Study Shows SOMA Breath As Effective As Psychedelics For Anxiety & Depression

Okay, so welcome Jeff.

Thanks, thanks for having me.

Yeah. So this is Dr. Jeff Tarrant and he's all the way from the west coast of America. Exactly. Where are you from again?

I'm in Eugene, Oregon.

Eugene, Oregon. That's right. So Jeff actually reached out to me a while ago because he was really intrigued by SOMA and wanted to put it to the test because he's a neuroscientist and he's done a lot of research with brainwaves and using brainwave therapy and wanted to see what's going on in the brain with the brain waves in relationship to the SOMA breath techniques. So we gave Jeff access to the 21 day protocol and he tested some of the tracks out in a kind of a clinical study like.

Way and created a small bit of research which looked very compelling. And then he went and decided to go and do a bit more deeper research. So now we've got a beginnings like a foundation of some really interesting.

Preliminary research on brainwaves and in comparison to psychedelics and what psychedelics do with the brain as well and in terms to things like depression and well being and mood. So without going into it too much, I'm going to give it to Jeff to actually explain in the simplest, most like accessible language possible for the non scientist types who might be watching this. All right.

So yeah, so the simple accessible version is first, Jeff, just explain.

Who you are, your credentials and stuff. Because I did it, I could have done a better job of that. But you know, you know yourself better than I do.

Yeah, so I'm a, I'm a licensed psychologist and I've been, I'm board certified in neurofeedback, which is, you know, basically monitoring brainwave activity and using that to teach people to increase flexibility in their nervous system. And so I've been doing that for, you know, 20ish years and elements of that have been kind of research oriented. A lot of it is geared toward understanding meditative states and altered states of consciousness. And so, and then, you know, like you mentioned, I came across your work and was, it was kind of serendipitous because at the time I was like, you know, I think I need to bring more breath work into what I'm doing. And I came across your stuff and I was like, okay, this is awesome. And after I had worked with it for a little while and was kind of looking at some of the other materials you had, and we had a couple of short discussions that, you know, people were having reporting, you know, pretty interesting experiences in the SOMA breathwork practices, some of which sounded psychedelic. And so that was really what kind of got me intrigued, was wondering from a brainwave perspective, what does this look like? What's going on? Exactly. Because it's one thing to kind of speculate or to make some guesses, and people do that all the time with all kinds of practices.

They feel relaxed, so they assume something has happened in the brain.

But it's a whole other thing to really look at it and say, well, what is going on? Is there something consistent in the brain that looks similar to what's happened with psychedelics? This is a perfect time to look at that because there's a lot of current research happening looking at psilocybin and LSD and Ayahuasca and.

5 Meo DMT and various psychedelics and what's happening in the brain. We actually have some pretty solid research literature to compare this.

Fantastic.

Yeah, let me just jump in.

So go for the. Yeah, go through the study. I'm intrigued.

So that the. So basically what we did was we decided we wanted to recruit people to try kind of the short version of the Soma breathwork meditation.

Just a 22 minute. The daily dose.

Yeah, right. It was daily dose, 22 minutes. And there was a couple of reasons for that. One, you know, we were kind of recruiting volunteers. We didn't want people who had done this before, although that would have been a huge advantage in some ways. Just from my own practice with this work, the more you work with it, it completely changes over time. But we wanted a clean sample. We didn't want some people with a lot of experience, some people with no experience.

So we chose yogis. People who had an active yoga practice, had experience with meditation, had experience with pranayama, but not necessarily this particular practice. So we did that for a few reasons because then they know how to do some breath work. They're not going to be surprised if certain things happen and they have at least a little bit of experience with meditative states.

So we had. We ended up our final sample. We had six people. We had to take two people out of the study because of bad recordings or because they didn't follow the protocol. And so we ended up with six people. It happens.

And so basically we put a little EEG cap on their head. It was a 19 electrode, looks kind of like a swimming cap, but it's got a bunch of EEG sensors and recorded their brainwave activity at rest. Just sitting there doing nothing.

Filled out a questionnaire about their mood. Just how you feeling? Before we get started, then had them listen to the guided audio. So it was your voice, the scripted version. And again, we wanted everybody to hear the exact same thing. It was the exact same recording, same instruction, same length. And we recorded the EEG the whole time through that practice. And then at the end did kind of a second recording. There's really three recordings. Before, after, and during. And then at the end had them fill out another mood question. So how you feeling now? At the end of the practice? As well as an altered states of consciousness question.

And so what we did to analyze the data, we kind of, because it was a small sample, we couldn't do a lot of fancy statistics. But what we were able to do was to look at specific brain waves in specific brain regions to see, well, what kind of trends were happening. And the biggest finding was that pretty much across the board, everything, all the brainwaves drop significantly from pre to post. So about 30% in some cases, especially alpha. Alpha brainwaves drop. And so that was kind of across the board. Looking at the whole head.

And which, which part of the. Was this during or after?

This was after. So this was just looking. Yeah, comparing before to after.

Yeah, there we still have a whole lot of data during that we could analyze. You know, that would, you know, for that we would want. I would want to break it apart into breath retention versus rhythmic breathing.

Yeah.

You know, and, and that's all possible. It would just take, it would just take a lot of time. Maybe a follow up study, break all that data apart.

So even just. Yeah, so not even during the practice, but afterwards showing these pretty significant decreases of brain activity pretty much across the board.

And so because we were interested in looking to see if this was consistent with psychedelics, really wanted to look at a specific part of the brain called the default mode network.

That's it. The default mode network. Brilliant. Okay.

Yeah. So it's actually not a part of the brain, it's a net. It's actually several parts of the brain that are talking to each other.

So explain what that is. Explain what that means.

Yeah, and the default mode network is getting a lot of attention right now because of what we understand its role to be. It's really kind of that the network in your brain that is creating your sense of who you are, it's kind of your, you can think of it almost as your ego. The brain's version of the ego. It's constantly interpreting information from the environment. Say this is who Jeff is.

Identifying who I am and how I relate to the world.

Which part of the brain is this.

The hub of it is called the posterior cingulate cortex. So it's kind of at the back of the head in the center.

Is it a primitive part? Is it the primitive part of the brain?

It's not actually.

It's sort of a go between. So it's part of the cingulate, and the cingulate runs right down the midline and it's actually a connector between your limbic system and your cortex.

It's literally right in between. Sometimes when I talk about this, I tell people it's basically a link between your emotional brain and thinking.

Ah, so it's the link between the bridge between your, like, conscious mind and the. The subconscious brain. Right. The autonomic nervous system.

Right. Which makes it interesting. Yeah.

And that's who you are. That makes sense. So you're the third person.

Right.

There's two people and you're the thing that's you. The default mode network is the third. The singular.

Yeah, so yeah, the singular kind of the hub. And there's other regions. But, you know, it's basically anytime you're thinking about yourself or you're talking about yourself, you're reflecting on yourself or you're having a memory about yourself, the default mode network is involved. And you know, and we know that for most people, that's most of the time, you know, it's a very active part of the brain. And a lot of the reasons that this is interesting from a research perspective is because we're finding more and more that if somebody has a significant mental health concern, usually there's some issues with the default mode network. Usually it's overactive, which makes sense. If you're thinking too much about yourself or how you relate to other people or to the world, it's probably going to make you anxious or depressed or both. And that's what we find. I mean, we see this over and over. And what's interesting, of course, is that with psychedelics.

That whole region basically goes offline. It shuts off. And so the way that a person normally thinks about themselves is basically interrupt. So if I've got, you know, if I've got some dysfunctional ways that I think about myself that are causing me.

Pain.

You know, on a psychedelic that's all disruptive. And all of a sudden you start thinking of yourself differently, you see yourself different, you see how you relate to others different, which is, I think, some of the healing potential with psychedelics, because it interrupts that automatic selfing that happens in the brain.

Is that part of the Brain that also creates tension in the body.

From anxiety and worry.

I would say that it's part of that process because of its tendency to get over involved in.

Identity issues, which of course are going to make stressed.

The brain's tricky because we like to separate all the little parts and act like they all do separate things. But most of the time it's everything working together, you know, in complex ways.

You know, so what? So when we kind of took that initial analysis of what was happening with the SOMA breath work and looked specifically at the default modem, what we saw was a pattern that looks remarkably like what we see with the traditional psychedelics, which. So it wasn't just on the surface of the brain. It was down to this default mode network and it was just shutting down. Delta decreased, beta decreased, alpha decreased, beta decreased. Pretty much everything decreased except gamma. And gamma just kind of hung out at neutral. It didn't really go.

And so, and this is very consistent. In fact, you know, when you look at some of the psychedelic research, the only brainwave that increases sometimes is gamma. Pretty much everything else drops out. And so, you know, we were seeing these patterns in this research, very consistent. We saw it with the default mode network. We looked specifically at the posterior cingulate, because that's the hub of the default mode network, saw the same thing.

Interestingly, the brain waves that dropped the most were delta and alpha. And those are the two we're most interested in. Because other research has shown that the decreases of delta and alpha psychedelics are what are associated with mystical experience.

So decrease in the frequency or the amplitude.

Amplitude.

Okay, all right.

And the reason that we're interested in mystical experiences, just, you know, I mean, aside from the fact that they're really powerful, is that there's other research showing that if somebody has a mystical experience on or off of a psychedelic, that is much more likely to have lasting effects, be more life changing in a positive way. So if somebody takes a dose of psilocybin mushroom and they report having a mystical experience, they're much more likely for that change to last than if somebody just sees some pretty lights and that's kind of the end of the experience.

And again, we saw that pattern here with soma. So this decrease of delta and alpha.

So all of this was very consistent. But for me, kind of coming from the research background that I have, just because the brain does something doesn't always mean that you can interpret that the way you want. Just because there's a decrease of delta and alpha and fault code network, it doesn't necessarily mean something by itself.

So that's why I was glad that we asked people to fill out the Altered States of consciousness question because then we have their report of saying, like, this is how I felt, you know, during the experience. And, you know, the Altered States of Consciousness questionnaire has been around for a long time, been used in a lot of published research. So it's not just something I made up. These are the validated questions. And it's got 11 subscales that ask about various elements of a psychedelic experience. So what we did was we looked at everybody's responses and then compared this to previous psychedelic research. And what was interesting about that was that there was at least a few subscales where the people in this experiment reported higher levels than with psilocybin or mdma.

And the scales that, that showed up like that were Experience of Unity.

Spiritual Experience and Changed being. Those were the names of the scale again. This was actually pretty consistent with that drop of delta, that drop of alph, you know, so it was kind of cool, right? Because it's like, okay, incredible. Yeah. So, you know. Yeah, it's very awesome. So people's experiences and their brain waves kind of matching up this way.

And, you know, and it was consistent with what, you know, I mean, you created this, you've been doing this for a long time. You see this all the time. But it's nice to sort of see it in a more research oriented, you know, these people had no experience, no background. This. I gave them no kind of indication of what could happen or what might happen. I did give them instructions about what the breath work was going to look like so that they had an orientation to that so they weren't, you know, just hearing the instructions and not knowing what to do. But that was pretty much all I gave them, was just a quick orientation. Yeah. And so for me. Yeah, go ahead.

Yeah, go on. You're going to say so.

Well, for me, I mean, the fact that we got these results at all was pretty impressive. Especially the fact that it was only the 22 minute version and they'd never done it before.

Wow, that's mind boggling.

Yeah.

I've been working with this, with these meditations now for six or eight months or something on an almost daily basis. I've noticed for myself that, you know, it took me a month of working with it consistently before I really kind of landed in sort of sweet spot with it. And, you know, the 60 minute version is totally different than the 22 minute version.

Yeah.

And so, you know, the Fact that we're getting these results in this situation is I think, is super significant.

Wow, that's brilliant. Well, obviously we need to do a bigger sample size, but what I'd love to know is why is it. So when we do these weekly sessions on Sundays, I ask people to do a score between one and 10, and the second time we do it in that. In that hour session, we actually change it to 11 because so many people put 10. So the second dose we give them is like quite a lot of people that say 11 on a scale of, you know, zero is the worst you've ever felt in your life, and 11 is the most ecstatic you've ever felt. And so why is it that this bringing down the default network brainwave activity is associated with feeling good? Like, because this is a scale of feeling, feeling, emotion. So why is that associated with feeling good?

Yeah, and interesting. I'm glad you brought that up because, you know, the default mode network by itself, I wouldn't say is necessarily.

Involved with feeling good or bad. Necessarily. I mean, it is because, you know, because of its connection to ruminating about yourself or brooding or being able to get out of your small sense of self. Right. I mean, that's an ecstatic feeling when you can detain from your little ego and recognize that you're bigger, that you are connected to the universe.

And that involves the default mode now because it's like, oh, the boundary between self and other gets shrunk so that I can feel my sort of energetic self in a different way. And so that's. That is definitely one component. We also looked at a part of the brain called the insula, which is in the temporal lobe. And the insula is very much involved in feeling states and especially the right side, because the right side is more of an embodied feeling. So when you feel things in the body, like when you have a heartache, you feel it in your chest. That's more of the right side of. And so what we saw was that right insula was pretty much the only brain region that became activated during this experience. Everything else shut down, but the right insula showed an increase of gamma.

And so I think that is an element of that kind of ecstatic bliss kind of feeling state. So the combination of getting out of your own little small ego and then also kind of this more ecstatic bliss state.

Excellent. So what is gamma?

Yeah, so gamma's the fastest brainwave that we look at. And it's really kind of associated more with sort of higher states of learning, being in a flow State.

You know, kind of being in the zone. It's like you understand something at a very high level without effort.

And so like you see elevated gamma, for instance, in Tibetan monks when they're doing a compassion meditation.

You know, they understand compassion at a very high level. They don't have to try to engage at that high level. They just.

And so a lot of people are really interested in gamma because of this, because it suggests an activation, but an activation that's kind of at a higher level. It's not like trying to force something. It's not like you're trying to think and analyze your way into a situation. It's like you just are, you just embody, you are in a certain state because this was occurring in the insula, you know, it's clearly an emotional state.

Wow, this is so fascinating. So going back to the study then, what would you say are the limitations of study and what, what would you suggest we could do next to improve on it?

Well, I mean, the obvious limitation is only having six subjects, you know, so, you know, it's a small sample, but you know, I was kind of thinking of this as a pilot and you know, with a pilot you just need enough subjects to see is there something. And you know, I think we accomplished that. Sure.

And that was all six. This happened in all six, right?

Yeah, there were varying levels, but you know, when you sort of look at everybody individually. Yeah, this is.

Wow.

And then, you know, the other limitations, of course we kind of mentioned, right. That this was just the 22 minute version.

And nobody had ever done it before. So it'd be very interesting to look at people who have been working with this program for a few months consistently and to look at the hour long version.

And you know, see what happened there. Yes, I suspect you would have similar findings, but they would be much more dramatic.

Yeah, fantastic. So interesting. Well, you know, if I was one of these dodgy scientists who make a statistic claims, I would say I've got 100% success record with this product, you know, creating this, this effect. Well, we're not going to say that obviously, so I would love to, you know, discuss further what, what you need from us to help you, you know, to do this independently with a bigger scale, bigger group. That's amazing. Thank you so much. Is there anything more you wanted to add?

No, no, it's, you know, I've enjoyed doing this work and you know, I'm looking forward to whatever the next step is.

Yeah. And what would you say would be a good application of this clinically yeah.

You know, it's interesting because I actually didn't even. Hadn't really thought about that until I started analyzing the data and trying to understand the data. And, you know, because of some of the effects, it really occurred to me that, and probably because of my back as a psychologist, that I think there really could be some clinical applications with this, you know, particularly around things like ptsd.

Yes.

Now I need to caveat there because I think this could also be triggering for people with.

Like, have to be careful maybe how we set it up, but, you know, because, you know, if it was set up with a certain intention, I mean, kind of like people are doing work with psychedelics, you know, it's like if you go in with a certain intention, you work with somebody that has some skill with helping you resolve and work through difficult experiences, go through this big, powerful experience, have somebody to process it with, kind of follow up so that it's not just sort of a one off kind of thing. I think there's a lot of potential using this kind of as a.

What I want to say, kind of a softer version of psychedelic therapy.

Yes.

It's doing the same thing. And I know some of the things that you've been working with already are kind of the hypnotic applications. And I think that's another place this could work again, because the way it's impacting the brain, I think you're setting the brain up to be receptive.

With this practice. And so if you have the right intention, come into it with some suggestive ideas. You've been already kind of thinking and planning about what your perfect life would look like, what you want, how you want to. What you want to achieve and how you want to develop.

And then kind of have strategic ways to kind of bring those ideas in while your brain's in a receptive state. It's.

You.

Figured that out. You've already been doing that.

We're doing it. We're doing it. I love it. It's happening. Yeah, man. All right, well, thank you so much, Jeff. Yeah, fantastic. It's a great summary of the results. All right. Very excited to see what we do in the future.

Sure.

And where can we find out more about you and your stuff that you do with brain mapping?

Yeah, thanks. My website's www.neuromeditationinstitute.com and so pretty much everything we're doing is there. That's the easiest way to kind of crack it down.

Jeff does some cool stuff with VR. Actually, they made a Soma VR version for the Helium app. Which you can check out.

It's.

If you've got a Oculus go. I've got one. And it's proper cool. The kids love it. Kids love it. And the. Do you do stuff with brainwaves as well as brainwave entrainment?

Yeah, brainwave entrainment. And a lot of our work is actually combining neurofeedback with meditation, so giving people feedback about what their brain is doing. In certain styles of meditation, they can learn to shift the deeper state. That's a lot of work.

Fantastic. Speaks my language.

Yeah, Perfect.

All right, man. Much love.

Appreciate it. Thank you.

Peace.

All right, take care.

Cool, man. That was great.

Where did I go? Sorry.

There you are.