Manage Stress Using Wearables, with Dr. Torkil Færø

Once you see this downturn in the heart rate variability, then you can start rather to eat lighter meals, do a yoga workout instead of an intense workout, sleep a little bit longer, be kinder to yourself. And you're having a lecture or you're having some appointments, you put them off until another week. And when you do that, you lose the PMS symptoms.

If you want to live like you matter, ditch the pills, look great and feel Freaking amazing. You're in the right place. I'm Dr. Wendy Trubo.

And I'm Dr. Ed Levitan. Welcome to the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast.

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Hello and welcome to the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast. We have Dr. Torkel Ferro. Today he is a GP, which is a general practitioner physician, an emergency physician, documentary filmmaker, author of the Pulse, the revolutionary new way to balance stress, optimize health and live longer. He's had over 26 years as a freelance doctor and learned that many of the causes of our diseases is most often found in the stressors our lifestyles place on our bodies. So using wearables, he's found a way to track and regulate his nervous system and physiology. So we're going to dive into that today because we know you have stress and we know that it takes a toll on you because we see you in our daily lives too. So we're going to dive in. So welcome. Torka, we're so happy you're here.

Thank you, both of you. Great to be here.

This is great.

Before we started recording, can you tell our listeners where you're coming from? Because I think it's super cool.

Yeah. I'm in Norway and right now I'm actually above the Arctic Circle, which is exotic even to me because I live in Oslo normally. And the way I've been working all through my doctoral career has been going out into the districts of Norway, which is a long, beautiful country, working 247 and then coming back again to where I live to go out in the world, do the photography, do the traveling and so on. So for me, being up here in the north, where it's dark all day in the winter and light all day in the summer is an adventure for me too. And to see the different ways that diseases present themselves in different parts of the country is just. I love it.

You know, I'm curious, do you find that people's heart rate variability changes with longer days or shorter days? Is there, Is there A sync up with that?

Yeah, there would be a difference. So in the summer, you know, heart rate variability is also affected by sunshine. Sun exposure is a very, very important.

Well, hold on a second. You're diving in first. Let's, let's, let's go back up a little. What is heart rate variability? Why do we care? Let's just start at the basics, Be that way.

Heart rate variability is maybe the biometric we should care most about. It reflects the state of our autonomic nervous system and our physiology, the basic state of our physiology. And we have the autonomic nervous system divided in two parts, the parasympathetic part and the sympathetic part, which I'm sure both you and most of your listeners are familiar with. The good thing is that the heart rate will reveal whether we are in the parasympathetic state or in the sympathetic state. When we are in the parasympathetic state, when we breathe in and the lungs filled with oxygen, the heart speeds up a little bit. And when we breathe out and there's less oxygen, it slows down a little bit, measured in milliseconds. If we are in the stressful state, for whatever reason, whether it's mental or physical or physiological, then the heart will beat at this steady pace like a metronome, like a clock, regardless of we are breathing in or out. In this way, the wearables like the whoop band, the Garmin watches and oura rings, and all of this new technology can tell us whether we are in the stressful state or the restful state and if our overall balance is compatible with health. So for me, it's just like a revolution that we can take control of our stress balance with this physiological resources that provides us with kind of a dashboard like we have in the car, but to our own physiology and intensity.

So I want to make sure. I'm the dummy down type person, so I want to make sure it's super clear. So most of the time we think of our heartbeat as going boop, boop, boop, whatever, 50 beats per minute or 60 beats per minute or whatever it is for you, what you're saying is between those beats, sometimes it's variable, sometimes it's not exactly 60 beats per minute. It's one. If, if you're talking about one second per beat, it's one second plus one millisecond or one second plus two milliseconds. And what we want is the variability, not the.

Not consistency.

Not consistency.

Yeah. We want to be able to reach the state where there is a variability so that we can relax and calm down into the parasympathetic mode. We also need to stress. We also need to push ourselves and do challenging things, both mentally and physically. But we need the balance to be sustainable with our physiology because we have ancient physiology and we are made to be in the restful state most of the time. So when we have these wearables on hunter gatherers that still exist today, they would be in the restful state 10 to 12 hours a day, and then they would be in light movement or moderate stress, maybe three hours a day. So this is the speed we're kind of built for, that our immune system and our own physiology is constructed for. And of course, in our day, when we eat ultra processed food, drink alcohol, we have turned the circadian rhythm upside down. And all of the stressors that I know from listening to your podcast is stressing our physiology and without us knowing, because we don't really have a good sense of our inner state. All our good senses, our eyesight and hearing and taste and smell, and all of this touch has been directed towards outward threats throughout history. So it's only in the last decades that it's our inner state that threatens our health with inflammation and chronic low grade inflammation, and that then becomes visible through the heart rate, because the heart rate responds to the demands on our system.

Okay, there's a lot to unpack there.

Yeah.

So the first thing that I really want to highlight is for all the listeners, you don't see the impact of it in your daily life, but what you see the impact in is all the things that you're struggling with. Inflammation, autoimmune disease, obesity, poor brain function, poor sleep, poor sex drive, poor energy. Those are the ways that the poor heart rate variability or the lack of variability or the stress takes its impact. So that's one. So you could be listening and go, well, I don't have any of that, but unless you're in your best health ever, you have that A B parasympathetic is when you rest, you regulate, you restore, you detox. And if you are not detoxing, you're then holding on to everything. So this has direct impact on how you feel in your daily life because you're not detoxing if you're in, in sympathetic action all the time of go, go, go, go, go. And then I think the third thing I would pull from that is go, go, go is not who we're meant to be. We are meant to actually be more rest and then occasional go as opposed to always go and then rest. Two weeks a year, the balance is off.

Yes. Yeah, that sounds like a good explanation. Yeah. And we are not. We don't have any alarm system for this. Just like in blood sugar, in inflammation, when you feel it, it has come a long way. So the heart rate will respond way before you can feel it. So it can make it possible to identify the energy thieves before you feel it yourself, when you can see it on the monitor. And of course, whoop. And Garmin and Samsung and all these devices have implemented artificial intelligence into their systems. And combined with millions of users, they can tell us so much about the state of our bodies and. And of course, so many people in the States and in Norway, people coming to my office here where I'm at work now, they have stressful lives and they are on the verge of burnout. Many people in a fatigue situation and you would not get into that situation without these devices warning you for a long time that you are over taxing yourself.

Is there a difference between men and women and tracking in terms of the efficacy for them?

It would be a big difference because. And then I'm talking about the menstrual cycle because suddenly you get insight into the physiological strain of the menstrual cycle of the week before. Menstruation is not a mood or, you know, a feeling. It's a physiological load that you can see on your heart rate variability. And when I compare it to people having a strong or serious COVID infection, it's the same amount of the dip in heart rate variability in a COVID infection as in the week in women who have PMS symptoms. And it will last for a week.

That's very cool.

Holy smoke balls. Okay, Torquel.

That's pretty.

I don't menstruate anymore, so that's like not in my brain plug for being postmenopausal because it kind of levels things out. But holy smokes. And Ed's glad about that too.

No comment.

And often, you know, the men can understand it because suddenly what was okay yesterday is not okay today. You know, suddenly the house is a mess. And it looks the same way to me. It was yesterday, so it wasn't that which have changed, you know, so it's. And when you see that dip, you can understand why it's hard for the women because it's a huge strain on the system. And I've seen also graphs from women with PMDD, the more serious kind of PMS, and they could last for almost 14 days with this huge dip in heart Rate variability.

That's so interesting though, because I truthfully have never thought of it that way. That the one, it's not just a mood issue, it's a physiological strain. That's a very, very different way of looking at PMS than just.

I'm not just a, there is actually.

Genuinely something going on, but it's a physiological strain that most, I mean, again, if I haven't thought of it yet, that's pretty far. I'm a doctor and whatever else and I never thought of that there was a physiological strain the week before that then affects mood versus anything else than just having a mood issue. So that, that's fascinating.

Probably starts when the egg does not get fertilized. I actually think it probably starts, you know, the egg lives for 12 hours, so it probably starts, you see it halfway through the cycle, but you really see it the week before when the progesterone plummets, that it's, it's physiological. I mean, okay, now, now we have to, we have to do this with our patients.

And yeah, and, and the problem, you know, is the probably the progesterone that is low that creates this anxiety, that creates the stress. Because what you, what you tend to do when you have this physiological strain is to go for some comfort foods, you know, snacks, you know, chocolate, which will further deteriorate your stress levels or alcohol or whatever can comfort you and it will just get worse. But once you see this downturn in the heart rate variability, then you can start rather to eat lighter meals, have salad, do a yoga, work out instead of an intense workout, sleep a little bit longer, be kinder to yourself and put off some, if there's some, like you're having a lecture or you're having some appointments, you put them off until another week. And when you do that, the interesting thing is that then you can see this curve flatten out and you lose the PMS symptoms. Because many of the PMS symptoms comes from too much cortisol, which will have a feedback mechanism on the sex hormones and disturb them. And this is physiological, this is by nature because if there was a stressful time, you know, a hundred thousand years ago, you were not supposed to have babies. You're not supposed to want to have babies because that would, you would need to wait until everything calmed down. And it used to calm down. You know, our bodies are made for, to deal with acute stress for a short burst of time and then everything is calm and then you can recover. And now we're in a low grade stress mode all the time. And that is what is making particularly women prone to stress related diseases. Because of course, the ones who get into a fatigue situation, that's mostly women that will get into this burnout situation. Men also, but it tends to be like migraines, you know, autoimmune diseases, fatigue syndromes, tends to affect women, at least in my experience, more than men.

Trickle. I think we, I mean this first of all is a revolution. But the bigger issue is that often by the time people present to us, I mean, we do functional medicine in our practice, so we have, we do get into it with people, but by the time they show up to us, they have the problem. We are almost never. Very few people show up in our office saying, I want to make sure I stay healthy my whole life. I feel amazing and I want to continue. What they say is, I feel awful. How can you get me back at least to functional? And our response is, we'd like to get you slightly past functional, but since you're not functioning, let's start with a very low bar. So the challenge is that we already have an epidemic of massive dysfunction. So, so you're saying this can help.

And this society, I mean, if you go down the path, that path, Western society, it's a go, go, go. It's not. Sit with your cycles.

Yeah, power. Power through. Yeah, just power through.

You know, could you imagine saying a forum, I'm sorry, can you redo your 34th annual conference? Because that's going to hit during my PMS time and I really shouldn't be outward facing and presenting at that time. Like that really wouldn't fly.

Well, but, but then you just, you might have a stress, but then, you know, you have to have the week before, you have to have even more relaxation to compensate for an upcoming stressor. Yeah. So you can always, if you, if you give yourself time to look through it, you can always find a way to compensate.

Well, what's the mechanism for that though? Because most of us are so outwardly focused that even that conversation is foreign.

Right. So it's, it's that, it's that time to breathe, it's a time to meditate, it's that time to reflect, journal whatever it is for people.

Interesting.

I mean, women have the menstrual cycles. Men have. Men don't necessarily have menstrual cycles, except if they're buried.

And I'm wondering where you're headed with Lisa.

No, but for men also, there are cycles. They're just not as predictable. So it's, men aren't supposed to Go, go, go all the time either is what I'm saying.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nobody of us are made for that. So we think of ourselves as machines, you know, because we are surrounded by machines that never needs to be turned off and we think we are the same way. And many people feel guilty if they relax and don't do anything for some time, you know, and probably particularly, you know, people with families that will not take the time to wind down. There's work, there's all these activities, this caring for the children and there's no time to wind down and we're not just made for that, so we cannot relate at all.

Yeah, we have four kids, they're now old enough to. If they get hungry, they can do something about it, you know. But I think when we look at the trajectory of. It used to be that women had one job, it was to take care of the house. There were no after school activities. You went outside, you played in the yard with your neighbors and you would make a casserole for dinner and that's what you ate and that's it. And everyone was in bed by eight and you're done. But now you don't even get home till 9 o' clock from all the activities and everybody needs to eat so that the life is much different. And women are working outside the home more. So they have two jobs that are both full time.

Yeah. And in addition to that, you know, whenever there's a short space in time, you fill it up with watching your phone or checking your mail or do you have any likes on Instagram? And you get stressed by all the attention because so many people are making money from you watching your screen. So we're on all the time and we don't think that there's a price for that, but it is so. So it is super important.

I think this whole thing is fascinating. So I think people are going to want to find you. Where can they? And we'll put all of this in the show notes. So where can people find out more about you?

Yeah, I'm on Instagram, Dr. Torque, Dr. Torco, and my book, the Postcur is on Amazon on everywhere. It's also an audible, an audiobook and an ebook. So it's easy if people want to listen to a book rather than read it.

So.

And also have a website called thepulsecure.com and there you can see I have a lecture there, a video lecture where I show how to use the Garmin washes. And you can see the Pulse cure is like a one hour lecture or so that explains you. Everything.

Okay. Awesome.

Awesome. It's been fascinating.

I mean, it's amazing. So thank you. Thank you for being here and for the listeners. Thanks for joining us for another episode of the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast. We hope this was valuable for you and let it makes a difference for you in managing your health. So thank you.

Thank you for having me.

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