Making Stress Work for Recovery: Full Transcript

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0: 04 Good afternoon and thank you for tuning in today on behalf of the University of California San Francisco Alumni association the UCSF Department of Psychiatry and The Greater good science center at UC Berkeley in the Mind Site Institute welcome to the six webcasts of our series titled Emotional Well-being During the COVID-19 crisis for health care providers this week's topic is making stress work for you restoration through hormetic stressors and Wim Hof Breathing I will now turn it and turn it over to our host Dr. Elissa Epel thank you so much Mario and John and the Alumni Association for sponsoring this welcome everyone we're talking about one of my favorite topics I'm just so excited we've gotten to this moment together and I'm going to be introducing Wim Hof to you and ask Dr Ashley Mason but first I promised a few jokes and so I'm going to share some slides I'm also going to present a little bit of background on hormetic stress this is a word we should all know because we need to harness stress for good

1: 41 okay so my first question is can you see my screen yes I do okay um so it's always funny to see a different thing than other people are seeing I am showing you uh first slide here of the phases of disaster this is a slide from samsa in a typical disaster we go through tremendous emotional ups and downs now where are we at collectively we are depending on our geography we tend to be somewhere between peak impact and looking toward recovery over the hump and some of us we are getting toward um thinking about a honeymoon of course community cohesion means we want to we need to be together physically um and at that time we can really kind of um we will be so happy when we are together but looking ahead there's rebuilding there's regeneration and there is also the possibility of yet another peak disaster of COVID in the fall so bottom line is still in uncertainty we cannot control the course of events individually but we can

3: 04 control our responses so we're talking today about ways to promote stress resilience physiologically we have been focusing on psychological strategies for managing acute stress well our department has created a short a video library of shorts on psychological strategies I suggest you look at that on our department of psychiatry webpage today we're talking about not how the mind changes the body um uh solely but how the body changes the mind how we can use biobehavioral strategies to actually promote stress resistance and stress resilience so jokes thank you for sending me jokes some were funny and crude I couldn't show them and all of them have this kind of heaviness of they're so funny and there's such a dark truth behind some of them so especially for essential workers and medical providers so here you might see your emotions reflected as you know in Michael Scott's from The Office laughing at coronavirus means letting yourself laugh that's important as well as crying at least inside at the reality of risk every day of having to show up uh here's an article in the New England Journal of Medicine I apologize for the

4: 31 grainy version this was this is what's on the web use of commercial disinfectants to treat novel COVID methods we read the labels on bottles and that we found in the janitor's closet conclusions this will kill you don't do it this is funny because at least some of you thought this was real right this could be a real study that's where we're at okay for those of you old enough to have watched those scooby-doo cartoons at the end they always pull off the hood and they find who the villain is the culprit it's just the climax and you're like ah it was them so I just thought this was so funny who's behind who's really behind the coronavirus it's the charmand bear sorry it's cheap humor but it got it for those of you who watch many scooby doo's is pretty funny okay just now a few images of art for us reflecting our times not another walk all right I restrained from indulging myself and showing you our border collie who usually can't get enough walks is so energetic and is so tired of walks in this period you might have had a group chat on zoom that looked like this

6: 00 or maybe it was more like the brady bunch okay so it's very easy and I am done this a lot in my mind have you know said this to young people this is just a pause there's a break we're in a um a period of putting life on hold and it's good to remember that this is real life that these days count a lot this is part of our life story this is part of our collective life story and what we do really matters so that's part of the kind of using this time and being fully present intentionally for how we use these days okay this last joke is bringing us to our topic of the day which is how does stress affect us does it accelerate aging or does it promote or can we turn this to promote hormetic stress prevent aging you've probably seen a lot of pictures of the presidents of the united states and how they age over the four or eight years in an accelerated way and here you see um beginning residency and ending residency a bit of accelerated aging we need to change that system okay so I have um been focusing on trying to understand positive stress the types of stressors that are good for us and the ways that we can respond that can promote

7: 30 hormetic stress which is harnessing our natural ability to actually become stronger so you've heard the phrase um what does what doesn't kill us makes us stronger there is a phenomenal array of beautiful basic mechanistic research and model organisms showing that when we apply short-term manageable stressors to organisms like worms we promote their longevity um I am writing this paper as you can see nia national institute of aging is very interested in uh promoting human or translational models of stress and so I have not turned this paper in it's late I'm not one of those people who are productive I'm one of the many women who are not turning in papers during this period um I know I'm not alone but I can tell you the bottom line this is uh that when we have over exposure to stress toxic stress chronic stress every day we don't have the resources to cope it accelerates our biological aging like inflammation it is associated with shorter telomeres when we have exposure to short-term manageable stressors our body turns on different responses the cleanup crew the housekeeping the repair mechanisms in our cell this has been called many things in the immune literature stress inoculation preconditioning biological shields it's like a vaccination response

9: 04 so we want to think about how can we promote positive stressors acute short-term stressors and respond to them with a healthy acute stress response recovery when all this great action happens like our parasympathetic nervous system goes up and to actually slow the rate of aging and not accelerate it so that's the question of today this is there's lots of weird things you can do to cells and uh organisms like uv but what can we do for humans what do we know of that promotes a short time term acute stress response that then promotes this recovery and house cleaning in our cells so this is a table that shows different thing different types of hormetic stressors for exercise for example that's the one we all um tend to use and know about but that's there's more than just exercise so exercise especially intermittent short-term exercise promotes hormetic stress and we're starting to learn the cellular level how it cleans up cells it turns on autophagy it increases our mitochondrial health um what I am going to focus on for the next rest of the session is temperature stress intermittent hot and cold versus static temperature that keeps us kind of not exercising our vascular system the whole day and also breathing stress intermittent hypoxia that can actually change our levels of co2

10: 32 and oxygen rather than the chronic shallow breathing that we tend to do when we're under stress and we're not paying attention to our breath okay so hello again that brings us to um our current moment i'm so pleased to introduce to you today Dr Ashley Mason of UCSF she's an assistant professor at the Osher Center and uh Ashley's going to talk to us about some of her recent studies using hormetic stress using hyperthermia now I've brought to you frontline medical providers ashley's also a frontline researcher she's also doing a COVID study that she'll tell us about next but first Ashley tell us about your sauna studies why sauna why depression sure yes thanks Elissa um so I began down this journey of doing sauna research after reading some of these earlier papers that were published in 2013 and 2016 that found that just a single sauna session a long sauna session between 70 and 110 minutes getting people's core body temperatures up quite high to 101. 3 degrees actually exerted an antidepressant effect in depressed populations and this antidepressant effect lasted out to six weeks from one sauna session that is very exciting and intriguing

12: 00 particularly in the field of depression which is really hard to treat antidepressants work for many people but they also don't work for many other people psychotherapy works for lots of people but same deal not everybody can get to it and it doesn't work for everyone so I was particularly interested when I saw this literature coming out on whole body hyperthermia for the treatment of depression and started to walk down that road myself to see okay is this something that we can start to look at further uh because there hasn't been much research on this since for a whole host of reasons but one of the reasons that I was particularly interested in it is well saunas aren't that hard to get to if this is something that works maybe this is something that is easy to access for all kinds of folks so I started looking at well can I take a commercially available sauna that I can buy on the internet and actually replicate what these 2013 and 2016 studies did and so far at the osher center at ucsf we've done one study where we had 25 healthy people come in and do the same kind of sauna session and we found that lo and behold our device actually can mimic the medical device that was used in those other studies and in the next study which i was getting ready to do when kovet hit we will be actually recruiting patients with depression yeah that's it's extremely innovative and exciting that you're doing this ashley I think it's it's so interesting when you hear about things that people are using

13: 31 and have these amazing anecdotes but there's not the research to back it and so you know as researchers we're kind of forced to ignore that but you've been able to find funding and study this um what do you think about some of the mechanisms how could this be working so there's a lot of different ideas out there about how this might be working but one of the most interesting things to think about with this is that there's literature going back to the 1980s and potentially even earlier documenting that a number of people with depression have dysregulations in their thermoregulatory capacities in other words they are not people with depression sometimes are not as good at regulating their body temperature this might mean that their body temperature is actually white quite warm or hot and yet they're not able to sweat or do compensatory cooling by putting these folks in a hypothermia situation where we're forcing their body to engage in self-cooling we're turning on potentially some of these mechanisms that haven't been working and a key question is well okay if you're turning it on once in one sauna session how long does that last do we need more sauna sessions are folks with this kind of physiological depression in need of weekly sessions twice weekly once monthly we don't know the answers to these questions but what we're trying to do or what i'm going to be trying to do in this next study is actually measure people's body temperature before and after sauna sessions in an

15: 00 ambulatory fashion so using a wearable ring that they can wear before the sauna sessions after the sauna sessions and we can actually see if we are changing their actual body temperature by putting them in these sauna sessions and by changing i mean making cooler because what the 2013 paper that I talked about found was that the amount of decreased depression from before the sauna session to after the sauna session actually correlated with the decrease in core body temperature that those folks had from before the sauna session to after the sauna session so I'd say that that's a really exciting mechanism that I'm very very focused on in this research well we can't wait to hear what you find and we certainly need more treatments for depression that work so tell us about what happened your study was paused you've been using these biosensors for hypothermia and mood and what next and what has it been like to study cova to jump in and study detection of it tell us about your study yeah so I I remember this all too clearly but you know it was around a monday that I learned that okay research is probably going to be put on pause at UCSF including the studies that I was planning to do and at the same time I was thinking well this is interesting I'm using these rings that measure body temperature and at the time there was a lot of focus on the symptom of fever in covet and elevated body temperature and so my next thought was thinking well I wonder if these rings are going to

16: 33 actually pick up if someone's getting sick is it possible that this could actually be a device that may tell us if people are coming down with covin um I've been wearing one of these rings for quite a while because I'm a researcher and research is me search right you have to know the tools that you're working with and i'd noticed oscillations in my body temperature when I had a cold or when i'd been sick that my ring actually was detecting aberrations in my physiologic metrics so I thought well who's most likely to be at risk for getting sick and my first thought was the folks who work in the emergency department so somehow 48 hours later the UCSF IRB was working with me we were getting this approved to actually get these wearable sensors to folks who work in the emergency room nurses physicians phlebotomist you name it all the folks who work in in high-risk areas in the hospitals and um following from that we actually not only distributed these rings to health care workers we invited everybody who already had one of these rings in the country and in the world to opt into the study and so now this study actually has close to 45 000 people in it it's called tem predict and um it all happened in just a number of days that this got thrown together I have never worked this quickly in my life this kind of study normally would take months to plan and get approvals for

18: 00 and actually do but somehow this all happened so fast and UCSF has been incredible in getting all of the approvals and reviews and things done that we need to make this this research happen in a very exciting study we hope that you can predict onset of infection and symptoms it will be incredibly important in the fall and thank you for your hard work i know how hard you're working and for joining us and telling us both about your hermetic study and your covet study thanks for having me it is now my pleasure to introduce to you Wim Hof Wim you might have heard of Wim is an extremely popular uh teacher um an untraditional teacher about um the mind and the body and he has over a million followers he has many world records demonstrating how mind over body can promote um amazing feats and that's not what attracted me to understand what he's doing and his method so I want to tell you that I I as you know I've been searching for hermetic stressors to study

19: 30 and I was at a conference and after um I spoke I heard Wim Hof speak and unlike you know it's just like a stiff conference everyone's wearing suits but Wim Hof got up and is himself and he is an outdoor adventurer and explorer extreme athlete and he told his story and he led us through his part of his method which is a breathing method that we will all do together soon today and it was a extremely interesting mind-body experience and then i read the literature about it there have been seven published studies on the wim hof method and it is an in combination of exposure to cold cold showers or ice and to extreme breathing which causes very short-term hypoxia that you recover from and you feel the recovery you feel uh i'll just say my own stress threshold um which is pretty low what was much higher the days that i tried the wim hof breathing so that i felt um a type of kind of calmness placidity and even some elation so that was enough to lead me to convince some of my colleagues at ucsf like Wendy Mendez Aric Prather to do a really intense rigorous study of the wim hof method to see is this really promoting stress resilience when

21: 01 we promote stress resilience in one way such as fitness we're actually promoting what we call multiplex stress resistance that we become resistant to other stressors this has been shown in the you know the the worms and the flies and in people as well when we're physically fit we're more resilient psychological stress so we are conducting a study at ucsf we are at the toward the end of a large clinical trial in the method the trials on pause i won't be talking about that anymore today but i just want to tell you about um the the real picture of wim hof i just had the pleasure of reading um there's been a lot of documentaries on him and books written by other people he has written his own story um that i just had the opportunity to read that's not out yet and so it's not that wim hof is a um someone with superhuman capabilities and genetically different wim hof is actually brought his method that he's cultivated through his life to people in a very um easy to understand way and there's very little mystery about it and that's why i think it's so exciting he has described exactly how he has used his mind to to do these amazing feats so he's from the netherlands he's the dedicated father of five children he is as i said an untraditional teacher about nature the nature of mind-body connection he goes by the label of he's been labeled extreme athlete but i just want um to present the fuller picture

22: 34 he grew up in a typical family where academic performance was highly valued in his family and his community and he always felt different he felt an extreme passion and connection with nature so that's where he spent a lot of his time by 13 years old he became a vegetarian very unusual in his culture in his late teen years been spending a lot of time outside he explored the ice and he was drawn to it and he's been swimming in ice water for decades so he has gone through a lot of personal um adversities as most people have he has lost his wife to suicide and one of the ways he dealt with a psychological pain of loss and becoming a single father was exposure to ice and i talked about multiple stress resistance how that actually creates also some capacity for more psychological coping so um welcome wim thank you so much for joining us i think it would be great for people to first hear if you could give a brief summary of what are these world world records and what is a common underlying principle why do you have world records in very diverse areas thank you yes uh thank you for having me you did a great preparation and uh very bright

24: 01 thank you very very much so um what i've been doing uh i did a lot of records it is actually through television television is crazy when they find out there is a person who is able to do some strange feats within the extreme cold where and that has been carried the idea of the call is being carried as very hostile very dangerous very out there and uh yeah that that is aggressive and and a person like me i had developed my skills my physiology to be able to stay in the cult where people stay he's super human he this is not possible and he is doing it look at that and then television came in discovery channel national geographic bbc etc they began to challenge me can you run a full marathon beyond beyond the polar circle in your shorts here you climb mount everest in your shorts can you swim big distances under a big cap of ice in the mid winter can you hang by one finger in two kilometers or more than one mile up there in the in winter sky just by one finger and showing the dexterity

25: 32 and the super power we all got i could do all those challenges so i got uh to get 26 world records because television is crazy they always challenge you for more but there is a uh underlying idea it was my emotional loss that made me go into the ice water which is able to steal your mind you are only surviving you are there that that made me able to be myself a moment without the pain the the heart broken pain this this nagging grief inside my head i had to take care of four children alone that and and with very little money and left behind boom there it was deal with it and society goes as a train and if you cannot catch on you just left behind so i could not i always say the call my children made me survive and the cold water healed me and then after a lot of training therein i came across television did a lot of records and then i caught the attention of science of scientists the scientists came in and they saw me

27: 01 doing things physiologically are not possible by humans but i'm a human and i'm doing it so they asked me can you go into a laboratory setting and be subjected to cold physiological experiments and i said of course that's what i want that's my underlying idea my my mission is to show that we as humans are capable of so much more than what we think and then i went into this physiological experiment where they i stood for 80 minutes in ice and they were taking blood all the time for over one hour until the blood could not get through anymore because it was too cold but my skin or my core body temperature remained the same i had absolutely control within uh uh being exposed to this aggressive impact of ice water upon my skin for 80 minutes and then they took that blood to a uh ex vivo to a laboratory and they exposed it to a endotoxemia in e coli bacteria and that normally makes a very aggressive reaction on the immune

28: 32 cells in the blood serum in my blood serum there was zero reaction and that is part of our capacity to have blood within us so enriched so on that uh bacteria and i say virus or inflammatory markers have no chance and of course this is the bold uh exclamation saying we can beat disease but later i sh i said to the doctors listen i'm not an anomaly i'm not the exception on the rule confirming the rule i will show you give me a group of people and i will take them in four days into a training and they will show all that means hundred percent score after thousands who could not 100 percent score within 12 people uh to show that we are able to tap into the autonomic nervous system into the innate immune system deeply effectively being injected with the bacteria and inoculated within a quarter of an hour and you all are doctors and physicians and nurses and you understand what i say that to me is part of my mission

30: 03 to bring a new perspective for our medical science and it's most necessary now and for that i thank you alyssa that you brought me up here thank you so much for telling us many people who otherwise wouldn't know about this method so there is a pilot study that wim just described published in pnas where um healthy young men were trained for four days and all so wim was injected with endotoxin and he showed less pro-inflammatory response than other people in the exact same protocol so then the question was can you train people to do this he trained um 10 10 healthy men to do ice exposure in the breathing over four days they also had the same response that wim did which was a less pro-inflammatory response to endotoxin now what this is method is doing to the immune system uh is potentially very interesting and i will just say that as i said with ashley when something is popular and you hear anecdotes it doesn't mean doesn't take it anywhere um to the mainstream world to the medical establishment to treatments where there's reimbursement etc and so whim has focused much of his energy on collaborating with researchers to say what is going on please examine this he has um you know i'll just say in hundreds of thousands of numbers of

31: 34 people practicing this and also reporting back anecdotes of being um helped so much from pro-inflammatory diseases the endotoxin study has been replicated in a large sample that's a publication that will come out soon from the raboud university in amsterdam there a small study on uh ancilling spondylitis was just published it was just a pilot study but it also showed that practicing the method reduced the symptoms and the crp the inflammation so these are all promising clues there's something happening here i just heard from my own sister-in - law who's had um you know adult eczema most of her life that she has found tremendous help from the method so again these are anecdotes but you need we need to be looking at this more carefully using hormetic stress in these ways tell us what's happening when uh we're going to move to the breathing next so tell us about um how are we changing the s you know the alkalinity of our blood when we do this hypoxic breathing tell us what briefly what's happening what we do with this 30 deep breaths is blowing off the carbon dioxide with that the alkalinity in the blood will spike up and with the spiking up it will uh be a you will the person will be able to

33: 03 not breathe even after exhalation and hold so retention after exhalation one minute two minutes three minutes that is in consecutive hours so we begin a very soon we will experience it because it is it's astounding it's amazing what you feel and then later we can uh dive more into the techniques and into the study and into the science what happens is the alkalinity in the blood spikes so much uh that the adrenal axis is being activated and that resets the body it all that is stress related it's like oxidative stress inflammation it beats it and it brings it down through this deep breathing bringing up the alkalinity then going into the uh into a retention for one minute two minutes three minutes without force and the body is alkaline so there is no bad chemistry going on you feel nice you feel great while the oxygen level is going to drop it's going to drop after one half minute

34: 31 so much that the brain brainstem is the reptilian brain the primordial the reactionary part of our brain which is related to the opioids and the cannabinoids it's the deepest of our systems of survival the fight and flight that uh when the uh oxygen saturation drops the adrenal axis is being spiked and then the uh the deepest part of our brain robustly is activated and with that the immune system is being uplifted boom bacteria virus inflammation out of it what was so interesting in the pnes study when they repeatedly looked at the blood changes was that the you know okay so the breathing method is basically a short hyperventilation you could do you could huff and puff and get a real hyperventilation where you really feel it and then you do some breath retention for as long as this is comfortable one minute two minutes um and so you're getting rid of some co2 you are it showed that there was an increase in the ph of the blood with this spike in epineph this natural spike in the stress response the spike in epinephrine that we get from hypoxia one of the most core stressors i can't breathe my body's mobilizing a big stress response the higher the epinephrine the better the inflammatory response

36: 04 later to endotoxin the higher the anti-inflammatory response the il-10 and the lower the il-6 so very interesting findings we we want to you know keep looking at again and again is how are we changing uh pro-inflammatory response both basal and to stressors and we do you know it does look like the acute stress response is part of the driver of this cleanup of cells the the response to cold having some cold at the end of your showers is another way to both condition the cardiovascular system supposedly increases norepinephrine i'm someone who's always cold when i get out of a cold shower i'm actually warm for once because we're invoking the natural counter regulatory response so when why don't you lead us through some breathing and i'll just say that um this is going to probably take about uh 10 or 15 minutes and only do this if you're comfortable with it you don't push yourself beyond what feels natural to you when will lead you through it please yes uh good uh feeling is understanding guys all your dogs a lot of in the mind or uh prejudice go and just feel the breathing it's really amazing what you're gonna feel it's your physiology and find out by feeling and then find out what's

37: 34 really happening good okay let's go as are you relaxed a relaxed body is able to store up uh oxygen better so relax please as you are relaxed we have a belly and a chest breathing belly and chest breathing means the full lungs we will fall fill up the lungs for full so fully in letting go not fully out but fully in letting go belly chest letting go fully in letting go we are blowing off carbon dioxide fully in letting go becoming a little bit light-headed look it's all logical and letting go just keep on going have your mind just fully in letting go don't go anywhere where with your mind just with the breath very simple and letting go fully in and letting go pull in letting go let your mind go your thoughts go just

39: 06 take a moment with this breathing technique has shown itself through signs now it's coming to you because i think this is of great help to beat anxiety and inflammation just find out feeling is understanding fully in letting go only takes 10 minutes the total then you can make up your mind but before fooling letting go these are the techniques i've been using very simple accessible very effective techniques in all my world records and they work for people with performance and with chronic diseases it does great things and people with panic attacks no longer panic attacks it's amazing what it does so simple pull in and letting go last 10 breaths fully in letting go lightheadedness tingling just all what is different breathe into it it's all charging up the body we've got

40: 30 to do a great thing after six breaths counting down and six and fully in whatever is different breathe intensify it's it's all good no worries it's gonna be great and two more and two and one fully letting go here comes the last one pull let it go and after the exhalation stop close your mouth no smuggling just be no need for breathing you are very alkaline the trigging trigger for breathing is gone that's the carbon dioxide trigger it's gone we are manipulating our brain to go into the depth into the brainstem fight and flight because you are not breathing after the exhalation you are in full stress yet without force you feel no stress you are okay and this is the way to trigger the deep systems of the

42: 03 hypothalamus the immune cells the adrenal axis all these deep systems so simple so effective automatic stress right on okay five four three two one fully in and hold hold to breath and squeeze it to your head to bring blood flow cerebral spinal fluid to your head to your midbrain three two one let it go now we go into round number two in round number two we will go between 90 to two minutes 90 seconds two minutes without air in the lungs that is hormone stress to the best here we go pull in let it go give yourself a chance to find out what this is all about letting go fully in letting go all the tissue the deep tissue the lymphatic system is open to receive all the oxygen inside we are going deeper in our physiology

43: 35 than ever before thought possible fully in letting go fully in let it go fully in letting go tingling light-headedness it does not matter it's all good letting go fully and keep on going letting go fully in letting go fully let it go fully in letting go fully in just follow the breath no minding no thoughts just give yourself a chance to go very deep into our physiology into the autonomic nervous system thought of by science impossible by humans to access into and now we are doing it you are doing it we all are doing this and this relates directly to a control over the immune system response last step fully in letting go fully letting up whatever you feel sense is different breathe into that it's good you are the

45: 03 alchemist pull it in let it go in letting go five more pull in letting go four fully let it go three feeling letting go two pull in let it go why here comes the last one fully in letting go and stop after the exhalation stop close your mouth be witness you feel a rush you can sense a rush and even hear a tone that's the neurology of your brain we change the chemistry inside deeply and in doing so without force we are able to extend this state of our physiology which is affecting the chemistry deeply inside of the blood now the saturation of oxygen is dropping drastically inside of the blood while we are alkaline so the carbon

46: 31 dioxide trigger is not there that communicates with the depth of the brainstem the fight and flight right there's no breath no oxygen adrenaline adrenaline while you are relaxed and you are fighting off danger and what is dangerous bacteria emotional stress viral stress any stress is danger and it is fighting up right now because the adrenal axis is being deeply activated it resets the body while you are in control fully in control this should be investigated in size in science to make this global a global exercise for everybody to bring down stress to bring down whatever is danger to bring our down inflammation of any kind okay there we are thank you so much four three two one fully it hold it squeeze it a little to your head

48: 03 three two one let it go okay now relax nice you can take over alyssa i think the people get it because people have feelings yes and that is stronger than any thought so i couldn't yes thank you so much i could have just referred you to his website he is um he has a free program for anyone who wants to try it he has in-depth programs as well and really you know we didn't we there's so much to talk about of interest about hermetic stress and the hypoxia and the cold but we wanted you to be able to try it now um you there's a range of ways to do this you can really huff and puff and get a lot of hyperventilation symptoms and then hold as long as you can and that is um what i think we all started off with with his method because that's what he's done to be able to withstand ice for hours for example that's the way he's he's heated his body he has used control over the autonomic nervous system the nervous system that we supposedly can't manipulate so uh there's also gentler ways of breathing doing the long deep breathing and then breath retention it's a more gentle way

49: 30 that's what is being um used a bit more for depression and all of this is just um it's about self-experimentation and good rigorous research so if you um if you want to try it you don't have to use ice you can use the cold showers um it is why would people do this because our body loves short-term acute stress because it kicks it into a recovery mode that our evolution is used to we're used to acute stressors we're not used to being in a heated room relaxing the whole time having you know an abundance of calories etc so the you know acute stressor recovery stress relaxation this is what our body loves so we need both we need mindfulness we need yoga we need ways to reduce our physiological arousal as well as these healthy ways to be increasing it in a way that's manageable and controllable so that is my hormetic stress lecture that's a very grand um let's just say high level but the biology of hormesis is fascinating we hope to discover a lot about it when you are so brave and so um passionate about bringing this to people it's fascinating what's happening in the world with this there is for example a group of people with traumatic brain injury they're paralyzed they cannot exercise their cardiovascular system could be uh you know melting away with weakness but they're now starting to use the

51: 00 method to feel invigorated and keep conditioning there's a group of elderly people including people in their 90s who are using this method who again can't go do a hit class but they can do this to be invigorating their system so there's a lot of possibilities it's very interesting fascinating thank you for being a pioneer and my last question to you will just be um since you have um from your view whim you have uh you've talked to many many people in many different countries about the method i don't know what it's like for you hearing so many amazing anecdotes um i know that you are bursting with love and passion and energy to bring this to medical care so just you know tell us what your aspirational vision is how do you see this helping and being implemented yes um so i was able to tap into the uh so-called autonomic nervous system considered to be impossible by science and then i showed a group to be able to do uh likewise that means it it's not me it's not about me it's about something i found and it is good and where i found it there is a lot more and it is for everybody accessible and i'm just pointing out guys look in yourself the placebo right now according for example to professor music in detroit uh university

52: 30 wayne state a whim has found a secret of placebo the the placebo now is no longer an abstract power of our mind no it can be used and i showed that in brain scans we are going into a new era wherein we have so much more control over our mood towards disease and our happiness and strength and health and those are related to the immune system the hormonal system and the energy metabolic processes in the cell and we have shown this already in the universities hospitals by data and now i want to bring it out all to the world so i asked any scientist prove me wrong because it's not about me it's about something i found and it works for millions of people who are practicing the method and these are not just believers these are also professors a lot of professors doctors but also carpenters uh electricians engineers and people from all walks of life grounded people but having no soul lace in their existence and medical care and they cut they see this they take it on and it helps and i don't say i'm not

54: 00 anti-medical care i just we need to supplement it with the power of what people already have and it needs to be awakened that together is going to be the future and it looks bright so much i i should also say a few things that i didn't get to say about the hermetic process um what we know about aging is that we don't have a pill and we may never have a pill to slow biological aging but the things that really work so far are in a sense working through similar pathways caloric restriction is a stressor um or fasting mimicking diets they are causing uh stress pathways to rejuvenation of stem cells that is walt walter longo's work at usc so we're not just talking about relaxation and restoration we are talking about rejuvenation and so that we can slow aging or maybe even in the case of these animals where they're regenerating some of their organs it is reversing and so we don't have drugs that can do this we have so many chronic medical conditions that plague our society like depression and immune conditions pro-inflammatory and autoimmune conditions these are not easily solved by the pharmaceutical company and so we i'm just so excited about the

55: 32 possibility of really exploring our inherent rejuvenation abilities um i am you know i just wanted to mention the mindset lastly which is that what whim has shown us in his latest book and in your classes is that there is nothing guru like there's no magic formula why can wim hof stay in a bucket of ice for two hours without permanently um burning his kidneys for example what he's doing is activating the autonomic nervous system keeping his temperature high these are studies monks have done this 30 years ago there's studies in for example science showing that we can increase our autonomic nervous system through breathing techniques so this is um something humans can do we can do this with these bodies it's amazing the mindset is belief intention and also relaxation which is still a mind-boggling because real we don't relax when we're in the middle of stress right but you're training us in the middle of a cold shower to stop that automatic gasping that our body has and to breathe slowly and so it's this very interesting you know dialectical experience of in the middle of stress having a clear peaceful mind i am fascinating with the retention i you know i will hyperventilate and get that over with so that i can have the

57: 00 retention period minutes of silence of stillness of watching the mind it's a very interesting experience um so thank you for leading the way and for your dedication and hard work and for those of you who this sounds terrible to don't try it there's a lot of you know other ways out there i just feel it's so important for us to know about natural ways to invoke our hermetic stress response so i'm so grateful to you and to all my colleagues who are studying this and i mean all the discoveries that um potential discoveries that could be made with this and this is where nia is moving as well now um i'll just end with the usual place with our webinar which is thank you to all of you healthcare workers this is a turning into a long marathon and we just need all the help we can get we have been really busy putting our minio videos on our website so if you go to the ucsf department of psychiatry you will find new resources something for everyone we also have the resources for finding wim hof's courses on our website now so on the webinar page you will see hit the pnes study you will see the mini the free mini course and so stay tuned and we really look forward to seeing you all next week when we will um talk with him jimpa about compassion and healthcare thank you you