How to Improve Heart Rate Variability: 7 Habits That Work

Nick Urban [00:00:01]:
You’re listening to High Performance Longevity, the show exploring a better path to optimal health for those daring to live as an outlier in a world of averages. I’m your host, Nick Urban, bioharmonizer, performance coach, and lifelong student of both modern science and ancestral wisdom. Each week, we decode the tools, tactics, and timeless principles to help you optimize your mind, body, and performance span, things you won’t find on Google or in your AI tool of choice. From cutting-edge biohacks to grounded lifestyle practices, you’ll walk away with actionable insights to look, feel, and perform at your best across all of life’s domains. In his new book, my guest describes 2 nights with the same wrestler in the same hours of sleep. On one of them, his recovery was cut in half. Today, we’re getting into the difference between sleeping and recovering and the habits that move your heart rate variability more than anything you can buy. Don Moxley has spent decades in applied sports science.

Nick Urban [00:01:16]:
Don, welcome back.

Don Moxley [00:01:17]:
Thanks, Nick. I’m really excited to be back. Thanks for the opportunity.

Nick Urban [00:01:21]:
So we first talked about heart rate variability on this podcast several years ago at this point, and a lot has changed in the realm of wearables and biomarkers and knowledge around heart rate variability to begin with. But let’s set the stage for someone who doesn’t know what it is. What’s the TL;DR, the summary of heart rate variability?

Don Moxley [00:01:41]:
Yeah, not to be too nerdy here, it’s essentially a measurement of your nervous system’s ability to recover. And I wind up using 3 terms: recovery, Resilience and resources. And HRV is a reflection of that. So, your nervous system has 2 sides to it. You have a motor nervous system that helps you move your arms and your fingers and so forth. And then, you have what’s called the autonomic nervous system or the automatic nervous system. And, you don’t have to think to breathe and you don’t have to think for your heart to beat or for your pancreas to pancreas or your liver to liver. These things happen through what’s called the autonomic nervous system.

Don Moxley [00:02:28]:
Well, the autonomic nervous system is largely driven through one of your big cranial nerves. You have 12 cranial nerves. The 10th one is called the vagus nerve. And vagus in Latin is wandering. It’s a wandering nerve. So it comes out of the brainstem, goes through your carotid sheath and down into the body. One side of it goes essentially to the heart. The other side goes to the organs and down to the gut.

Don Moxley [00:02:53]:
Now, the thing about the vagus nerve that’s really important is that that nerve is reading information at an 80% level and it’s sending signal down at a 20% level. So, it’s interpreting and it’s going down saying, okay, if this is coming in, let’s do this on the way out. So, your autonomic or your automatic nervous system, it has 2 sides to it. So we have what’s called the sympathetic, and this is what we refer to as fight or flight. So if we’re sitting here and a lion walks through the door, our eyes see it, our brain registers a threat, it sends a signal down to the body, you might want to go somewhere right now. And to help you, we’re going to give you some hormones and some chemicals. It’s going to give you adrenaline. It’s going to give you cortisol.

Don Moxley [00:03:43]:
That’s going to cause you to release energy to escape the threat. The other side of that’s called the parasympathetic. When you get away from the lion and you climb up in the tree and you clean your pants out and you think, okay, I got to chill out here a little bit, the parasympathetic kicks in and it starts to build, helps you build. So you don’t get… you typically don’t get both at the same time. The body’s either surviving or growing. It’s one of the two. Now, and, and, and I realize that’s a very basic explanation and a good neurophysiologist would probably losing their mind right now, but I’m trying to make it approachable. But, you know, that’s the thing.

Don Moxley [00:04:27]:
But, but our challenge, Nick, is that these days we don’t have to deal with lions anymore for the most part. We don’t have to deal with bears unless you’re an idiot in a national park. You know, things like that. We don’t have to deal with that. What you have to deal with… Our paper lions. You had that phone that dings and you’re like, what it is? And I talk in the book, I said, whether it’s the athlete that’s not quite sure about what’s coming next or their parent who gets a call, they’re getting ready to leave work and their phone rings and their boss says, hey, can you come down to my office? That’s a relatively non-threatening call, but all of a sudden our brain kicks in and we We respond to threat first. On the savanna, if we’re out walking on the savanna and there’s a rustling in the weeds, the people who survived walked away from the weeds and didn’t go see what was in the grass. Well, that’s that negative threat.

Don Moxley [00:05:26]:
Or if your grandparents have been to the doctor and the doctor says, as they’re leaving the room, hey, I want to check on one of the things. Let me take blood and I’ll call you with the results. They go home and all of a sudden that phone rings and you see the doctor’s office number on it. You’re like, oh, here it is. Here’s the results. We typically have a sympathetic response to that, a threat response. Well, we have threat response all day. And this is the challenge is that we don’t just have a lion occasionally.

Don Moxley [00:05:54]:
We’re dealing with paper lions continuously. And this has turned into a problem for us.

Nick Urban [00:06:00]:
Yeah. There’s 2 obvious solutions to that issue. The first would be to remove all stressors. And another one that seems more feasible and perhaps more impactful and would reduce the amount of fragility that we are under would be to increase our baseline, our resilience to these things. And perhaps you get this concerning call or text, or you see something, and instead of your brain just going straight into sympathetic threat mode, you’re able to like… process it more effectively and then determine, without enough window, determine whether or not you should be engaging sympathetic or parasympathetic. Is there a great way of actually doing that though, of increasing that resilience?

Don Moxley [00:06:42]:
Absolutely. That ability to get the phone call and not fall into sympathetic is a trained response. What we’re doing is we’re taking the response from the amygdala, the threat detection part of our brain, And we’re shifting it up into the prefrontal cortex. And that’s a trained process. We train that like you’re doing bicep curls. You do reps and the system eventually learns, okay, what is it? How do we do this? So, your ability, and we call it shifting. Okay? The threat is always going to be there. Right.

Don Moxley [00:07:16]:
Okay? That’s just the nature. The body recognizes Essentially everything is a threat. And it’s, and it’s fair. But, you know, I’ve used the example, if I’m walking down the street and there’s a snake on the sidewalk, okay, your natural response is, oh, that’s a snake that could kill me. Okay. Now, if I take a second and I look and I see, oh, that’s just a, that’s a garter snake that can’t kill me. In fact, it’s a nice little snake and I’m not going, I’m not going to hurt it. Whereas if I take a, if I see the snake And all of a sudden it curls up and starts rattling.

Don Moxley [00:07:52]:
It’s like, oh, that’s a real threat. Let’s not mess around with this. So that’s our prefrontal cortex. And we can train that. People who work with snakes, you know, one of my favorite Instagrams right now is there’s this guy out in Southern California called Wrangler Bruce. Okay. Um, and he catches rattlesnakes, but he also comes across gopher snakes all the time. People see him and they call him.

Don Moxley [00:08:13]:
And all of a sudden he’s reaching up into this, you know, box and pulling out a, a, a gopher snake, which is a harmless snake. Well, he’s trained himself. He sees it, he recognizes it, he responds. This is the same thing that we can do with threats when we train ourselves, when we develop the ability to shift, to recognize and shift. Man, we’re using lots of R words in this discussion, but that’s part of the process.

Nick Urban [00:08:41]:
So these are all specific adaptations. You’re able to train for this particular type of stressor. What about a more generalized, you know what, like, I don’t, I can’t predict what I’m going to be exposed to today. If I’m going to see something walking down the street or I’m gonna get a call or something, is there a way of building the overall baseline so that we’re more… Absolutely.

Don Moxley [00:09:02]:
Impervious to everything? Build your capacity. Yeah. Yep. You can absolutely build your capacity and that’s building resources. Okay. Because at the end of the day, whether you’re an athlete going into a competition, a parent trying to get through a long day so that when you get home from work, You’re not snapping at your kids and you have a good relationship, or you’re the grandparent trying to get the most out of life. You do that by building resources. And the more resources you have, the higher the ability you have to respond to this perceived threat.

Don Moxley [00:09:33]:
And there’s a lot of ways to build resources. We talk about it in the book, what I call the levers or the practice. And listen, you know, it’s pretty straightforward. the first thing, the first most important thing that you just cannot ignore is you have to respect sleep. You have to say, okay, in the book, I talk about my friend, Dr. Ron Garbo, Ralph Garbo, and he is a pain management doctor. He was a pain management doctor. Now he’s doing autonomic rehabilitation out in Virginia Beach area.

Don Moxley [00:10:06]:
But he uses a term, I think he coined the term called intentional recovery. Now, we will intentionally engage in exercise. We’ll say, okay, I want to build resources. I’m going to intentionally begin, and I make decisions. I may park further from the store. I might buy a gym membership and start going. There’s a lot of ways to do this, but there is intention that goes with it. I may intentionally begin to try and improve my nutrient consumption.

Don Moxley [00:10:36]:
So, I plan my diets. I do strategic shopping, but it’s intentional. Mm-hmm. I’m not waiting till I’m hungry to make the decision as to what I’m going to eat. I’ve thought about it ahead of time. I intentionally prioritize sleep. I say there’s processes with sleep, there’s timing, there’s lots of things that go into it. And I say, you know what, this is important to me.

Don Moxley [00:10:59]:
And I’m going to follow. Now, do you hit it all the time? No, you don’t. Okay. And you don’t need perfection. We don’t need monk-like adherence to these behaviors in order to see the benefit. But, I call it the 5 rocks in my jar. Movement is an important rock, and the more you move, the better. You hack movement with exercise.

Don Moxley [00:11:22]:
Nutrient-dense food. Sometimes we can’t get all the nutrients, so we hack that with supplements. Sleep. You can’t hack sleep, but you can hack the sleep environment. You can put together… because our environment’s pushing back on us. And we have to adjust to it. And then, and my 4th rock is what I call light, nutrient-dense light, getting nutrient-dense light into our eyes and onto our skin at the right time and eliminating toxic light, eliminating the lights that don’t do us any benefit. You know, I was driving the other night and I was, I think I was listening to Kristen Holmes’ new book, Aligned.

Don Moxley [00:12:02]:
It’s a really good book. She’s the head sports scientist for Whoop.

Nick Urban [00:12:06]:
Yeah.

Don Moxley [00:12:07]:
And so I’m listening to it and I’m thinking, you know, what was it like before we had electric lights? And then I’ve… and I’ll tell you, I’ve started to do a little study like this on me as I’m trying to figure out what is the cost of my alarm on my phone that I set to get up in the morning? Because I know I’ve had stretches where my HRVs have really taken off and I’ve got everything aligned when that’s happening. And I’m usually going to bed early and I’m waking up naturally at sunrise. Well, when I, you know, right now I think my alarm on my phone, if I have to wake up prematurely from my normal sleep raise, it’s cost me about 20 points on my HRV.

Nick Urban [00:12:50]:
Wow.

Don Moxley [00:12:51]:
So does that mean I don’t use my alarm? Absolutely not. I have responsibilities. I have things I have to do in this world. So I set the alarm, but I recognize the cost. I take time to invest in the other tools to support. And then the 5th rock. Let me get through the rocks.

Nick Urban [00:13:08]:
Okay, okay. Get through it. I want to go back to the light. Yeah.

Don Moxley [00:13:10]:
Community. Okay. Community. It’s so important to have. And if you don’t have and naturally invest in this, intentionally invest in this, you’ve got to get community. And then the jar is what I call purpose. Okay. So, it’s the purpose, it’s your purpose in life that cause you to prioritize movement, nutrient-dense food, sleep, light, and community.

Don Moxley [00:13:37]:
So, and when you do those things, you develop resilience and you develop resources.

Nick Urban [00:13:43]:
I love that you mentioned nutrient-dense light on there. That’s probably one that people haven’t heard of or thought of. I’ve talked a lot about light, but not the nutrient-dense light. What is a good quality light?

Don Moxley [00:13:53]:
Well, I think it’s timing. So, when we’re talking about light, it’s impossible to talk about light and not look at circadian rhythm. Okay? Looking at you, listen, every cell in your body has a little circadian clock in it. And oh, by the way, everything in nature responds to light. I mean, light is the energy that causes us to move. It comes from the sun. It’s where all energy comes from. So light is critical and it’s timing.

Don Moxley [00:14:24]:
Listen, I have the benefit, I own a dog. Okay? And the first thing I do when I get up in the morning is the dog says, you’re taking me outside. Now, I’m normally up right at sunrise. That’s my normal waking time. So I get to go out and I get to put my eyes on the horizon and get that fresh morning light to help align circadian rhythm. I work really hard to back off artificial light at night, turn lights down, be real careful with devices, things like that. I intentionally take a look at light. Now, normally in my office, right over my shoulder is a near-infrared red light device that I really like.

Don Moxley [00:15:07]:
It’s a good tool. And as we go into the fall right now, light is… we’re losing light and all of a sudden it’s shifting on me a little bit. So, I’ll start to use… I’ll supplement healthy light. I’m supplementing near-infrared light and red light. And, when I sauna, I supplement far-infrared light. So, at the end of the day, it’s energy. So, when I talk about light, those are the kind of things I’m talking about.

Nick Urban [00:15:35]:
I love that. And, you can’t tell right now, I have a little mini infrared light panel above my monitor and that helps offset some of the blue and the narrow spectrum blue that comes out of monitors and technology. So, I think that’s a great way, but of course, you also want to get natural light as you’re mentioning for not just the fact that you’re getting the wavelengths, but you’re also having the impact on all the different bodily circadian clocks.

Don Moxley [00:15:58]:
Yeah. You can’t separate light from circadian rhythm. At the end of the day, it’s about that rhythm. Okay? There are natural rhythms to living in this organic environment that we’re in. And, our society pushes against those rhythms. Our society pushes against moving. It pushes against nutrient-dense food. It pushes against sleep.

Don Moxley [00:16:25]:
It pushes against light, and it pushes against community. Okay? That’s just the net… that’s the natural aspect of the tech and the society that we live in. So we have to intentionally take a look at, okay, what are we doing in our life to fight back against that? And to finish the thought, HRV winds up being that number that we can look at, say, are we making progress or not?

Nick Urban [00:16:49]:
Perfect. I was going to ask you to tie that together. So, the nervous system, pretty hard to measure for the most part. We can’t do a blood test and immediately figure out what state the nervous system is in. It’s hard to check other metrics, but heart rate variability, as I understand it, is still one of the best windows into like, what state are you in? Are you in the stress state or are you in the relaxed state?

Don Moxley [00:17:10]:
Yeah, and how much time you spend in each and how do you shift from one to the other. And I, you know, Nick, I believe this technology is nascent. I believe what we’re dealing with right now, I believe in a decade it’s going to evolve dramatically. That doesn’t mean what we have now isn’t valuable, but just, you know, I wrote this book called The HRV Book. And I’m working on my next book called The HRV Book for Athletes. And I wrote The HRV Book kind of just for everybody out there. You know, I see so many people with a Whoop band on their wrist or an Oura Ring on their finger or a Garmin or a Polar or a Pulse and Health or something like that. And I ask them, I’m like, tell me about how you’re using this.

Don Moxley [00:17:59]:
Well, I’ll tell you, there’s a lot of people that get the device And all of a sudden, the number was not what they expected. And instead of saying, okay, maybe I need to change something, or maybe I need to… they take the device off, or they don’t use it, or they throw it away. I contend that to evolutionary change, we search for food to survive, we search for mates to spread our DNA and move on. Well, I think the third thing we search for… Purpose. is confirmation, confirmation of our beliefs. And I’m not sure that’s a good thing. Yeah. But there’s so many people that buy this ring and all of a sudden, you know, you’re an orthopedic surgeon and your HRV never gets above 20.

Don Moxley [00:18:42]:
So instead of taking a critical look at what they’re doing, they say, no, there’s a problem with it, it doesn’t work. Well, there’s not a problem with it. There’s stress there and you need to recognize it. And the challenge with stress is that over time, It becomes somewhat invisible to us. We don’t feel it. We don’t see it. In the book, I talk about the ring or the bracelet being a thermometer.

Nick Urban [00:19:09]:
Yeah.

Don Moxley [00:19:09]:
That you wake up in the morning and you’re chilly. Now, I know you’re down in Austin and you only get chilly when the air conditioning is set too low. But up here in Ohio where I’m at right now, we’re going into a solid fall shift. Okay? We’re in that weird time of the year where the furnace comes on at night and the air conditioner comes on during the day. to control our environment. We’re going from 40 degrees or 45 degrees at night to the mid-70s, high 80s during the day. But you wake up and you’re chilly. Okay? So to confirm that the room temperature is a problem, you go look at a thermometer.

Don Moxley [00:19:47]:
Okay? And because you can wake up and be chilly and you could have a fever. The room could be a regular temperature, but you’re perceiving it as something else. Okay. So you go confirm the temperature is chilly. Then you make a decision. I’m going to put on a jacket. I’m going to close a window. I’m going to put a log on the fire.

Don Moxley [00:20:07]:
You’re going to make a decision. So you have a feeling, you confirm it with the measurement, and then you make a decision. Well, this is the thing that you do with HRV measurements.

Nick Urban [00:20:17]:
Hmm.

Don Moxley [00:20:18]:
Maybe. And, you know, over time, when we have too much cortisol in our system, we learn, we become hypervigilant. Back to our snake analogies, that if you’re born in a rattlesnake pit, the only way you survive is being hypervigilant. Well, there’s a change in the hormones in your brain. There’s a change in the hormone levels of your amygdala. There’s a hormone in there called anandamide. It’s an endocannabinoid that actually drops because you need hypervigilance to survive the rattlesnake pit. Now, if I take you out of a rattlesnake pit and I put you in a house full of bunny rabbits, you’re still hypervigilant.

Don Moxley [00:20:57]:
That anandamide doesn’t come back, or we don’t think it does. Right now, the research, you know, it’s the research and model animals is that it doesn’t come back. So, and the other thing that we have to start to take a look at, Nick, is that there’s lots of ways to adjust HRV and improve it. And I talk about that in section 4 of the book. But we also are not quite sure about how durable these things are. So if I do a breathing exercise and I see a change in my HRV over the next 10 minutes, okay, that’s great. We got the change. It’s important.

Don Moxley [00:21:32]:
If I do repeated breathing exercises over time, you know, there’ll be a sustained rise in our HRV. But if I stop doing the breathing exercises, there’ll probably be a natural shift down. Back to our north, to our state. So the durability of these practices that we take a look at, we’re not quite sure about yet. It looks like you probably need to sustain them. Going back to the rattlesnakes and the bunnies, you know, there’s an actual physical change, there’s a hormonal change, and we have to recognize this. Just because I was born in a rattlesnake pit doesn’t mean I can’t live a bunny life. Okay.

Don Moxley [00:22:13]:
But I have to recognize the impact that that trauma had on me, and I have to change my life.

Nick Urban [00:22:19]:
So, anandamide is often called the bliss molecule. And are you saying that in people who are chronically stressed, or perhaps that was passed down to them epigenetically, that they tend to have lower levels of anandamide?

Don Moxley [00:22:33]:
Well, what I’m saying in model animals, we’re pretty sure this happens. So, if you look at dogs and mice, and you fear condition them, there’s a natural drop of anandamide in the amygdala. We know that. Now, you can’t do that study in humans. They don’t do well to the anatomy of the brain that needs to be done to measure this. But yeah, it looks like there is a natural drop when we’re looking at the fear conditioning of this. We also know that there’s a natural rise in anandamide with these healthy behaviors when we’re exercising at an appropriate level, when we’re doing the things that we need to do, when our stress… And personally, I think that’s an important part of understanding the entire process. Listen, our country has gone through a relatively profound change as it relates to understanding cannabinoids.

Don Moxley [00:23:25]:
Cannabis has been part of our pharmacopeia up until 1948. It was a regularly prescribed medicinal product. In 1948, there was what’s called the Cannabis Tax Act, and we started to see a movement away from cannabis as a medicine. In 1970, they kind of shut the door, but we’re starting to see a reemergence of it, and we start to see this thing called CBD. That was the real popular one that came out. Well, we need to get some controls on this, but CBD plays a role, and the precursor to CBD is called CBDA, cannabidiolic acid. And that is a very healthy molecule, hangs on 5 different receptors, does a lot of good things. So we know this works, but it works in relationship to behavior and behavioral change so that we can go ahead and do the things, again, to be able to make the shift.

Don Moxley [00:24:23]:
Instead of living in the rattlesnake pit, let’s move out of it. Let’s start to look at our environment. Let’s start to develop the tools that we need to build resilience. So, whether you’re consuming exogenous anandamide analogs or you’re creating them naturally, it looks like it’s a pretty good process.

Nick Urban [00:24:43]:
Yeah. I want to explore the solutions for sure because that’s obviously very important. Before we go into the solution realm, I am a bit in no man’s land when it comes to heart rate variability. I started using it in college when I was training to understand where I was. And then at some point, maybe 5 or 6 years ago, I realized that, you know what, I’m looking at this first thing in the morning, it’s dictating my day. And then before I even check in with myself to see how I’m actually doing, how I’m feeling, I either have determined that… or my device determined that I’m gonna have a good day ’cause I’m fully recovered, or a bad day because I didn’t score as highly. Right. And that seems to be more and more popular these days.

Nick Urban [00:25:22]:
I like your analogy of the device on everyone’s wrist being a thermometer and you want them to become the thermostat. That’s an elegant way of explaining it. But like, what do you see in terms of heart rate variability being like diagnostically useful? Because if you measure first thing in the morning, it’s different than 5 minutes after a walk, which is different than 5 minutes after breathwork, which is different than 10 minutes into a sauna. It’s so variable.

Don Moxley [00:25:50]:
Because stress is variable. And one of the things I like to do… so let me answer the first part of your question first. I believe in a decade, when we walk into our doctor’s office, they’re going to ask us about our HRV and our CGM data and some other data that will be starting to come along. Right now, we walk into our doctor’s office, we put… they put us on a scale and we get a number. That is practically valueless. There is no value in that number. And in fact, with females, it is a stress inducer. Okay.

Don Moxley [00:26:26]:
Number one. Number two, we walk us into an exam room and what they do is they put a blood pressure cuff on your arm. I’m not, I’m not negating the value of blood pressure one bit. I think it’s important to do and you need to do it. But those are the two numbers that are on the chart that the doctor gets. And then the doctor looks at you and says, Well, what brought you in here? And all of a sudden we’re down to very subjective kind of responses. I believe in a decade we will walk into our doctor’s office, there will already be a downloaded record of our HRV data, resting heart rate. You know, one of the things that’s hot right now, Nick, is VO2 max again.

Nick Urban [00:27:06]:
Yeah.

Don Moxley [00:27:07]:
And I’m old enough… listen, when I started measuring VO2s back when I was in grad school, we were using Douglas bags. These are big balloons, weather balloons that we’d collect air in and we’d push it and we’d measure it. And so that’s how we did it back then. And then we got nice sensor developments and things like that. But I’ve never been comfortable measuring VO2 max on civilians.

Nick Urban [00:27:31]:
Okay?

Don Moxley [00:27:31]:
It’s, you know, George Jessening someone off the back of a treadmill to see if we can find out what their max is, is not a pleasant experience. But you know what? If you want to measure your cardiovascular fitness, look at your nighttime resting heart rate, what your heart rate drops down to at night. If you’re engaged in the behaviors, movement, food, sleep, light, and community, you’ll see a natural improvement in your cardiovascular fitness that you can interpret as improvement in VO2 max. Okay. But we get so obsessed with these numbers. Is my VO2 a 50, a 60, a 70? I don’t care. What I want to know is, are you improving? So let’s start there. Okay.

Don Moxley [00:28:15]:
The, the, the, the, what are the numbers? And I think if my doctor takes a look at the fact that over the last year, my nighttime resting heart rate has naturally dropped 10, 15, 20 points. Oh, your cardiovascular fitness is improving. If my doctor says, ah, your HRV, your, your heart rate variability has improved. on the average 10 to 15 points. Hmm, you’re managing stress better. If… okay, these are 2 really, really good numbers that are really valuable that relate to behaviors, that relate to my effort to push back on the environment or prevent the environment from pushing me over the cliff.

Nick Urban [00:28:56]:
Mm-hmm.

Don Moxley [00:28:57]:
Um, so to answer your question, I think it’s one of the most important numbers we can get, but I also think When you walk in and you step on a scale and it gives you a number and you judge yourself by it, that’s bad. If you put your age… if you get up in the morning and you look at your number and you say, oh, I suck, well, that’s bad. You don’t want to judge yourself. It’s simply, it’s simply a number. You want to look at it in context. And after a while, you stop looking at it in the morning and making decisions. I wake up in the morning, And I check my feelings. How do I feel? Do I feel warm? Do I feel cold? Do I feel anxious? Do I feel relaxed? These are the kind of things I want to tune into my natural system.

Don Moxley [00:29:43]:
The HRV just gives me some direction. What’s going on here? And again, if you read the book or when you read the book, I refer a lot to a paper by my friend, Dr. JP Errico, on looking at autonomic balance as an indicator for longevity. The data is very clear. We spend a lot of time in the second section of the book looking, okay, where’s the data at? What are the indicators here? And there’s good data on athletics that as you improve HRV, you improve performance. It’s very clear. When you look at Errico’s data, it looks like they’re starting to lay out the fact that autonomic balance, your ability to shift, is associated with longevity. And he’s presenting it as could be the best longevity marker we have.

Don Moxley [00:30:29]:
So, because what we know at a crude level is I know right before you die, your HRV is going to be zero. Okay? There’s going to be none.

Nick Urban [00:30:39]:
Yeah.

Don Moxley [00:30:39]:
But even though your heart is beating, it’s going to be beating in a perfect… in perfect rhythm. And that’s not what you want. And I know my athletes have unusually high HRVs, and the higher the HRV, what I see is the higher the performance. So, in my mind, I look at that and I say, okay, I want to be moving away from zero all the time. That’s what I’m working towards. And again, we see this either in a young athlete, the athlete’s parents, or the athlete’s grandparents, their ability to manage life. Nick, I believe this becomes one of our top indicators over time.

Nick Urban [00:31:13]:
I built an app called Autonomic Map, which lets you connect to a Polar H10 chest strap and literally get your 24/7 continuous heart rate variability. And then, I use that to be able to see what changed it for the better and what for the worse. One thing I noticed when I was working out with it is that my heart rate variability could drop very low, as low, I think I saw like 5 milliseconds.

Don Moxley [00:31:33]:
And it should, that’s what it should do.

Nick Urban [00:31:35]:
Yeah. So if, if that’s normal, that’s good. It should be doing that. I would assume that when you say for your athletes, the higher, the better longevity, you mean first thing in the morning or overnight HRV?

Don Moxley [00:31:48]:
So I, I’ve measured HRV at, at 3 different levels at 3 different times of the day. Back before we had wearables, I had to get guys to wake up in the morning, to put that strap on, to do the measurement first thing in the morning. And so this is… and how I qualify that measurement is, how have I recovered from the day before? Okay? Now, the thing that pollutes that data just a little bit is that in the waking process, there is a natural cortisol dump in the morning. So when you wake up, your body says, okay, you’re going to get up, you need to hit the ground running. Let’s make sure there’s some nutrients in your system so that you can survive. So there’s a natural lowering, but it tends to be a very consistent lowering. So you can take that measurement. And Dr.

Don Moxley [00:32:45]:
Marco Altini has done a lot of good work on this. He basically created an app that you can measure it through your fingertip on your phone’s camera. And that’s his preferred method when working with elite distance runners, by the way. You know, listen, Nick, you and I are cut from different cloth. We’re willing to get up in the morning and put that stinky wet transmitter strap on and do it. Yeah. Now, when I was interviewing Marco on my podcast, And he was telling me that he gets up in the morning and he measures every morning. I go, Marco, you don’t have kids, do you? And he is like, no, I don’t.

Don Moxley [00:33:23]:
I’m like, okay. So, you know, all of a sudden life complicates the process a little bit because all of a sudden you have a family. And what you learn is that, why am I waking up for some other reason than I really want to wake up? Yeah. So that’s a good time to measure if you’re experimenting, if you’re trying to learn, if you’re trying to decide if you want to invest in this. My preferred measurement time is at night when I’m asleep and seeing that performance across my sleep period. That’s… I have… when I’m asleep, I really have very few external stress responses going on. I may have internal things going on, but the external has been shut down. Now, back in the day, Nick, I couldn’t get… Yeah.

Don Moxley [00:34:07]:
I’ll tell you what, I really struggled to get a lot of my team to measure first thing in the morning. So the next best time I had back then was right before they came into practice. And we got to the point… so practice was the same time. In the same way, in the morning, your body is taking into account, okay, we just woke up, there’s a cortisol response, it’s going to be fairly standard. Over time, right before practice was a good time for us. And I always described it as Are these athletes ready for what I’m getting ready to put them through? And I think I wrote about this in the book. I’ve told the story so many times, but when we’re measuring stress in our athletes, we had a situation where my wrestling team, we’d sent them home for holiday break because wrestling happens in the fall and in the winter. So, 4th quarter, 1st quarter.

Don Moxley [00:35:00]:
4th quarter wrestling, I call weight-cutting season. You’re getting in, you’re getting things working, you’re getting down to weight. First quarter of the year, that’s championship season. Now, you know, when you go into January, February, and the beginning of March is nationals. So we were… we’d sent the guys home for the holidays and they came back and I had a 7-day period planned. We had a training block where I was going to bury these guys for 7 days. It was my last chance to really put a big deep training block in. The guys come back and we measure HRVs their first day back from vacation.

Don Moxley [00:35:33]:
I got the worst measurements of the entire year that day. And I went to the coach, I go, we can’t do what we were planning. I said, we need to create… they had not slept in their bed, I don’t think, that night before. They had come in from home and then I got them. And you know, Nick, what I learned is that family stress was the worst stress that my wrestlers dealt with. Wow. And I see this, I’ve now seen this in a lot of other situations too. So family’s a lovely thing.

Don Moxley [00:36:03]:
It’s important, but I’ll tell you what, family stress is real. And understanding the impact of people that you love and people that love you, it may not be registering quite when, but this is shifting from the amygdala to the prefrontal cortex. This is taking a look at, okay, Can I recognize this? I’ve seen this in my relationship with my wife. You know, we’ve been married now for 37 years. What year? Yeah, yeah, 37 years. Been together for 38. And what I’ve learned is that it’s not about me. It’s about us.

Nick Urban [00:36:46]:
Hmm.

Don Moxley [00:36:47]:
And, you know, we had a situation last night There was tension, and I have a choice at that point. I can be right or I can be happy. Yeah. And I’ve learned with years of good counseling, this has taken a lot of professional work. Shut your mouth, Don. Back off. This is not the time to be right. And oh, by the way, there’s rarely a time to need to be right.

Don Moxley [00:37:18]:
Okay. There’s, there’s, there’s a time to teach. There’s a time to learn. But being right or wrong, that judgmental bullshit goes, goes away pretty quick. So this is the kind of thing. So we got the guys back, we gave them one night in their bed. Boom. I’ve got great scores.

Don Moxley [00:37:34]:
We went full on. So instead of having a 7-day training block, we had a 6-day training block.

Nick Urban [00:37:38]:
Hmm.

Don Moxley [00:37:39]:
I didn’t, I didn’t give up anything with the one day. And oh, by the way, I probably prevented problems for myself with guys that just were not ready to get better. I may not have ever been able to get back in front of the recovery cycle.

Nick Urban [00:37:55]:
Yeah, because at an elite level in athletics, it’s all about the recovery. It’s like you can push and train. It is now.

Don Moxley [00:38:02]:
Yeah, it is now.

Nick Urban [00:38:03]:
Exactly. It is now. And it’s not like you’re just doing this and you’re looking at the data and saying, oh, this data is nice and It’s wishful thinking. You actually produce results by listening to the players, but also following the data at the same time.

Don Moxley [00:38:17]:
Okay. So the 3rd book I’m working on right now, so I just finished the HRV book. I’ve got the HRV book for athletes coming, but last summer I wrote a paper called The Complete Athlete. I’d had some people reach out to me about comprehensive athlete development, and I wrote this paper, and I’m turning that paper into a book right now. A more fully researched, fully elucidated book. And when we look at this, when you first start as an athlete, you’re very skill-controlled. Okay? As you improve your skills, you move up through the sport quickly. So technical tactical plays a really important role starting out.

Don Moxley [00:38:58]:
Then once you get your skills, all of a sudden we start to move to the physical side of what I call the performance triangle. Movement is at the bottom. You have to have movement. We put strength on top of movement, or we’ll use strength to improve movement. Then you start to add strength. So a young athlete that wants to get better all of a sudden starts going to the weight room and they start to get stronger. And then they start looking at energy systems. At the end of the day, it’s about your ability to produce ATP.

Don Moxley [00:39:22]:
Bang. Okay, so you got to build energy systems. But now at the top of that pyramid, I have resilience and recovery. Okay. That, that you can get. And, and back in the day, back in the early ’80s when I was competing, you know, hard work was the determining factor. And we didn’t have, we didn’t have heart rate monitors. We measured heart rate like this.

Don Moxley [00:39:42]:
Now that’s a joke, frankly, with what we have today. But, and I literally, my, my partner and I were talking about this and we have a newsletter coming out this week that I struggled with anxiety. In my last year. So my, my, my, my third year of competition at Ohio State, I had solved some problems and all of a sudden I’m ranked nationally. I’m 39-9 and doing pretty good. But of the 9 losses, 7 of those took place in a dual meet situation in our home arena. Hmm. I couldn’t lose on the road and I couldn’t win at home.

Don Moxley [00:40:20]:
It was, and it was like, it was binary.

Nick Urban [00:40:22]:
Okay.

Don Moxley [00:40:23]:
So I worked with a sports psychologist that summer to get on top of this. And all of a sudden, I switched from competing. And if you think of competing, there’s the risk of loss. That’s a threat. Okay. And when I wrestled at home, what I learned is my parents only got to come see me when we wrestled at home. You know, my parents were farmers from Eastern Ohio. They didn’t get to travel to all the places we went to in the Big Ten and competed.

Don Moxley [00:40:50]:
So they only got to see me at home. So when we went into the arena and my… if I got anything from my father, I got his mouth. I knew they were in there. And in my mind it was, don’t lose. Okay. Well, that’s the… that’s what we had to solve. We learned this and that’s why I’m writing about in the new book, The Complete Athlete. But, um, but how did I do this? I learned meditation.

Don Moxley [00:41:14]:
I learned to… I, All the techniques that we talk about that move HRV, I was learning those back in the early ’80s. We just didn’t have a metric that went with it. So, this is kind of timely knowledge. I’ve got a script for a social media post that’s called, Do Monks Need Wearables? No. Their life, their lifestyle, their life is as zen as it gets. Okay, so they don’t, they don’t need a wearable. Their life… ours is different. Okay, we don’t live a monk lifestyle.

Don Moxley [00:41:52]:
We don’t, we don’t do that. We don’t spend our days meditating. We don’t do these kinds of things. We’re involved in the game of life and it creates stress. And we have to learn to intentionally add the recovery elements in, add the elements that build the resources and build the resiliency. so that we can deal with, with life in general. And the HRV number that you’ve been judging yourself with, stop it. Okay? You don’t judge yourself when you wake up and the room’s chilly and it’s 50 degrees.

Don Moxley [00:42:26]:
You don’t say, oh, you’re an idiot. You didn’t turn the furnace on. No, you make a decision and you move on. Okay? Same thing with this and looking at it. And if you keep waking up morning after morning after morning, you might start thinking about, okay, do I change the adjustment on the filter or the furnace, or do I close the window, or do I put more blankets on my bed? You make a decision based on the trend. This is the same thing with HRV. Okay? As you start to see the trend, as you start to see things moving, then you make bigger decisions. You intentionally engage in a process of recovery.

Nick Urban [00:43:00]:
Let’s explore the things people can do to support their HRV, their recovery as a whole. I have a feeling there’s some kind of genetic component to it. There’s also a lot of stuff that’s not genetic. And I think that if you have a really low HRV, the first place before adding on things to address it would be to figure out what’s causing it and then address that. And once you’ve fixed that, then you can look for additional support. What would you say are the ways of like the holistic plan of improving HRV?

Don Moxley [00:43:31]:
You know, you used a term there that I’m going to push back. My wife, kicks my ass about this all the time because I’m so effing literal. But I don’t believe there is a genetic element. There could be an epigenetic. Yeah. I don’t believe this is coming out of the chromosomes on your DNA. I think it could be epigenetic. So there’s no doubt about that.

Don Moxley [00:43:59]:
But listen, We pass on survival opportunities. I believe one of the biggest things that affects the major difference between people’s HRV is what I call their trauma portfolio. Hmm. That, you know, stress is, is what happens to you. You respond to it, you move on. Trauma is stress that leaves a mark that says, ah, okay, it’s the rattlesnake. You see the rattlesnake bite a friend, you lose ’em. Okay, that leaves a mark.

Don Moxley [00:44:31]:
Well, we traumatize in our world at a really high level, and there’s a lot of bullshit that goes on. I mean, we’re watching it right now. You know, we’re recording this on October 5th. We just came out of a week of a bunch of Cornell garbage coming out of a fraternity there. Okay, when we send our kids off to college, we may be sending them into trauma pits. Okay, we have to be aware of this. And now listen, when I sent my daughter off to Ohio State, um, she knew defensive tactics. Okay, this is something that, that I, that as a father of a, who had been through this, I felt it a responsibility for my daughter to learn these things.

Nick Urban [00:45:15]:
Mm-hmm.

Don Moxley [00:45:15]:
I personally believe every young female should learn how to, uh, fight out of the guard with jiu-jitsu techniques. That if you find yourself with someone between your legs and you don’t want them there, you deserve the opportunity to get out of that situation and not be stuck there. And if you learn good jiu-jitsu, you choke them out or you rip their elbow out and they stop thinking about taking advantage of you and the situation ends. So, recognizing that environment, taking control… control is the wrong word. I want to be careful there because you can’t control. You can certainly influence, but, but being able to respond to the threats, having the physical capacity to respond to the threats around you. So, so trauma, I believe if, if you have a dramatically low score, if, I mean, my, my Olympians, their HRVs are above 150 milliseconds at night. I mean, they’re very, very high.

Don Moxley [00:46:13]:
They have lots of resources to re… to, to respond to stress. That’s why they’re so good at what they do. Yeah. Me, listen, 2 summers ago, we were… my wife and I live in an RV. We travel the country for the most part. We were out in Lake Tahoe, California for nearly 6 months. I’m at altitude. I’m exercising very well.

Don Moxley [00:46:41]:
We have the dog. I’m walking the dog. I’m getting the light things. I’m doing the tools. All of a sudden, I’m popping HRVs in the 90s. Okay? It’s the highest I’ve ever measured in myself. We come… all of a sudden, we move back to Ohio. I come back because of a series of things.

Don Moxley [00:47:00]:
I’ve got a lot of stress in my life. I’ve got a change in my employment. I’ve got a change in what I’m doing professionally. My HRVs dropped dramatically. Now, as I work my way back through and I put more practice into the time of adjusting, you know, last week, popped to 71 HRV, average HRV. So I’m working my way back up. Now, can I get to 90? I think altitude was part of the benefit. I think the cardiovascular benefit I was getting with altitude up there in Lake Tahoe was a benefit.

Don Moxley [00:47:31]:
So we’re starting to see these things. I’m in a phase of my life where I have to set an alarm right now several mornings a week. Mm-hmm. And I have some very early mornings. I mean, I have 4 o’clock appointments for one reason or another. And sometimes that backs up where I have a 10 or 11 o’clock appointment the night before. I have a 4 o’clock appointment in the morning, 4, 4:35, and my nighttime sleep is rough. I’m seeing stuff in my sleep patterns that’s just like, okay, this is pretty… maybe I need to… and I’m going to have to make some adjustments to this, but for right now, that’s the way it works.

Don Moxley [00:48:07]:
And I have to take advantage of it. So to go back and answer your question, Yes, we bring our experiences to the table. That’s what makes us all different. But what we do is there are a universal set of things that we can do to improve that. So to go back and answer your question, so in the book I talk about 7 levers. Okay. The first one is sleep. We’ve talked about it already.

Nick Urban [00:48:32]:
Yeah.

Don Moxley [00:48:32]:
You have to prioritize it. There’s lots of great books. I’ll tell you what, one of the books I really enjoyed was Matthew Walker’s book, Why You Sleep. I think it was excellent. You know, I’ll tell you a technique that I picked up. I don’t know if you do this, but we know we go in a series of 90-minute cycles when we sleep. Well, if for some reason my alarm is set for, say, 6:00 AM, and I happen to wake up at 5:15, 5 o’clock, and I’m inside of one of those 90-minute cycles, I don’t try to go back to sleep.

Nick Urban [00:49:08]:
Yeah.

Don Moxley [00:49:10]:
Because I have found I’m better off getting up right then rather than have the alarm wake me out of the middle of a sleep cycle. I actually find that’s almost a negative response. Yeah. So number one is understanding the rhythms, understanding the cycles, not judging. Okay? I’m not judging. I’m simply saying, okay, here’s where it is. I sleep in a room that is pitch black dark. I sleep in a room that we keep very cool.

Don Moxley [00:49:37]:
I like sleeping Year-round. I want to sleep in a cool room with heavy blankets on me. That’s what I like. Yeah. So it’s those techniques. I try to get to bed the same time. And even if I have an early morning… well, I’ll tell you, I try to get to bed, whether I don’t have to get up in the morning, I still try to get to bed early. I try to keep that rhythm in place.

Don Moxley [00:50:00]:
You can survive 1 or 2 mornings that are out of cycle.

Nick Urban [00:50:06]:
Mm-hmm.

Don Moxley [00:50:07]:
But 1 or 2 mornings in cycle won’t account for a week that’s out. Okay? So it’s about accumulating those times. So start with sleep. And there’s lots of good stuff out there. Prioritize it. That’s number 1. Number 2 is you own the tool that gives you probably more influence over this than anything. And that is your breath.

Don Moxley [00:50:30]:
The devices that we wear, whether it’s an Apple Watch or something else, These devices, our phones, have breathing coaches in them. There’s wisdom in this, the wisdom that comes from ancient religions. I mean, every ancient religion, whether you’re a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim or a Buddhist, regardless, they all have breathing techniques built into them. They also have fasting too, by the way. But you own your breath. And this is a Listen, we taught it to my wrestling team. We taught what we called recovery breathing. And before practice, when they’re warming up, we had a swim clock on the wall, one of those great big clocks with the sweep second hand, so you could see the 5-second intervals.

Don Moxley [00:51:17]:
And as we’re warming up, we’d coach them breathe 5 seconds in, 5 seconds out. I’d also coach the body position. Get your head up, get your shoulders back, air into the lungs. Mm-hmm. maybe get your hands up above your head. I want you recovering there. You know, there’s a great artist… there’s a great author that wrote a book called Presence. I’m blanking on her name.

Don Moxley [00:51:42]:
It’ll come to me in a minute, but it’s called the Superman pose. Okay? They’ve been able to demonstrate that this Superman pose… and I taught my athletes to get into it. And one of my national champions, I’m watching him wrestle this very difficult match. They go out of bounds with his opponent. I see him stand up, essentially get as close to the Superman pose as he can as he walks back, and I see him get 3 rescue breaths in or recovery breaths as he comes back to the center of the mat. This difficult match, he gained a little bit of an advantage with that.

Nick Urban [00:52:16]:
Hmm.

Don Moxley [00:52:16]:
So these are the kind of things, breathing and tools like that. And when you feel that anxious when you’re at work, And the phone rings when you’re coming home and you’re trying to figure out what’s going on, well then that’s when you can throw those breaths in. Or if your doctor calls and you see the number on the phone and you feel that anxious response, you can throw those breaths in right there. And it really helps you return to that spot. So those are the 2 real big ones that you have control over. In the book, we also talk about there’s this amazing technology that has emerged in the last 3 to 4 years. It’s called vagal nerve stimulation. Vagal nerve stimulation comes from work that they’ve done at looking at epileptics.

Don Moxley [00:53:00]:
They actually used to go in and wrap a wire around the vagal nerve in the carotid sheath, and they saw that it affected HRV. Well, we’ve now been able to translate this down to something that we put on our… we put right on the carotid. It sends a little electrical signal through it, and it improves HRV. And the research that they see coming out of the military on this is impressive. I’ll tell you, if I’m coaching a team and I’m looking for optimal performance, everyone owns one of these vagal nerve stimulators. The data is very clear. And, you know, Nick… There’s so much of our learning. I’ll give you the floor back in just a second.

Don Moxley [00:53:39]:
But so much of our learning comes from either elite athletics, warriors, or astronauts. We see a lot of deep-sea divers, people that go into extreme environments. And we can harvest a lot of what we learn there for those of us that are just in our, in what we call our normal Earth environments.

Nick Urban [00:53:56]:
Yeah. There’s controversy over the efficacy of the commercial consumer available vagus nerve stimulators. And it’s good to hear that you’re seeing that they work well even in other populations.

Don Moxley [00:54:09]:
Nick, there’s controversy over everything. I make observations. What does the observation tell me? That’s where we start. Then I go look for data to support the observation. I go get that and say, is there something that backs this up? Can I refine this? Can I improve the process? Can I improve what I did? The data on this vagal nerve stimulation stuff, particularly as it relates to traumatic brain injury and repair from this in the military, is impressive. And in the book, I have a reference. You can go to the references in the book and see this. You can go pull up that study.

Don Moxley [00:54:44]:
It’s impressive. And like I said, my experience so far… earlier we were talking about the fact that we’ve seen such a change and we’ve seen the emergence of wearable tech and these kinds of things. Back when I was coaching 15 through 18, if you wanted to put in an HRV program, you had to invest between $4,000 and $9,000 in technology. You had to put in… you had to go to training and get trained on how to use this. So there was an expense there. You had to put together a data management policy. So who sees the data and when? I mean, university athletics, some of it is, is actually problematic, but there’s been a shift in agency, Nick. Now, when I walk in to work with a team, the coaches are telling me that half the, half their players are coming in with a Whoop band or an Oura Ring on their finger.

Don Moxley [00:55:32]:
Okay. And we see this at all levels, D1, D2, D3. We’re seeing it at all levels. Yeah. So the agency is shifting away from the need for the organizational kind of control and towards individual. And this is only going to continue to go. Listen, I don’t know if you watched the Tour de France, but I was watching Tadej Pogačar this summer. And I don’t know if you saw the little lump that’s on his… Yeah.

Don Moxley [00:55:56]:
It’s in his sleeve. That’s a Whoop device. It’s not on his wrist. It’s up in his sleeve. And Jonas Vingegaard had one too. Whoop’s done a really good job of getting that device. They’ve got some… they published some awesome research. And again, I told you, I’m currently reading Kristen Holmes’ book, Aligned, and the data, it’s excellent.

Don Moxley [00:56:19]:
It’s excellent. So this is the kind of thing… I know there’s controversy because there’s so many internet-based experts. It’s just like, okay, give me a break. Everything that we have in here is referenced. It comes from real experience. It’s usually coming out of fairly elite environments. Is it going to be a silver bullet? Probably not. Silver bullets only work on vampires.

Don Moxley [00:56:47]:
But there are tools that you can use that make a difference. And again, vagal nerve stimulation, I believe, is the real deal.

Nick Urban [00:56:56]:
Good, because I care what the research says. I also really care about the real-world results with people who are using it, especially if they’re not using it on just the themselves but across a larger population, larger sample size than N of 1. It’s great to know what actually works. It’s also cool to see what holds up in the literature. But, if this is consistently working with athletes, then even if it’s not a silver bullet, it still has utility.

Don Moxley [00:57:20]:
Athletes, warriors, astronauts, all those extreme environments. You and I, we talked a little bit about this before we started recording, but I did a talk many, many years ago And it was about HRV actually and implementing on a team basis. And when someone says, has this been demonstrated with research? Is it peer-reviewed? Has it gone through a random controlled trial? You have to understand the research process. And this is what you learn in graduate school. First of all, this is your first year of graduate school is understanding statistics of research.

Nick Urban [00:57:54]:
Yeah.

Don Moxley [00:57:54]:
And what you do is you create, you design a study and You spend a lot of time designing the study so that you can select study participants that your results represent the regular population. There’s a ton of effort that goes into that. And then at the end of the study, if you’ve done it well and you’ve selected and you’ve done your controls, you wind up with what’s called a bell curve. Okay? The most people, the most response is in the middle, and that’s the mean. That’s the average. But the problem is there’s someone in the 3rd standard deviation to the right in the 99th percentile, and there’s somebody in the 3rd standard deviation to the left, the 1st percentile. They’re in the study too. Okay? One’s a hyper-responder, one’s a negative responder.

Don Moxley [00:58:48]:
This is my challenge as a professional to sit down with you and maybe help you figure out, are you a hyper-responder to this technique? Or are you a negative responder? We talked about my wife and I earlier, you know, because of our backgrounds and because of trauma, we respond to certain stimulus differently. And that’s where you start to work with a pro. And, you know, I think, listen, I’m a huge AI fan. I think what’s coming with machine learning in particular, not necessarily the LLM stuff, but the machine learning and the ability to manage data is incredible. It’s incredible. But at the same time, I don’t think we’re there yet from the standpoint that it helps… AI in the tool of a professional is better than AI by itself. And so being able to work with that. So, you know, I got to tell you, you know, one of the things I talk about in the book is managing your mind, meditation, thought process, doing these things.

Don Moxley [00:59:51]:
Some of the most valuable medical professionals in my life are counselors. They make a huge difference. Now, I fire a lot of them too. Okay? There’s a lot of them that I sit in there and I’m thinking, okay, this has been a complete and utter waste of my time. We’re not going anywhere here. And I will fire them quickly. And I think that’s important. I think it’s important to have that advisor in your life.

Don Moxley [01:00:14]:
But when you get a good one, man, I hang onto them as long as I can. So… Managing the mind, working at this. We then move to what we call training load. Training load is stress, managing it correctly, being able to… this is the value of a heart rate monitor, measuring heart rate during exercise, not heart rate variability. Yeah. We talked about it a little bit ago that during your exercise, your HRV drops way down. It’s supposed to. Remember, you’re starting to exercise, your body says, Oh shit, you may be being chased by a lion.

Don Moxley [01:00:47]:
That’s what, that’s what your DNA says. You know, it’s like, ah, there’s something going on here. I’m going to give you the resources you need. Here’s the adrenaline, here’s the dopamine, here’s the cortisol so that you can release all the things you need to escape. That’s all exercise is. It’s an artificial lion. Okay. Um, and your, and your HRV should drop.

Don Moxley [01:01:08]:
But when you finish and you recover, then it should come back up and it should… you should supercompensate. So your HR should be dropping down over time and your HRV should be rising. So using training load to come in here, using exogenous stressors. I have a sauna will be part of my lifestyle for the rest of my life. Love it. And what’s interesting is that back when I was wrestling back in the late ’70s, and early ’80s, I used to cut a lot of weight. I mean, cut a lot of weight. Cut too much weight.

Don Moxley [01:01:44]:
We lived in saunas, okay? Saunas with plastics on a bike. It was the crazy wrestling stuff, you know? And when I got out of wrestling, when I quit cutting weight, I stopped using saunas until almost 6 years ago. I had a surgery, my 7th knee surgery.

Nick Urban [01:02:03]:
Oh.

Don Moxley [01:02:04]:
But I got a MRSA infection from this surgery, and I was very ill for close to 90 days. I was in bed for 60 days. I was 6 Percocets a day for September. It was rough. Now, if you look at my retrospective HRV data, we saw it build and improve over… it was low for a year. I was still healing, but it started to come back up. Well, a sauna was a key element in my recovery.

Nick Urban [01:02:32]:
Hmm.

Don Moxley [01:02:34]:
And then, so we look… so cold, heat, things like that. What you eat, drink. It’s important to get the omega-3s in. Omega-3s are important resolvants in the process of recovery. And then finally, relationships. And I… and in section 5 of the book, I spend time talking about Tom Ryan, the head wrestling coach at Ohio State, when we first started our HRV program, we wired this guy up with a Bodyguard, a Firstbeat Bodyguard, and Tom is a type A to the max. Okay? We wire him up, we get 24 hours worth of data. When he’s awake, it’s sympathetic.

Don Moxley [01:03:17]:
It’s go, go, go, go, go. But when he goes to sleep, it’s parasympathetic, and there’s no middle ground. Well, we’re looking at his data and all of a sudden there’s this green parasympathetic spike in his sympathetic data. I think it was about 9:30 or 10 o’clock at night, right before he went to bed. And we’re like, Tom, what were you doing at this time? Well, he thinks about it. Tom is a devout Christian. Devout, as straight-laced as you get. And Tom says, oh, that’s when I pray.

Don Moxley [01:03:51]:
And I thought, wow, we now have physiological evidence to the value of prayer. And now I went on and I wired up 2 other religious leaders. These are people that led churches for 3 days. I saw nothing.

Nick Urban [01:04:09]:
Huh.

Don Moxley [01:04:10]:
Okay, so be careful. Um, what… and again, I am not… I am pro-spirituality. And I write about this in the book. There was a really good book, Lisa Miller, The Aligned Mind, I think it was called, talking about spirituality and stress and so forth. And I talk about this in the, in the 5th section of the book, living the life, having that part, because a lot of that is community. A lot of that is being able to sit at peace. Um, you know, but it all revolves around autonomic balance and that autonomic balance being represented in this number that we call HRV.

Nick Urban [01:04:45]:
I’m surprised you didn’t mention more about the role of particular nutrients or supplements. How did you come up with the idea for HRV+?

Don Moxley [01:04:54]:
I was concerned about time’s reason, but since you brought it up, so I finished working at Ohio State and I left Ohio State to go work in the cannabis industry down in Florida. And, I made that decision largely because I had people reaching out to me when I was at OSU Asking me about the role of cannabis and what I saw. And my guys are NCAA athletes. We were still testing for cannabis back then. I’m like, I don’t know anything about it. But then I started to look at the research, and Nick, the research is legitimate. It is excellent, and it’s deep. Anyone who says there’s not enough research on cannabis has not taken the time to look at it or look for it.

Don Moxley [01:05:34]:
It’s there. There’s tons of it. So I’m like, okay, there’s something here. Now, I don’t use THC, okay? But then we started to look at CBD, and then we started to look at the precursor, CBDA, and then we started to look at the terpenes that go with this, particularly one that’s called beta-caryophyllene. So long story, I’m working down in Florida. I had a brother that was struggling with an autoimmune disease, and it was more than MS and it was less than Lou Gehrig’s, but it was significant. And I said, Chuck, the more I look at what you’re dealing with, the more I see is this autonomic dysregulation is part of what you have to deal with. So I made him up a tincture of this cannabis and terpene extract.

Don Moxley [01:06:23]:
And probably 2 or 3 months into this, he comes to me and he says, listen, he says, he’s working with the Cleveland Clinic on, you know, he’s working with elite people. And he says, your tincture does more for me than anything else I take. And I thought, wow, this is really interesting. So we lost my brother. It continued to digress. It got… and then COVID took him out. But I was working with Longevity Labs. The last time we talked, I was working with Longevity Labs.

Don Moxley [01:06:53]:
And at the time, we had hired Dave Asprey to He had one of our docs on his podcast and we saw a huge explosion in the sale of our Spermidine Life product. But I was interviewing many of our customers. Dave Asprey at the time was an advisor to Oura. Most of his customers had an Oura Ring on and most of them didn’t know what to do with it. And I said to my president of our company, I said, listen, there’s an opportunity here. And he said, can we make a supplement? And I said, I’ve already done it. So, we took the cannabis extract side of what I’d already done and we added in omega-3 fish oil, which is a pro-resolving. But, these omega-3s are automatically, are enzymatically spun up to be what’s called specialized pro-resolving mediators.

Don Moxley [01:07:44]:
Okay. So, we put this together, we run a test run on it. Not only do we see an improvement in wearable-based HRV measurement, But people were reporting back to us, sleep, sleep, sleep. They’re like, my sleep is off the chain. So we created this supplement and what brings us together today, and one of the reasons I had a chance to buy that company back about a year ago, and we’re promoting that product. I mean, we’re having to do it through… because Meta’s a pain in the ass on advertising of cannabis. But we’re doing podcasts, we’re doing this work. And the company’s called Mode Method, modemethod.com.

Don Moxley [01:08:25]:
Nick, if your people go there and they put in the coupon code HPL, they will get a 20% discount on the bundle of the HRV book and a bottle of HRV+ together. Or if you just want to use HPL, you can get 20% off the book by itself. So either the bundle or the book. But that’s how we got to where we are today.

Nick Urban [01:08:50]:
Cool. And what kind of results do people see if they see a change in HRV?

Don Moxley [01:08:55]:
We ran an initial study on this and we saw up to a 40-point improvement. Those are our hyperresponders. We did have non-responders. We had 2 in the study. We had 2 non-responders. Again, think about the normal curve. Okay. But the average was about 15 points.

Don Moxley [01:09:17]:
So everybody’s different, but everyone that I give this supplement to tells me that the sleep is magical.

Nick Urban [01:09:25]:
Perfect. Well, Don, thanks for coming back. The previous episode we recorded together was episode 45. So if you guys want to go back and check out the previous one, there’s that, and it has some of Don’s backstory and working with athletes as well. as spermidine and other topics related to longevity. Don, for people who’ve made it this far, give them a shout-out on where they can find your book, your supplement, all the stuff you just mentioned. Let’s give it to them one more time.

Don Moxley [01:09:52]:
The simplest way is if you go to thehrvbook.com, okay? That’ll take you to my personal website. My personal website is trainrecoverwin.com. So, you can go either way. When you get to the homepage of Train Recover Win, You’ll see a link to Mode and Method there. If you want to go learn more about the supplement, you can see a link there. My podcast is there. I do a podcast called 90% Healthy with my co-host Claudia Balogh. You can see that there.

Don Moxley [01:10:18]:
But that’s kind of where my world revolves out of. But the easiest way to get there is thehrvbook.com.

Nick Urban [01:10:25]:
Perfect. Well, thanks for joining the podcast yet again, Don. Thanks for tuning in to High Performance Longevity. If you got value today, the best way to support the show is to leave a review or share it with someone who’s ready to upgrade their healthspan. You can find all the episodes, show notes, and resources mentioned at outliyr.com. Until next time, stay energized, stay bioharmonized, and be an outlier.