing this and also reporting back anecdotes of being helped so much from pro-inflammatory diseases. The endotoxin study has been replicated in a large sample. That's a publication that will come out soon from the Radboud University in Amsterdam. A small study on ankylosing spondylitis was just published. It was just a pilot study, but it also showed that practicing the method reduced the symptoms and the CRP, the inflammation. So these are all promising clues there's something happening here. I just heard from my own sister-in-law who's had, you know, adult eczema most of her life, that she has found tremendous help from the method. So again, these are anecdotes, but you need— we need to be looking at this more carefully, using hormetic stress in these ways. Wim, tell us what's happening when, uh, we're going to move to the breathing next. So tell us about, um, how are we changing the, as you know, the alkalinity of our blood when we do this hypoxic breathing? Tell us what briefly what's happening.

What we do, uh, with this 30 deep breaths is blowing off the carbon dioxide. With that, the alkalinity in the blood will spike up, and with the spiking up, it will be— you will— the person will be able to not breathe even after exhalation and hold. So retention after exhalation 1 minute, 2 minutes, 3 minutes. That is in consecutive rounds. So we begin, and very soon we will experience it because it's, it's astounding. It's amazing what you feel. And then later we can dive more into the techniques and into the study and into the science. What happens is the alkalinity in the blood spikes so much that the adrenal axis is being activated, and that resets the body.

It—

all that is stress-related, it's like oxidative stress, inflammation— it beats it and brings it down through this deep breathing, bringing up the alkalinity. Then going into the, into a retention for 1 minute, 2 minutes, 3 minutes without force, without force. And the body is alkaline, so there is no bad chemistry going on. You feel nice, you feel great, while the oxygen level is going to drop. It's going to drop after 1.5 minutes. So much that the brainstem is the reptilian brain, the primordial, the reactionary part of our brain, which is related to the opiates, the opioids, and the cannabinoids. It's the deepest of our systems of survival, the fight and flight. That when the oxygen saturation drops the adrenal axis is being spiked, and then the, the deepest part of our brain robustly is activated. And with that, the immune system is being uplifted. Boom! Bacteria, virus, inflammation, out of here.

What was so interesting in the PNAS study when they repeatedly looked at the blood changes was that The, you know, okay, so the breathing method is basically a short hyperventilation. You could do— you could huff and puff and get a real hyperventilation where you really feel it, and then you do some breath retention for as long as this is comfortable, 1 minute, 2 minutes. And so you're getting rid of some CO2. You are— it showed that there was an increase in the pH of the blood, but this spike in epinephrine, this natural spike in the stress response, the spike in epinephrine that we get from hypoxia, one of the most core stressors— I can't breathe, my body's mobilizing a big stress response— the higher the epinephrine, the better the inflammatory response later to endotoxin, the higher the anti-inflammatory response, the IL-10, and the lower the IL-6. So very interesting findings we want to, you know, keep looking at again and again is how are we changing pro-inflammatory response, both basal and to stressors. And we do, you know, it does look like the acute stress response is part of the driver of this cleanup of cells. The response to cold, having some cold at the end of your showers, is another way to both condition the cardiovascular system, supposedly increases norepinephrine. I'm someone who's always cold. When I get out of a cold shower, I'm actually warm for once. Because we're invoking the natural counter-regulatory response. So, Wim, why don't you lead us through some breathing? And I'll just say that this is going to probably take about 10 or 15 minutes. And only do this if you're comfortable with it. You don't push yourself beyond what feels natural to you. Wim will lead you through it. Please.

Yes.

Good.

Feeling is understanding, guys. All you doctors, a lot of in the mind, your prejudice go and just feel the breathing. It's really amazing what you're gonna feel. It's your physiology, and find out by feeling, and then find out what's really happening. Good.

Hey, let's go.

As you— are you relaxed? A relaxed body is able to store up oxygen better. So relax, please. As you are relaxed, we have a belly and chest breathing. Belly and chest breathing means to full lungs. We will fill up the lungs for full, so Fully in, letting go. Not fully out, but fully in, letting go.

Belly, chest, letting go. Fully in, letting go. We are blowing off carbon dioxide. Fully in, Letting go. Become a little bit lightheaded. Look, it's all logical. And letting go. Just keep on going. Have your mind just fully in and letting go. Don't go anywhere with your mind, just with the breath. Very simple. And letting go. Fully in. And letting go. Pulling in, letting go. Let your mind go, your thoughts go.

Just take a moment with this breathing technique. It has shown itself through science. Now it's coming to you because I think this is of great help to beat anxiety and inflammation. Just find out feeling is understanding.

Fully in, letting go. Only takes 10 minutes the total. Then you can make up your mind.

But before—

fully in, letting go. Fully in, letting go.

These are the techniques I've been using. Very simple. Accessible, very effective techniques in all my world records.

And they work, and they work for people with performance and with chronic diseases.

It does great things. And people with panic attacks no longer panic attacks. It's amazing what it does. So simple, pull it in and let it go. Last 10 breaths.

Fully in, letting go.

Lightheadedness, tingling, just all what is different, breathe into it. It's all charging up the body. We're gonna do a great thing after 6 breaths.

Counting down. And 6. And fully in.

Whatever is different, Breathe, intensify it.

It's all good. No worries. It's gonna be great. And 2 more. And 2. And 1. Fully in, letting go.

Here comes the last one.

Fully in, let it go.

And after the exhalation, stop.

Close your mouth. No smuggling.

Just be.

No need for breathing.

You are very alkaline. The trigger for breathing is gone. That's the carbon dioxide trigger. It's gone. We are manipulating our brain to go into the depth, into the brainstem, the fight and flight, because you are not breathing after the exhalation. You are in full stress, yet without force. You feel no stress. You are okay. And this is the way to trigger the deep systems of the hypothalamus, the immune cells, the adrenal axis, all these deep systems. So simple, so effective. Hormetic stress, right arm. Okay, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, fully in. And hold, hold the breath and squeeze it to your head to bring blood flow, cerebrospinal fluid, to your head, to your midbrain.

3, 2, 1, let it go.

Now we go into round number 2. In round number 2, we will go between 90 to 2 minutes. 90 seconds, 2 minutes without air in the lungs. That is hormetic stress to the best.

Here we go. Pull in, let it go. Give yourself a chance to find out what this is all about. Let it go. Pull in, let it go. Pull in, let it go.

All the tissue, the deep tissue, the lymphatic system is open to receive all the oxygen inside. We are going deeper in our physiology than ever before thought possible.

Fully in, let it go. Fully in, let it go. Pulling in, letting go.

Tingling, lightheadedness, it does not matter, it's all good.

Letting go. Pulling in, keep on going. Letting go. Pulling in, letting go. Pulling in, letting go. Pulling in, letting go.

Fully in. Just follow the breath. No minding, no thoughts. Just give yourself a chance to go very deep into our physiology, into the autonomic nervous system, thought of by science impossible by humans to access into. And now we are doing it. You are doing it. We all are doing this. And this relates directly to a control over the immune system response.

Last time, fully in, letting go. Fully in, letting go.

Whatever you feel, sense is different, breathe into that.

It's good.

You are the alchemist.

Fully in. Let it go. Pull it in. Let it go. Pull it in. Let it go.

5 more.

Pull it in. Let it go. 4. Pull it in. Let it go.

3.

Pull it in. Let it go. 2. Pull it in. Let it go.

1.

Here comes the last one. Fully in, letting go, and stop after the exhalation. Stop, close your mouth, be, witness. You feel a rush, you can sense a rush, and even hear a tone. That's the neurology of your brain. We change the chemistry inside deeply. And in doing so without force, we are able to extend this state of our physiology, which is affecting the chemistry deeply inside of the blood. Now the saturation of oxygen is dropping drastically inside of the blood while we are alkaline. So the carbon dioxide trigger is not there. That communicates with the depth of the brainstem, the fight and flight. Hey, there's no breath, there's no breath, no oxygen, adrenaline, adrenaline, while you are relaxed. And you are fighting off danger. And what is dangerous? Bacteria, emotional stress, viral stress. Any stress is danger, and it is fighting off right now because the adrenal axis is being deeply activated. It resets the body while you are in control. Fully in control. This should be investigated in science, in science, to make this global, a global exercise for everybody to bring down stress, to bring down whatever is danger, to bring down inflammation of any kind. Okay, there we are.

Thank you so much.

5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Fully in.

Hold it.

Squeeze it a little to your head.

3, 2, 1. Let it go.

Okay, now relax. Nice. You can take over, Elissa. I think the people get it because people have feelings.

Yes.

And that is stronger than any thought.

So I could have— yes, thank you so much, Wim. I could have just referred you to his website. He is Wim Hof has a free program for anyone who wants to try it. He has in-depth programs as well. And really, you know, we didn't— there's so much to talk about of interest about hormetic stress and the hypoxia and the cold, but we wanted you to be able to try it. Now, there's a range of ways to do this. You can really huff and puff and get a lot of hyperventilation symptoms and then hold as long as you can. And that is what I think we all started off with, with his method, because that's what he's done to be able to withstand ice for hours. For example, that's the way he's, he's heated his body. He has used control over the autonomic nervous system, the nervous system that we supposedly can't manipulate. So there's also gentler ways of breathing, of doing the long deep breathing and then breath retention. It's a more gentle way That's what is being used a bit more for depression. And all of this is just— it's about self-experimentation and good rigorous research. So if you, if you want to try it, you don't have to use ice, you can use the cold showers. It is— why would people do this? Because our body loves short-term acute stress because it kicks it into a recovery mode that our evolution is used to. We're used to acute stressors. We're not used to to being in a heated room, relaxing the whole time, having an abundance of calories, et cetera. So the acute stressor, recovery, stress, relaxation, stress, relaxation. This is what our body loves. So we need both. We need mindfulness. We need yoga. We need ways to reduce our physiological arousal, as well as these healthy ways to be increasing it in a way that's manageable and controllable. So that is my hormetic stress lecture. That's a very grand, let's just say, high level. But the biology of hormesis is fascinating. We hope to discover a lot about it. Wim, you are so brave and so passionate about bringing this to people. It's fascinating what's happening in the world with this. There is, for example, a group of people with traumatic brain injury. They're paralyzed. They cannot exercise. Their cardiovascular system could be, you know, melting away with weakness, but they're now starting to use the method to feel invigorated and keep conditioning. There's a group of elderly people, including people in their 90s, who are using this method, who again can't go do a HIIT class, but they can do this to be invigorating their system. So there's a lot of possibilities. It's very interesting, fascinating. Thank you for being a pioneer. And my last question to you will just be Since you have, from your view, Wim, you have, you've talked to many, many people in many different countries about the method. I don't know what it's like for you hearing so many amazing anecdotes. I know that you are bursting with love and passionate energy to bring this to medical care. So just, you know, tell us what your aspirational vision is. How do you see this helping? And being implemented?

Yes, so I was able to tap into the so-called autonomic nervous system, considered to be impossible by science, and then I showed a group to be able to do likewise. That means it's not me, it's not about me, it's about something I found and it is good, and where I found it, there is a lot more. And it is for everybody accessible. And I'm just pointing out, guys, look in yourself. The placebo right now, according, for example, to Professor Music in Detroit University, Wayne State, Wim has found the secret of placebo. The placebo now is no longer an abstract power of our mind. No, it can be used, and I showed that in brain scans. We are going into a new era wherein we have so much more control over our mood towards disease and our happiness, strength, and health. And those are related to the immune system, the hormonal system, and the energy metabolic processes. In the cell. And we have shown this already in the universities, hospitals, by data. And now I want to bring it out all to the world. So I ask any scientist, prove me wrong, because it's not about me, it's about something I found, and it works for millions of people who are practicing the method. And these are not just believers, these are also professors, a lot of professors, doctors, but also carpenters, electricians, engineers, and people from all walks of life. Grounded people, but having no soul-lace in their existence. Medical care, and they can— they see this, they take it on, and it helps.— and I don't say I'm not anti-medical care, I just— we need to supplement it with the power of what people already have and it needs to be awakened. That together is going to be the future and it looks bright.

Thank you so much. I should also say a few things that I didn't get to say about the hormetic process. What we know about aging is that we don't have a pill, and we may never have a pill to slow biological aging, but the things that really work so far are, in a sense, working through similar pathways. Caloric restriction is a stressor, or fasting-mimicking diets. They are causing stress pathways to rejuvenation. Of stem cells. That is Walter Longo's work at USC. So we're not just talking about relaxation and restoration, we are talking about rejuvenation, and so that we can slow aging, or maybe even in the case of these animals where they're regenerating some of their organs, it is reversing. And so we don't have drugs that can do this. We have so many chronic medical conditions that plague our society, like depression and immune conditions, pro-inflammatory and autoimmune conditions. These are not easily solved by the pharmaceutical company. And so, I'm just so excited about the possibility of really exploring our inherent rejuvenation abilities. I am, you know, I just wanted to mention the mindset lastly, which is that what Wim has shown us in his latest book and in your classes is that there is nothing guru-like. There's no magic formula. Why can Wim Hof stay in a bucket of ice for 2 hours without permanently burning his kidneys, for example? What he's doing is activating the autonomic nervous system, keeping his temperature high. These are studies— monks have done this 30 years ago. There's studies in, for example, Science showing that we can increase our autonomic nervous system through breathing techniques. So this is something humans can do. We can do this with these bodies. It's amazing. The mindset is belief, intention, and also relaxation, which is still mind-boggling because we don't relax when we're in the middle of stress, right? But you're training us in the middle of a cold shower to stop that automatic gasping that our body has and to breathe slowly. And so it's this very interesting, you know, dialectical experience of in the middle of stress having a clear, peaceful mind. I am fascinated with the retention. I, you know, I will hyperventilate and get that over with so that I can have the retention period— minutes of silence, of stillness, of watching the mind. It's a very interesting experience. So thank you for leading the way and for your dedication and hard work. And for those of you who this sounds terrible to, don't try it. There's a lot of, you know, other ways out there. I just feel it's so important for us to know about natural ways to invoke our hormetic stress response. So I'm so grateful to you and to all my colleagues who are studying this and, you know, all the discoveries that— potential discoveries that could be made with this. And this is where NIA is moving as well. Now, I'll just end with the usual place with our webinar, which is thank you to all of you healthcare workers. This is turning into a long marathon, and we just need all the help we can get. We have been really busy putting our mini videos on our website, so if you go to the UCSF Department of Psychiatry, you will find new resources, something for everyone. We also have the resources for finding Wim Hof's courses on our website now. So on the webinar page, you will see the PNAS study, you will see the mini— the free mini course. And so stay tuned, and we really look forward to seeing you all next week when we will talk with Thupten Jinpa about compassion and healthcare.

Thank you.