Master Your Breathing With Dr. Neema Moraveji

Wellness force radio episode 29.

We've seen that over 75% of the time that Spire produces that kind of notification, it results in a physiologically significant reduction in respiratory rate within 90 seconds. What that means is that, you know, if you think about what's the smallest piece of feedback that could have the biggest impact on your day, it would very much be a deep breath at the right time.

Wellness Force Radio welcome back for another episode. I am your host and digital health coach, Josh. Thanks for sharing a slice of your busy day here with me on the podcast. If you're here for the very first time, Wellness Force Radio is where I bring you the most inspiring and passionate experts in behavior change and wellness technology. These are the thought leaders. They dedicate their lives to empowering others with the knowledge and tools that drive real transformation in our physical and emotional wellness. Today's show is sponsored by WellnessForce.com where@wellnessforce.com you'll learn how to change old habits with new technology. Explore wellnessforce.com today and see if digital health coaching is right for you. Now a fast question. Are you using an iPhone? Go ahead and tap the screen where the show is playing on the show logo. What'll come up is all the links and everything from Today's show with Dr. Nima. You can go ahead and hit the review link in purple and take just 60 seconds to leave an honest review to be published live on itunes. Your support by leaving that amazing review allows me to keep the lights on for this show and to keep serving this community by bringing on world class people who are making a difference and changing lives. Today's guest, Dr. Nima Moraveggi. I met Dr. Nima earlier this year at the Quantified Self 15 Conference. He blew my mind with his device, Spire, a breathing technology that tracks more than just how you breathe, but it can show you how to actually be a better human being in every asset of your life. Dr. Nima is the director of Stanford University's Calming Technology Lab and is the founder of Spire, the device we're going to talk about today in the show and also why it's so important to track our breath. So without waiting any further, let's jump into the interview with Dr. Nima Moraveggi. Dr. Nima, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much, Josh.

Well, I'm excited to have you on today. We met, I think it was four or five months ago at the Quantified Self conference in San Fran and I was enamored with your project on Spire and what you're doing to really help people lead more breath control in their lives, how to transform their bodies and what the power of breath really is. And today's show is all about breath control. I know this is your specialty, and I'm excited to share your mission and your message with the audience. And I think it's gonna be very valuable and new information they haven't heard yet. So really excited to have you on.

I am as well. I mean, our booth over there at the QS show, there's a lot of people there, but I distinctly remember our conversation and how it just kept kind of growing and growing. So it seems like a good fit to do a longer one here.

And I remember, just so the audience knows, we'll talk about SPIRE today as well as all the different aspects of behavior change and how that works with the body. But what was really cool is I got to use the device and I'll share that later on today. My effect actually seeing my breath on the screen. So before we jump into what spire is, Dr. Nima, I want to talk about your passion for breath so that people know. I mean, obviously we know what breathing is because we all do it autonomically. But what is your passion for breath work and how would you describe breath work?

Well, my passion is really around using our breath as a fundamental tool to achieve whatever goals we have, not only in our lives, but in our days. So from picking up the kids, to focusing at work, to lowering stress, to kicking ass in a workout, breath can be used in all of these situations. It's very, very powerful. It's really our way in to our nervous system, if you understand what I mean. So what happens is when there's so many different things happening in the body, with heart rate and skin conductance, sweating, all these things, breathing is just one of them. But breathing is also so unique because you can change your breath immediately for some reason, for some very interesting reason, the human body has direct control over its breathing, over its respiration cycles and patterns. And that means it's a way in. And that just allows for so many interesting applications. So my passion really started from experiencing that firsthand a lot of different perspectives. Athletics to meditation, yoga to just kind of self regulation in general and just kind of grew from there and working.

The breath is an interesting term because breathing occurs whether we want it to or not, unless we're changing it. You said firsthand. But if you were to describe breath work for people that might not have studied it or people that might not have had, that have knowledge that you might have. How would you simply describe doing breath work for the average person?

Well, I would describe breathwork as the skill of being aware and regulating our own breathing for our own reasons, for our own goals and purposes. So there's two parts to that. One is being aware, and then one is regulation or changing. And those are two separate and distinct skills that kind of combine this greater skill of. Of using the breath to our own advantage.

Aware and regulation. Your work stems way back. You are the director of Stanford University's Calming Technology Lab. Maybe explain a little bit to the audience about what you're doing at Stanford at the Calming Lab and what that technology lab does.

This lab started as a kind of movement on campus where, you know, Stanford is a place where people are working on technology designs all the time for all types of things. So when I started bringing up this conversation on campus around technologies that help us bring balance to life, help us bring a sense of groundedness, a sense of peace or control in this kind of very hectic lifestyle, it spoke to a lot of people on campus, from different professors to graduate students to undergraduates. People kind of said, yeah, you know, I love technology. I got nothing against technology, but, man, I would really love to have more balance in my life. I want to use the technology for what I want it to be good for, but I don't want to have those kind of negative side effects of feeling anxious when checking my phone or feeling like I can never get through all my email or like I have to read all these tweets or, you know, and the list goes on and on. You know, technology creates that stress for us. So it became this kind of little movement campus that cultivated enough of a critical mass to form into a research group.

What a great place, too, as far as test subjects at Stanford, where I'm sure everyone's on their devices all day long. So you probably have some good case studies.

Yeah, we do. And we also try to go outside of campus quite a bit into the Bay Area and work with users from different walks of life as well.

I love the way that you talked about being aware and then having the regulation. And you teach respiratory psychophysiology at Stanford. There's a course that you're known for teaching called Designing Calm. Can you touch on what that course is for your students? And I think it'll really push us into the next phase of the interview where we dive into the physiology and the biology behind that.

Yeah, well, the course is about designing new kinds of technologies and designing calm into existing technologies. And so what that means is if you think about all the new apps and products and wearables and all the stuff that's. That's out there, there's a premium on products and experiences that create qualitatively different experience. They create more balance or more calm. And when I say calm, I don't mean necessarily relaxation. I just mean calm. Absence of anxiety. You can be like a quarterback in the pocket in order to do a, you know, throw the right pass. It's got it. They have got to be calm. You know, if they're anxious and worried, then they may make the wrong. Not about always being relaxed. It's just about being focused, being present, not feeling anxious. And so how can we create technologies that help users cultivate that feeling? So in the class, we actually bring students through the physiology and psychology of stress, anxiety, worry, how to avoid those things, what causes those things for users, and then how can they redesign technologies in light of this? So if you imagine an email client that was designed from the ground up to avoid the stress or minimize the stress that they often create, that would be a different kind of email client. And that's the kind of thing that we explore in the class and that we prototype and test with users every year.

And the physiology of stress and how that relates to breathing, is that something that you guys touch on during the class? I'd love to learn about the direct relationship between the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system as it relates to breathing.

There is very much this physiological component to stress, but in the class, we don't always focus on that. However, at some point in the class, we begin to discuss the physiology of stress. The physiology of calm is what we call the psychophysiology, which is the combination of psychology and physiology. And breath is really the fundamental tool for that science, just because sits at this border of conscious and unconscious control. So in the nervous system, there's these two major branches, the sympathetic and parasympathetic. And the easiest way to understand and remember these things is that sympathetic aligns with this fight or flight response. You know, when you have to do something, you have to run, you have to act, you're activated, you're aroused, you're just kind of ready to do something. Whereas parasympathetic aligns with the rest and digest system. So when you're sleeping, when you're at rest, when you're giving yourself a break and your body can digest food or prepare for sex or to think in a different way, sympathetic is not so much about complex problem solving as Much as it is about reacting and moving physically moving, running, or fighting. Right. So those are the. And this is again, this is like rule of thumb for understanding this system. And there's a lot of changes that happen in the nervous system across these two sides. For example, as regards to the breath, as it relates to the breath, when you're in sympathetic activation, breathing rate increases, your heart rate increases, you start sweating. There's a whole bunch of things that happen. Cortisol's dumped into the bloodstream, adrenaline. And then in parasympathetic, it's usually the converse. So breathing slows down, heart rate slows down, a number of different things happen. So that is. We definitely teach that in the class. And we use that, we experience that, we experiment with that on ourselves a bit just to experience these different states.

What does that look like? Do you guys have sessions where you hold your breath or you put people in these fight or flight situations and monitor different biomarkers?

Yeah, well, there's two. There's two major things that we do in the class. One is we do different kinds of meditations and breath slowing. But also you can actually simulate the fight or flight response by manipulating the breathing and actually, you know, breathing faster on purpose in certain ways and then actually observing how that feels to you, it increases your heart rate. And you can actually simulate this anxious state of mind we do with the kind of guided audio tapes in the class. But it's pretty amazing that you can kind of fake it and it actually affects you.

What have been your findings when you've done studies or different time period measurements of people that have irregular breathing patterns, Maybe they have kyphosis and they have some kind of upper cross syndrome going on, which leads to too much carbon dioxide, not enough processing. What are some of your findings there? For people that maybe have this feeling like they need breathing work and they need more awareness of their breath, what are the negative aspects that you've seen from improper breathing?

It's super, super common that people come to us and say, you know, I feel like I'm a real shallow breather. I feel like I'm a real chest breather. I feel like I, you know, get out of breath from time to time or I'll stop and realize, wow, I'm not even breathing. I'm just holding my breath. So just while looking at an email or typing a text, I'm raising my.

Hand, I think, that's me sometimes.

Yeah. And, you know, we all do that, and it's not useful to punish ourselves for that. But just as these experiences train us and train our muscle memory and our cognitive memory around, you know, responding with tension, we can retrain that muscle memory to respond with calm, with a deep breath, with an opening up of the abdominal muscles, allowing the breath to go lower in the abdominal cavity and keeping it from unnecessary stress. You know, we say at SPIRE and in the lab, stress. It's not about eliminating stress, it's really about harnessing stress and understanding experiencing a calm state of mind, just as we, as we do stress. We have to understand calm and use stress to our advantage because it certainly does have its advantages. It's just when it's chronic, when it's so frequent, and when it's unconscious, repeatedly unconscious, that's when you become a victim of it as opposed to being able to harness it.

And was SPIRE, the device that we'll touch on, was that developed at the lab or was that outside of the lab at Stanford?

Well, it started off as a research project where we sort of asked the question, you know, what happens if you use technology, use sensors, use whatever means necessary to give people feedback about what's happening? Give people feedback in a way that they can use. It's one thing the field of biofeedback had been around for a long time. But what's so different about what we're doing is that I think that the problem with biofeedback is that traditionally it's required you to stop what you're doing, put on some sensors, go do this very attention demanding exercise of looking at the screen and trying to change something to result in some other effect on screen. It takes all your attention and makes you stop what you're doing. You'd only do it in extreme circumstances. But if we can, but if we can change the feedback so it's so easy to act upon it, you don't have to stop what you're doing, then that could be a real game changer. And so that was the hypothesis. And in fact we found that giving people feedback around their breathing does not distract them from what they're doing and they can use it to in fact regulate their breathing again without distraction. We actually did cognitive testing on people at computers with giving them this peripheral feedback and we found, oh my God, it actually doesn't distract you and you're able to regulate your breathing better without stopping what you're doing. And that just became so exciting that we decided to start working on it outside of Stanford. And one thing led to another and we started working on different sensors. And I'm happy to tell that story as well.

I almost feel like it's this little magic stone that I had attached to my waistline. And I literally, in real time for the audience, you can see your breath on the screen. But what's exciting, and we're no strangers to quite quantified self on the show, we always bring on guests for behavior change or wellness technology, the power of self quantification and of tracking, you know, what you can measure, you can effectively manage. And the breath is no different in the market right now. This is the only device that I see that has really created a fun way and a fun user experience. So I'm sitting there at the conference, I'm talking to Dr. Nima. He's taking me through a little bit of a guided walk verbally. And I'm watching my breath and my heart rate kind of change on the screen. And I thought, what if I had little notifications throughout my week that told me, hey, Josh, take three deep breaths right now, because we've noticed that you haven't been. Can you talk about what spire is and why you created it?

Yeah, it's very much this idea of doing for the mind what's already been done for physical activity. So if you look at pedometers and what Fitbit has demonstrated so well is they took this concept of physical activity and they boiled it down to its essence, simplified it, so it's super actionable. And they boil it down to step, actually. And that just made it really easy to kind of say, okay, I don't necessarily need to go to the gym, but I can walk to the parking lot or wherever I'm going and take these extra steps. So we kind of were inspired by that, but very much focused on the mind aspect of health. And we boiled that down to its essence, which turns out to be breath, because the breath is reflecting the mind so much, and it can be and is so actionable. So what it does is it's a. We actually shaped it like a stone. It looks like a stone. It's very much intentional. And you clip it to your pants, or you can also clip it to a bra for women. It doesn't even have to touch your skin. What it's doing is looking and sensing at sensing the expansion of your abdominal cavity, your thoracic cavity, as you inhale and exhale. And it's looking at that wave and sending it to the phone and. And doing really interesting things, like you can set up your spire to say, hey, if I haven't had a deep breath for 30 minutes, I want you to Buzz slightly and it'll just kind of vibrate slightly and show you on your phone and say, hey, you haven't had a deep breath or you seem tense for the past 25 minutes. Right. It can also give positive feedback. Like, hey, that was a really long session of calm that you just had, like, real calm. Great job. That was a calm lunch. That wasn't just a lunch. It was actually a relaxing lunch. And we can also sense what's called focus in the app, or concentration, which is a distinctive breathing signature. We sense that sense of deep focus that you get when you really get in the zone in something at work. The breathing changes. And we can measure that. We show you on the app as well. So you get that kind of positive feedback.

Do you feel like that can direct people towards being in more of a flow state? I mean, have you done any studies or what's the correlation between being in that brainwave, that flow state, and using breath as a quantifying measure?

Yeah, that's all based on laboratory studies of what happens to your body and your brain and your physiology when you're focused on something but you don't feel aggravated about it, you don't feel anxious about it, yet you're aroused and you're very focused. And it results in different physiological pattern, and that's indicated in the breathing. So there's less variability in the breathing pattern, and we're able to pick that up. So it is very exciting. But the real kind of bread and butter of the experience so far has been around giving people feedback during the day, during their week, during when life is actually happening. That's very subtle feedback, like, hey, you haven't had a deep breath in a while. And having. What we've seen, we've analyzed our own data, we've seen that over 75% of the time that Spire produces that kind of notification, it results in a physiologically significant reduction in respiratory rate within 90 seconds. What that means is that if you think about what's the smallest piece of feedback that could have the biggest impact on your day, it would very much be a deep breath at the right time that really can change how you respond to an email, how you go into a meeting, how you talk to your spouse, whether you snap at your child, all this stuff. A deep breath at the right time is so simple to do and yet so powerful. And we're seeing. We're having that exact impact on people. And so it's super exciting.

What comes up for me when I'm listening to you is I would like to immediately start using Spire and cross reference it to those times where I want to be more emotionally present. Because I think something that I'll just touch on, I've struggled with is the ability to manage my emotions to the most optimal degree in stressful situations. And I'm curious, in your own life, have you used the device in your own life and noticed a behavior change of your own or with maybe some people that you've worked with?

Oh, there's no question. I mean, you know, just at work on its own, when I'm, when I'm doing email or when I'm working on something. And that notification comes up every single time. And that's a big statement, but I would venture to say every single time it's produced. Like, okay, yes, I could be doing this better. Okay, yes, I could be doing this in a less emotionally reactive place. Oh, yes. I mean, I could be doing this in this slightly better way. And that really helps us align with our true intentions and our values. Of course it helps us reduce stress and that's great and that's really important. But the positive side, the exciting, aspirational side to that is that it helps us be our best, our best at work and at home. And so I've seen this. You know, there's the notification itself, which is of course very, very powerful and very useful. And then there's the training that, that that notification imbues on you, you know, because then what happens is you just, you know, just wearing Spire makes you feel that awareness of your breath and that awareness of what's happening.

This is a great point. I want to touch on this and it's something that I discussed with Ariel from Muse, the CEO of Muse, where just having the presence of the device on your body already is a cue psychologically to put you into the state you're working towards. Do you feel like that's what's happening with Fitbit and that's what's happening with Jawbone and any kind of device that we're physically wearing or we're using on our body, is it already starting to create that positive change just by us wearing it, or are there deviations from that?

Well, it's certainly helping us to motivate our at. Why people buy these devices. A big reason is they recognize and acknowledge that motivation is what weans. And so if the device can help provide that motivation or remind them of their resolve to walk more or to stress less or to be more focused, then it's providing value just in that way. Of course, the feedback is what's really valuable. But definitely when it comes to wearing it and reminding yourself of your motivation for it, it's very powerful.

And I think what's unique about calming is that, like you had touched on earlier, calming doesn't mean that you're completely still and you're breathing perfectly and you have your legs crossed and you're sitting in a Zen forest. Calming could also be a state of focused attention. And I don't know anyone in my circle or outside of my circle that couldn't use more focused attention. My question is, when we talk the healing aspects, though, beyond just that emotional presence, what are some of the ways you feel that Spire can lead towards healing through breath for people? So is there ways that Spire can really move the needle for people's behavior change towards healthier habits outside of just breathing?

Absolutely. I mean, so just. There's a couple examples that come to mind. One is that device guided slow breathing has been shown to be an effective means of lowering blood pressure because when you get into a calm state, you do lower your blood pressure. It's also been shown to increase heart rate variability. The simplest way to increase heart rate variability is to slow down your breathing, ideally around six breaths per minute, and give your heart time to change its rate according to the inhale and exhale. So it's a very direct impact on that. And also you have things like mindful eating. If you're able to measure your breathing and your state of mind while you're having a meal, this can help you be more mindful about not just what you eat, but how you eat, which can then change how much you eat if you're actually tasting your food and so on. And then you have so many different applications where a general sense of being present to your state of mind and your state of body can help you make decisions in a different way. These are things that are harder to measure, but we've been hearing from our users, for example, just things like, wow, I really need to take a break and go walk around the building. The app itself does let you know that, but just being more present about your own breathing is the actual tool, the fundamental tool for mindfulness. This is why so many yogis and and spiritual teachers and so on teach breath awareness is because it's the ideal tool to bring the mind from mind wandering, anxiety or regret about what I should have done or what I should do into, hey, I'm in the present moment, I'm here. Ignore all that stuff. What do I need to do now? What do I want to do now what's going to serve me right now and that day after day, building that muscle is just a very impactful thing for so many different behaviors in health and productivity.

Such a powerful statement we just had. Yesterday, I recorded an episode with Juliana Reyes. She's a mindfulness coach and trainer. She touched on exactly what you just mentioned around it being an exercise or the mind being a muscle. We've talked on the show before about the myelin sheaths and new synapses being created through new processes in the brain. Do you feel like that SPIRE has this potential to actually help rewind wire the brain towards being in a more cultivated state of breath?

Absolutely. I know that we're not yet at a place to be measuring that in order to do a study on it. However, we've already been doing studies. I can't actually report on results yet because they're not published yet.

They must be exciting.

It's very exciting. A month of using SPIRE has shown. Now we see quantitative data showing that changes not just in stress, but in work performance, subjective work performance, and mindfulness. Super exciting. But, you know, if you think about it this way, okay, so, you know, we're all people that are trying to improve our lives. We are open to whatever tools are available to us. And you know what? There's not going to be one magic bullet. Life changes, Our tastes change, our needs change. And so that's what's so great about all the different tools that are available to us. But at the end of the day, what we're really after in terms of a tool, a tool that's so powerful that it can help us change our fundamental rhythm of how we go about these behaviors and taking on different behaviors feed the way we feel, the way we think. That rhythm is what we're really. We change that. If we tip the needle on that just a little bit, you have a domino effect of different behaviors that it can change. And that's why in our research at Stanford, we ended up calling the breath the root behavior. Actually, I went so far as to call it the root behavior because it is, if you think about it, if you take a behavior as something that you can consciously change, not just something that you're just doing unconsciously, like your sweat level or something, but the fact that you can consciously change it. And yet it has such a core impact on our physiology and our state of mind. It really is the one behavior that if we change that and we're working on all the other changes, like eating better and exercising and so on, which are all very important. But if we change that just a little bit, we get a little bit of help on that. We can see the impact is really boundless for the different areas of application in our lives. So that's what's so exciting about what we're doing. And we're seeing those now in our users that use the product and are reporting to us things like, not just, oh, I have less migraines now, which is super exciting. But I'm able to do things now that I wasn't able to do at work, like speak confidently in front of my teammates because I calm down and I have that confidence that's built from, oh, I'm tense, okay, I know how to reduce that. Boom. I reduce that in a couple minutes or even with a breath. That builds an inner sense of confidence that then can spill out into our life in general. So there's just a lot of potential. We're just at the beginning. The product's been out now since the beginning of the year, and we're just getting started. It's really exciting what we have up our sleeves.

And I feel like really what Spire's pointing towards is the ways we can have sustainable behavior change, because a lot of behaviors can be changed and then there's the default where someone can go right back. I'm curious, when we look at the customer or even just the user, like a busy mom, what really works for busy moms? When we look at behavior change, can Spire be implemented in that, and what are some of the ways that you've seen behavior change? I know it's a huge topic, so it's kind of a loaded question. Hey, Nima, how do we change all of our behaviors? I'm just curious about behavior change in the beginning. For a busy mom with three kids, she has just a little bit of gaps during the day for cultivating these healthy habits. What has been your experience when reaching out to these and making an impact for these type of people, these busy moms?

I find that the first stage is just to take a deep breath. No matter what's going on, that little gap, or even if there isn't any gap, but you're at the wheel, kids are in the back. You can say, okay, I'm going to take a deep breath. And not just randomly and vaguely, I'm going to take a deep breath, but rather I'm going to take a deep breath because I know I'm going to get feedback on that. I know that I might be able to get into a calm streak during this traffic so taking that deep breath is really like the first line of defense. But then what happens is the focus on a particular behavior, which, like you mentioned, can end up changing. You might get into taking walks around your house for a month or something like that, and then that might change. And I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing that it changes. Of course you want to have a sense of consistency, but things change. And that deep breath can go with you to whatever is changing. Your context changes, especially with three kids. I mean, you got to go here, you got to go there. You can take that deep breath with you and apply it to listening better to your kid, to not being stressed in traffic, to focusing when you need to. You know, you're watching a soccer game and, you know you really want to stay focused. I mean, it really doesn't matter in terms of what the behavior is. Just know that the way you're bringing yourself to that behavior can really have a difference.

I think about someone who is really busy, and it could be a mom or a dad or just any busy working person, and. And sometimes from clients that I've worked with before, there's just it not being a priority, behavior change not being a priority, or they don't have the resources or the tools or the time or what it might be. Do you feel like with quantified self just as a movement, that can be a powerful tool? What mindset does someone have to be in to even accept self quantification as a possibility?

Yeah, that's a really cool and good question. I have a daughter, you know, she's two. I can. And we run this company, and the lab is. Life is busy. And I think that the notion of behavior change can be intimidating to people, even when you focus on baby steps and just tiny behaviors. But I do think that there is a mindset that is important to cultivate that quantified self, or let's just say feedback, you know, because, you know, I think the bigger name of the game is feedback there. Not necessarily quantifying things, but. But when you have a mindset of, let's call it resilience, I think that, well, one word that comes from me is empowered. Feeling empowered, Feedback. It makes you feel powerful because the things that were once intangible and kind of floating around in your head are now real things. And when you change them, you feel empowered and you build confidence and agency. And when you have that, that's a very powerful mindset because, like, we all know life happens and you can't control that. But when you have resiliency. When you have confidence and that kind of inner strength, you can enjoy the change rather than resist it or feel like you need to be rigid and live a certain way in the light of what's happening around you. So I think feedback in a way that's easily changeable is a very, very powerful thing. That's why pedometers and trackers and Fitbits have taken off. And that's why we focused on breath. The way we have and our users have been so excited about what we're doing is because it's so easy to take a deep breath. It's so easy to know what that means and to change it.

And some of the things that I, that I work on is being sedentary versus active and how much time correlates to that and tracking calories and steps and workouts. But then when I look at the breath aspect of it, I really haven't had a way as a coach to quantify that and to give my clients some real time feedback. And I think what's really exciting about spire is the ability to give, as you had said, that feedback. And if we can be as human beings open to feedback in every aspect of our lives, I don't see how we could get anything but better. What does the future look like for spire? In 2020, 2016 and 2017, one of.

The biggest requests that feature requests that we got from our users was to add this feature of the deep breath notification. Like, I haven't had a deep breath in so long. So we added that. And then this other feature they requested was I want to track what I was doing when I got that stress notification or when I got that focus notification. I want to be able to mark it down, which like, you know, and it's really powerful when you, when you mark that down, when it happens that, hey, you just had 30 minutes of focus, you know, what were you doing? And you can write that down, down and then you can reflect on it later. The mind will skew things. When you track it and you look back, that's objective data. It's a whole different ball game. It's exciting. And we were just looking at some of the data ourselves in aggregate and it was just like, wow, people are really using this in a way that we didn't expect. We originally created that feature to help us improve our feedback, but now we realize it's really a feature for people to be able to track it for themselves. And so we're working on exposing that better. As far as studies, I Mean, that's a big area for us. We've had labs, so many labs around the country using Spire for different kinds of studies. Results are starting now to come out. These things obviously take time. It spans different areas. Right. So from stress and mindfulness to asthma and blood pressure and adhd, copd, like different things, you know, respiratory related disorders. Fire is not a medical device and it shouldn't be used as that. But people want to start looking at that data to see what's there. And of course these more clinical applications, you know, anxiety, depression, Spires are being used there and for self regulation at work in the workplace. We're just now completing a large deployment of spires in a local high tech company with Stanford that we think is the largest study that's ever been done like this where you're deploying Spires into a corporate setting, deploying wearables into a corporate setting for stress reduction and seeing what happens. So it's very exciting and we'll be starting to see the results of that in the coming months.

Well, I'll make sure to link all your information in the show notes. Where can people go to learn more about Spire and your work?

Well, our website is Spire IO that's IO for breathe in, breathe out IO so Spire IO and you're able to go there. The blog is a great place to learn about the science behind it, to learn about what's happening, to learn about how you can apply it to, you know, running, of course, fire tracks, running and all that but you know, just exercise and workouts as well as the workplace. So the blog is a great resource and also there is a discount code for the WellnessForce audience that you guys are able to use. It's Spire IO R lowercase R wellnessforce. There you'll be able to get a good discount on the device.

Awesome. Well thank you so much for your generosity there. I will definitely link that for everyone to go and get some savings. Learn how to breathe better, impact your health in a really unique way that I think is fundamentally one of the building blocks of life. Right our breath. And there's so many people that are in the yoga community and in the mindfulness community that listen to the show. So thank you so much for that offering and I just want to take one second again to honor the work you're doing and just thank you for the impact you're creating outside of the quantified self community but in the health and wellness community as well. So thank you Dr. Nima.

Thank you for saying that and acknowledging what we're doing. And I wanted to say the same to you. And not just you, but everyone that's part of this community that is touching the lives of other people in their worlds. I mean, we're really all in this together just by how we speak about things, how we connect the left and right brain, our hearts and minds and make this, make health a big story that touches each of us. I think it's really our duty. So thank you so much, Josh, for what you're doing.

My pleasure. And my last question before we let you go is, and I ask this to every guest and I'm really, really excited to hear your answer. I'll take a deep breath before I ask you, what is wellness to you?

Oh, man. It's funny that you ask that because I ask myself often the question what is health and what is wellness? Is similar. I would say that that wellness is a mindset of living in alignment and in balance with listening to the cues in our own bodies and in our environments that direct us towards living in harmony with our own bodies, our own minds and our environments. You know, you can be very well and still have, for example, a physical.

Disease.

Because of how you're living. And I want to acknowledge that because some of us, we have things that we can't change about our physiologies. And everybody has different kinds of deficiencies. You could call them, let's just call them characteristics, but it's how we live with them, how we respond to them and how we use them that really makes a difference. But great question.

Dr. Nima Morvedji, thank you for coming on.

Thank you, Josh.

Feeling inspired and motivated from Today's show with Dr. Nima. Remember to go check out the show notes and links today for your Wellness Force radio discount@wellnessforce.com spire it's a huge discount, you guys. I'll wait till you get to the checkout to actually get surprised, but it's is a good one. Wellnessforce.com spire for a discount on your device to track breathing One of my favorite quotes today was the inhale doesn't have to be the beginning of the breath. It's the exhale that gets us in touch with our calmness. And I invite everybody that heard the show today here with me on Wellness Force Radio. Spend more time exhaling. There's a technique called box breathing that I'm going to link in the show notes as well. I actually learned it from Mark Devine when I volunteered for the Seal Fit event last year. I'll link that in our show notes, as well as that huge discount for your spire from Wellness Force Radio. What a great gift from Dr. Nima to the audience. Just a tremendous, generous man with a lot of heart and definitely doing great things for the wellness industry. Now you get to go have an amazing day with inspiration and tools from Dr. Nima as well as all the other guests we've had on the show. And until I see you again real soon, I'm wishing you love and wellness.