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you should not compare your own HRV to others as very important so you have to find your Baseline and then see okay with better sleep better diet better exercise and better rest and so on what hearted variability Can You Reach [Applause] [Music] hi everyone Dr here from peum labs and today I have a very special guest Dr torquil Faro he’s a physician from Norway and has written a book called the pulse cure I think you’re going to find it very interesting and we’ll see on the other side hi Dr Farah how are you oh I’m fine Sanji very good it’s evening time here in Norway a little bit of snow actually still in in April yeah we just had a snowstorm here in Toronto as well this for the last two days so I can sympathize with you so thank you so much for taking the time and giving us this opportunity for our listeners to understand about the work you’re doing I think it’s really interesting I have a ton of questions about it so maybe just to get take us through a little bit of the story about how did you get to where you are now like what what made you uh get involved in this space of healing with the heart rhythm got it correct I’m yes I would say that yeah using the PO or the heart rhythm to monitor the state of your physiology yeah that’s the thing and I stumbled upon it maybe five years ago and I was reading a book by Bessel fer culk called the body keeps the score and he was writing about HRV heart rate variability as a measure of the autonomic nervous system and I was from before that I was interested in the autonomic nervous system it was overlooked in a medical study so I just knew knew that it is a fight flight and freeze and rest and digest and as I was never scared or fighting or fleeing I thought it didn’t really uh matter to me but as I got interested in it I became aware that you could measure these the heart rate variability through ECG devices and also from watches and a rings and so on so I just got hooked on testing out and I saw that there’s so much potential in managing or regulating our stress system with the variable so it opens a window into our function into our stress balance and as a doctor I I see that the stress balance is what gets a lot of people sick from inflammation chronic inflammation and so on poor sleep poor diet too much stress too much alcohol and yeah and not enough rest I would say so so I wrote a book called the pulse cure about it my publisher became aware that I was using these variables and just asked me is this a a book for us and and it proved to be it’s still actually today it’s still on the 66th week number six in the Norwegian bestseller list so it has been just a yeah it’s been a tremendous success so so in May in miday it will be released also in the US and Canada probably as well then and so that will be exciting to see if it also catches on because this is actually the world’s first guide book on how to use variables and connected to the lifestyle changes that we need to take to get the stress imbalance yeah okay so Dr farro can you take us through a little bit of your background so you’re a medical physician right yes I’m a medical doctor just a very normal doctor uh DP in working all around Norway from north to south all over um always been working as a locom doctor like a freelance doctor doing about some work 24/7 for one or two weeks and then going on to the next place so I’ve seen around uh 1% actually of the Norwegian population so I’ve seen 50,000 different patients wow so yeah yeah so so it has been interesting because then I could can see what makes people sick what makes people healthy and it’s so frustrating as a doctor to see people getting sick and then that with the right lifestyle they wouldn’t need to get get these diseases so that is the frustration that is the driving force be behind the writing of these books I would say it’s often hard to convince patients to do the right steps so it’s probably easier to do it through a book and I think with the success of the book I probably reached more patients more people through this book in one year than the 25 years working as a doctor so so so can you tell us for somebody who’s like again a late person why is the heart rhythm so important like why is the heart the pulse such a good indicator of stress on the system yeah it’s a good question and because even I as a doctor did not know about it until I read it then five years ago it was not on our radar I think for most doctors but it seems but it proves that the autonomic nervous system can be revealed in the heart rate so if you are in the relaxed state in the parasym pathetic mode uh when you breathe in the pulse rate goes up a little bit and when you breathe out then it goes down a little bit with a variation just measured in milliseconds and that is in the relaxed State the state where you can recover where the immune system works better and then in a stress State the heartbeat will beat very regularly with a steady beat because it needs to use Force also when you are breathing out it needs to push through even as there is less oxygen in the lungs so then you can measure the state if you’re in the parasympathetic mode and in the stress mode and we are made to stress but we are made to recover in between the stress so we need to find the balance and it’s this balance that is out of vac in most of the western world and probably the whole world now lives more or less in the western style so sounds basic yeah it sounds like H the heart rate variability like you’re describing heart rate variability is that yeah is that what you’re saying yeah yeah that is HRV yeah right and so this is regulated primarily by the vegus nerve and are you seeing really impacts people are you saying are generally living in with a lower HRV because of chronic stress like they’re not in a completely relaxed State yeah so they’re living with a lower HRV compared to their Baseline I just recently listened to your you had a conversation on the V nerve earlier yes and you should not compare your own HRV to others as very important so you have to find your Baseline and then see okay with better sleep better diet better exercise and better rest and so on what heart rate variability can you reach so for me for example that that would be like 55 or so in HRV which is not very high my normal would be maybe 45 and if I go down to like 30 that is hard times that is if I have covid or if I’ve been out drinking or if I’ve been training too much and or eating something that I shouldn’t be eating so so it so that is a good thing that the lifestyle changes that we know is good for us can be measured in the heart rate variability so that makes it a speedometer for our physiology how are you recommending or how you recommend people track their HRV like which type of wearables or have you used personally or that you think are are good measures yeah there by far the best one is garment gar because they have the algorithms of first bit The Finnish company that they have Acquired and they they bought the company and use their algorithms into their watches so that is by far the best system so when I’m talking about it you can track it your system throughout the 24 hours uh and see the differences between what you eat and so on and then I’m talking about Garmin while with the AA ring MH and whoop band and some on they have plenty of other I wear them now at the same time the AA ring and the woop band then you will get more of the answer from the night from the HRV during the night how well you have slept how well are you recovered but to identify exactly what stresses you and how much then Garmin is by far the best one I would say and I’ve been comparing it to the ECG device from first dat the chest that you put on your strap I think polar does a strap HRV they have a strap but but first bit has a as a ECG one that you attach just like a normal ECG but it’s just one one line and not 12 as we use in the medical room so and I see that they are more or less the same so so it’s very accurate now the watches these days what have you heard of this Ultra human ring no I’ve heard that there are more Rings coming on here Samsung is releasing their Galaxy ring so there seems to be a lot of competition now this market and this is this is good because most of the competition in the medical field is from from the big Pharma after you have been sick but these are devices that can help you avoid getting sick and that there is so much money in this in preventative medicine that is really really hopeful I think so so the aim of the book is to bring awareness to people about the importance of their their HRV and their Rhythm to for their health I assume that’s correct is that for their health and well-being because also when you live more according to the good lifestyle that gives you good health you also feel better you have more energy you feel more refreshed in the morning and yeah you tolerate more stress actually so so so the book is about on sleep on diet on exercise on alcohol on rest active rest like breathing exercises meditation and so on and finding out strategies to improve your health and which are visible in HRV so you don’t really need a device to make use of the book you can just be a free writer and just use the strategies that the ones who have used the variables have found out by measuring can one change that are you saying that we normally get lower as we just get older I’ve seen people in their 30s and they like their HRV is like 100 or something but do you think we can change that baseline or are you saying that maximum number you’re saying for you is pretty much going to be 55 like this aging is creating an upper limit on that HRV I think so that it’s creating a limit and and you can say also from athletes that even as a if you except for Tom Brady so when you pass 40 no matter how much you want to still be in the game and no matter how many millions you can make out of it you’re not capable your body will not forgive you it you cannot restore and recover from the exercise and so so you will not be able to reach the same magnitudes of HRV that you could as you were younger so and we see as as doctor as well what is almost impressive about the body is how much beating it can take how much bad lifestyle you can tolerate until you are like 50 or 60 and your body is still running so so the body will will forgive you a lot until that age but after you turn 50 you have to do the job yourself you have to you have to I’m not saying optimize but you have to do certain steps to make sure that you’re balanced stress– wise yeah and what we you find out using the variables is that the stress come from unexpected places so it’s not just the mental stress from work or from all the things that you are doing in your life it’s also from food from sleeping too little from eating too late from exercising too hard and yeah and alcohol which is usually the most surprising for most people that not that alcohol is destructive or you reduced the day after or some days after but the magnitude of it people are really shocked when they see that Sports athletes attracts athletes say that it takes five days after if they go out on a Saturday night after a game it will take five days until they are recovered from that so five days after after sorry from from a drink of alcohol or from exercise if they go out on town maybe they had a game and they go out drinking then it takes five days until their HRV is back on track again no I’ve noticed it I used to wear a ring for a few years and even one drink in the evening would have at least 10 points difference on HRV yeah yeah for sure so and it will yeah it’s so surprising and then it’s like you get the physiological price of the alcohol okay you got the economical price in the bar and the tab afterwards and the check but then here you can see the physiological check the balance on your system and then for most people they actually whoop say that somewhere in the neighborhood of 75% of their users will adjust their alcohol consumption just because they see the effect of this so then they they skip the unnecessary ones if you could call it that and they keep the important ones so if they could just as well have a soft drink or a beer then they would go for the soft drink or water or tea or whatever yeah what yeah go ahead sorry yeah so so this is what motivates you to do the right choices so it’s I think it’s more of a motivating thing it’s a gamification of yourself when you see the numbers as you say okay you lost 10 points and so it’s a game where you are the it’s not an avatar or or someone else it’s actually your health is at stake so so what were you about to say yeah no I’m just going to say have you seen any success stories of how people have changed their life with becoming aware of the of the of the pulse on HRV have you seen that type of thing with yeah yeah a lot really and this is what is driving the success of the book is that once you start tracking this just after one or two weeks you see the importance of it immediately and people they use cold therapy they get rid of their joint pain pains or migraine and gastrointestinal problems like bloating and and such things and they adjust the feeding window so they might go like in the book I recommend to test eating like eight hours in the day and be fasting for 16 hours and so many people report that they feel a lot better and a lot of symptoms of these inflammation based diseases disappear or diminishes yeah so I get messages almost every day from people who have health this MH what do you think is still needed to learn about is there any like what more would you like to see done in research on this aspect that you think still think are unanswered questions in this space you know the research there’s a lot of research so HRV is such an easy metric to get into the research if you Google almost any kind of disease or any kind of symptom or you will find a connection to heart rate variability if you Google the disease and heart rate variability so there’s so much research in general but there’s no so that much research on what happens when you start using it because this is quite new to use it in this way yeah so so it would be interesting to see more research but also what is important is that this is individualized so even if a research will show that okay the average of 1,000 people will react to this in this way it doesn’t necessarily matter to you because you may be on either side of this average and this and the HRV will show how you react to alcohol or how you react to gluten or about of exercise because what these devices often do is they also track the V2 Max so then you will see your Fitness level and that makes it easier to adjust your exercise and and so on because if you have a poor fo Fitness level then an easy exercise like other people could tolerate very well and be rid of within a day if you have a really poor Fitness level it can take several days and and a week to to recover so um so it’s a a lot of uses for this I find yeah I get a sense that what would be really interesting is you’re right to know how much what is the best way you did mention a couple of things like for example exercise well what is the ideal amount of exercise and how many minutes and what zone would be interesting to see what impact would be the best way to get impact HRV those would be good questions or you said what’s the ideal fasting time we Tred to say yeah 168 is probably great but is there an ideal is there an ideal situation you’re it’s probably right it’s individualized though I supect some people are more responsive than others yeah and what what whoop and a lot of people find is if you exercise according to HRV you can exercise less and get better so because if you don’t allow your body to recover from the exercise with enough rest you don’t get the payback for the effort so I I used to be on the national team as a kayaker paddling a kayak and we trained way too hard I’m sure we were training maximum every day uh so now that people start training more uh after there because we didn’t have no clue on how to see the level of stress and see how we were doing but what you can with the variables is that you see if you are overreaching if you are training too hard and then you can adjust and particularly for women with a with the menstrual cycle then it’s very obvious that the week before bleeding before menstruation is quite the heavy load on the system actually when you see the curves of the HRV you can see it’s almost as hard as having a covid as a stress load on the system it will be one week quite visible dip in your HRV uh the week before menstruation and and that so so the Norwegian national team in soccer they use the aura rings to train according to the menal cycle because you cannot put the same load on your system the week before as the week after the first day of the the menstrual cycle mhm well that’s very that’s very interesting I wasn’t aware of that one of the things that thought was really interesting about the the the aing was that the heart rate recovery if it happened later in the night versus early in the night all that it’s interesting so what time does how long does it take for your HRV to recover and after exercise myself after running usually took me two days before it get to the level it was my ideal HRV yeah yeah and then that this exercise was this hard that it would take two days and then maybe if you had an important lecture the day after or you have another kind of stress in your life you would be able to okay I shouldn’t train this hard when I have these other stressors in my life so that you can balance the intensity of your exercise to your whole total situation MH okay so for our viewers out there who are um they can where can they get the pulse pulse core how do you say pulse cure pulse cure yeah yeah where can they get the postcure from they can get it anywhere at least from the 15th of May when it’s released in the US the audio book and sorry the audio book and the ebook is already available anywhere from Amazon and so on is a big English British publisher that is publishing it and they have their own MOS their own publisher in the states got so so people can already order the book on Amazon on eBook or pre-order if this is released before before the before May so it will be interesting to see also because I know that Americans and and Canadians where you are they are a lot into technology and like Garmin and whoop they are American brands so so it will be interesting to to see how it goes and America is also a very stressed Society they have I’ve heard been on on other podcast that they have been saying like 60% of the workforce they have some on burnout they’re on the verge of burnout so this is important also for companies to have so a lot of companies are approaching me here in Norway to to have their Workforce IM balance because if if their Workforce has a better stress balance it will also show in their e economical balance on their own bottom line so to perform you need to have good health in the bottom of this so are you seeing it with as patients with your patients are you implementing this what do you think for family doctors how could they imp Implement something like this in their oh they could the people already have these variables so at least in Norway I think 70 or 75% of the population already has these devices in on their wrists and probably the same in the States you have the Apple watch which is not as good as Garmin but you can use it to some extent so so it’s already there so so the doctors can ask the patients to see okay how are you doing and is it’s very important because what we have found is that after for example a surgery your HRV is down for a lot longer than I would imagine it can take like two or three weeks so usually you would even after minor surgery so it’s easier to see how long should you be away from work after a disease or after surgery or after after a stressful period so I’m not sure how it is in the States but in Norway is a quite good sick leave system so if if you feel sick you can be away from your work for 3 weeks four weeks and so on and you don’t lose any money but it’s easier to find out when can you go back to work when can you go back to exercise and doing everything is normal so so so I think it’s particularly important for doctors to see and I think HRV will be within if not now already within a few years it will be a metric that you know and this gives you the power so because if you wait until you get sick then the power is in the hands of the doctors or the healthc care system is out of your control yeah but with this measur and devices you get the control and if you start before it’s too late then then you can avoid getting a lot of these inflammatory based chronic diseases that is is now is probably like 80% of the diseases that we see as doctors in the the Western World yeah I think it’s it’s actually very interesting you said that because I think we people rely on blood pressure for example which I think is a much later marker when you’ve already had changes already happen in the cardiovascular system so HRV would be a much earlier sign if you are you can already take care of it before damage happens theoretically yeah so I think absolutely and and HRV has a connection to nine out of the 10 deadliest diseases in the states so probably also of course in the whole Western world so it’s and it’s probably both on the cause and consequence side of it so if you have a low HRV as a sign that your body is under stress and that your immune system is compromised it’s a bigger chance that you will develop any of these diseases and once you get them it will become even worse so it will be a vicious circle spiral so to say so and and a lot of people also can see that okay they are doing the measure in the pulse cure resting sleeping better and they see that the body is still stressed still high level of stress and actually people have found out they have cancer they have found out they have thyroid problems they have found out they have deficiencies in vitamin B12 and d and iron and so on so it’s also something that can be and also people have found also if they have seen it’s too much stress so have you seen any supplements that could impact HRV like you’re saying is there any deficient you think that could impact HRV or supplements that could change HRV yeah at least particularly those the B12 and the v d and iron which is the most common ones that if you are deficient it will show in the HRV actually some people when they get shots of vitamin B12 they can see from their HIV that okay I forgot it I have to take it again they can see it from their from the level other than that I’m not I’m not sure I haven’t been testing it there are probably lots of studies is on I think almost on a lot of the supplements you can Google the supplement and heart rate variability and you would probably find somebody’s some because the the amount of research in general in the world has been on a so much larger scale the last years so there so much research going on worldwide so right where do you what’s your next project or what’s your next work in this space are you thinking about what do you yeah yeah that is a bit hard because now the book is coming out in the US it’s coming out in Denmark in Sweden in Holland in Poland and and more countries coming up so this takes of course a lot of time but I I’m writing a book now that is a sequel that I’m exploring more the part of rest in the book because so I’m kind of taking the like 15 pages of the rest chapter and making it to a full book because that seems like the part that is hard is for people to really get good at and there’s not so many books there are lots of books on exercise on nutrition and so on but not that many books on rest and and rest is also so important not just to recover but rest is also the creative face so that the resting state is not just something you have to tolerate to to perform it’s actually the state of creativity and that’s often when you get the best IDs when you are relaxing so if you are too hard producing you’re not really exploiting your brain enough so the the calm brain St State the default mode network is creative and productive and restorative so so that is some of what the book is about oh that’s exciting of course called The Rescuer at least so far of course that’s excellent um I had one more question about the there I seen another device which which basically talked about coherence between breath and heart like this idea that as we’re breathing that that we’re somehow out of sync but there was I think it’s an app heart math or something where they basically teach you how to breathe in coordination with your pulse have you seen this type of research yeah so it seems that the breath is a part of the autonomic nervous system that your breathing will go on naturally you will not stop breathing of course but is also a Believer into the the autonomic nervous system so that you can calm down by breathing slowly so the coherent breathing as you’re saying for example if you are breathing six times a minute you can maybe breathe 4 seconds in and six seconds out I think the most important is to breathe slowly but also in addition if you’re out breath is a bit longer than your in breath then it’s also better and this of course you can see real time that when you have the watches because on the Garin I can push a button and I can see the stress level as we speak and then I can just start one minute or two minute or breathing and I can see on the watch that okay I’m calming down before a meeting or before a podcast or a lecture or anything you can you have this speedometer on your hand that you can regulate your system so so this is what the book is about to stress right it’s in the Norwegian version It’s called stress right and because we need to stress we need to put load on our system to build ourselves stronger but we just need to balance it with enough recovery so that we get payback for the effort and so so people should not be scared of of stressing but they just need to be aware that we are not made to be in this stressful State Around the Clock it will have a it’ll be a price for this and because in the in the ancestral you have to think about the evolution and the how our bodies and Minds were developed throughout the evolution and we used to be most of the time in the restorative mode and then just parts of the time in this hunting and fighting mode so yeah we need to get a little bit back to that kind of a lifestyle to hack our lifestyle with sleep and rest and so on do you suggest a dedicated amount of time let’s say for breathing per day or like mindfulness or meditation or do you think that it’s five breaths here five times a day or something like that what is your thinking on that yes I think that would be for this will be different for many people probably some people that are in the fatigue situation they must do more maybe they need to do like 20 minutes in the morning and in the afternoon but that many other people it can be better as you say maybe five deep breaths five times a day and maybe after a while while you will catch yourself doing it as a natural thing so I think it’s easier for a lot of people just to do small bouts of this for example if to exercise just take some push-ups run on the spot just half a minute has been proven to have a lot of effect so it you don’t need to do a lot but you need to have some attention on this every day to have a sustainable lifestyle that can that will keep your body fit throughout your years so you need to invest something in this otherwise you’ll pick up the tab in your later years no so and actually American Research with 700,000 American veterans from the military service have shown that if you do the lifestyle strategies from the pulse cure more or less exactly the same you actually live for 24 years longer if you start and Implement these strategies from you are 40 years old but also if you start when you are 60 it will still give you 18 extra years so so most of the benefits is later on yeah it sounds like a lot of it’s not too late is what you’re saying it’s not too late and it’s even the later you start the more to gain because usually as a doctor we used to think that okay when you’re 70 years old it doesn’t matter anymore you can yeah just drink just relax stay in the sofa and yeah enjoy your life and and that seems then not to be true that is probably the the time in your life that you have most out of doing exercise and being yeah being fit and eating right and yeah that’s yeah that’s a good point to end on that’s a perfect I think it’s motivating because some people look at this say you know what it’s already too late and I’ve already damaged my body but you what you’re saying is yeah that there’s lots of Hope and people can change this just with and there’s still lots of benefit to happen yeah yeah yeah because we I used to do all the mistakes in the book I I did everything wrong I was smoking I was drinking a couple of glasses of wine every day that was supposed to be good for us some years ago and I was weighing 40 pounds more than I do now and I did not exercise I did not care about what I was eating as a doctor we used to work around the clock way too much and because we had the notion that okay if I did everything right maybe I’ll live for two years longer but it would take 2 years to do those steps so I bother but now we see that is it totally different this is another budget so to speak on this yeah well that was very informative thank you so much for your time today I really appreciate it again what’s the is there a website to go for people to go to or just go on Amazon yeah there will be yeah of course for for the book you can just go go like anywhere it’s just a normal book and we have a a website called the pure.com which is a social website with the members but you can also see there you can have webinars you can see lectures that I’ve made and you can learn from other people in Norway the Norwegian the website we are now building the English American website we have like 4,000 members and they are they’re all helping each other they’re putting out their questions putting out their curves that they get in the apps and people help people is the base for this website so you can go there and can go to my Instagram account dror it’s called drore TL Point MD is the the English speaking version so okay we’ll put that in the notes then same.com okay excellent thank you so much really appreciate your time today yeah thanks for having me thank you so much thanks hi everyone I hope you enjoyed today’s talk with Dr torquil Faro he’s the author of the pulse cure it was really interesting to learn all about the impact of your HRV on your health and some of the takeaways were make sure you take some breath during the day and it’s never too late im mean if you’re abused your body for the last 20 30 years you can still have benefits by reducing stress and getting that HRV at a higher level so again you can go to get your book of The pul Cure by going to the pure.com you can also look up Dr faroh’s contact on Instagram in the p in the show notes and I hope you like today’s video if you did please like And subscribe uh like make sure we get our video out to more people talk to you later [Music] [Applause] …