#184 Adapting to Stress Through Touch with Dr Dave Rabin

Dave Rabin (0:00)

And the body senses these frequencies from like soothing music or soothing touch from a loved one, like a hug, or someone holding your hand on a bad day, and automatically almost instantaneously sends safety signals to the brain that says, if I'm safe enough, if I have the time to pay attention to somebody holding my hand, then right now, then I can't possibly be running from a lion right now, because if I was running from a lion right now, I wouldn't have the time to intentionally pay attention to somebody holding my hand, right? How good that feels, or the feeling, and that's the same for breath, right?

If I have time to pay attention to the feeling of air coming into my lung, into my nose, and down my throat, and into my lungs, then I am clearly not running from a lion right now, and I can, and that's a subconscious signal that almost immediately helps facilitate a calming down of the body, and a boost in parasympathetic tone, which is reflected in heart rate variability.

SPEAKER_2 (0:57)

Do you want to know what it is?

Siim Land (1:01)

Body Mind Empowerment.

SPEAKER_2 (1:03)

Get stronger, faster, smarter, quicker, friendlier, more helpful, more driven.

Siim Land (1:08)

Everything the body needs.

SPEAKER_2 (1:10)

Control your mind.

Siim Land (1:14)

Welcome to the Body Mind Empowerment Podcast. I'm a host Siim Land, and our guest today is Dr. Dave Rabin.

Dave has a PhD in neuroscience and an MD in medicine. He's a board certified psychiatrist, and neuroscientist who has studied resilience and impacted chronic stress on humans for over 15 years.

Dave is also one of the co-founders of Apollo Neuro, which is the world's first adaptogenic wearable device. It's basically a wrist strap that generates vibrations and rhythmic waves that resemble physical touch. They will then allow your body to feel safe and relaxed. If you wanna try it out, then head over to apolloneuro.com forward slash siimland for a 15% discount. That's A-P-O-L-L-O, neuro.com forward slash siimland. Dr. Rabin, welcome to the show.

Dave Rabin (2:04)

Thank you so much for having me, Siim. It's a pleasure to be here.

Siim Land (2:06)

Yeah, we met at the London Health Optimization Summit and you shared some really interesting ideas about consciousness and the neuroscience. So I'm happy to talk with you on the podcast.

Dave Rabin (2:21)

Yeah, it's great to be able to share this knowledge with the world and also to be able to combine it with a lot of the things that you talk about on your podcast, which I think are very helpful to our communities in terms of improving health. So it's a pleasure to be here and I appreciate you having me.

Siim Land (2:38)

Yeah, certainly. So how did you become interested in consciousness and neuroscience?

I think that's not something that a lot of kids or people are interested in.

Dave Rabin (2:49)

Yeah, that's a good question. I think for me, I think it all started when I was a very young child, maybe in my, I don't know, as far back as I can remember was probably like somewhere between like three and five years old. I was having, I remember having dreams that were very, very real or seemed very real. And they were very real to me. And I would, sometimes they were scary in the form of nightmares, but other times they were, you know, positive and or just neutral, like conversations with people in my regular life. And I would, you know, be in my regular reality and I would reference something in a dream and the person or people I was around would say, oh, what are you talking about?

And I would be like, oh, you know, I have this sudden realization like, oh, wait, maybe that didn't happen in this reality. Maybe that was something that happened in my dream, but it was so real to me that it was confusing that I was having these experiences that were, it was hard for me to distinguish the boundary between dream and reality. And so I started asking people and I was very fortunate to grow up with two parents who were Western trained physicians and very loving and really tried to explain these kinds of phenomena to me as a kid, but I kept getting different answers from everyone, but the general conclusion was, these are just dreams, they're not real.

And I think that didn't really sit very well with me because over time I kept having these experiences and what I realized was that they were very real to me and that they felt real to me. And so what the world around me was defining as real may not be the whole story.