LS 85 - Achieving Nirvana with Nervana's Ami Brannon

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Welcome to the Longevity Show. Informing listeners on the important aspects of health, wealth and happiness to ensure you live life to its fullest. With fascinating interviews with top authors and gurus in the field, along with the latest news in the science and technology of longevity, we're going to reveal expert advice and amazing secrets of living a longer.

And now, here's your host, Jason Hartman.

This is Jason Hartman. Welcome to the Longevity and Biohacking Show. Occasionally we have a guest host and today we have Fernando guest hosting for me. So I hope you enjoy this episode. It's fascinating. Dive in and enjoy and make sure you Visit us@hartmanmedia.com to check out all of our great shows and be sure you have actually subscribed to to the show so you don't miss any episodes.

It is my pleasure to welcome Amy Brannan to the show. Amy is the co founder and CEO of Nirvana. The name is a nice play with the word nirvana, which is of course the state of perfect happiness. Amy and her team came up with an amazing biohacking product which I have used myself with unbelievable results. It's called the Nirvana Generator. In accompanying headphones, it essentially produces an electrical signal that stimulates a branch of the vagus nerve that is located in the ear. And for clarification, the vagus nerve is a part of the parasympathetic nervous system, essentially the rest and digest system. And it passes through the neck and the thorax to the abdomen and it has the widest distribution in the body. So needless to say, it's a very important part of our anatomy. Amy holds degrees in both nursing and psychology from the University of Central Florida. She has almost 20 years of leadership experience in hospital administration and healthcare sector marketing. She's an entrepreneur who is passionate about creating scientifically supported products that are accessible to consumers and can enhance the enjoyment of life. Welcome Amy. It's a pleasure to talk to you again.

Thank you, Fernando. It's good to be here. Thanks for having me.

I am really looking forward to diving to the science behind your product. Of course, I met you and I met some of your team in Pasadena. I might have met Greg as well, another co founder. Okay, yeah, I do remember. And so I was really amazed with the results that I saw with the session that I had with you. So I wanted you to tell our audience about Nirvana. Explain to us what Nirvana is all about.

Nirvana is exactly. I think you did a great Job describing it. Nirvana is a nerve stimulator. It actually stimulates a branch of the vagus nerve through a set of headphones. They look like standard earbuds, just with a little specific design. And the left earbud is actually made out of conductive and non conductive silicone. So the conductive silicone helps to transmit an electrical signal into the earth. That electrical signal actually targets the branch of the vagus nerve that sits there inside the ear canal. And what that does is once the vagus nerve is stimulated, it sends a message to your brain to relax. So it has the brain release some neurotransmitters, those that typically you can access the vagus nerve, as you probably well know, by meditating. Right. So this is a very, very similar effect. The people that we've talked to over the time, the couple of years that we've been developing this, we know a lot of people who have tried meditation and have actually struggled to be able to focus to the point that they can get that good deep relaxation. And after they use Nirvana, they actually find that it's easier to meditate. They can get into a deeper state, they can stay a little bit longer. And even without meditating, they can bring themselves into that calm, relaxed state throughout any given day.

Explain this to me. Is there any particular reason for the left earbud to be the one that is starting the connectivity? Or is it just a matter of choice, left or right?

It's mainly because the left side of the vagus nerve, the left branch, is actually innervated just a little bit differently. So what we're targeting, it's best to go in through the left ear. And that's just why we chose it.

So when I tried it, the feeling I had within, I think within 30 seconds to a minute, I literally started to become happier. There was a playlist that you have with the system and you can play different songs, but essentially I wasn't in a particularly joyful mood prior to trying it, but after a while I was singing along. I just felt. Felt good.

I was amazed what was going on there. I mean, how does stimulating the vagus nerve did this to me?

You know, I think that your experience is not exactly one that everyone experiences. I think that everyone is so different, but within such a short period of time. And I remember watching you sit there while you tried it out and you were. You had a great response.

Yeah.

And I would, I would argue that you probably already have tuned up your vagus nerve. And I don't know that because we haven't talked about this, but my question for you is, do you currently meditate? Do you feel like you're a very calm person and that it's easier for you to relax than maybe for others?

Well, yes and no. I do meditate. You know, I tend to think that I am more relaxed more often than not. But of course I think you can go a little bit deeper. But I guess what you're saying is that sensation is something that happened to me. It might not happen every time that I use the product. That's what you're getting at. And it's more of a practice, such as native meditation. It will help me get deeper into meditation. And maybe it's a reinforcement of the meditation, like you said, that created that sense of wellness.

Right. When you're asking what exactly was happening, it's the neurotransmitters that are released. You can get different levels of stimulation. So with the device, you can change the intensity of the signal. And when you mentioned the playlist, we actually have songs that are not intuitive in that you would think that they're not necessarily the most relaxing. But because we have one mode, the music mode, where the signal follows the beat of the music, we choose songs that are a little more energetic. They have more peak intensities within the song. So when you get that signal, you're getting more peak intensities over a shorter period of time, where the signal dances along and, you know, really stimulates your vagus nerve even more. So we have another mode called formula mode, that really powers up the signal, which is the electrical signal all the way up and then all the way down. And it's a little slower, a little more, maybe what some would call relaxing. But I think the thing is, not everyone relaxes the same. I personally, I don't enjoy slower music. I don't really find it relaxing. For me, I enjoy music that's more upbeat, similar to what you heard when you were at the biohacking conference. So it may take, like, for me, I have a similar reaction to you. So whether that's through longer use, because I use it regularly, I feel really, really good when I use Nirvana. And it tends to stay with me on a short term, just, you know, for an hour or so during the day. But also because I use it daily, then I feel less stress overall, I'm able to relax much easier. And most commonly, I think just things bother me less. Things that maybe used to bother me or I used to get stressed out about, I just don't. I find it much easier to Process things, think through them logically, and take my time.

Sure. Yeah, I can see that. Can you describe what the product looks like and the process of starting out with a session?

The device itself is a handheld generator. It's a rectangle format, has four buttons and a dial in the middle and a small LCD screen. So that's just, you know, for user interface, we use buttons to increase or decrease the intensity. There are a set of headphones like I described before. It has. The headphones have a plug. It's a dual prong plug. One is for the electrical signal and the other is for the music signal. And you can connect this to your music device. So whether you listen to music from your phone or from an MP3 player, an iPod or your laptop, you can connect that to the Nirvana generator. And when you go through the menu, you select your mode. So whether it's audio mode, which is with music, and within audio mode, you could actually choose to listen to live music. If you're at a concert, if you're at a festival or anything, any live music venue, there's a microphone on the generator itself. So it's. The electrical signal will follow whatever music is in that live environment. And then there's formula mode, which is the preset signal that's in a pattern that you don't have to have music at all.

I was going to ask you if you always need to have music at all. So this formula mode, it just plays some beat, some sort of marker for your brain to follow along.

And actually it sends the electrical signal just in a pattern. So you don't hear music, you just feel the signal power up and power down.

Yeah, I do remember there is the control for intensity. You know, you can definitely feel electrical current going through the head, essentially. And, you know, you can definitely increase that as you go along. You get sensitized to it to a certain degree, and you need to keep increasing it as you go to get. I guess this is a target to increase intensity to as high as you can. Can or do you start slowly and you know, over a period of time, you know, many days, perhaps you. You increase it up, right?

You. That's a really good question. You don't have to increase the intensity to a really high level. Now we have the intensity levels that we have are between 2 and 25. So it's a wide range of levels. But that makes each step small, which is. That was our goal. We don't want the steps to be very big, so that if you're comfortable at, say, 14, then you go up to 15. You don't want it to be a big jump. Typically, people will be able to tolerate, you know, a higher intensity the more often they use the product, but it's not required.

Now, who can benefit from your product? What are some examples of, you know, how you recommend nirvana to be used?

I would say anyone who has stress in their life that they feel is difficult to manage or that they feel effects from that stress. You know, we all know that the effects of stress are really what affect your health. And this is how our bodies generate disease much of the time. So the more you're able to control the effects of your stress, I truly don't believe that everyone has a lot of control over how much stress they have. It's pretty common to hear, you know, you just need to decrease the stress in your life. Well, if you have an aging parent, if you have young children, if you have a busy job, if you have deadlines to meet that particular day, it's unlikely that you're going to change any of that right away. So I think that it's as much about trying to control what you can and preventing the effects of that stress that you can't control. So I think that's really the biggest area. Anyone who has those stressors that really just needs to manage the effects more effectively. And then for general relaxation, for general health, and for meditation, it does make meditating quite a bit easier.

Now, I know that there's all kinds of research about VNS therapy, which is vagus nerve stimulation. And, you know, it's designed to prevent seizures, and it has been used for other medical benefits. Is there any use that is provided by your device that can also help with some medical issues?

Like I described, our device is only for wellness, so we've specifically created it for these particular effects. So we have not tested our device for any medical purposes. Certainly there is a lot of historical literature. There are implanted surgical devices out there for vagus nerve stimulation for the conditions that you talked about. So at this point, there are scientists who have requested that maybe they're able to use our product to study different signals. And that's just the really, really interesting and cool thing about this type of product is that the electrical signal is easily changed. So if there is something else that someone wants to study outside of what we're doing right now, then this may be able to be used by research and development teams to test for other effects.

Now, is there any side effects? I mean, could you somehow hurt yourself by using the product too much or too High of an intensity or anything like that?

Good question. We know that's a common question. So there are a couple of research briefs that we have available on our website, which is experience nirvana with an e dot com. So there are a couple of research briefs that talk about stimulating the nerve too much. Can you stimulate the nerve too much? Can you become addicted? Those are questions that we get pretty frequently. But the human body has these great protective mechanisms in place. So really, this type of stimulation is only going to be so effective before the body initiates its own governor to say, okay, you can continue to stimulate or put the electrical signal into the ear canal, but it's really not going to do anything more than it already has after a certain amount of time. And we've tested this on so many people, and we've all been using it ourselves for, you know, better part of the last year, so that we feel very comfortable and strongly about that. The side effects, the only side effects that we have seen or hear about is itching in the ear canal and maybe a little bit of redness, but really nothing beyond that.

Okay, now I'm curious about the name that you guys chose. I mean, it's a very catchy name, and as I said earlier, it's a play on Nirvana. Any interesting stories on how you guys decided to come up with the name?

You know, I think it's probably just what you would think. It's sitting around the kitchen table.

Throwing all kinds of names out there. And this really caught all of our attention the most. And it sends a message about what we do. We are trying to help people find that true nirvana, that happiness, that relaxation, that Zen. And the fact that we do that by triggering the nerve, the vagus nerve in the ear, it just matched together perfectly.

It just makes sense. It brings the right connotation. Now, this is something that enhances meditation, allows you to get into a deeper state, helps with stress management. But it's really something that we need to work into our lifestyle, isn't it?

Absolutely. I think that at the time we're living in, there are so many things we seek instant gratification for, so many things. You know, if we send a message to someone, we expect a message back right away. And if we don't get one, we'll send another message or we'll make a phone call. This is something that I think the tendency would be for people to think that you press a button and immediately you feel happy or relaxed. And while that can happen occasionally, I think that overall what we're seeing is that incorporating this into your daily life, which is really, really easy, putting it in your daily life, it actually helps you get more balanced on a regular basis. So I use mine while I'm checking email just so I make sure that I use it every day because I'm just as busy as, you know, anyone else probably is. I have three kids and I have this.

That's interesting. So it doesn't. I would think that you would want to be very quiet, you know, not focusing on no issues. So you use while you read an email. That's very interesting. And it works well for you, I imagine.

Yes, it works great. Now I do that because I actually do not meditate now that I use Nirvana. It's something I've thought about and especially after meeting folks like yourself and others at the biohacking conference, it's something I would like to start doing. But for me, I tend to multitask. So if I can get my relaxation in while I'm doing something else, if that makes sense.

Well, that's at the heart of biohacking. You find a way or method or a device that can increase your performance and you found a way to integrate that into your busy life. And I think that's very powerful.

I appreciate that because I think that I look at so many of the things that biohackers do and it does exactly what you're saying. You try to push the limits, you try to do more with less and more in less time. But I do think that most of it is incorporating it into your lifestyle. And when you think about it, you say, okay, I just need to do this once or twice a day for 15 to 30 minutes. And if you use digital wearables, if you track your stress level, tension, focus, heart rate variability, any of that, you should be able to see a difference over the period of a week or so.

That is awesome. It's just something that can help you get somewhere faster, that it might take you longer. Like, like we were talking earlier, if you're meditating and I do, you know, there's a certain speed where the practice allows you to get to a certain target. But if you can enhance that via your device or any other product that does something similar, just very powerful in that it shortcuts, you know, the amount of time that it takes and allows you to live a more stress managed life, which is, I think is very important nowadays. I wanted to ask you, going back to the effects of the product, you know, there is a neurotransmitter enhancement that happens and I imagine There are some release of hormones while you're using the product. Correct?

Right. We know that the vagus nerve is essentially your parasympathetic nervous system. This is the side of the nervous system that helps you rest and digest. So the release of neurotransmitters is going to be things like serotonin, acetylcholine, maybe a little bit of dopamine. But those things are hard to measure in and of themselves. It's probably where your biohacking will come in over time. You know, when someday we're gonna be able to put a sensor on our finger that's gonna be able to tell us all those things right away.

I'm really looking forward to that. That's what I'm hoping for future generations of Apple watch, maybe we'll have better sensors, but that would be a great thing to have as you're using the device. What are my dopamine levels? You know, how is it changing? Yeah, I think that would be awesome.

Right. And also, what is it inhibiting? Because it's also, you know, it's important to think about the fact that, you know, like today's Halloween. Right. So we think on days like today of the immediate scares or the, you know, the things that are frightening all of a sudden. But those things are things that we come across very rarely. But chronic stress inflicts the same type of response on your body, and you want to counteract those effects. You want to counteract all those stress hormones and everything else that's rushing at you and tearing your body apart. You want to be able to balance that side. You need. Everybody needs a little bit of stress. I think we all believe that. But you can't let that stress control you or tear your body apart. And this is definitely a way to trigger the other side of the nervous system and really get your parasympathetic to kick in.

Yeah, well said. I agree 100%. Now, Amy, we're coming up to the end of the show. I need to end it, but I do wanted to end, ask you about some of the logistics on the device, maybe how to get it, what the price, and also if you can give out any URLs or links that you want our audience to know so that they can learn more.

Our website is where we sell the product directly from our website, and that's experiencenirvana.com N E R V A N A. And, you know, we also have our Facebook page, which is nirvanaus. And that's also our Twitter. That's our Twitter handle as well, and.

All spelled with an E, as you've mentioned.

Yes, it is.

And what's the price?

We still have our introductory pricing at $289. Our retail price is 319. So this is, you know, we still have introductory price going on right now.

And it comes with everything that you need to get going with the product. The earbuds and the device itself and so on, and you're ready to go. And what about the music?

Everything you need.

Do you hook up the music with a smartphone or does your device have music in it as well?

You need to use your own music device. This product doesn't actually hold music in it.

Got it.

So whatever your music is, that's kind of the beauty of the product is it's very easily personalized to whatever your music taste is.

Yeah.

And if, you know, one of the things is if this signal, the electrical signal in audio mode doesn't exactly follow your music because maybe you prefer something that's a lot more calm or subtle. The signal may not follow that as well, but you can still use it in formula mode and just turn on your music, so it just won't follow to the beat.

Okay. Well, Amy, thank you very much. And again, experiencenirvana.com has all kinds of links, and you can buy the product right there. I do appreciate your time, and I'm very glad to learn why I felt so good when I tried your device.

Thank you so much, Fernando.

You're welcome. You have a great day.

Okay, you too.

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