Enhance Your Physical & Mental Resilience (HRV, Respiratory Rate, RHR)

**Andy Galpin** (0:00)
The science and practice of enhancing human performance for sport, play, and life. Welcome to Perform. I'm Dr. Andy Galpin. I'm a professor and scientist and the executive director of the Human Performance Center at Parker University. And today we're going to be talking about how to control your nervous system. My favorite example of this actually comes from a TV show. Many of you probably remember the show The Office, at least the American version. And I'll never forget one of the classic scenes, one of the characters, Dwight Schrute, was telling and bragging actually about how he had superior genes, and he was able to, at his own will, raise his blood cholesterol levels. And of course, the bewildered friends of his asked him, why would you even want to do that? And his response in classic Dwight fashion was, so that he could lower his cholesterol. That had made me laugh, and I've never stopped laughing at that. And it highlights one example, albeit, admittedly, not sure why you would want to do that, or if that's real or not. But it highlights the point of, how can we actually have control over aspects of our physiology that most people think we can't? Maybe we have some control, but it's subconscious or otherwise. And that's what I'm referring to when I say control your nervous system. There is actually a bunch of science behind this. Probably the most famous initial scientifically documented experiment came in 1970 There was a famous gentleman, I think his name is Swami Rama. I hope I pronounced that appropriately. But Swami was able to do a host of feats that still baffle most of us. What eventually happened was he sat in a room with a handful of scientists, and they placed what are called ECGs to measure electrical conductivity of his heart, as well as EEGs to measure directly into his brain. And he performed again this whole host of insane physiological feats without moving. Now that part's critical, right? So when he did things like take his resting heart rate from 70 beats per minute to reportedly 300 beats per minute, and he held that for several seconds and then brought it back down, he did that not by running sprints up a hill or anything, but by just simply sitting there and having the conscious ability to control that aspect of his physiology. Another really impressive thing Swami was able to do was actually shock the scientific team. They thought he was in cardiac arrest because his ECG stopped working. And what happened was he was able to bring his heart rate below 20 beats per minute at the same time, give himself what's called AFib. And so the machine itself thought his heart had been stopped for like 20 seconds. I guess he signaled that, you know, I'm fine, I'm OK here. And then eventually brought it back up. Arguably more impressive was some of the stuff he was able to do with his physical temperature. So they had him on the same hand change the temperature by, I think, like six degrees Celsius in his same hand, again, only inches away. And so clearly demonstrating some, not only control of his whole body temperature, but extreme precision of where that temperature was going and where it was not. But nonetheless, that was documented and published. And again, to this day is probably one of the more famous cases of such incredible control of one's, what's supposed to be, autonomic physiology. A decade later, and I'm going to highlight this one as well, I think it was 1982 actually, a similar thing was done in a more extensive group. And so what actually happened here was a paper was published in Nature. Now, that's one of the most blue ribbon highest esteemed journals in all of science and physiology. And so, preeminent journal, it was published, and they looked at a bunch of Tibetan monks that lived in the Himalayas, studying and utilizing a practice that's called TUMO, T-U-M-M-O. And they were able to do a bunch of similar things that Rami was able to do. I won't draw them out, but temperature controls, raising their body temperatures by like eight degrees consciously without moving. In fact, one of the things that they did was them, they put wet sheets on top of them and put them in very cold, if not sub-zero conditions. And these individuals were able to not only stay neutral with temperature, stay neutral with their heart rate, but they were also able to physically dry the sheets within like 30 to 60 minutes. And so, you can go on and on, you can probably find many other case studies like this, and again, thousands of anecdotes and other stories throughout history. But I think one thing that I'm trying to highlight here that is inarguable. There is clearly the ability to run control over your physiology if you really take the time and attention. Is it tummo? Is it visualization? Well, probably, realistically, we've got tons of different options. And so, what I'd like to do today is talk about just a few of them. What do we know? What does it mean to control your nervous system? What can we do? What can't we do? And then what are a bunch of tactics and strategies so that you can have a more resilient nervous system? To start us off, I want to make sure we're all on the same page when I say nervous system. The easiest way to conceptualize it is think about it in two large branches. The first is what's called the central nervous system. This is your brain and brain stem and spinal cord. And the second is what's called your peripheral nervous system. So this is everything else that goes out and comes back to the central nervous system. Now focusing on the peripheral nervous system, that's where most of the action happens. In this case, the peripheral nervous system is broken up into a couple of other categories, one being what's called the somatic system. This is what you can actively control. We're not going to talk about that much today. It's stuff you already know you have control over. What I want to focus more on is the other branch, and that's what's called the autonomic nervous system, the ANS.