Talking With Experts About Wim Hof Breathing & Hormetic Stress

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 mine site Institute

Welcome to the six webcasts of our series titled

emotional well-being

during a kovat nineteen crisis for health care providers

This week's topic is making stress work for you

resset 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

After dr. Actually 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

Hermetic stress this is a word we should all know because we need to harness stress for good

You

Okay, so my first question is can you see my screen

Yes, I do

Okay

So it's always funny to see a different thing then other people are seeing I am showing you

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 are tend to be somewhere between

peak impact and looking toward recovery over the hump and

Some of us we are

Getting toward thinking about a honeymoon, of course community cohesion means we want to we need to be together physically

and at that time we can really kind of

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 kovat in the fall

so bottom line is

still an uncertainty

we cannot control the

course of events

Individually, but we can 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 our

Department has created of short video library of shorts on

Psychological strategies, I suggest you look at that on our Department of Psychiatry webpage

Today we are talking about not how the mind changes the body

Ness

Solely, but how the body changes the mind how we can use bio behavioral strategies to actually promote stress

resistance and stress resilience

Jokes thank you for sending me jokes some were funny and crude could 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

Here's an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, I apologize for the grainy version

This was this is what's on the web use of commercial

disinfectants to treat novel kovat

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 up the hood and they find who the villain is the culprit

It's just the climax and 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 Charmin bear. Oh

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

Alright 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

You might have had a group chat on zoom' that looked like this or maybe it was more like the Brady Bunch

Okay, so it's very easy and I am done this a lot my mind have you know said this to young people this is just

a pause

There's a break. We're in 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 stroke 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 aged over the four eight years in an accelerated way and here you see

Beginning residency and ending residency a bit of accelerated aging we need to change that system

Okay, so I have

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

hormetic stress which is

harnessing our natural ability to

Actually become stronger, so you've heard the phrase

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

I am writing this paper

As you can see NIH National Institute of Aging is very interested in

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 I

Know I'm not alone, but I can tell you the bottom line. This is 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 this has been called many things in the immune literature

stress inoculation

Preconditioning biological shields. It's like a vaccination response

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

Organisms like UV but what can we do for humans? What do we know of that promotes a

Short-term acute stress response that then promotes this recovery and housecleaning in ourselves. So this is a

Table that shows different things different types of hormetic stressors for exercise. For example, that's the one we all

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 to sell your level how it cleans up cells. It turns on a toff. Adji. It increases our mitochondrial health

what I'm 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 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

Our current moment. I'm so pleased to introduce to you today. Dr. Ashley Mason

UCSF she's an assistant professor at the Osher Center and

Ashley is going to talk to us about some of her recent studies using hermetic stress using

Hyperthermia now, I've brought to you frontline for medical providers Ashley's also a frontline

Researcher she's also doing a kovat study that she'll tell us about next but first Ashley tell us about your sauna studies

Why sauna why depression?

Sure. Yes. Thanks, Alyssa

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 100 and 1.3 degrees actually

Exerted an antidepressant effect in depressed populations in this antidepressant effect lasted out to six weeks from one sauna session

That is very exciting and intriguing 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?

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 with these

2013 and 2016 studies did and so far at the ocean 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 low 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 coalbed 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 and have these amazing anecdotes

But there's not the research to back it

and so

You know as researchers were kind of forced to ignore that but you've been able to find funding and study this

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 dis regulations in their thermo regulatory

Capacities in other words, they're not people with depression. Sometimes are not as good at regulating their body temperature

this might mean that their body temperature is actually

Quite quite warm or hot and yet they're not able to sweat or do compensatory cooling

by putting these folks in a hyperthermia situation where we're forcing their body to

Engage in self cooling or turning on potentially some of these mechanisms that haven't been working and a key question as well

Okay, if you're turning it on once and once on a 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 ambulatory fashion

So using a wearable ring that they can wear

Before the sauna sessions after the sauna sessions and the calculus C's we are changing their actual body temperature by putting them

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 Solano session to after the sauna session

Actually correlated with the decrease in core body temperature that those folks had from before the sauna session 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 in 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. Okay. Tell us about your study

Yeah, so I I remember this all too clearly, but you know

it was it was over on 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 his symptom of fever in covent an elevated body temperature and

So my next thought was thinking well, hmm

I wonder if these rings are going to actually pick up if someone's getting sick

Isn't it possible that this could actually be a device that may tell us if people are coming down with Kovan?

I've been wearing one of these rings for quite a while because I'm a researcher and researchers knee searched, right?

You have to know the tools that you're working with and I've 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 felt welcome 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

Following from that. We actually not only distributed these rings to healthcare 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 the study actually has close to

45,000 people in it. It's called ten predict and

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 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 and then 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 Kovach 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 teacher

An untraditional teacher about

the mind and the body and

She has over a million followers. He has many world records demonstrating how mind over body can promote?

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

as you know, I've been searching for hermetic stressors to study and I was at a conference and

after I spoke I heard wim hof speak and

unlike, you know, it's just like a stiff conference in France wearing suits, but when HOF got up and is himself and

He is an outdoor

adventurer and Explorer and extreme athlete and he told his story and he led us through his part of his method which is of 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 a very short term

hypoxia that you recover from and you feel the recovery you feel

I'll just say my own stress threshold

Which is pretty low what was much higher the days that I tried the wim HOF breathing so that I felt

a

type of kind of calmness placidity and even simulation so that was enough to

Lead me to convince some of my colleagues at UCSF like Wendy Mendez Erich Raeder to do a really intense

rigorous study of the wim HOF method

To see is this really promoting stress resilience when we promote stress resilience in one way such as fitness

We actually promote in what we call multiplex

Stress resistance that we become resistant to other stressors

This has been shown in the you know

The the the worms and the Flies and in people as well when we're physically fit were more resilient psychological stress

So we are conducting a study UCSF

We are at the toward the end of a large clinical trial and the method the trials on pause

I won't be talking about that any more today

But I just want to tell you about

The the real picture of wim HOF. I just had the pleasure of reading

There's been a lot of documentaries on him and books written by other people

He has written his own story that I just had the opportunity to read. That's not out yet

and so it's not that wim HOF is a

Someone with superhuman capabilities and genetically difference

no, wim hof is actually brought his method that he's cultivated through his life two people in a very

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 is used as mine 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

to present the fuller picture he grew up in a

typical family

Where academic performance was highly valued in his family in 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 thirteen years old

He became a vegetarian

Very unusual in his culture

In his late teens in 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

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 multiplied stress resistance how that actually

Creates also some capacity for it's more psychological coping

so

Welcome Wynn. 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 what is a common underlying principle?

Why do you have World Records in very diverse areas? Thank you. Yes

Thank you for having me

You did a great preparation and very bright. Thank you, very

much so

What I've been doing

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 and some strange feeds within the extreme cold

where

and that is being carried their idea of the coal is being carried us very hostile very

dangerous very out there and

Yeah that is aggressive and and a person like me I had developed

My skills my physiology to be able to stay in in the cold

where people stay

He's superhuman

He this is not possible and he is doing it look at that and that television came in

Discovery Channel National Geographic

BBC etc. They began to challenge me. Can you run a full marathon?

Beyond the Polar Circle in your shorts here you climb Mount Everest in your shorts

Here you swim big distances under a big cap of ice

in the mid winter kay

yang by one finger in

Two kilometers or more than one mile up there in the inner in winter

sky it just by one finger is showing the dexterity and the

Superpower y'all got I could do all those challenges

So I got to get

26 World Records because television is crazy. They always challenge you for more more more, but there is a

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 your you are there that that made me able to

be myself a moment without a pain the

heartbroken pain

This this nagging grief

inside my hat I had to take care of four children alone that and with very little money and

Left behind boom there. It was deal with it and society ghost 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 in the cold water

healed me and then

after a lot of training there in I

came across television did a lot of records and that I caught the attention of science of

scientists the

Scientists came in and they saw me doing things

Physiologically are not possible by humans, but I'm 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 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 eyes and and they were taking

blood all the time for

Over 1 hour until the blood could not get through anymore because it was too cold

But my skin or by core body temperature remained the same I had

absolutely control within

being exposed to this aggressive

impact of ice water upon my skin for 80

minutes and then they took that blood to a

ex-vivo to a laboratory and they exposed it to a

endotoxemia in e.coli bacteria, and that normally makes a very

Of reaction on the immune cells in their 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

Bacteria, and I say virus or flama. Tory markers have no chance

And of course, this is the bold

exclamation saying we can beat disease but

Later, as I said to their doctors. Listen, I'm not an anomaly

I'm not 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

hundred percent score within twelve people

To show that we are able to tap into the electronic 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

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

Thank you so much for telling us many people who otherwise wouldn't know about this method

So there is a pilot study that wind just described it published in PNAS

where

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 then the question was can you train people to do this? He trained?

1010 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

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

To the mainstream world to the medical establishment to treatments where there's reimbursement, etc

And so wim has focused much of his energy on

collaborating with researchers to say what is going on, please examine this he has

You know

I'll just say in the hundreds of thousands of numbers of people practicing this and also reporting back anecdotes of being

Held 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 rabid University in Amsterdam. They're a small study on

Angling 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?

You know adult eczema most of her life that she has found tremendous health from the method

So again, these are anecdotes

But unique we need to be looking at this more carefully using hormetic stress in these ways women

Tell us what's happening when?

we're going to move to the breathing next so tell us about

how are we changing the 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 thirty 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

Be you will the person will be able to not breathe even after

exhalation and halt

so retention after exhalation

One minute two minutes three minutes

That is in consecutive

hours

So we begin

soon we will experience it because it's it's

astounding it's amazing what you feel and then later we can dive more into the techniques and

into the study and into the sides

What happens is the alkalinity in the blood spikes so much

that the adrenal axis as being activated and that

Resets the body it all that is

Stress-related is like oxidative stress

Inflammation it beats it and it brings it down

through this deep breathing bringing up the alkalinity then going into the

Into any retention for one minute two minutes three minutes

without force

Without force and the body is alkaline

So there is no bad chemistry going on you feel knives

You feel great while the oxygen level is going to drop

It's going to drop after one 1/2 minute

so much that the brain stem is

the reptilian brain the primordial the

reactionary part of our brain which is related to the

opiates the opioids and the cannabinoids it's the deepest of our

systems of

survival the fight and flight

That are when the oxygen saturation drops

the adrenal axis is being spiked and then the

the deepest part of our brain

Robustly is activated. And with that the mewn system is being uplifted. Boom

Bacterial virus inflammation out of it. What was so interesting in the PNAS 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

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 epinet this natural spike in the stress response the spike and 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 later to endotoxin the higher the anti inflammatory response the il-10 in the lower the il-6 so they're very

Interesting findings, we want to you know, keep looking at again. And again is how are we changing?

Pro-inflammatory response both basil and two 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 that 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?

this is

going to probably take about

Ten or fifteen 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

a good

Feeling is understanding guys

All your dogs a lot of in demand laura

prejudiced go and

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 will soon be happily good

Hey, let's go

As are you relaxed your relaxed body is able to store up

Oxygen better. So relaxed nice as you are relaxed. We ever Bali and

chest breathing

Bali and chest breathing means to full lungs we will fall a lot fill up the lungs for full so

fully in

Letting go not fully out but fully in

Letting go

Bali chest

Letting go

Fully in

Letting go we are blowing off carbon dioxide fully in

Letting go

Becoming a little bit lightheaded. Look, it's all logical

Letting go just keep on going. Have you mind just

foolin

laughs bingo

Don't go anywhere with your mind just with the breath

very simple letting go

boolean and letting you know

Boolean

letting go

Let your mind go your thoughts go

Just take a moment with this breathing technique

They're showing 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

boolean

Letting go only takes 10 minutes the total

then you can make up your mind but before

Let it go

Let it go

These are the techniques I've been using very simple

accessible very effective techniques

in all my world records and they work 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 boolean

and letting go

last 10 breaths foolin

Letting go lightheadedness

Tingling just all what is different breathe into it. It's all charging up the body

We're gonna do a great thing

after six breaths

Counting down and six

and fullier

Whatever is different breathe

Intensify, it's it's all good. No worries. It's going to be great and

two more

Two and

One fool it letting over here comes the last one Fuli in

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 going on that's the carbon dioxide trigger

It's gone

We are

manipulating our brain to go into the depth

Into the brainstem. Did it 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

Hypothalamus the immune cells. There are Drina Laxus all these deep systems

so simple so effective for

matic stress right on okay, five four three

Two one

Boolean

And hope

Hold the breath and squeeze it to your head to bring blood flow

cerebrospinal fluid to your head to your midbrain

3

2

1 let it go. Now we go into round number 2 in round number 2

We will go between 92 2 minutes 90 seconds 2 minutes

Without air in the lungs that is hormetic stress to the best. Here we go full lid

Let it go

Give yourself a chance to find out what this is all about

Let it go

through lien

letting go

Fuli

Let it go all the tissue the deep tissue the lymphatic tear system is open

To receive all the oxygen

Inside we are going deeper in our physiology than ever before thought possible

fool in

Let it go

fool in

Letting go fool

Let it go

tingling

Lightheadedness, it does not matter is all good

letting go

fully and keep on going letting go

Fuli

Letting go

fully

Let it go

fully a

Let it go

Fool, yes

Just follow the breath. No mind ain't no thoughts

just give yourself a chance to go very deep into our

physiology

into the autonomic nervous system

thought off by stands

Impossible by humans to access into and now we are doing us

You are doing it. We all are doing this and this relates directly to a control the immune

system responds

last time Julio

Let it go

Fuli

Larry go whatever you feel. Sam's is different breathe into that

It's good. You are you Alchemist?

foolin

Let it go

Will ya?

Let it go

For ya

Let it go five more

Fuli

letting go for

Louie

Let it go three

wheel in

Let it go - whoo. Yeah

Let it go why it comes the last one

foolin

Let it go and stop off to 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 dioxide trigger is not there

That communicates with the depth of the brainstem the fight and flight

Hey, there's no breath. There's no breath. No oxygen at regulating 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

- resets the body while you are in control fully in control

They 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 us down

inflammation of

any kind

Okay, there we are

Thank you so much four three two

one full yet

Hold it

Squeeze it a little to your head

Three two one let it go. Okay now relax

Nice you can take over Alisa. I think the people get it

Because people have feelings

Yes, and that is stronger than any thought

So I could yes, thank you so much. Wim I could have just referred you to his website he is

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 hormetic stress and the hypoxia and the cold

But we wanted you to be able to try it now

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

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

There's also gentler ways of breathing of doing the long deep breathing and then breath retention. It's a more gentle way

that's what is being used a bit more for depression and all of this is just

It's about self experimentation and good rigorous research. So if you

If you want to try it, you don't have to use ice you can use the cold showers

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 were 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 stress relaxation

This is what our body loves so we need both we need mindfulness

we need know about 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. It's a very grand

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

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 you know melting away with weakness

But they're now starting to use the method to feel invigorated and keep conditioning

There's a group of elderly people including people in their 90's 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

since you have

from your view whim you have

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 ank doubts

I know that you are bursting with love and passionate 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

so I was able to tap into the

So called autonomic nervous system considered to be impossible by science, and then I showed a group to be able to do

Likewise that means 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 par example 2 professor music in Detroit

University Wayne State

Wim has found a secret of placebo

The the placebo now is no longer an abstract

Power of our mind know it you 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

to work

disease and our happiness and their strength and health and

Those are related to the new 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 electricians

engineers and people from all walks of life

grounded people but having no solace in the

existence and medical care and they come they see this they take it on and it helps and I don't say I'm not

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

What we know about

aging is that we don't have a pill and

We may never have a fellow 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 or

Fasting mimicking diets they are causing

stress pathways to

Rejuvenation of stem cells that is Walt Valter 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 am just so excited about the possibility of really exploring our inherent

rejuvenation abilities I am

You know, I just wanted to mention the mindset lastly

Which is that what wim has shown us in his latest book and and 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

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 and for example science showing that we can increase our autonomic nervous system through breathing techniques

so this is

Something humans can do we can do this with these bodies? It's amazing. The mindset is belief

Intention and also relaxation which is a still a mind-boggling because really 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 retention period

Minutes of silence of stillness of watching the mind it's a very interesting experience

so thank you for leading the way and for your dedication and hard work and

For those of you who this sounds terrible to you. 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 hormetic 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

Potential discoveries that could be made with this and this is where ni a is moving as well now

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 Mineo 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 P NES 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

Talk with Thupten Jinpa about compassion in health care

You

You